U.S. housing starts dropped much more than expected during the month of December after shutdown-delayed data was released - 11.2% decline MoM vs a 0.2% drop consensus expectation. Building permits were slightly better than expected at 0.3% MoM.
The shutdown obviously had pernicious economic effects and should be considered an outlier, so not much predictive analysis can be gleaned from the data.
The S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices YoY for December was up 4.2% vs an estimate of 4.5%.
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