Construction Informer

If you want to get a non-governmental view of the residential housing market one place to start is with Metrostudy. The company provides independent primary and secondary housing market information.

In doing so it claims that unlike government statistics which rely on a “sampling of housing permits,” its statistics are backed up by researchers who drive to every site in the housing markets it serves and verify there are foundations in place.

Metrostudy is predicting a much longer recovery than other economists and is seeing 2009 starts being down by 47 percent over 2008. The company claims that other housing starts forecasts are unrealistically high and that housing starts could be just 500,000 in 2009, a departure of 100,000 to 200,000 lower than other housing forecasts. The company claims that government “headline housing starts numbers have long been overstated.”

Here is how Brad Hunter, chief economist and national director of consulting, for Metrostudy characterized inventories in the Florida market:

Finished vacant inventories are actually being reduced, but they remain too high in most markets. Florida leads the nation as the most overbuilt, with 12.6 months of finished vacant inventory in South Florida, 10 months in Naples-Fort Myers, and 9.2 months in Central Florida. These readings are all far in excess of the equilibrium level of 1.5 to 2.5 months that Metrostudy considers normal in a healthy market. Only San Antonio and Baltimore are presently in a normal range for this measure.

And so there you have it – another view for consideration.