Apartment Starts Are Up, Permits Are Down

Census Bureau headquarters. (Photo: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP)

WASHINGTON, DC—As part of a housing report that also saw new single-family construction reach a 10-year high in November, the Census Bureau on Tuesday reported an 11.1% seasonally adjusted increase year-over-year in multifamily starts for the month. However, in keeping with a trend reported recently by RealPage, permits for residences of five or more units were down 8.8% from October and 7.7% from November 2016 to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 395,000 units. In contrast, permits on single-family homes hit the highest level in more than a decade.

Conversely, permits for single-family residences were up 9.7% Y-O-Y and permits overall were up 3.4%. “The year-over-year increase in housing starts is good news for the housing market, as starts are the source of future completions, meaning an increasing amount of new housing supply is on the way,” says Mark Fleming, chief economist at First American Finance Corp. “Housing completions have just begun to keep up with new household formation this past quarter.