Housing Starts Fall while Building Permits Decline

 

Looking a little deeper, most of the weakness in housing starts was in mutlifamily. Single family residences barely budged while multi-unit fell from 109,000 units in January to 76,000 units in February. The same can be said about building permits.

Housing Starts moved 5.9 percent lower to 575,000 annualized units, almost erasing the 6.6 percent gain seen in January. While this was a poor print for housing starts, the market was expecting worse…hence this is easier for traders to shrug off. Building Permits were 1.6 percent weaker in February at an annualized rate of 612,000.

This follows a 4.7 percent decline in January but was essentially on the screws as forecasts called for an annualized pace of 610,000 permits. As the weather warms up expect both housing starts and building permits to rebound in the second half of the year, a welcome sign for landscape professionals. ?EUR??,,????'?????<