Free Republic

Housing starts fell to 1.32 million. The numbers: Construction of new homes fell 14.7% in March, as home builders scaled back new projects. The pace of construction slowed as builders contended with higher mortgage rates sapping demand. Housing starts fell to a 1.32 million annual pace from 1.55 million in February,

US home building sank in August, dropping 11.3% from July levels, as mortgage rates stayed elevated amid lingering inflation. Housing starts, a measure of new-home construction, dropped to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.283 million last month, well below expectations of 1.44 million, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau. It was the lowest level since June 2020. The number of units started was 14.8% lower than a year ago. Single‐family housing starts, which account for most of the construction, dropped 4.3% in August from the revised July figure, at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 941,000....

Bidenomics, the economic gift to big donors and a boot up the backside of middle class and low wage workers, keeps on giving. Now its homebuilder sentiment falling to 45. U.S. homebuilders are feeling pessimistic about their business for the first time in seven months, thanks to stubbornly high mortgage rates. Builder confidence in the single-family housing market fell 5 points in September to 45 on the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index. The decrease follows a 6-point drop in August. Anything below 50 is considered negative. Mortgage rates are up 152% under Biden’s Reign of Economic...

Everything is NOT beautiful with the US economy. Another crack in the dam (US economy) is buyer traffic for new homes. They are now down -64% since last year (YoY). ... Of course, The Federal Reserve is removing its massive monetary stimulus. BUT commercial bank deposits have declined the most since 1973.

Sales of new homes soared in January to a blistering seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 923,000, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. That puts sales 4.3 percent above the revised December rate of 885,000 and 19.3 percent above the January 2020 estimate.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman announced late Friday their decision to approve 42 new housing units in the town of Kiryat Arba near Hevron, where a terrorist murdered a 13-year-old girl in her bed on Thursday. The new houses will be built in the same part of the town where the young victim of that attack, Hallel Yaffa Ariel, lived. Tenders for the housing units in question were initially issued a year and a half ago, but they were frozen for political reasons. The government's decision yesterday essentially green-lighted construction to begin. In addition, the decision...

Besides the obvious advantage of a free heating source (as long as the sun continues to rise and set) we have discovered a few more advantages:

Nanoparticle inks can turn your existing 2D printer into a circuit board production line – and the possibilities for 3D printers are mind-boggling. Printing foldable mobile phones on a sheet of paper from a normal 2D printer is just a decade away, according to Jürgen Steimle, head of the Embodied Interaction Group at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken, Germany. Steimle and his colleagues took a step towards this in 2013, when they used a standard printer loaded with nanoparticle ink to print a paper circuit that works even after the sheet is torn. In the past couple...

There have been bad housing markets before, but never in post-World War II history has the market for new homes suffered as badly as it has in this decline. Multimedia Graphic In a Bad Housing Market, New-Home Sales Suffer Most That plunge raises questions about whether some homes built during the boom will ever be sold. It could also suggest that home builders have been slow to cut their prices enough to keep up with falling market prices. For more than three decades, the sales volume of existing single-family homes and newly built houses tended to rise and fall by...

Hat tip to several - thanks! Note: Victorville is east of Los Angeles at the southern edge of the Mojave desert.

Last year was a record for the nation's home building industry . The Commerce Department reported Thursday that construction of single-family homes and apartments totaled 2.065 million units last year. The increase of 5.6 percent over 2004 pushed overall residential construction to the second highest level on record, exceeded only by 2.357 million units built in 1972. Meanwhile, single-family home construction hit an all-time high for the third straight year, rising to 1.714 million units, up 6.4 percent from the previous record of 1.611 million homes built in 2004. The record-setting performance came despite the fact that housing activity dropped...

The Labor Department reported that its Producer Price Index, which measures price pressures before they reach the consumer, rose 0.9 percent in December, the biggest increase since a 1.7 percent jump in September. For all of 2005, wholesale prices rose by 5.4 percent. That was the biggest increase since a 5.7 percent increase in 1990... However, core inflation, excluding energy and food, was up a more moderate 1.7 percent in 2005... Retail sales posted a weaker-than-expected 0.7 percent increase in December, the Commerce Department reported, after rising by 0.8 percent in November. "Retailers continue to report good sales momentum in...