Eye On Housing
The Federal Reserve reduced the key, short-term federal funds rate by 25 basis points to a top rate of 2% at the conclusion of its September Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting. This was the second cut in 2019, partially reversing a set of increases enacted in 2018. The more dovish stance of the Fed is good for housing and… Read More ›
Total housing starts posted a 12.3 percent increase in August (1.364 million units) compared to an upwardly revised July estimate of 1.215 million units, according to the joint data release from the Census Bureau and HUD. Relative to August 2018, total starts are 6.6 percent above the annual pace of 1.279 million units. Single-family production in August posted a monthly… Read More ›
Only 41 percent of single-family homes started in 2018 included fireplaces, according to NAHB tabulation of recently released data from the Survey of Construction (produced by the U.S. Census Bureau with partial funding from HUD). This percentage is the lowest on record since NAHB began tabulating the data in a consistent fashion in 2001. Since 2015, the share of single-family… Read More ›
Data from the BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) indicate that construction job openings increased in July, after a declines off a cycle high count for April. The estimated number of job openings in the construction sector increased to 373,000 in July after reaching a post-Great Recession high of 434,000 in April. The July 2019 count of unfilled jobs… Read More ›
New data released by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, combined with recent NAHB survey data, show a mismatch between the actual prices of new homes and the prices buyers expect to pay—providing further evidence for the growing problem of housing affordability. At the end of August, the Census Bureau released 2018 data from… Read More ›
Despite broader interest rate declines for government bonds and mortgages, NAHB industry survey data for the second quarter of 2019 indicates that interest rates for acquisition, development and construction (AD&C) remain stubbornly elevated. For example, loans for spec single-family home building averaged a 6.2% rate for the second quarter. These higher interest rates have caused the volume of loans outstanding… Read More ›
In the second quarter of 2019, interest rates on loans for land acquisition, development, and single-family construction (AD&C) continued to drift upward, according to results from NAHB’s quarterly AD&C Financing Survey. As the survey showed, relationships among the various subcategories of AD&C loans remained about the same, with the highest average interest rate—6.59 percent—recorded on loans for land acquisition loans,… Read More ›
The news in today’s newly-built home sales report was found in the estimates for June, rather than July. Contracts for new, single-family home sales decreased in July by 12.8% to a 635,000 seasonally adjusted annual rate according to estimates from the joint release of HUD and the Census Bureau. However, that decline came off an significantly upwardly revised June estimate,… Read More ›
An elevated rental share of multifamily construction is holding typical apartment size below levels seen during the pre-Great Recession period. As multifamily developers build more for-sale housing units in the years ahead, the average size of multifamily homes is likely to rise. According to second quarter 2019 data, the average per unit square footage of multifamily housing construction starts was 1,103, off from… Read More ›
How do homes built-for-rent differ from more common for-sale new single-family homes? This is an important question given recent attention on the built-for-rent sector of the residential construction industry. Second quarter data for 2019 reveal that approximately 42,000 homes were built-for-rent over the last year, representing about 5% of single-family construction. Though this figure continues to trend modestly higher as… Read More ›