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>None of the developers would have been able to find land, make deals, develop projects,

The tract builders already bought and developed the land (e.g. ~100 parceled lots) before COVID but the individual lots were unsold. The "housing starts" statistics are official US Department of Commerce data instead self-reported numbers by homebuilders so it's very possible that there was a real uptick in selling off those unsold lots that were previously moving slowly.

E.g. See satellite photo of two neighborhoods in suburbia under development by a tract builder like Toll Brothers:

https://www.google.com/maps/search/toll+brothers+neighborhoo...

... and the street view shows the showcase model home and the construction equipment already building on those lots:

https://www.google.com/maps/@41.0783819,-74.1180052,3a,75y,1...

Multiply that type of scenario happening all over the country and getting accelerated by coranavirus fears. A builder can get heavy equipment out on the empty lot within a few weeks after a new house contract is signed.

I do agree that skepticism is warranted. We should be seeing parallel stories of falling prices of city apartments and condos.

Which we have started to see within the Bay Area and other higher rent areas.

The really interesting thing to watch will be commercial real estate, but those leases are longer & either impossible or expensive to break. We’ll see how the remote culture change impacts commercial real restate and if companies stop signing new leases & don’t renew them either once they run their course.

>those leases are longer & either impossible or expensive to break

Unless a small business, e.g. restaurant, simply goes out of business. As is happening all over the place.

My prediction is that commercial real estate is in for a bad time. The shift to remote work appears to be sticking enough that plenty of businesses are going to be really questioning thier facilities budget, and I doubt food or personal services are going to fully recover quickly. I have no idea what retail will do, but it had issues before the crisis.

Yeah different scenario than I was talking about. I’m thinking the 50,000+ square foot commercial properties that are on 5-10 year leases

Anecdotally I have heard that a lot of commercial projects have recently been suspended so there are also more construction works available for residential work.

I'm in the architecture field. We work on single family, multifamily, clubhouses and student housing on a national scale with some of the largest builders in the USA. I can tell you that we are very busy with current and new projects in the pipeline. I can't explain what people are doing, this is just to give perspective from the architectural point of view.

I just spoke with a coworker who used to live in Chicago and moved to the suburbs. He said that homes in his neighborhood have been selling quickly and prices are increasing exponentially. The condo in the city he sold in February is the last to sell. Six are on the market.

Just a second anecdata point. I was looking for a plot of land for the past few years. I'm not going to say where, but let me just summarize that I have been monitoring pretty much all the areas I've travelled (roughly 1/6 of the US) to just in case something nice popped up. The available land options have quite astonishingly disappeared starting in February. The ones that remain are bad ones (next to trains or under an airport landing) and even those have prices going up. In some areas there is literally nothing left, and when one does pop into the market, the price is about DOUBLE what it was a year ago.

I don't have like any analytics on this, but I'm sure Zillow could easily produce something.

Also just in case people are wondering, for land with a house, I see a trend where the listings are marked up about 100k more than it was a year ago. The actual sales price of those listings isn't kinda available yet for much of the pandemic (since that data lags behind the when it drops off the market a few months). But a year ago if you saw a house at 200k it will sell at 200k. 300k will sell at 250, 400 will sell at 320, 500 will sell at 400, 600 will sell 450ish (you get the idea). I have the feeling that the speed at which 500k rural homes are selling that they are going for very close to asking now.

Another COVID related reason for land being snapped up might be shifting of investment preferences away from stock and corporate/municipal bonds. Land with long term development potential is a relatively safe bet if you're prepared to hold it for long enough.

> But a year ago if you saw a house at 200k it will sell at 200k. 300k will sell at 250, 400 will sell at 320, 500 will sell at 400, 600 will sell 450ish (you get the idea)

I have not seen this in suburbs of cities in the Rocky Mountains or West coast. If anything, the houses would sell for more than list price for anything in the $500k to $1M range.

In Southern California, I'm seeing prices remain about the same and just recently start to fall a bit.

A lot of people are taking property off the market right now rather than drop the price severely.

I'm sure there are exceptions, but I don't think that many people are buying houses right now. Most people are in a wait and see mode.

I was referring to the previous commenter's claim of houses selling for less than list price a year ago.

Is that in an urban setting or rural? I'm seeing the change in rural.

suburb

What are "clubhouses" in this context?

A clubhouse for a golf course, pool, single family association or an apartment/condo association. A large building with amenities for a community exercise room, kitchen, bathrooms, game room...

Increasing exponentially? What market is this??

they aren't increasing exponentially.

at best, the delta in number of sales has gone up by an order of magnitude.

