Sales of new and existing homes were lackluster last year, but there is an air of optimism running through this year’s gathering of home builders, contractors and suppliers at the home-building industry’s annual convention. The National Association of Home Builders’ International Builders Show, combined with the Kitchen & Bath Industry Show, is expected to attract 125,000 attendees and occupy 750,000 square feet of meeting and showroom space at the sprawling Las Vegas Convention Center.
It is the largest edition of the trade show in many years, due partly to its consolidation with other shows and partly to the gradual recovery of the home-building market. It brings with it mildly upbeat outlooks for a return of momentum in the spring season, which unofficially begins after the Super Bowl and typically hits its stride in March.
The National Association of Realtors Chief Economist Lawrence Yun estimates that new-home sales will increase by 41% to 624,000 this year from 2014 and that construction starts for single-family homes will rise by nearly 32% to 840,000. The builders association’s economists predict gains of 29.6% in sales of new single-family homes and 25.5% in single-family construction starts.
If such forecasts are correct, the future looks better than the stall of 2014. In the first 11 months of last year, sales of newly built single-family homes totaled 399,000. That was essentially flat with the same period of 2013. Many factors combined last year to hamper new-home sales, including job and wage growth that didn’t fully revive until the latter half of the year, tight mortgage-qualification standards, mounting student debt and the persistently high price of new homes.
The Realtors predict that resales will increase by 8% this year from last to 5.3 million, and that median resale prices will increase 4% this year. Those predictions bode well for remodelers, since moves spur remodeling activity.
(Excerpt above from the Wall Street Journal)