America has a builder president again. So, naturally, builder sentiment improved in November.
If you’ve been around any general contractors, you know they love (love) them some Trump. When you’re in the office with them, you have to go with it. They’re putting a roof over your head after all. Sure, you’re going to have a structural engineer give it a second look once it’s done, but he probably loves him some Trump too, so you’ll play along if you know what’s good for you.
I’m kidding. But not. I’m actually not kidding at all about any of that. I’m a Trump guy when I need to be, and in a deep red state, that’s pretty often.
At 46, the NAHB’s gauge of builder moods easily topped estimates and registered the highest headline print since April, in data released Monday.
November marked the third straight monthly gain, but as the figure shows, we’re still below the 50 line which separates net optimism from pessimism.
As you can imagine, the color accompanying the release featured a lot of red flags — and I don’t mean cautionary statements. “Builders are expressing increasing confidence that Republicans gaining all the levers of power in Washington will result in significant regulatory relief for the industry that will lead to the construction of more homes and apartments,” NAHB Chair Carl Harris declared. (Carl builds custom homes in Wichita. If you want to get carried away to Oz, give him a buzz.)
Harris pointed to “a huge jump in builder sales expectations over the next six months.”
The chart shows the NAHB’s measure of forward sentiment. At 64, it’s now the highest since April of 2022.
Again, that’s predicated almost entirely on — for lack of a better way to describe it — MAGA vibes. I’m not saying builders are wrong to be optimistic. If you’ve read my housing market coverage since the pandemic, you know I’m deeply concerned about a state of affairs where everyday people who work hard and make the median household income can’t afford a house. Forget whether that’s “sad” and “tragic” (it is those things, but that’s a little mawkish for my tastes), it’s flat-out dangerous. You can put working people through a lot, but you can’t put them out on the streets. That’s when you get social unrest. If Trump can somehow help out with that situation, God bless him. And Godspeed.
One risk though, is that Trump’s plan to run the economy hot prevents the Fed from cutting rates as quickly or deeply as they otherwise might, while the inflationary read-through from tariffs and deportations pushes up long-end US bond yields, leaving mortgage rates elevated.
Even in their MAGA zeal, builders were cognizant of those risks. “[W]hile the stock market cheered the election result, the bond market has concerns, as indicated by a rise for long-term interest rates,” NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz remarked. “There is also policy uncertainty in front of the business sector and housing market as the executive branch changes hands.”
Workers, the bottom 80% of the economy have to have money to buy houses. Kamala had a simplistic way to help. Donald is just going to push rates up and block house-hungry buyers who can’t afford houses at current prices. How does this work? The rich get risher and the poor get….
Costs and interest rates will probably go higher. I guess we will see whether more houses get built (and sold).
I am going to take a shot in the dark here and say you live in Knoxville, TN. I don’t know why but it is what I have pictured in my head over the years.
I doubt it’s Knoxville and I’ve got a high school contractor buddy, a 100 year old house, so I know exactly what you’re talking about ??
He’s definitely closer to the coast, and in a larger city. I’m going to venture Charleston, not being familiar with the south.
I was originally thinking one of the Research Triangle cities of North Carolina, but I no longer think that’s the case.
“you know I’m deeply concerned about a state of affairs where everyday people who work hard and make the median household income can’t afford a house.”
Good news is houses are going to get a lot more affordable over the next 2-3 years, which isn’t good news for builders or really anyone for that matter. A decade from now, we’ll all feel better about things. Until then, we’ll be thinking of the Biden years as the good times
Your true colors of trolling everyone for everything are peaking through here.
I taught business and investments to more than 12,500 students over 40 years. For the last 25 of those years I started of my first day of every semester by telling them two things. If they wanted a decent grade they would have to participate in the class discussion. Furthermore, when they gave an answer to one of my numerous questions they should expect to hear another question that stretched beyond the previous one. If they got more than two questions back at them, that was a A for the day. The second thing I told them was that I was an equal-opportunity troll. I never criticized anyone in a nasty way but accounting majors, finance majors, economists, management majors, and human resource types could all expect to catch a shot regularly. Many practitioners of Zen wear a white dot on their foreheads. This is too remind them that everyone gets crapped on by a random bird once in a while.