New Housing Starts Take Double-Digit Dive in August
New housing starts in August fell sharply from the previous month. The rate of new building permits also fell sharply.
The U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported Thursday morning that new housing starts in August fell sharply to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 956,000, a decrease of 14.4% from the upwardly revised July rate of 1.117 million and an increase of 8% compared with the August 2013 rate of 885,000. The consensus estimate from a survey of economists expected a rate of around 1.038 million.
The seasonally adjusted rate of new building permits also fell sharply, to 998,000, down 5.6% from the upwardly revised July rate of 1.057 million but 5.3% above the August 2013 rate of 948,000. The consensus estimate called for a rise to 1.055 million permits in August.
Single-family housing starts slipped to an annualized rate of 643,000 in August, down 2.4% from the upwardly revised July rate of 659,000.
Permits for new single-family homes fell 0.8% in August to an adjusted annual rate of 626,000 from a downwardly revised total of 631,000 in July.
Multifamily starts, for buildings with five or more units, a more volatile number than single-family starts, rose 17.5% year-over-year in August.
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Paul Ausick has been writing for 247Wallst.com for more than a decade. He has written extensively on investing in the energy, defense, and technology sectors. In a previous life, he wrote technical documentation and managed a marketing communications group in Silicon Valley.
He has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Chicago and now lives in Montana, where he fishes for trout in the summer and stays inside during the winter.
