September’s housing starts and building permits

It appears that the only widely watched report that was released last week was the September report on New Residential Construction from the Census Bureau….

Housing Starts Reportedly Lower in September, Building Permits Little Changed

The September report on New Residential Construction (pdf) from the Census Bureau reported that their widely watched estimate of new housing units that were started during the month was at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,221,000, which was 5.2 percent (±11.8 percent)* below the revised August estimated annual rate of 1,288,000 housing unit starts, and was 7.4 percent (±11.5 percent)* below last September’s pace of 1,319,000 housing starts a year…the asterisks indicate that the Census Bureau does not have sufficient data to determine whether housing starts actually rose or fell over the past month, or even over the past year, with the figure in parenthesis the most likely range of the change indicated; in other words, September’s housing starts could have been up by 6.6%, or down by as much as 17.0% from those of August, with a 10% chance that the actual change could have even been outside of that wide range….in this report, the annual rate for August housing starts was revised from the 1,275,000 reported last month to 1,288,000, while July starts, which were first reported at a 1,239,000 annual rate, were revised from last month’s initial revised figure of 1,309,000 annually to a 1,369,000 annual rate with this report….

Those 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 103,800 housing units were started in September, down from the 111,400 units started in August…of those housing units started in September, an estimated 72,600 were single family homes and 30,100 were units in structures with more than 5 units, down from the revised 78,900 single family starts in August, and down from the 31,500 units started in structures with more than 5 units in August…

The monthly data on new building permits, with a smaller margin of error, are probably a better monthly indicator of new housing construction trends than the volatile and often revised housing starts data, which can also be impacted by unusual weather….in September, Census estimated new building permits were being issued for a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,400,000 housing units, which was 0.2 percent below the revised August rate of 1,403,000 permits, and was 3.0 percent below the 1,444,000 rate of building permit issuance now reported for September a year earlier…the annual rate for housing permits issued in August was revised from an annual rate of 1,394,000 to 1,403,000 annually….

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 115,100 housing units were issued in September, down from the revised estimate of 118,300 new permits issued in August…the September permits included 69,800 permits for single family homes, down from 74,200 single family permits in August, and 40,700 permits for housing units in apartment buildings with 5 or more units, up from 40,100 such multifamily permits a month earlier…

(the above is the synopsis of last week’s economic reports 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…)