Year Over Year growth or decrease in this case.
The only silver lining in the current US housing markets are twofold.
First the sales of new homes are actually up from the number they bottomed out at in July. They got down to about 550M in July. They were about 630 in October. They topped out around 850m in December of 2021. The high since 2007. This was because home builders dropped their prices from the beginning of the year to make up for the increase in interest rates.
Secondly, manufactured home sales are up about 14%. Single section mobile homes are up 22%. Multi section (double wide and modular) home construction is up 9% over last year.
IMHO, as a lumber broker this is the future of home construction in the US. Homes will be built in a factory and delivered to the site as a component. Either as wall panels and trusses or module parts that are assembled on site with a crane.
The days of stick building on site will continue to become a smaller segment of the industry. It is too labor intensive.
Do you know anything about this kind of wood siding? Pretty sure the guy who built my house bought it at Home Depot. But I guess you need to have it “transferred” to your local store.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/questions/2-in-x-8-in-x-12-ft-Select-SPF-Log-Cabin-Siding-740462244283/309019619/1
Or lead time on custom houses are to long. When lead time are at 1 year to build a buyer needs price and loan protection the home builders are unable to provide. While the steel building fabricators are giving me a fixed price all the way out to end of 2025 for an 50x100 on a slab, with a 6 month delivery timeline. If you need a house, buy/build a commercial/farm building at this point and wait for the fed and local zoning to admit they have a control problem.
The days of stick building on site will continue to become a smaller segment of the industry. It is too labor intensive.
Thank you for your expert opinion!!!
After I retired, I appraised residential housing part-time for my brother's firm for 5 years and watched the manufactured housing business get better and better.
It is great to get the opinion of a lumber broker on this matter!
Thanks for your insider information. Very interesting. The modular homes they build these days are really nice and supposedly a lot more energy efficient when assembled, than other construction methods.
So glad I’m not into buying, fixing and flipping houses these days. It would be nerve-wracking, though through the years Wisconsin Real Estate has been very good to me. ;)