Eye On Housing
For the third quarter of 2020, NAHB’s Home Building Geography Index (HBGI) found construction gains for traditional second home markets. High-concentration second home counties were defined based on the proportion of the local housing stock that are non-rental properties and not classified as their taxpayer principal residences. Counties with relatively high concentrations1 of such residences were designated as “second home… Read More ›
Multifamily construction shifted into less dense markets during the third quarter of 2020, per the latest NAHB Homebuilding Geography Index (HBGI). This change is similar to the evolving geography for single-family home building, as housing demand moved to lower cost, more affordable markets. The multifamily data confirm that these shifts in demand are not just occurring for single-family home building… Read More ›
A trend of higher demand for housing in lower-density areas reported in the second quarter National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Home Building Geography Index (HBGI) has persisted into the fall, as single-family and multifamily construction continued to overperform in lower cost markets like suburbs and exurbs. The third quarter HBGI reveals that a suburban shift for consumer home buying… Read More ›
The Q2 2020 NAHB Home Building Geography Index (HBGI) reveals a notable multifamily construction shift to the suburbs/exurbs. This is similar to HBGI findings reported for single-family construction. A driver of this broader impact is COVID-19, which thus far has had larger impacts on higher density neighborhoods. These geographic changes will ultimately generate market share gains for smaller multifamily structures,… Read More ›
While the question of when the first cases of the novel coronavirus to reach American soil occurred is contested, its rapid spread in the United States by the end of the first quarter of 2020 has been transformative. During this crisis, the nation’s health infrastructure has been in focus. NAHB’s Home Building Geography Index (HBGI), in addition to covering the… Read More ›
In the last analysis of NAHB’s Home Building Geography Index (HBGI), single-family construction was shown to be expanding faster in regions of lower population density. The COVID-19-induced public health crisis has added momentum to this trend. Moreover, multifamily residential construction has been on a similar trajectory of growth that intensified in 2019, regardless of the virus impact. Indeed, over the… Read More ›
The fourth quarter NAHB Home Building Geography Index (HBGI) highlight recent performance of single-family and multifamily construction markets across the seven population density-based regional geographies of the index. Over the course of 2019, exurbs outside medium-sized cities, i.e., outlying counties of small metro areas, performed best at 2.9% growth rate. Small towns (micro counties) performed next best at 2.8%, although… Read More ›
For the current edition of the Home Building Geography Index (HBGI), NAHB introduces a red vs. blue segmentation of the 3,221 counties of the United States. “Red counties” are defined as those in which the majority of the population in the 2016 Presidential election voted for President Donald Trump, while “blue counties” are defined as those in which most of… Read More ›
For only the second year since the Great Recession, multifamily unit completions declined in 2018, according to NAHB analysis of the latest annual multifamily data from the Survey of Construction (SOC). As is typical, the number of multifamily units completed for rent exceeds the number of units completed for sale (92% rental share). In 2018, the number of units completed… Read More ›
When NAHB’s Home Building Geography Index (HBGI) was introduced, it allocated county single- and multifamily permits into seven regions based on population densities. These regions are representative of different types of housing markets in the United States. New work in this post offers a per capita analysis of the HBGI regionals, which corroborates earlier findings of market share and growth… Read More ›