US Housing Starts is at a current level of 1.216M, down from 1.564M last month and up from 1.199M one year ago. This is a change of -22.25% from last month and 1.42% from one year ago. After riding the high coming into 2020, the outlook is bleak.
Housing Starts are the total number of single family houses that started construction in a given month in the US. Housing starts can be viewed as a forward looking metric to gauge the outlook for an economy. This metric most notably crashed during the 2007-2009 housing crisis.
New U.S. home construction declined in March from the previous month by the most since 1984 as the pandemic started to take a bigger toll on the housing market and broader economy.
Residential starts decreased 22.3% to an eight-month low of 1.22 million annualized rate, according to a government report released Thursday. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey called for a 1.3 million pace. Applications to build, a proxy for future construction, fell 6.8% to a 1.35 million rate. ©2020 Bloomberg L.P.