April’s new residential construction, et al

Agency issued economic reports released this week included the April report on New Residential Construction from the Census Bureau and the Regional and State Employment and Unemployment Summary for April from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a report which breaks down the two employment surveys from the monthly national jobs report by state and region….while the text of that report provides a useful summary of this data, the serious statistical aggregation can be found in the tables linked at the end of the report, where one can find the civilian labor force data and the change in payrolls by industry for each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands…

This week also saw two more regional Fed manufacturing surveys for May:… the Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Survey, covering most of Pennsylvania, southern New Jersey, and Delaware, reported their broadest diffusion index of manufacturing conditions fell to –0.4 in May, down from +26.7 in April, which they explain was because “22.5% of the respondents reported an increase in general business activity (down from 33 percent last month), and 22.9% reported a decrease from April to May (up from 6 percent), while 55 percent of the firms reported no change in activity (down from 62 percent).”…In addition, the Kansas City Fed manufacturing survey for May, covering western Missouri, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Wyoming and northern New Mexico, reported its broadest composite index came in at +8 in May, down from +10 in April and from +11 in March, indicating that a slightly smaller plurality of the region’s manufacturing firms continued to report an increase in their activity this month…

April Housing Starts Reported Lower, Building Permits Higher

The April report on New Residential Construction (pdf) from the Census Bureau estimated that new housing units were being started at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,465,000 in April, which was 2.8 percent (±11.0 percent)* below the revised March estimated rate of 1,507,000 annually, but was 4.6 percent (±13.9 percent)* above last April’s rate of 1,400,000 housing starts a year….the asterisks indicate that the Census does not have sufficient data to determine whether housing starts actually rose or fell from March, or even from April of last year, with the figures in parenthesis representing the most likely range of the change indicated….in other words, April housing starts could have been up by 8.2% or down by as much as 13.8% from those of March, with revisions of a greater magnitude in either direction from that range also possible…with this report, the annual rate for March housing starts was revised from the 1,502,000 reported last month up to 1,507,000, and February starts, which were first reported at a 1,356,000 annual rate, were revised to a 1,490,000 annual rate, while January starts, which were first reported at a 1,487,000 annual rate and were revised from an annual rate of 1,398,000 annual rate a month ago, were revised to a 1,385,000 annual rate with this report….

The annual rates of housing starts reported here were extrapolated from a survey of a small percentage of US building permit offices visited by canvassing Census field agents, which estimated that 133,400 housing units were started in April, up from the 123,400 housing units that were started in March, and up from the 97,700 housing units that were started in February…of those housing units started in April, an estimated 85,700 were single family homes and 47,200 were housing units in structures with more than 5 units, down from the revised 87,900 single family starts in March, but up from the 36,700 units started in structures with more than 5 units in March…

The monthly data on new building permits, with a smaller margin of error, is probably a better monthly indicator of new housing construction trends than the volatile and often revised housing starts data…Census estimated new building permits for housing units were being issued at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,442,000 in April, which was 5.8 percent above the revised March rate of 1,363,000, but was 0.2 percent below the rate of building permit issuance in April a year earlier….the annual rate for housing permits issued in March was revised from 1,372,000 to 1,363,000…

Again, these annualized estimates for new permits reported here were extrapolated from the unadjusted estimates collected monthly by canvassing census agents, which showed permits for roughly 131,200 housing units were issued in April, up from the revised estimate of 121,800 new permits issued in March….of April’s permits, 86,300 were for single family homes, up from 82,200 in March, while 42,400 were in buildings with 5 or more units, up from 35,500 in March…

(the above is the synopsis that accompanied my regular sunday morning news links emailing, which in turn was mostly selected from my weekly blog post on the global glass onion…if you’d be interested in receiving my weekly emailing of selected links, most of which are chosen from the aforementioned GGO posts, contact me…)