Following last month’s bounce in permits (later revised lower), September expectations were for a decline of 2.1% (presumably analysts knew of the storms’ potential impact when they guessed) but it utterly collapsed – down 4.5%. Worse still Housing Starts were supposed to drop just 0.4% in September but crashed 4.7%.

These are 2 to 3 standard deviation misses of expectations… so don’t simply blame the storms as analysts were well aware that they occurred when they made their forecasts…

Notably, multifamily starts tumbled to 286K, lowest since Sept 2016…

And it was clearly not just the hurricanes – starts dropped in every region except The West:

Some context…

But buy homebuilders…