We have some fairly big developments in my mostly suburban area that take years to build out. The building sites are already prepped and permitted, so they can increase the build rate somewhat dynamically. Since it looks like we are only talking about 10000 extra starts in a month I find it believable there is enough supply to react to an increase in demand for home building.

Anecdotally, I know one family that just bought a plot of land in Westchester County (moving out of Manhattan). And this pandemic has accelerated my wife & my house hunt, though we were already thinking of doing it beforehand. But you're right - these are either land purchases or people thinking of buying a home, not actually doing it. There isn't enough time to have gotten through the surveying/planning/permitting process since coronavirus started, all of which proceed much more slowly since everyone is closed or working remotely.

Another possibility is that this is reflecting speculative demand. Developers who already own land and have plans drawn up accelerate the process, because they anticipate people will want to move out to the suburbs, and besides financing is cheap now. Whether this'll pay off depends a lot on how the situation evolves - historically pandemics have hit urban areas first but later migrated to the outskirts and then rural areas, and eventually nobody is safe.

> though we were already thinking of doing it beforehand.

I think we’re seeing a lot of this effect, and it’s under appreciated.

I’ve been thinking of buying a canoe for a while, and suddenly everyone else that was has been motivated to jump into action.

Result: canoes are hard to get.

Also add up the free time from other things being closed, vacations cancelled, work slowdowns, as well as the new liquidity of time offered by work-from-home... any outlet for that has huge demand now.

I had this problem with getting a close-up filter for my lens. They're a cheap way to get into macro-ish photography, and suddenly everyone with a camera needs a way to keep shooting with fewer places to go. My filter just shipped after two months on backorder.

And you'll probably have trouble getting just about anything related to videoconferencing like high-end webcams, key lights, popular USB microphones, good office chairs, HDMI converters, etc.

> so people are leaving the cities where they appear to have careers/work/friends and are heading to the suburbs during lockdown because of the virus situation, while businesses are laying off and contracting/shrinking/making losses and are going out of business?

This is completely anecdotal, but I know a few people who have left urban centers recently to go to suburbs. And I know a bunch who are looking to. Over time this might even out... i'm sure many people, particularly those with young children, have been considering the move and now they have an impetus.

More anecdotes: I live in the suburbs. Both my neighbors have sold due to suddenly-rising demand in housing. There are for-sale signs everywhere. The people who have already moved in are all from the city (NYC).

Coworkers who live in the city are finding it much less workable to live there when they have to stay in small apartments. You can buy a nice, large house in a nice town for the money you spend on renting a small apartment in the city. When the lease is about up, you can close on a house rather quickly (I sold my last house in NJ in 3 days, closed on the new one as fast as both us and the seller could move our stuff) and suddenly be able to walk around and have a backyard. That kind of fairly-quick life improvement is important. Also, now people will worry about "the next virus" when they're in the city.

The protests outside their doors didn't help.

With employers suddenly becoming rather adept at work-from-home and remote work, the work benefits of stay in the cities have diminished permanently.

Anecdotally I know a number of folks who have either moved out of or are seriously contemplating of moving out of city apartments and purchasing property in relatively rural locations--including people for whom this isn't something they even contemplated previously.

It makes sense. The only reason to live in an urban area is for the social benefits and activities. A small apartment quickly feels like a prison cell when you can't go anywhere or do anything.

But this is nothing new. Better public schools, lower crime, lower taxes (or at least better perceived value), an improved quality of life for a particular lifestyle have always been motivators. It’s harder to establish a career in the suburbs, but relatively easier to maintain one.

COVID has probably made a measurable impact, but it’s very easy to measure small effects too. Whether much has changed long term, I am doubtful.

I currently live downtown.

Life is semi-normal, but most of the reasons why I'd want to live down here are disrupted.

Concert halls are closed indefinitely. Meetup.com groups are now all remote. Restaurants will soon allow people to eat inside but will be operating at limited capacity and who knows what it will be like in the Fall/Winter. And now there's way more homeless people living in nearby parks/streets because of the economy/Covid-19 related limits on shelters. Shops are also closing by the week.

You know what I envy from all my friends? Backyards. Just being able to step outside instead of having to don a mask, wait for an semi-empty elevator and walk through public spaces is a big, big advantage. That and having a bigger space for working from home.

I'm planning to move to the suburbs over the next year or so in a large part because of how Covid-19 changed the downtown core.

The new factor that might tip things is more acceptance of remote work.

Yeah, especially for the more senior folks who can easily afford to build or buy a house and also have the advantage of being able to ensure they can work remotely for the near to medium future (especially with some companies shifting to remote for higher level IC's and some shifting to remote first entirely).

