Housing Market's Comeback Is Poised to Accelerate

Housing was the epicenter of the last recession. From the peak in 2005 to the end of the contraction in mid-2009, U.S. residential investment declined at an unprecedented rate of about 20 percent a year. In normal business cycles, sectors that overshoot to the downside tend to rebound sharply. Given the significant oversupply of homes and tightening of credit, housing enjoyed no such recovery. Residential investment was essentially flat for almost two years after the recession ended. Since then, a slow recovery has been underway and we suspect the housing market will pick up in the year ahead.

Although residential investment has been expanding since 2011, recent growth has been sluggish, rising just 1.1 percent over the last year, compared with about 7 percent in the two previous years. Some of this weakness can be attributed to a housing market in transition: Owner-occupied real estate is recovering as renter-occupied real estate is declining. Also, multi-family construction is ebbing as single-family building picks up. With inventories tight, home resales appear to have flattened out as new home sales take a greater share. In other words, conditions in the U.S. housing market are normalizing. That’s a good thing.