By Ali Wolf | Builder Online
Forecasting the housing market is always a balancing act, requiring us to weigh hard data against human judgment. This year, that balance feels especially fragile with new policies, conflicting datasets, and a widening gap between hard economic indicators and soft sentiment measures all pointing to a more fluid environment. As a result, the risks to this year’s forecast are higher than usual. While our primary focus here will be on housing starts, we will also discuss our sales and mortgage rate expectations.
Our base case is that housing starts in 2025 will be essentially flat, with total starts just under 1.3 million, a 0.1% dip from last year. Broken down, single-family construction is forecast to 935.0K starts (+1.0%), while multifamily activity is expected to ease to 340.0K starts (–2.9%). In other words, 2026’s starts activity is expected to be more of the same, though with a little extra spice from additional uncertainty at the margins.
