Home Building on the Rise in 2014
 The prospects for home building in 2014 are bright, with a forecast of a nearly 25 percent gain in total housing starts, with a 32 percent pickup in single-family construction. And the coming year will come atop the gains of 2013. Final numbers are expected to show that housing starts expanded almost 18 percent last year to a total of 921,000.
November housing starts data from the Census and the Department of Housing and Development show an uptick after weakness in home construction during the fall. Total housing starts topped an annualized pace of one million, the first time since 2008. Single-family starts rose to 727,000, a 20.8-percent increase over October and the highest since December 2007. Multifamily starts rose to 364,000, a 26.8-percent increase over October.
The government data also show that the seasonally adjusted total number of single-family and multifamily homes under construction has now increased for 27 months in a row, growing from 413,000 in August 2011 to 685,000 in November 2013. This continuous growth provides a robustness check on the state of the housing recovery and sometimes volatile monthly data. Read more |
