From the Las Vegas Visitor Authority: January 2025 Las Vegas Visitor Statistics Las Vegas started the year with January visitation of approx. 3.34M visitors, down 1.1% from last January. Las Vegas convention attendance reached roughly 629k in January, up 12.8% YoY, supported in part by strong attendance at recurring larger tradeshows including CES and World of Concrete, plus the calendar impact of World Market Center's Winter show (38k attendees) and Total Product Expo (8k attendees) falling fully in January this year vs. last year when its impact straddled Jan and Feb. On a room base with r ..read more

Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: Housing Starts Increased to 1.501 million Annual Rate in February A brief excerpt: Total housing starts in February were above expectations; however, starts in December and January were revised down slightly, combined. The third graph shows the month-to-month comparison for total starts between 2024 (blue) and 2025 (red). Total starts were down 2.9% in February compared to February 2024. Starts bounced back in the Northeast region after being down sharply year-over-year in January (likely weather related). There is much more in the artic ..read more

From the Fed: Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization Industrial production (IP) increased 0.7 percent in February after moving up 0.3 percent in January. Manufacturing output rose 0.9 percent, boosted by a jump of 8.5 percent in the index for motor vehicles and parts. The output of manufacturing excluding motor vehicles and parts increased 0.4 percent. The index for mining gained 2.8 percent, and the index for utilities decreased 2.5 percent. At 104.2 percent of its 2017 average, total IP in February was 1.4 percent above its year-earlier level. Capacity utilization stepped up to 78.2 ..read more

From the Census Bureau: Permits, Starts and Completions Housing Starts: Privately-owned housing starts in February were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,501,000. This is 11.2 percent above the revised January estimate of 1,350,000, but is 2.9 percent below the February 2024 rate of 1,546,000. Single-family housing starts in February were at a rate of 1,108,000; this is 11.4 percent above the revised January figure of 995,000. The February rate for units in buildings with five units or more was 370,000. Building Permits: Privately-owned housing units authorized by building permits in ..read more

Note: Mortgage rates are from MortgageNewsDaily.com and are for top tier scenarios. Tuesday: • At 8:30 AM ET, Housing Starts for February. The consensus is for 1.383 million SAAR, up from 1.366 million SAAR. • At 9:15 AM, The Fed will release Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization for February. The consensus is a 0.3% increase in Industrial Production, and for Capacity Utilization to be unchanged at 77.8 ..read more

From the MBA: Share of Mortgage Loans in Forbearance Decreases Slightly to 0.38% in February The Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) monthly Loan Monitoring Survey revealed that the total number of loans now in forbearance decreased by 2 basis points from 0.40% of servicers’ portfolio volume in the prior month to 0.38% as of February 28, 2025. According to MBA’s estimate, 190,000 homeowners are in forbearance plans. Mortgage servicers have provided approximately 8.6 million forbearances since March 2020. The share of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac loans in forbearance decreased 2 basis points to ..read more

Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: Lawler: Early Read on Existing Home Sales in February; Recent Rent Trends at Two Large Publicly Traded Companies in the Single-Family Rental Business A brief excerpt: From housing economist Tom Lawler: Based on publicly-available local realtor/MLS reports released across the country through today, I project that existing home sales as estimated by the National Association of Realtors ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.21 million in February, up 2.9% from January’s preliminary pace but down 2.6% from last February’s seasonally a ..read more

Today, in the Calculated Risk Real Estate Newsletter: 3rd Look at Local Housing Markets in February A brief excerpt: The NAR is scheduled to release February Existing Home sales on Thursday, March 20th at 10:00 AM. The consensus is for 3.92 million SAAR, down from 4.08 million in January. Last year, the NAR reported sales in February 2024 at 4.31 million SAAR. NOTE: The tables for active listings, new listings and closed sales all include a comparison to February 2019 for each local market (some 2019 data is not available). This is the third look at local markets in February. I’m tracking o ..read more

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) reported the housing market index (HMI) was at 39, down from 42 last month. Any number below 50 indicates that more builders view sales conditions as poor than good. From the NAHB: Builder Confidence Falls on Cost Uncertainty Economic uncertainty, the threat of tariffs and elevated construction costs pushed builder sentiment down in March even as builders express hope that a better regulatory environment will lead to an improving business climate. Builder confidence in the market for newly built single-family homes was 39 in March, down three ..read more

On a monthly basis, retail sales increased 0.2% from January to February (seasonally adjusted), and sales were up 3.1 percent from February 2024. From the Census Bureau report: Advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for February 2025, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $722.7 billion, up 0.2 percent from the previous month, and up 3.1 percent from February 2024. ... The December 2024 to January 2025 percent change was revised from down 0.9 percent to down 1.2 percent. emphasis added Click on graph for lar ..read more