Every two weeks, we prepare a report focused on understanding market intelligence and analyzing construction industry data and trends.
This in-depth report is developed primarily for internal distribution, but because we want to keep construction professionals like you informed about the industry, we make this report available to anyone who's interested in reading it.
What's New In This Report?
Highlights
The advance estimate of real GDP growth for Q4 2019 was 2.1%, the same as that of the previous quarter's estimate of 2.1%.
The annualized value of Construction Put-in-Place was $1.33T in December 2019, 5.0% up from its year-ago activity with civil construction spending growing at 9.4%.
Construction Update
The Leading Indicator of Remodeling Activity (LIRA) projects annual spending for home improvements and repairs to decline to 3.4% in Q1 2020 and reach $326B.
The ABI for December 2019 rose to 52.5 points, above 50 (neutral mark), with the West region and the Commercial/Industrial sector in the lead.
Economic Update
In January 2020, the unemployment rate slightly changed to 3.6% after adding 225K jobs, 44K of which were in the Construction Industry.
Out of the large MSAs (1M+ population), 39 of 51 showed year-over-year unemployment rate decreases in December 2019 with Burlington-South Burlington, VT, and Logan, UT-ID having the lowest unemployment rate of 1.6% and 1.7%, respectively.
