The number of homebuilding projects started in January plunged, hitting the lowest rate since August, with the Midwest region lagging the most.
Data from the U.S. census bureau on Friday showed housing starts fell by 14.8% in January, rocked by a chunky 35.8% fall in projects started on multifamily dwellings. Starts on single family homes fell by 4.7%.
The move doesn’t necessarily represent a slump in demand for new homes — the most recent new homes sales data showed that sales of single family homes rose 8% in December, which followed a 9% drop in November.
Kieran Clancy, senior U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said that new housing starts data didn’t alter the broader upward trend that the data for single family homes have shown over the longer term.
“The monthly housing starts numbers are extremely noisy and prone to revisions, but the bigger picture is that single-family starts are trending higher,” he said.
Indeed, the reasons behind the drop could have been due to the weather. The data showed that the biggest slump in new starts was in the ...