Uses and Abuses of Residential Building Permits in Forecasting Private Housing Starts

This paper examines the commonly held view that the Census Bureau's monthly series for residential building permits issued is a leading indicator of the series for private housing starts. A close study of the residential building permits and housing starts series shows that on a quarterly basis the series are coincident, with cyclical peaks and troughts in the seasonally adjusted data occurring in the same period. On the monthly basis for the period 1960 through 1976, the peaks and troughs in the building permits series have usually followed those in the housing starts series. Also, evidence presented in the paper shows that monthly changes in the residential building permits series are not highly correlated with changes in the housing starts series one to five months in the future. Finally, the analysis suggests that changes in the backlog of unused residential building permits are not indicative of future changes in the rate of housing starts. The major implication of these results is that permits data offer little or no information about future month‐to‐month changes in the rate of housing starts. However, because the building permits series is less irregular than the housing starts series and the cyclical movements of the series are basically the same, permits data can be used to identify irregular monthly movements in the starts series.