MBA Chart of the Week: Single-Family Housing Starts and Builder Application Survey Forecast

In this week’s chart the blue, not seasonally adjusted line shows the month-to-month seasonal pattern of single-family housing starts which decline steeply during the winter months.  The grey line shows the seasonally adjusted, annualized rate of housing starts that helps us to understand whether the current number of starts is high or low for a particular time of year.   

There has been an upward trend in single-family starts during 2015, and we use the Builder Application Survey Index to forecast starts for September, October and November. The BAS Index predicts that while raw number of housing starts will begin to slow down over the next few months (orange dashed line), the level of activity will continue to be higher than we have seen in recent years on a seasonally adjusted basis (yellow dashed line).   

The BAS is a monthly survey of homebuilder affiliated mortgage lenders, measuring the number of mortgage applications taken for new homes which we summarize in the BAS Index. The New Residential Construction statistics for September will be released by the Census this week on October 20.  

To view the Chart of the Week, click https://www.mba.org/news-research-and-resources/forecasts-data-and-reports/forecasts-and-commentary/chart-of-the-week.  

(Lynn Fisher is vice president of research and economics with the Mortgage Bankers Association; she can be reached at lfisher@mba.org. Joel Kan associate vice president of economic forecasting with MBA; he can be reached at jkan@mortgagebankers.org.)