Eye On Housing
Per the latest results of NAHB’s Home Building Geography Index, in the third quarter of 2021, both single-family and multifamily home building showed gains in second home counties. This marked a reversal for multifamily after weakness last year. Second home counties are defined by NAHB as those having a high proportion of housing units that are not their owners’ primary… Read More ›
In the third quarter of 2021 apartments and other multifamily residential construction showed a continuation of the suburban shift that was characteristic of prior quarters, per the most recent data from NAHB’s Home Building Geography Index. For the current period, market share declined in high-density markets, namely large metro core and suburban counties. Between the third quarter of 2020 and… Read More ›
Housing affordability has gained increased attention in recent quarters due growing home prices and rents. For the second quarter of 2021, NAHB’s Home Building Geography Index (HBGI) explored a geographic measure of housing affordability using Price-to-Income ratios of all counties in the United States1 to map the geography of single-family and multifamily construction. The principal findings of this new classification… Read More ›
The first quarter 2021 Home Building Geography Index (HBGI) showed that single-family home building continued to shift to low-density and low-cost markets, a trend stemming largely from the COVID-19 pandemic and first reported in the second quarter of 2020. However, this suburban shift has been even more pronounced in the multifamily sector, which is experiencing growth in 2021 after a… Read More ›
The National Association of Home Builders’ Home Building Geography Index (HBGI) tracks the markets of single-family and multifamily residential construction and their recovery following the Great Recession. In the first quarter of 2019, the first “cut” of the HBGI was introduced, which was an urban density-based delineation of the housing market into seven geographical “regions”. The first quarter HBGI analysis… Read More ›
The Census Bureau, in collaboration with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), produces the Survey of Market Absorption (SOMA), which tracks apartment and condominium completions, absorption rates (the share of apartments/condos rented or purchased within the first 3 months after completion), and asking rent prices. In the second quarter of 2017, completions of unfurnished, unsubsidized, privately financed apartments… Read More ›
Households paying 30 percent of more in rent, a threshold long used by the federal government to identify “rent-burdened” households, has been a significant housing issue for some time. Nearly half of renter households (48 percent) in the U.S. were rent-burdened in 2015.[1] The large share of rent-burdened households is a symptom of the broader affordability problem in the housing… Read More ›
According to the most recent release of the Survey of Market Absorption (SOMA), produced by the US Census Bureau in collaboration with the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, completions of nonsubsidized, unfurnished, rental apartments in buildings with 5 or more units totaled to 73,300 in the fourth quarter of 2016, about 9 percent higher than completions in the… Read More ›
The US Census Bureau recently released data on multifamily completions and absorption rates from the second quarter of 2016. Completions of privately financed, unfurnished, unsubsidized apartments in buildings with five or more units totaled to 62,600, which is approximately 5,000 fewer than completions in the second quarter of 2015 (Figure 1). Examining Figure 1 further indicates a leveling off of multifamily… Read More ›
In the third quarter of 2015, the NAHB’s Multifamily Production Index (MPI) increased one point to a level of 56. This marks the 15th consecutive quarter with a reading of 50 or above, which indicates that more respondents report conditions are improving than report conditions are becoming worse. The MPI is fairly consistent with the strong performance of multifamily starts, which have recovered from… Read More ›