Following last month's bounce in permits (later revised lower), September expectations were for a decline of 2.1% (presumably analysts knew of the storms' potential impact when they guessed) but it utterly collapsed - down 4.5%. Worse still Housing Starts were supposed to drop just 0.4% in September but crashed 4.7%.

These are 2 to 3 standard deviation misses of expectations... so don't simply blame the storms as analysts were well aware that they occurred when they made their forecasts...

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Notably, multifamily starts tumbled to 286K, lowest since Sept 2016...

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And it was clearly not just the hurricanes - starts dropped in every region except The West:

• Northeast: -9.2%
• Midwest: -20.2%
• South -9.3%
• West: +15.7%

Some context...

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But buy homebuilders...

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