With November's housing starts up 9.3% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 685,000 units, executives from the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), Washington, D.C., are starting to like what they see in the homebuilding data. NAHB Chairman Bob Nielsen, a home builder from Reno, Nev., said in a press release, “While we still have a long way to go back to normal, the latest numbers are one more indication that housing is slowly turning the corner. In scattered markets across the country, buyers who have long sat on the sidelines are starting to take advantage of today's very attractive prices and interest rates, while others are making the move to a new apartment. This nascent trend would be stronger if not for the very restrictive lending environment that continues for both building and buying new homes.”
David Crowe, NAHB's chief economist, said the latest housing data points toward a slow-but positive growth evnvironment for homebuilders in 2012. “Along with recent gains that have been registered in builder confidence and other economic measures, the improvement in new-home production and permitting shown in this latest report provides further evidence of the gradual strengthening that we expected to see in housing markets toward the end of the year,” he said in that press statement. “We anticipate continued, slow improvement in housing starts and sales through 2012.” Details
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.