There is undoubtedly serious stratification in the housing market, as higher end homes have no trouble selling at greater and greater price points. That, in turn, has left those owing homes in the tiers below struggling, supposedly, to do what Americans of past generations have done – move up to bigger and better. Because these middle level home owners are [...]
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 [...]
The latest figures from the Census Bureau on home construction continue to suggest that the home sales number from last month was, at best, a one-off abnormality. If new home sales were heading appreciably higher in what might have been perceived as a sustained advance, you would expect that new home construction would at least closely follow to take advantage [...]
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 primary monetary channel for “stimulating demand” has traditionally fallen through real estate. Mortgage finance is the largest private source of financialism, reaching directly to people’s personal economy. The price appreciation of houses and the availability of mortgage credit are seen by orthodox economics as the basis for marginal “demand” changes in a theoretical philosophy that prizes nothing but activity [...]
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 [...]
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