Today, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) released their Housing Market Index (HMI) showing continued evidence that the new home market is experiencing a prolonged recession.The release came along with some guarded, yet optimistic, outlook from Chief Economist David Seiders who has continues to look for an “upswing” in building activity in the second half of 2008.
“The HMI has held within a narrow two-point range for the past five months, indicating that builder views of housing market conditions essentially haven’t changed over that time, … Builders are anticipating a time when market conditions will support an upswing in building activity – most likely in the second half of 2008.”
With this month’s release the NAHB has apparently discontinued (I’m looking into it… I’ll post what I find out) publishing the individual builder respondent rating (“good”, “fair” and “poor”) data series that are the components of the overall composite HMI series, so I have reworked my charts to simply show the four main composites; the HMI index, the “present conditions” index, the “future conditions” index and the “buyer traffic” index.
It’s important to understand that each component of the NAHB housing market index is now sitting at or near the worst levels ever seen in the over 20 years the data has been being compiled.
This suggests that the current severe contraction has surpassed all other events seen in the last 22 years and is now firmly in uncharted territory.