Until urban centers decide to become more family friendly this will continue. Bad inner city schools, traffic, and no wonder families want to get away.

There are plenty of counter examples (mostly Asia). It isn't like this cannot be fixed, but without families nobody as arguing for family friendly things and so people move out when the kids come.

Until urban centers decide to become more family friendly this will continue. Bad inner city schools, traffic.

Chicken, egg; The family that moves to the suburbs (and commutes) IS the traffic and is the economic and brain drain from the city.

There was a 30 year shift into the cities, so family-friendliness can't explain the trend. This is mostly likely a consequence of the virus.

I agree its a recent phenomenon but it's not just the virus. I was born in raised in the city. I remember the bad old days. I see what's happening with the far left and their want to gut the NYPD and I foresee it backsliding into the bad old days. Crime is already ticking up but it's too early to point at that and say it's happening. It's a longer term projection I am making.

It will unfortunately get worse with all the people and money pulling out of downtown if this continues.

Probably more like 20 years. Boston, for example, was still losing population until the late 90s. (And the last major tech employer at the time also left during the 90s.)

Demographically, you were mostly seeing college-educated young people make up the net inflow over the past 20 years. I suspect that layered over the virus effects, you probably had some demographics who were on the edge of moving anyway--which is one reason that so many of them pulled the trigger fairly quickly.

It is not just the COVID19 reaction that is driving people to consider leaving the cities but the willingness of public officials to let violent protesters run wild. Those pictures in many big newspapers have lasting effect.

It is one thing to fear a virus you cannot see and another where you have pictures of destroyed businesses and cars.

I'm surprised this is getting downvoted. A lot of my friends are leaving or considering leaving cities exactly for this reason.

A lot of small businesses got destroyed in riots as well, and I imagine their owners would be leaving too.

Yeah, those anti-mask people can get pretty violent. They just lynched a doll of their governor in Kentucky and no one's doing anything about it.

Anti-mask people are non-violent in comparison to BLM and Antifa. There were six murders inside of Seattle'a "autonomous zone" including two minors. Anti-maskers aren't burning city halls, throwing Molotov cocktails into police cars, destroying public and private property, etc. There is no equating the two.

Violence has been a vanishingly small part of what are largely peaceful protests that continue to this day across the country.

Be careful of the media you consume.

It can rot your brain.

I just consume local Seattle media describing multiple murders in the CHOP, all of which were between protesters (or whatever you choose to call people hanging out there), nothing to do with police or right-wingers. If I was living anywhere near, I'd be moving ASAP. I am actually now glad we didn't buy a house closer to transit, like I wanted. We might still decide to move somewhere non-walkable if this continues.

ok

You have a very skewed view of things. Police and insane white supremacists trying to start a "boogaloo" were responsible for starting the violence in several of the protests.

The anti-mask people also have a death count and economic damage on their hands. It's just by way of the pure stupidity of refusing to wear masks in a pandemic, based on stupid myths about how it's to mind-control or harm them, as opposed to being mad police are murdering them and then brutalizing them at protests.

A number of anti-maskers have gotten violent about it, like the guy who rammed a woman with his shopping cart, or the one who stabbed a guy and then suicides by cop trying to stab them, or the other one up in Canada... There are several examples. I'm not excusing violence and lawlessness by people at protests, but you are clearly only seeing the part that supports your worldview, and nothing close to the reality.

Read up on murders in the CHOP and nearby. Nothing to do with police or white supermacists. Everything to do with the people in the CHOP, eh, protesters I guess?

I think you're right on that this is a submarine article pushing people to keep the buying market up. My wife and I were flabbergasted when we checked out various online home estimates for our properties and they had gone up. We had fully expected their estimated value to go down 10-20% and then we'd have to wait several years for their value to slowly climb back up.

The data is in the article: housing starts are up from April, but still lower than Feb when this started. You are probably right, that these are mostly projects that were already in the pipeline. But that they are restarting is interesting data.

Housing starts increased 17.3% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.186 million units last month, the Commerce Department said. The percentage gain was the largest since October 2016. Data for May was revised up to a 1.011 million-unit pace from the previously reported 974,000.

Still, homebuilding remains 24.3% below its February level. The South and the West accounted for about 75% of housing starts last month. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast starts increasing to a rate of 1.169 million units.

Developments in rural areas are rare. If you want a new home you simply find a piece of land, buy it, and then find a builder to make a house.

That still takes time, but not as much. In my area at least apparently homes for sale are going like hot cakes and prices are through the roof, so people that already live here might be taking the opportunity to sell their old home and build a dream home.

