Nothing much to see from Building Approvals data

Posted on July 31, 2018 by Pete Faulkner - Building Approvals, QLD, Uncategorized

The June Building Approvals data out today doesn’t really tell us anything we didn’t already know. Approvals were up 6.4% m/m (seasonally adjusted) after some upward revision to May’s numbers for a 1.6% y/y increase. However, for this highly volatile data-set (because of the very lumpy nature of large scale unit approvals) we much prefer the Trend series. The Trend shows a o.1% m/m increase with the year-on-year increase at 2.1%. In short the data has been pretty much flat-lining for the past with monthly Trend shifts of about +/- 1% for the past year.

At the Queensland level it’s a similar story. In Queensland the seasonally adjusted data spiked up 37.7% m/m in June which turned a 23.4% y/y decline in May into a 10.1% y/y increase in June. Clearly, the Trend is the way to go at the State level! This shows a somewhat more sensible 1.6% decline for the month which equates to a 5.2% decline for the year. Over the course of the year in Queensland Trend house approvals have risen by 2.6% while units are down 16.3%. While the Queensland data has been rather more volatile than that at the national level, here too we see a data-set that has been relatively stable for the best part of 12 months with monthly shifts in the +/- 2.3% range.