Reporting agencies including the U.S. Census Bureau, HUD, and the Associated General Contractors of America (AGC) present monthly economic reports focused on construction and housing statistics. Throughout most of the summer, previous reports indicated that builders and architects are no longer experiencing steep declines, but they’re also not enjoying rapid recoveries. Conditions vary from state to state and commercial construction tends to lag behind residential, but one hopeful trend is that future indicators like permitting and billings have been slowly but consistently climbing. As end-of-summer statistics come out, the message is basically more of the same: Nearly everything is better—sometimes a little and sometimes significantly—when compared with last year. However, 2011 has not realized the overall industry increases predicted by economists. Below are highlights from the most recent economic reports along with comparisons to 2010 results.
Employment trends from the AGC:
About half the states and not quite half of the metropolitan areas across the country saw employment figures rise in commercial and residential construction. California is still seeing the biggest reverse of that trend with employment dropping 7 percent from 2010 to 2011 in the Los Angeles area, and 7,200 people lost jobs in the past month throughout the entire state. Better news can be seen in the Houston area, which added more than 10,000 jobs during the past year, while North Dakota saw an increase of 20 percent in its construction employment rates. Other states with big increases in construction jobs include Michigan, Tennessee, and Illinois. You can look for trends in your area by reading the AGC’s complete state-by-state employment rate chart for the past 12 months.
Residential construction and sales from the U.S. Census Bureau and HUD:
The Census Bureau partners with HUD to provide residential-specific construction statistics. They further break down those numbers into multi- and single-family housing. The sales numbers generally are much lower than starts since the reporting agencies include only those homes built for sale, excluding anything built for an owner or as a rental property. Keeping that in mind, new single-family sales for August 2011 dropped by 7,000 from July, but were 6.1 percent higher than sales in August 2010.
Housing starts decreased across the board with single-family housing starts in August falling 1.4 percent from July’s 423,000 to 417,000. The slowing down of construction season for much of the country could account for that drop. Completions of all privately owned housing units (multi- and single-family combined) rose 2.6 percent in the past year for a total of 623,000 in August 2011.
The best news comes in the form of building permits. The combined figure for private housing permits rose 3.2 percent from July to August 2011 and nearly 8 percent since August 2010. Total permits given for August 2011 were at a seasonally adjusted rate of 620,000. Single-family permits accounted for 413,000 of those, which is a 2.5 percent increase since July 2011. All of the Census/HUD figures can be viewed at www.census.gov/newresconst.