My Facebook feed regularly gets ads from real estate companies with the same general message. Apparently it’s simultaneously a great time to sell, and a great time to buy?

It's a time of change. Many things are shifting.

Sell to cash in on equity. Buy to get a better house.

Realtors make money either way...so it is a great time for either.

Just as always follow the money.

I just shared this link on Facebook and got an IMMEDIATE warning that it violated community guidelines... just because it has the word "coronavirus" in the title?

If anything it primarily doesn't have anything to do with Covid. I remembered this article from 3 years ago[1] already discussing the renewed hollowing out of American cities, mostly tied to cheaper gas prices and aging millenials following the recession and the shale revolution.

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/why-is-...

Sure but I have a feeling the no-so-obvious flaws of city living (rapid spread of disease, potential for riots) has really lit a fire under people thinking about moving.

NYC was going through a decline in population even before this, but the other midsized urban areas like Denver and Austin have been experiencing a boom. Unfortunately I think the policy response to Covid has killed all of that. I just moved out of my inner city apartment there. Everything I pay higher rent for is shut down.

As was pointed out many developments are built out over time in sections as demand dictates.

Another factor besides coronavirus is widespread civil unrest. I think the one two punch was enough to make many people start considering it.

My friend’s sister was begging her parents to let her return home from New York during this mess. They told her no.

> Another factor besides coronavirus is widespread civil unrest.

Also local politicians are coming under pressure to “defund the police” and some are taking the first steps toward that goal.

Amazing that you're getting downvotes; Hackernews is a weird place sometimes. The reality is most people don't want to live around civil unrest (real or perceived).

I'm in Brazil and this is just an anecdote, but my family is quarantined in an apartment, and the wife and I have been arguing because she wants to move into a house now. I'm pretty sure we would already have committed to buy if my mind was the same as hers.

I’m a real estate agent in a rural area approx 5 hours from two coastal cities... what we are seeing is an acceleration of a trend that was already underway pre-Covid. Remote workers and retirees were already coming here, this just pushed the time table for others.

Make sure you understand what the article is suggesting here, because there's more to it than the headline:

> U.S. homebuilding increased in June by the most in nearly four years amid reports of rising demand for housing in suburbs and rural areas...

> Still, homebuilding remains 24.3% below its February level. The South and the West accounted for about 75% of housing starts last month....

> Demand for housing is being supported by cheaper mortgage rates. The 30-year fixed mortgage rate is at an average of 2.98%, the lowest since 1971, according to data from mortgage finance agency Freddie Mac...

> But a resurgence in new coronavirus infections across the country eroded consumer sentiment in mid-July, other data showed on Friday, threatening the nascent housing and economic recovery. Some areas in virus hot spots in the populous South and West regions have either shut down businesses again or paused reopenings.

This is a good article which talks about a lot of the context here: money is cheap, we started re-opening more in some places, construction picked back up in those places. Even with this things are slower than in the winter, and the current recovery is tenuous due to the increasingly obvious need to put the brakes on reopening plans as the virus continues to spread.

> I know several people who have moved out of cities over the last several years actually for various reasons, mostly the accumulating cost and declining benefits, especially with the consequences of political and government policies starting to impact communities along with the overall cost of living increases. This is not a coronavirus trend, even if that has only accelerated things.

Yeah this has been the deal in my area. Millennials were later to start families, but now that they are they're needing more space than they can afford with downtown real estate costs.

If people are moving now I suspect it has to do with interest rates being low enough that it becomes an attractive option financially.

As for declining benefits, that's true too. The initial wave of urbanization involved revitalizing poor neighborhoods by opening up lots of quirky, independent shops. But leases are now high enough that few such businesses can really survive and they're being replaced by large chains or, in other cases, just laying vacant or being occupied by luxury brands that people don't care about having access to on a day-to-day basis.

COVID has just accelerated those marginal business collapsing under the weight of unsustainably high leases/rents.

Housing supply is very low in my suburb within a large metropolitan area. Many people are buying. A neighbor recently went on the market and had multiple offers on the first day. I've heard similar stories from a few friends in the Midwest.

Yes, probably a good deal of PR, projection, and reductionism in the headline.

On the other hand, what would you have expected to happen to housing starts during a national period of pandemic and racial unrest? An uptick is surprising.

It's also hardly a surge in building. It's still well below the pre-pandemic rate. It's just an increase from the sharp decline caused by the pandemic.

Anecdotal, but I have three friends and a coworker who decided to purchase homes in the last few months and all of those purchases were due in part to Coronavirus.