The Week in Housing

We'll get a real good view of how the housing market is shaping up this week. Yesterday afternoon, the National Association of Home Builders released its monthly Market Index, which measures builders' confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes. It dipped slightly, from dipped to 18 in September from 19 in August. The drop was attributed to the fact that the government's $8,000 tax credit for first-time buyers expires on November 30, which means that just about everyone who was going to take advantage of this has done so already.

Today, we get a more real-world version of this, when the U.S. Housing Starts and Building Permits numbers for September are released. For housing starts, the consensus expectation is 610,000, up a bit from 598,000 in August. Building permits are expected to post an even smaller increase, from 580,000 in August up to 590,000 in September.

To conclude the week in housing, we'll have fresh numbers on existing home sales on Friday. The projections for all these are pretty conservative; if we can exceed them, we'll have further signals that the housing market is moving in the right direction.