US housing starts and home sales fall

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Led by a drop in multifamily home building, total housing starts fell 5.3% in September to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.2 million units, according to data from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the US Commerce Department.

According to the US Census Bureau and US Department of Housing and Urban Development single-family starts edged down 0.9% to 871,000 units. Meanwhile, multifamily starts, which includes apartment buildings and condos, fell 15.2% to 330,000. Regionally in September, combined single-family and multifamily housing starts rose 29% in the Northeast and 6.6% in the West. Starts fell 13.7% in the South and 14% in the Midwest.

Existing-home sales declined in September after a month of stagnation in August, according to the National Association of Realtors. All four major regions saw no gain in sales activity in September.

Total existing-home sales fell 3.4% from August to a seasonally adjusted rate of 5.15 million in September. Sales are now down 4.1% from a year ago according to data from the National Association of Realtors.

Sales of newly built, single-family homes fell to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 553,000 units after downwardly revised August, July and June reports, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the US Census Bureau. This is the lowest sales pace since December 2016. However, on a year-to-date basis, sales are up 3.5 percent from this time in 2017.

According to the Census Bureau’s Housing Vacancy Survey, homeownership rates among all age groups under 64 increased over the last year. Millennial households, mostly first-time homebuyers, registered the largest gains among all households, with owners under age 35 showing a 1.2 percentage point increase from a year ago to 36.8%.

Millennials are gradually returning to the for-sale housing market, where gains in home price are slowing down. The homeownership rates of households ages 45-54 and 55-64 experienced a 0.8 percentage point increase. The US homeownership rate was 64.4% in the third quarter of 2018, which is not statistically different from its last quarter reading.

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