Housing Starts May 2009 | Good News Or Bad News For Sonoma County Real Estate?
June 17th, 2009 categories: Buyer Resource
April 2009 housing starts were anemic at an annual rate of 454,000 for the entire country. May 2009 numbers just came in this morning, and we saw a 17% increase over April’s numbers to an annualized rate of 532,000 nationally.
Building permits also saw a jump, although not as large; a 4% increase from 498,000 in April to 508,000 in May.
GOOD NEWS: Both the housing starts and building permits beat analyst estimates, of 508,000 and 485,000 respectively.
Looking at a little bit of recent history, annualized home starts in May 2008 were 975,000, and in May 2007 they were 1,400,000 units.
Currently, we are at 38% of the new home starts we were in 2007. This is good news, as the last thing we need at this point is more inventory.
What does this mean for Sonoma County? Hard to say as home starts are national numbers. Hopefully Sonoma County is part of the national trend where inventory drops, and then prices are forced to rise a la Supply and Demand from Econ 101.
Sonoma County still has a lot of affordable homes and we need outside help of some sort to right the ship. Maybe this is one of the early signs.
