Dive summary:

• Housing starts were up 7% from February to March, according to U.S. data, but this time it was a boom in multifamily starts that kept the rise going while single-family tripped up.
• Multifamily – five or more units – is more volatile than the single-family sector, and March was its month, with a 27% leap in starts while the "single" category of four or fewer units dropped 4.8% from its February annualized pace.
• Whichever way you look at it, housing starts were up to an annual pace of 1.04 million, which blew economists' guess of 933,000 and figured out to a 7% rise despite February having been revised upward from the first report.

From the article:

Meanwhile, the number of new building permits, an indication of future construction, fell 3.9% to an annualized rate of 902,000 in March. That was below economists' estimates for a rate of 945,000. ...