Approval numbers are trending up this year, the first genuine sign in a while that the supply side of this market might be starting to respond to two years of sustained shortage and price growth.
I want to be careful about how much weight to put on this. Approvals aren't completions, and I wrote at length last year about how many builders are still working through insolvency risk from contracts signed years earlier. An approval today doesn't put a finished home on the market for at least eighteen months, often longer.
Still, it's the first data point in a while pointing the right direction rather than the wrong one. Worth tracking closely over the year, because if it's real, it's the first meaningful crack in the supply constraint that's been driving almost everything else I've written about since 2023.