Housing Starts Plumb Six Year Low

In October, housing starts more than retraced the downwardly revised 4.9% September gain and fell 14.6% to the lowest level since July 2000. The latest result fell well short of Consensus expectations for 1.68M starts.

At 1.486M units, the October figure pulled the year-to-date average to 1.863 starts and 10.2% below the first ten months of 2005.

Single-family starts in October fell 15.9% to 1.177M, also the lowest level since July 2000. The year-to-date average level of single family starts fell 11.5% from 2005. Multi family starts in addition were down by 9.1% m/m.

By region, single family housing starts were weakest down South and fell 24.8% (-32.4% y/y). Starts also fell 9.1% (-32.9% y/y) out West, were 7.3% (-33.1% y/y) lower in the Midwest but in the Northeast single family starts rose 10.9% (-22.2% y/y).

Building permits fell 6.3% after a revised 5.2% September drop. The ninth monthly decline this year was to the lowest level since 1997. Permits to start single family homes fell 3.8% (-31.7% y/y), the lowest since 2000.

What Do Financial Asset Prices Say About the Housing Market? from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System can be found here.

Mexico's GDP is enjoying its best run of growth since before dot.com bust in 2001. In Q3, the year-on-year gain was 4.6%, following 5.5% and 4.7% in Q1 and Q2, respectively. The quarterly growth in Q3 was 1.0% from Q2, led by construction and transportation. Manufacturing edged up a mere 0.1% and didn't grow at all in Q2, but it had surged 2.9% in Q1 and is ahead 5.1% year-on-year. These data were reported yesterday afternoon, November 16, by INEGI, the Mexican government statistics institute.

Government officials, speaking prior to the G-20 Conference in Melbourne, Australia, indicated that this pattern was in line with their hopes. Their aim is to diminish the Mexican economy's dependency on demand from the US. So they are emphasizing local construction and services industries. The financial sector and other business services are up 4.6% year-on-year for Q3, the same as total GDP, but they have been expanding more rapidly than the total for most of the last five years. Finance Minister Gil Diaz highlighted the growth in construction, fueled in part by expansion of mortgage lending. Indeed, during the first half of this year, mortgage lending at banks was running more than 40% ahead of last year. Gross value added in construction is up 7.7% in Q3 from a year ago and 2.6% Q3/Q2 alone. Another strong sector is transportation, storage and communication, up 9.4% year-on-year. Mexico's output of oil is slowing, but its production of natural gas is growing rapidly, and we would surmise that pipeline usage is one part of the gain in the transportation sector.