Worth a read: NAHB downright giddy in its 2013-2014 housing forecast
During its recent Fall Construction Forecast, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), Washington, D.C., offered up some bullish forecasts for the housing market’s future prospects. According to this post, NAHB expects a 21% hike in single-family starts this year to 528,000 units and a further 26% climb to 665,000 units in 2013. Multi-family housing starts are expected to rise 26% this year to 224,000 units and 6% in 2013 to 238,000 units.
Mark Zandi, Moody’s Analytics, was the lone economist at several NAHB construction forecast conferences back in housing’s heyday during 2006-2007 who was willing call what was happening back then a “bubble.” Today, he is apparently quite bullish about the U.S. economy’s growth prospects and is pegging much of his forecast on a robust housing market. At the NAHB event he reportedly forecast GDP growth in the 2% range this year and next, and “double that growth closer to 4% in 2014 and 2015.”
The NAHB post says he also “expects job growth to go from two million per year to closer to 3 million in 2014 and 2015.” “A big part of this optimism is the housing market,” said Zandi in that post. “I expect 1.1 million total housing starts in 2013, 1.7 million to 1.8 million in 2014 and over 1.8 million in 2015.”
About the Author
Jim Lucy Blog
Chief Editor
Jim Lucy has been wandering through the electrical market for more than 30 years, most of the time as an editor for Electrical Wholesaling, Electrical Marketing newsletter and CEE News. During that time he and the editorial team for the publications have won numerous national awards for their coverage of the electrical business. He showed an early interest in electricity, when as a youth he had an idea for a hot dog cooker. Unfortunately, the first crude prototype malfunctioned and the arc nearly blew him out of his parents' basement. Before becoming an editor for Electrical Wholesaling magazine and Electrical Marketing, he earned a BA degree in journalism and a MA in communications from Glassboro State College, Glassboro, NJ., which is formerly best known as the site of the 1967 summit meeting between President Lyndon Johnson and Russian Premier Aleksei Nikolayevich Kosygin, and now best known as the New Jersey state college that changed its name in 1992 to Rowan University because of a generous $100 million donation by N.J. zillionaire industrialist Henry Rowan. Jim is a Brooklyn-born Jersey Guy happily transplanted in the fertile plains of Kansas for the past 20 years.