November Residential Permit Snapshot

Hi everyone, below are the updated permit numbers through November.

Hopefully you're having a great holiday season and are gearing up for a Happy New Year! The Census published updated residential permit numbers for November on Friday and we thought it would be a good week to send them out before this year officially comes to an end. Stay safe out there and if you're doing something fun for the new year, we'd love to hear about it!

Single Family

Single family continued to recover, with only the trailing 12-month count staying down year over year. Looking at the monthly counts, we've mostly been at 2,200+ per month since March, so that 12-month count should turn positive in January or February based on the current trajectory. If you follow XHB (SPDR S&P Homebuilders ETF), you saw it hit a near-term peak at $84.60 in August, retreat from there to $69.83 in October, then rally to a new all-time high of $95.64 as of mid-day Dec. 22nd. Investors are optimistic about the 2024 home building market.

Multifamily

Multifamily permits continue to defy gravity, bouncing back up in the month to tally a trailing12-month count of 22,661. That's the highest count in our data set, which goes back to 2000. The only time period with a higher count that we're aware of is the mid-80s. If we take a look at the FTSE NAREIT Equity Apartments Index, we see it was within 2 cents of its all-time high ($632.10) in April of 2022 and has been in a choppy decline since then. The current low point was in October at $362.02. It has rebounded from there to reach $419.15 as of mid-day Dec. 22nd.

Combined

The combined permit count dipped to a near-term low of 41,120 in June and has shot back up to 46,351, mainly due to a strong few months of multifamily permit activity. The most recent peak for this count was 53,619 in March of 2022 and we currently sit 15.68% below that number. Below are the longer-term charts for reference:

Thanks for reading, until next time,

John & Ramey