Housing Starts
Get Housing Starts (Total New Privately-Owned Housing Units Started) for the United States from the Census Bureau (via FRED).
Housing Starts counts the number of new residential construction projects that have begun in a given month. Residential investment is one of the most interest-rate-sensitive components of GDP, and construction activity leads the broader business cycle (it typically turns down before a recession and turns up before a recovery), making Housing Starts one of the ten components of the Conference Board’s Leading Economic Index.
Requires a free FRED API key, see the fred_api_key parameter of the Economics class.
See definition: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
Also known as: new residential construction.
Housing Starts in Python
Install the Finance Toolkit with:
pip install financetoolkit -U
Then call get_housing_starts as shown below.
from financetoolkit import Economics
economics = Economics(start_date='2020-01-01', fred_api_key='FRED_API_KEY')
economics.get_housing_starts()
Which returns:
| Date | United States |
|---|---|
| 2026-02-01 | 1346 |
| 2026-03-01 | 1522 |
| 2026-04-01 | 1414 |
| 2026-05-01 | 1199 |
| 2026-06-01 | 1427 |
Parameters
The function accepts the following parameters:
- rolling (int, optional): The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None.
- trailing (int, optional): The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods. Defaults to None.
- growth (bool, optional): Whether to return the growth data or the actual data.
- lag (int, optional): The number of periods to lag the data by.
- standardize (bool, optional): Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False.
- rounding (int | None, optional): The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None.