Single & Multi-family Housing Starts Post Sharp March Declines
Friday, April 18th, 2008After slipping 0.7% in February (revised from a preliminary estimate of a 0.6% decline), housing starts tumbled 11.9% in March to 947,000 units. After two consecutive months of sharp gains, there was a large decline in the highly volatile multi-family starts category. Single-family starts fell for the twelfth consecutive month. The median of analysts’ projections (as surveyed by Bloomberg) was for total starts of 1.01 million. Note that there were minor upward revisions to starts in January and February. For the third consecutive quarter, housing starts fell at a better than 30% annualized rate. The first quarter average for housing starts is down an annualized 34.5% versus the fourth quarter average. This result indicates that residential investment will again be a significant drag on 1Q real GDP growth.
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