Why? Lower lumber prices and strong housing demand!
According the the National Associations of Home Builders, Builders are enjoying some reprieve from easing material costs in a still-strong housing market, where home prices continue to march higher.
“The single-family building market has moved off the unsustainably hot pace of construction of last fall and has reached a still hot but more stable level of activity,” NAHB Chief Economist Robert Dietz said in a statement.
Derived from a monthly survey that NAHB has been conducting for 35 years, the NAHB/Wells Fargo HMI gauges builder perceptions of current single-family home sales and sales expectations for the next six months. The report also showed that current sales conditions and prospective buyer traffic advanced. At the same time, sales expectations for the next six months remained unchanged.