[1]Home Depot [2]recently revealed its second quarter results [3]revealing that it experienced a record number of transactions in the last three months. Multiple market watchers believe the health of home depot is a sign of the housing market recovery overall, CNNMoney [4] said in a report [5].
"All of that suggests Americans are ramping up spending on efforts to spruce up newly-purchased homes or ones they'd like to sell," CNNMoney said. "While housing might not be back to pre-crisis levels, it's certainly looking a lot healthier."
“The fact the builder confidence has been in the low 60s for three straight months shows that single-family housing is making slow but steady progress,” said Tom Woods, NAHB chairman and a home builder from Blue Springs, Missouri. “However, we continue to hear that builders face difficulties accessing land and labor.”
Additionally, on Tuesday [9], single-family construction starts climbed higher for the month of July, while permits and completions dropped, according to residential construction statistics for July 2015 [10] jointly released by the U.S. Census Bureau [11] and HUD [12].
According to the data, single-family housing starts were at a rate of 782,000 in July, 12.8 percent above the revised June figure of 693,000.
Selma Hepp, Trulia's chief economist weighed in on the new residential data, finding that although single-family starts were up in July, they are still running below historical levels.
"Finally a little bit stronger than multi-family starts, the single-family starts are still below long-run average in most major metros across the county," Hepp said. "In fact, Trulia’s latest study reveals that the single-family component is still well below historical norms even in metros seeing improvement in annualized permit activity. Only 13 out of the 100 largest U.S. metros saw increases in single-family construction over their historical norms, most notably in Austin, Houston, Charleston and Nashville."