US housing starts fall in December
Friday, 20 January 2012 21:06
US housing starts fell 4.1 percent in December, the Commerce Department reported Thursday, but analysts said the figure was distorted by seasonal and year-end adjustments.
December activity took the annual pace of new starts, an indicator of the health of the country's construction industry, to 657,000, down from 685,000 in November.
That was 7.8 percent above the level of December 2010, the Commerce Department said.Analysts played down the significance of the month-on-month decline, saying that annualization and seasonal adjustments magnified a fall in multi-family housing starts in the Northeast by a factor of 11.
"We would read nothing into this December drop in housing starts since it was entirely the result of a drop in multi-family housing starts in the Northeast," said RDQ Economics analysts.
"Single-family housing starts across the country rose 4.4 percent, which was the third consecutive monthly increase and probably a better measure of underlying trends in housing activity," they said.
"Our 2012 view on housing construction is that we will see a modest gain and we see nothing here to dissuade us from that view."
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