Hardware Retailing The Industry's Source for Insights and Information
Builder confidence in the market for newly built, single-family homes improved four points to a 58 reading on the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) for December. This gain reflected improvement in all three index components—current sales conditions, sales expectations and traffic of prospective buyers.
“This is definitely an encouraging sign as we move into 2014,” said National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) Chairman Rick Judson, a home builder from Charlotte, N.C. “The HMI is up 11 points since December of 2012 and has been above 50 for the past seven months. This indicates that an increasing number of builders have a positive view on where the industry is going.”
HMI data is derived from a monthly survey that NAHB has conducted for 25 years. The index gauges builder perceptions of current single-family home sales and sales expectations for the next six months as good, fair or poor and asks builders to rate traffic of prospective buyers as high to very high, average or low to very low. Scores from each component are used to calculate a seasonally adjusted index where any number over 50 indicates that more builders view conditions as good than poor.
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