New Housing Starts Disappoint Again in March
The U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported Tuesday morning that new housing starts in March rose less than expected.
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The U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development reported Tuesday morning that new housing starts in March rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 926,000, an increase of 3% from the upwardly revised February rate of 908,000 and a decrease of 2.5% compared with the March 2014 rate of 950,000. The consensus estimate from a survey of economists expected a rate of around 1.04 million.
The revision to the February rate totaled 11,000 additional new housing starts. Even at the revised total, housing starts fell 16% year-over-year in February.
The seasonally adjusted rate of new building permits fell in March to 1.039 million, down 5.7% from the upwardly revised February rate of 1.102 million and 2.9% above the March 2014 rate of 1.010 million. The consensus estimate called for 1.085 million new permits.
Single-family housing starts rose to an annualized rate of 618,000 in March, up 4.4% from the downwardly revised February rate of 592,000.
Permits for new single-family homes rose 2.1% in March, to an adjusted annual rate of 636,000 from an upwardly revised total of 623,000 in January.
Multi-family starts for buildings with five or more units, a more volatile number than single-family starts, fell by 4.7% year-over-year in March and rose 4.4% compared with February.
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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.
