New home building remained strong during November. Housing starts increased 3.2% (13.6% y/y) to 1.365 million (SAAR) from 1.323 million in October, revised from 1.314 million. The Action Economics Forecast Survey had expected 1.346 million starts for last month.

Multi-family starts increased 4.9% last month (7.3% y/y) to 427,000 following an 11.8% improvement during October. Single-family starts increased 2.4% in November (16.7% y/y) to 938,000 after October's rise of 1.6%.

Starts in the South rose 10.3% (13.4% y/y) to 752,000, the highest level since March 2007. In the West, starts improved 1.4% (22.7% y/y) to 351,000, the highest level since September of last year. Moving lower last month were starts in the Midwest where they fell 15.5% (+9.7% y/y) to 158,000. They've been trending sideways since 2016. Starts in the Northeast declined 3.7% (-4.6% y/y) to 104,000, the lowest level since July.

A 1.4% increase (11.1% y/y) in building permits to 1.482 million brought them to the highest level since May 2007. Permits to build multi-family homes increased 2.5% to 564,000 (14.9% y/y) while single-family permits rose 0.8% to 918,000 (8.9% y/y).

The housing starts and permits figures can be found in Haver's USECON database. The expectations figure is contained in the AS1REPNA database.