Friday 17 October 2008

US housing starts - the crash continues

This is how the Financial Times described it:

"US housing starts approached their lowest level in nearly half a century in September in a sign of the deepening crisis in residential real estate, figures from the commerce department showed on Friday.

Builders started construction of new homes at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 817,000 last month, 6.3 per cent lower than the August level of 872,000, and 31.1 per cent lower than a year earlier. It was the weakest level of new building since January 1991, when starts hit 798,000. Excluding that month, which came during the downturn of the early 1990s, starts have never been lower since records began in 1959."

4 comments:

Mark Wadsworth said...

Tee hee, from the look of that chart, in a year or so housing starts will go negative.

Which is quite possible, if demolitions exceed new builds. Which was one of Nulab's first crude ruses to prop up house prices.

Anonymous said...

Talking of things going wrong, your blog does tend to upset my browser (IE6).

Electro-Kevin said...

The Lehmans video was great.

Thanks.

Anonymous said...

The bright spot here (looking into the future) is that housing starts are falling off quite substantially.

Bad news for construction jobs, good news for helping to reduce inventory levels which ultimately will help to begin stabilizing the U.S. housing market.