The annual rate of building permits took a hit last month due to weakened multifamily activity. But completed construction grew from a year earlier.
Building permits were issued on 107,000 privately owned housing units during the month of August 2016 in municipalities that issue building permits.
Activity increased from the downwardly revised 95,100 permits issued in the previous month and was also greater than 98,400 as of a year previous.
The latest data was jointly released Tuesday by
the Census Bureau and Department of Housing and Urban Development.
During the eight months ended Aug. 31, 2016, there were
780,900 permits issued.
The annual rate of building permit issuance on a seasonally adjusted basis worked out to 1.139 million last month, slipping less than 1 percent from July 2016’s downwardly revised figure.
In addition, the annual rate declined more than 2 percent from August 2015’s downwardly revised rate.
“After two months of gains, the housing market gave back a bit in August,” National Association of Home Builders Chairman Ed Brady said in a written statement. “However, with builders reporting low inventory levels and rising confidence, we expect more consumers will return to the market in the months ahead.”
On a year-over-year basis, the annual rate was down more than 6 percent in the Northeast to 103,000 in August 2016.
The West also experienced a more than 6 percent drop from August 2015 to an annual rate of 272,000.
A nearly
4 percent retreat from a year earlier in the South left the rate there at 567,000.
In the Midwest, however, the annual rate jumped more than 11 percent to 197,000 last month.
On just one-unit properties, the U.S. annual rate increased 4 percent from August 2015 to 737,000, while it tumbled 13 percent on multifamily units to 370,000.
At the close of August 2016, there were a seasonally adjusted
130,000 housing units authorized but not started. The inventory was unchanged from a month earlier and down 11 percent from a year earlier.
The report indicated that U.S. housing units were started at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.142 million during the most-recent month, off nearly 6 percent from July but modestly higher by less than 1 percent from August 2015.
That left a seasonally adjusted 1.038 million housing units under construction as of Aug. 31, 2016, nearly 1 percent more than in the prior report and more than 13 percent more than a year prior.
Home builders completed construction on 98,300 housing units in the most-recent month, more than the upwardly revised 93,700 units completed in July and 92,100 in August 2015.
A total of 669,700 housing units were completed from Jan. 1 through Aug. 31 of this year.
The seasonally adjusted
rate of completed construction fell to 1.043 million from the previous month’s upwardly revised 1.080 million but climbed from an upwardly revised 0.963 million the same month the previous year.
Completed construction soared almost 58 percent from
August 2015 to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 120,000 in the Northeast, giving the region the strongest gain.
In the South, the rate of completed construction climbed 14 percent to 549,000, while it inched up less than a percent in the Midwest to 156,000 annual rate.
But the West suffered a 13 percent year-over-year decline to 218,000.
