While Homebuilding in some areas hit hardest by the housing market crash has increased over the year, the construction of new single-family homes has fallen over the past couple of months.
According to Metro Study, a housing market research firm, home construction has increased in some of the areas hit hardest when the housing bubble burst. These increases are measured from the second quarter of 2009 through the second quarter of 2010. New home starts for single-family homes increased 68.1% in South Florida and an 83.7% increase in Naples/Ft. Myers, Florida. There were also significant increases in the second quarter for Las Vegas, Nevada and Denver, Colorado with 65.1% and 59.7% respectively. Remember, these are year over year increases.
While this shows an increase in those specific areas in new single-family home construction over the last year. The nation as a whole has been plagued by a decrease in single-family housing starts over the last few months. According to data released by the United States Census Bureau, single-family housing starts dropped 0.7% in June and 4.2% in July. That puts the seasonally adjusted annual rate at 432,000 single-family housing starts.
Just to give you some perspective on where that puts homebuilding in the United States, the seasonally adjusted annual rate in September of 2006, before (towards the beginning of) the housing bubble burst, was just over 1.4 million single-family housing starts. That’s a drop of nearly 1 million starts in just 4 years.
Signs are not good when it comes to predictions for future construction. There was 3% decrease in June permits and a 3.1% decrease in July permits; April and May saw significant decreases too. According to the real-estate analysts RL Brown and Greg Burger, Phoenix, Arizona is expected to have 8,500 permits for single-family housing starts this year. That Is 4,000 less than the number of permits pulled in 2009. Many analysts expect much of the country to see similar results. Market analysts expect a small increase in homebuilding in 2011 and marked increases by 2012.
In 2008, some experts said we would see improvement in late ’09 early ’10. Will the experts predicting a rebound in ’11 and ’12 be right, or are they just throwing dates out?
image credit: www.anime.si
Bryan is a member of New Homes Section and a proud contributor to its blogging network. 
“That’s a drop of nearly 1 million starts in just 4 years.” That’s incredible! And with unemployment rates not improving, I don’t see an end in sight for this economic depression.
Thats all pretty depressing stuff surely we should be seeing some light or are we going into a double dip property recession in the USA
No worries, we’ll just throw a little more of our kids money at it in the form of a spendulis plan, that’s gotta work…right?