Dive Brief:
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Construction starts in both the residential and nonresidential sectors were lower in the second quarter of 2015 than forecasters had expected, according to a report on Thursday from construction data provider CMD.
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The overall U.S. economy posted “somewhat disappointing results” in the second quarter, and construction “followed suit,” Alex Carrick, CMD’s chief economist, said in a release. Still, he predicted “more robust growth” in the construction market in the long term.
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While the report forecast 7.1% growth in total construction starts by the end of the year, that is less than the 9% CMD had predicted earlier in the year.
Dive Insight:
Starts might not be as paltry as the numbers suggest. Carrick pointed out that the growing popularity of mixed-used projects that combine multifamily residences, retail outlets and office buildings in the same complex has made the multifamily market “harder to read” because statistics for those developments sometimes lump starts in all of those categories together.
Sometimes that means either resident starts get counted as commercial — or the other way around, which can confuse the reporting on trends, Carrick said.
And the news on second-quarter starts wasn’t all bad: Single-family starts grew 9% over the second quarter of 2014; and civil engineering construction starts were up 7.7% from last year, the report noted.