Residential building permits in March shows the rate of growth continues relatively soft although better than last month. There was a serious decline in the growth of completions – but this could be weather related. There was a fairly significant downward revision of last month’s data.
- The rate of annual growth for building permits in the last 12 months for this sector has been mostly in a channel between 25% and 40%. This month continues well below this channel.
- 3 month rolling averages (comparing the current averages to the averages one year ago) continued to decline.
Trends of Year-over-Year Growth Unadjusted Data
| Â | Building Permits | Construction Completions |
| Current Movement | accelerating | decelerating |
| Movement Compared to Rolling average one year ago | decelerating | decelerating |
Unadjusted 3 Month Rolling Average of Year-over-Year Growth – Building Permit (blue line) and Construction Completions (red line)
Econintersect Analysis:
- Building permits growth accelerated 2.7% month-over-month, and is up 9.5% year-over-year.
- Single family building permits contracted 1.2% year-over-year.
- Construction completions decelerated 12.1% month-over-month, up 16.4% year-over-year.
US Census Headlines:
- building permits down 7.7% month-over-month, up 11.2% year-over-year
- construction completions down 0.2% month-over-month, up 7.7% year-over-year.
- the market expected 960K to 1030K (consensus 965K) annualized seasonally adjusted housing permits issued versus the 990K reported
Note that Econintersect analysis herein is based on UNADJUSTED data – not the headline seasonally adjusted data.
When more building permits are issued than residences completed – the industry is expanding – and this expansion has been underway for over a year. The “less bad†/ “more good†growth trend line has been positive since 2009. In the graph below, any value above zero shows more permits are being issued than completions.
