Housing Starts Fall and Housing Continues Slump

The commerce department just reported the latest housing start information and its worse than analysts expectd. Starts of new homes fell by 2.6% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.331 million while authorized building permits fell by 5.9% to a seasonlly adjusted rate of 1.307 million. Bothnumbers are the lowest since 1995.

While month by month data is often volatile and should be taken with a grain of salt, housing starts have shown a decline over a period of time. For the last six months, annualized starts were 1.42 million down from 1.45 million in the five months through July.

In addition, the National Association of Home Builders reported yesterday that builders are the most pessimistic they have been in the last 22 years.