Article source: ConstructConnect

The ease with which the U.S. and Canadian economies recover from the coronavirus-caused economic downturn is very much going to depend on whether we can escape without a significant upsurge in inflation.

Over the next six months to a year, everyone in my profession will be keeping an eagle eye on how prices are performing.

For the moment, general price inflation, as represented by Consumer Price Index (CPI) numbers, remains restrained, although there are some indications that ‘all item’ and ‘core’ values are flirting with +2.0% year over year. For example, in Canada, two of the three ‘core’ measures monitored by the Bank of Canada now do sit at +2.0% y/y. The third BoC ‘core’ measure is +1.3% y/y (see lower text box in Chart 5).

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Article source: ConstructConnect

There are some exciting stories to tell about new home building in the U.S. and Canada at the beginning of this year. Let’s cover the U.S. first.

Monthly average U.S. housing starts (seasonally adjusted and annualized/SAAR) in 2020 were 1.396 million units, +7.8% versus 2019’s figure of 1.295 million.

In January of the current year, starts rose some more, to 1.580 million units, +13.2% versus 2020’s 12-month average.

The monthly average for single-family starts in 2020 was a conveniently memorable one million units, +12.0% to 2019’s 893,000. In January 2021, there was a further bump to 1,162,000 units, +16.2% versus last year’s monthly average.

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Article source: ConstructConnect

Short of going directly to suppliers or specialty newsletters for information, the best source of data on construction material cost movements is to be found in the Producer Price Index (PPI) figures published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The January 2021 PPI numbers confirm that lumber- and steel-related markets, as well as some others, are, indeed, ‘hot’.

Table 1 sets out PPI percentage changes for 15 crucial construction material inputs over two distinct time frames, the past year and the latest three months.

On a year-over-year basis, the biggest price movements have been recorded by softwood lumber, +73.0%; particle board and oriented strand board (OSB), +70.3%; iron and steel scrap, +50.8%; plywood, +35.6%; copper wire and cable, +12.5%; and prefabricated metal buildings, +12.4%.

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Article source: ConstructConnect

As I sit writing this Nuggets report, it’s just after Valentine’s Day and we’re about one month away from the mid-March annual anniversary of when the coronavirus descended on us all and turned our employment and social lives upside down, amidst the terrible medical toll taken on the population at large.

Saying 2020 was a ‘difficult’ year is an epic understatement. Among bad years, even throughout history, 2020 was one of the sorriest. The myriad statistics generated last year reflected the grim reality.
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Salt Lake City at Head of U.S. Labor Market Class

As someone often called on to make presentations on the economy, or as a salesperson wishing to sound knowledgeable when speaking with a client, it’s always good to know where the best labor markets are among cities.

This article is a handy reference piece.

For the 51 largest (by population) metro statistical areas (MSAs) in the U.S. and the 35 census metropolitan areas (CMAs) in Canada, I’ve ranked them in two ways:
(1) by year-over-year jobs creation performances (or rather, with the pandemic on the prowl, by jobs retention performances, smallest decline being most admirable); and
(2) by unemployment rates, from lowest (best) to highest (worst).

The Top-33 city rankings for the U.S. appear in Table 1, which makes use of the latest data available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), for December 2020.

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Article source: ConstructConnect

• A Sharp Divide in the Construction Marketplace
• A Boom in Residential Construction
• Nonresidential Construction Pausing and Considering

A Sharp Divide in the Construction Marketplace

The ‘duality’ theme often ascribed to the economy these days ‒ e.g., online retail sales ‘great’ vs ‘bricks and mortar’ retail sales ‘struggling’ ‒ since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic can also be applied to the nation’s construction marketplace.

The Census Bureau’s 2020 end-of-year statistics on put-in-place investment in the U.S. showed total dollar volume being +4.7% when compared with the whole of 2019. But the growth was entirely in residential construction, +11.8%, while nonresidential stayed flat, -0.1%.

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