Every two weeks, Oldcastle Building Solutions Business Intelligence prepares a report focused on understanding and analyzing construction market data and trends.
This in-depth report is developed primarily for internal distribution, but Oldcastle Building Solutions exists to inform construction professionals like you, so we're making this report available for anyone who's interested in reading it.
What's New In This Report?
Highlights
The ABI contracted 4.6 points in September 2017 to 49.1, weighted by contractions in the Midwest and West regions. However, the South and Northeast regions made gains in their ABI scores in the month.
In October 2017, the HMI rose 4 points to 68. This reverses September's depressed confidence scores, which reflected concerns of rising labor and material costs due to hurricane damage repairs.
Construction Update
In September 2017, housing permits reflected an annual rate of 1.2M, falling 4.3% below its year-ago rate, primarily due to a 24% contraction in Multi-family permits.
Housing starts in September 2017 were 6.1% above their year-ago rate, with gains over the year in both Single Family and Multi-family starts to 829K and 298K, respectively.
667K new Single Family homes were sold in September 2017, 17% above the revised year-ago rate. The jump in sales resulted in the supply of new homes for sale (at current sales rate) to drop to 5 months from 6.1 months in August.
Economic Update
The advanced (first) estimate of real GDP growth for Q3 2017 was 3.0%, following 3.1% growth in second quarter.
The Associated Builders and Contractors (ABC) reported a 4.1% decrease from the previous quarter in their Construction Backlog Indicator (CBI), to 8.6 months in Q2 2017.
