Housing starts
New, privately‐owned housing unit starts in May were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,631,00 – a massive 21.7 percentage-point increase from the revised April number of 1,340,000, and 5.7% over the 1,543,000 new housing units started in May 2022. Roughly 997,000 of the new housing starts this May were for single-family housing units, which likewise increased month-on-month by an impressive 18.5%.
The number of buildings of five or more units started in May was 624,000.
Commenting on the statistics, Fannie Mae chief economist Doug Duncan said that the single-family starts vastly exceeded expectations in May, with 997,000 starts being the highest recorded since June 2022.
“In percentage terms, that’s the largest single-month jump since June 2020, which occurred due to a rebound from the initial shock of the COVID pandemic,” Duncan said.
While May’s results exceeded expectations, Duncan found the continued growth in new home construction consistent with improving home builder sentiment and the persistent lack of housing stock. Still, he added that some of the strength in starts was likely to be “statistical noise” – a sentiment affirmed by the US Census Bureau and HUD, which explained in their report that month‐to‐month changes in seasonally adjusted statistics often showed “irregular” movements which did not necessarily mean anything more than what they were.
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