Broken Measures

Construction Job Openings went backwards by 8 years

The Memo:

Re: Job Openings and Builder Inventory Management

From: Mr. Awsumb

Comments:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released their Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) today. The real headline should be, we’ve erased 8 years of construction job openings. Here’s what that looks like when compared with Construction Job openings on Indeed.com.

A reminder, JOLTS is measuring in the past, so today’s publication was November 2024 job openings, and Indeed is for December. Indeed indexes their data to February 2020 being 100.

I took the liberty of highlighting what January looks like for the industry, by measure of employment.

Yes, those red lines and low points are all January.

Read the Research below to see how the other broken measures being utilized in the Homebuilding industry are faring, plus a look at the monthly dollar expenditures per new build homes and apartments.

-Ulysses Awsumb

---

The Research

The multifamily construction decline is picking up the pace. Here’s a look at it from the Backlog (pipeline of work) on a national level.

The rate of new starts is well below the delivery rate, which, barring any changes in fiscal or monetary policy, will continue for a while.