Housing Starts
Get Housing Starts (Total New Privately-Owned Housing Units Started) for the United States from the Census Bureau.
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.
No API key is needed: without a FRED API key the data comes from the Census Bureau directly, which gives the same figures. When a FRED API key is set (see the fred_api_key parameter of the Economics class), it comes from FRED.
See definition: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST
Also known as: new residential construction.
Housing Starts in Python or via the MCP
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',
end_date="2025-12-31",
)
economics.get_housing_starts()
Or, after setting up the Finance Toolkit MCP, ask:
How many new homes were started in the United States, at an annual rate, in each month from August to December 2025?
Which returns:
| Date | United States |
|---|---|
| 2025-08-01 | 1291 |
| 2025-09-01 | 1319 |
| 2025-10-01 | 1273 |
| 2025-11-01 | 1319 |
| 2025-12-01 | 1378 |
Parameters
get_housing_starts accepts the following parameters.
| Parameter | Type | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
rolling | int | The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None. | 4 |
trailing | int | The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods. Defaults to None. | 4 |
growth | bool | Whether to return the growth data or the actual data. Defaults to False. | True |
lag | int | The number of periods to lag the data by. Defaults to 1. | 4 |
standardize | bool | Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False. | True |
rounding | int | None | The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None. | 2 |