October housing starts may have posted impressive highs that month but it was a wholly different story in September. World Property Journal reports that single-family production, among other housing unit starts, experienced a dip that month due to different factors-the most prevalent of which is housing unit prices.
Data released by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Commerce Department revealed how much higher the housing starts have progressed. Compared to September values of 1.2 million (down from 1.27 million the previous month), October saw a significant spike of 1.23 million housing unit starts.
These figures were for the single-family starts, indicating that single-family units have more difficulty selling than multi-family units. Those units were good for 10.3 percent, worth 363,000 units in comparison to a loss of 865,000 single units for families.
NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz is keeping a positive outlook about it, however. He said that single-family housing started out strong in the year, gradually weakening due to a lot of factors in the economy and in trade. However, he is positively adamant that there will be changes as the years pass by. 2018, by his estimates, still was the best in terms of construction turnouts so far since the downturn.
Freddie Mac, or the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, lent to the discussion about the downturn. Security Sales said that Freddie Mac used data from their fixed-rate mortgage transactions and saw that a rise of 4.9% was detected only last week. These values were the highest since 2011, making it only a fairly recent development when compared to 30-year-old values in mortgage values.
If building permits are to be the median of success in the housing units, however, then the future looks bright. According to the article, housing demand in the form of permits are forecasted to rise by 4.1%, enough for rates of around 1.3 to 1.2 million. These permits were also used as an indicator that there was something wrong in the housing markets, with dips in permits recorded to a low of 7.6%.
Single-family and multifamily housing starts are still at a high in current annual estimates. These currently stand at 13.5 percent in the West while it is enjoying highs of 5.5 percent in the South. The decline was felt hardest in the Northeast, at 4.8 percent, and is starting to be felt in the Midwest at 0.6 percent.
