Looking Up: Single-Family Housing Production Numbers Show Improvement

Single-family housing production continued its upward trajectory during Q4 2023 largely due to easing mortgage rates and a lack of existing housing inventory. The latest findings from the National Association of Home Builders' Home Building Geography Index (HBGI) for Q4 2023 found that larger urban metro markets led in growth rates while large metro suburban counties gained the most market share.

The lowest single-family year-over-year growth rate in Q4 2023 occurred in micro counties, which posted an 11.7% decline. Most markets, apart from small metro outlying counties (0.4%), continued to post declines. Despite these declines, the rates for large/small metro areas showed remarkable improvements as they rose from double-digit declines to just above 5% declines across the board. Nationally, from the Census Bureau’s monthly new residential construction survey, single-family permits for the three final months of the year (fourth quarter) were over 20% higher than the previous year’s level. The HBGI growth rates, which are based on a moving average of permit rates, began to rise as permit levels in the fourth quarter of 2023 increase by 24.8% nationally compared to the fourth quarter of 2022.

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