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Two different economic reports on the residential housing market show conflicting results. One report is on the latest data in housing starts…the other contains the latest results on new home sales. But these reports paint two very different pictures. Is housing growing? Or rather, is it fading?
As regular Strata-gee readers know, I follow basic economic data for our readers. Not all economic data, just that data I feel are germane to the custom integration and consumer electronics industries. Normally, that is a fairly sane and sedate task – but lately, it has gotten a bit crazy, with wild up/down swings the likes of which I haven’t seen since the last great recession. Take housing starts, for example…
The U.S. Commerce Department released new data this week on housing starts for December 2018. Overall residential construction dropped to 1.08 million units on a seasonally adjusted annual rate or 11.2% lower than the November rate of 1.2 million units. This is the lowest rate of residential construction since September 2016.
As I write this on Wednesday, December 19th the stock market has closed down 351.98 points or nearly 1.5% to its lowest level of the year, according to CNBC. The broader S&P 500 Index also closed at a 2018 low. But as bad as this news is, perhaps even more concerning are two key indicators for the housing market – single-family housing starts and homebuilder sentiment – both of which showed disappointing results.
As you head home from work today, take a look around you at the other commuters on the road. All around you are Toyotas, Hondas, Nissans, Suburus and the like. These are all signs of the incredible success Japan has has penetrating the U.S. automobile market – taking significant market share away from the once dominant Big Three American auto makers, GM, Ford, and Dodge/Chrysler many years ago.
Can Japan do it again? Are builders D.R. Horton, Lennar, PulteGroup, K.B. Homes at risk of the same loss of market share? If Takeshi Homma (pictured here) is successful, he hopes to help Japanese companies take a big bite of the American homebuilding market.
I’ve been sounding the alarm about a housing slowdown for a couple of months now, starting with this overall look at how a housing industry-led recession could be just around the corner. Now, new data on housing, the industry that was a major driver of the last recession, continues to offer a bearish outlook with housing construction starts dropping a significant 5.3% in the month of September.
Five Steps to Take Now to Protect Your BusinessOccasionally, I’ll chat with an integrator or other industry colleague about that ugly shared nightmare experience, otherwise known as the recession of 2007-2009. This recession, unlike others in the past, zeroed in like a torpedo on the residential construction market and dramatically reshaped the custom integration industry. For those of you joining the industry since that time, you dodged the bullet…but you also missed the lessons that survivors were forced to learn in order to keep afloat.
September housing starts, the government’s measure of new residential construction activity, showed an overall decline to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,127,000 units. This rate is down 4.7% from the revised August rate of 1,183,000 units. This is the third monthly decline in a row indicating a softening in the construction of new homes – and the lowest level of construction since September 2016.
In a result that exceeded economists’ estimates, November overall housing starts jumped an impressive 10.5% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.173 million units. Well over the revised October rate of 1.062 million units, it also exceeded the 1.007 million units in November last year by 16.5%.
More importantly for our industry, single-family home construction rates jumped as well.
We were fortunate enough to receive an invitation from the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) allowing us to participate in their annual Fall Construction Forecast presentation, a webinar put on for the benefit of their members last week. Boy! Are we glad we attended! Not only did the organization offer up a roster of world-class economists with really interesting insight into what’s going on in the economy – they also offered reams of really valuable data delineating the latest trends in construction.
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