Vacancy rates are one of the key statistics NAHB Economics tracks to judge the health and direction of the housing market. The currently low homeowner and rental vacancy rates are typically interpreted as a sign of tight housing markets, with lower vacancy rates signaling a greater housing shortage. NAHB’s analysis of the latest 2017 ACS…
The United States Post Office has been attempting to reduce or eliminate sidewalk and curbside delivery of mail to individual homes, especially in new subdivisions. Instead, the Post Office now wants to deliver mail primarily to centralized or “cluster” mail boxes, each serving multiple homes in a development. So far, implementation of this policy has varied across the…
About two years ago, NAHB reported that 22 percent of single-family builders had used aerial drones (or unmanned aircraft systems, as the Department of Defense calls them) at least once in their construction businesses. But the times they are a-changing. When we revisited the issue in March of this year, we saw that the percentage…
The new NAHB study presents the most recent and comprehensive estimates of home building employment, including self-employed workers, by state. NAHB Economics estimates that out of 9.8 million people working in construction in 2016, more than 3.8 million people worked in residential construction, accounting for 2.5% of the US employed civilian labor force. These numbers…
From the trough of the housing downturn in 2010 through 2015, the number of homes under construction increased by 131 percent and the number of employees working in construction trade businesses increased by 18 percent. Over that span, how much would you guess the number of one-person construction trade firms increased? The answer, believe it or…
Using the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CES) data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), NAHB Economics research shows that a home purchase triggers additional spending on appliances, furnishings, and remodeling. NAHB’s most recent estimates are based on the 2012-2014 data and show that during the first two years after closing on the house, a typical…
The 2016 top ten publicly-traded builders captured a 27.4% share of new single-family home closings, up from 27.1% in 2015. The 27.4% share in 2016 is out of the 559,000 new home sales reported by the Census Bureau. However, this count represents a smaller share of the total single-family market when not-for-sale, custom home building…
