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
Following 1.2% growth in Q1 2017, the second estimate of real GDP growth for Q2 2017 increased to 3.0% from the first estimate of 2.6% growth.
While the ABI decelerated to 51.9 in July 2017, it was the sixth consecutive month firms reported increasing demand for design services.
Construction Update
Construction Put-in-Place was $1.21T in July 2017, 1.8% above year ago activity.
571K new Single Family homes were sold in July 2017, 8.9% below the July 2016 rate. The median sales price of new homes remained below the long-term average, at $314K.
Economic Update
In August 2017, the unemployment rate was little changed at 4.4% with 156K non-farm jobs added. The Construction industry added 28K jobs in the month, after adding 6K in July 2017.
43 of the 51 large MSAs (1M+ population) showed year-over-year unemployment rate decreases in July 2017. Again, Denver, CO had the lowest rate, at 2.4%.
