While Housing Starts fell 0.5% MoM (better than the 1.8% drop expected) - as incentives dominated inventory liquidation, forward-looking building permits collapsed 11.2% MoM (vs -2.1% exp). That is the biggest MoM drop since the peak of the COVID lockdowns...

This leaves the total number of housing starts (SAAR) at the lowest since June 2020 for permits...

Housing Permits are down over 22% YoY - the biggest drop since 2009 (with single-family permits -29.7% YoY and multi-family down 10.7%)...

Under the hood, this is the 9th straight month of single-family housing unit permits declines. But more notably multi-family permits plunged. On the Starts side, signle-family dropped for 8th month of the 9 while multi-family starts managed a small rise MoM...

Single-Family Permits dropped 7.1% from 841K SAAR to 781K, the lowest since May 2020. Multi-Family permits tumbled 17.9% from 620K to 509K, the lowest since May 2021.