In a slew of US housing data, housing starts, building permits, and housing completions all fell below estimates in the month of March. Middleburg Communities Chief Economist Brad Case sits down with Yahoo Finance to expand upon the significance of these latest housing prints and what they mean for housing market inventories.

"I think it's difficult for the single-family owner-occupied market because so many people don't want to get out of their current mortgage because they plan to buy a different house and they'll be moving into a different mortgage, so it's going to take a long time for the single-family market to get out of that," Case explains, also discussing how Federal Reserve officials are watching shelter costs and rent inflation.

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This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video Transcript

- New data out this morning showing that new home construction slipped in March. Housing starts falling 14.7% on a monthly basis, while building permits fell just over 4% from the month prior. Now, this comes as homebuilder confidence remained flat in April, amid rising mortgage rates.

Joining us now, we want to bring in Brad Case. He's Middleburg Communities' Chief Economist. Brad, it's great to have you here on set. So interesting numbers coming out on the housing front today. What does this tell you? Is it a bit surprising? And I guess, what does this tell you about maybe this recovery that we've seen losing a bit of steam?

BRAD CASE: Yeah, it was surprising to me. I expected the starts numbers to be up. The permits, I wasn't surprised by the fact that they were down at all. What we've seen in news residential construction is an increase in the employment of people working on these projects, and that's why I expected a bump up in starts, we didn't see that.

More generally, what we've seen over the past few years since the COVID pandemic started, it was first a huge surge in demand, and then a huge surge in supply, and then that is pretty much over. What, what surprised me this morning was that it was such an emphatic this is over. I expected it to be just a more moderate pace of construction from here on out.

- What does that set up for the spring buying season that we were expecting to see really commence?

BRAD CASE: Well, I think it's difficult for the single family owner occupied market because so many people don't want to get out of their current mortgage, because they plan to buy a different house, and they'll be moving into a different mortgage. So it's going to take a long time for the single family market to get out of that.