The National Association of Home Builders [6] just released it latest monthly housing market index, which rose from 35 to 37. As headlines proudly blast, this is the highest level of confidence since February 2007. The NAHB chairman was positively giddy: "From the builder’s perspective, current sales conditions, sales prospects for the next six months and traffic of prospective buyers are all better than they have been in more than five years,” said Barry Rutenberg, chairman of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and a home builder from Gainesville, Fla. “While there is still much room for improvement, we have come a long way from the depths of the recession and the outlook appears to be brightening." Sadly, as the chart below proves, it doesn't take much to get the NAHB confident these days. We present the fudge free data on housing completions: not starts, not permits, completions, which is what you get on the other side of the homebuilding process once all i and t's have been dotted and crossed, because one can fudge both the start and permit metric more than Bank of Spain's X-13-ARIMA seasonal "models" can make MS' IPO track record successful. We leave it up to readers to decide just what homebuilders are so very confident about. Residual record hopium sloshing in the system notwithstanding.
The red arrows show the same level of confidence, at least as reported by the NAHB.
[7]
Chart source: St Louis Fred [8]