Home construction estimates continue to suggest the same kinds of economic imbalances unchanged from last year. While construction of single family homes had been rising, that increase was not nearly as widespread and voluminous to indicate that the real estate market had been restored by full economic restoration (jobs, jobs, jobs). Apartment construction, on the other hand, has been scaled [...]
The single family housing market, at least from the view of new construction, continues on as it has for the past two years. There isn’t really much taking place, as new construction plods along in a curious stasis, sort of continuing to scrape along the bottom of the barrel. Permits and starts were again near 700k, SAAR, but that remains [...]
The estimates for home construction in May were pretty much as expected except for one single data point. The calculation for new permits in the multi-family segment jumped by 53.5% year-over-year, completely out of character with everything else. Given that fact, it seems far more likely that the permits estimate is an outlier or artifact of even expected variation. That [...]
These may be desperate times indeed, where every small piece of anything not wholly dismal is singled out as the indicator that either the worst has passed or it never was. I am simply at a loss to describe housing construction figures in such unequivocally glowing terms. For the most part, construction activity hasn’t deviated at all from its trend [...]
As expected from home construction figures for February the level of starts has once again reverted toward permits. For some reason, especially in apartment construction, new starts of multi-family dwellings far outpaced permit levels in the “rebound” into the middle of 2014. There is no clear explanation for the divergence, especially since permit levels show quite a bit of caution [...]
For statistics like GDP, what is most important is relative comparison between the most recent quarters (or years). That narrow view misses a lot of important context, an aching factor when structural or longer-term defects in actual economic function drag on long past the points of tapered comparison. In that way, by only measuring the most recent relativity these statistics [...]
The latest figures on housing construction have almost flipped the circumstances from late 2013. It was apartment construction that kept up hope that any retrenchment in single family construction would not be so devastating. Permit and start activity was, at the margins, almost totally dependent on multi-family construction to offset weakness in single homes. As of December 2014, the flattening [...]
The latest volatility in housing construction figures transferred to the single-family segment, as apartment construction has now entered full-scale languishing. In some respects that is contradictory to 2014’s view of a boom in rental properties, but I wonder if the lack of household formation is finally starting to catch up – rent or not. There is already an immense shadow [...]
I speculated in May last year that the introduction of the taper concept was in large part due to what Jeremy Stein articulated in February 2013, namely the idea that certain “markets” were becoming overheated in the “reach for yield.” In essence, it amounted to an attempt to “talk down” assets, chief among them the raging price appreciation once again [...]
By any reasonable token, a healthy home market should not be all that much disturbed by a 100bp rise in the average mortgage rate. And even that likely overstates the degree to which mortgage rates have moved – they briefly reached a record low of about 3.5% at the end of 2012, now settling just below 4.5%. At the tail [...]
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