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An article in today’s Innisfail Advocate regarding building approvals in the Cassowary Coast would appear to give us some insight into the CCRC building approvals data for Dec well before the ABS release it (due 10th Feb). The story quotes Mayor Bill Shannon as saying that residential building approvals for the year 2014 were up by 33% over the previous year.
Clearly Council knows the data for approvals granted in Dec (although the ABS is yet to release them) so we have no reason to suppose that this contention is inaccurate. Assuming it is right, we can deduce that building approvals in the Cassowary Coast in Dec must have been 5. This would take total approvals for the year to 97; which is 33% greater than the 73 seen in 2013.
As loyal readers will know, we put little emphasis on the raw unadjusted data preferring instead to consider the Conus Trend series. Assuming 5 approvals in Dec would see the Conus Trend for CCRC remain unchanged at 6 in Dec and provide a total Trend over the year of 83 against a Trend total for 2013 of 73. This suggests a increase in the Trend total over the year of 13.7%. This is certainly healthy growth, although not at the extraordinary level that the unadjusted data would suggest.
{The reason that the Trend total for the year is so far below the unadjusted total, unlike in 2013 when they were the same, is the extraordinarily high numbers in Mar and Nov when 14 approvals were recorded for both months. Although these readings certainly pushed the Trend data higher, the fact that neither were sustained (being followed the next month by readings of just 2 and 5 respectively) meant that their impact on the Trend data over the year was far smaller than their impact on the unadjusted total}
We shall have to wait until Feb 10th to see if the official ABS data supports the Mayor’s figures.
We are proud to have CBC Staff Selection as supporters of the Conus/CBC Staff Selection Trend Employment and Jobseeker data series