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
CPI-U, which measures inflation, increased 0.2% in December 2019, after rising 0.3% in November.
In January 2020, the Housing Market Index (HMI) reached a score of 75 with stable performance in the current, future and traffic components of the index.
Construction Update
In December 2019, housing permits reflected an annual rate of 1.42M, 5.8% below the year-ago rate, but with annual increases in Single-family permits.
Housing starts in December 2019 were 41.0% above their year-ago rate with 1.6M starts, with huge increases in both Single-family and Multi-family annual starts.
The Dodge Momentum Index (DMI) reached 156.2 in December 2019, 1.5% above the revised November score of 153.9.
Economic Update
The third estimate of real GDP growth for Q3 2019 was 2.1%, a 0.1% increase from the previous quarter's estimate of 2.0%.
In December 2019, the unemployment rate stayed at 3.5% after adding 145K jobs, 20K of which were in the Construction Industry.
