How Confident Are Builders? Q1 Data Reveals Insights

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Every month, the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index (HMI) tracks the sentiment of homebuilders nationwide. Rated from 0 to 100, a score greater than 50 indicates builders are optimistic. 

Below is a graph of this sentiment score since 2015:

You can visually see that the score has oscillated since the second half of 2022 (when interest rates hiked). This, combined with additional supply coming online, has dampened builder optimism. And all the headlines around tariffs haven’t helped either.

So why does this matter? If homebuilders are more pessimistic about the market, they will build fewer housing units. This isn’t so good for those trying to get into the market, as prices of single-family homes aren’t likely to go down. However, this is likely good news for existing investors, as lower supply likely means more appreciation.

Because real estate is hyperlocal, let’s drill down and see which markets have the most optimistic builders.

New Building Permit Data

Every month, the U.S. Census publishes how much supply was permitted in every market in the Builder Permits Survey (BPS). This can be a good indication of how confident builders are in the market’s demand for housing units.

To gauge builder confidence at the market level this year compared to last year, I looked at how many units have been permitted year to date (so, all units permitted for Q1 2025) and compared this to the year-to-date units permitted at the same time last year. In English: I compared the supply permitted in Q1 2025 to Q1 2024.

Yes, I know. Just because supply was permitted in a given quarter doesn’t mean that it was the same quarter that builders intended to build. I think it’s fine to disregard these semantics and just focus on comparing apples-to-apples data. 

Take a look at the markets with the largest difference in supply permitted in Q1 of this year to last year:

The markets that stood out to me the most were:

• Orlando, Florida
• Lafayette, Indiana
• Columbus, Ohio

Orlando, Florida, has permitted almost double the amount of units in Q1. Take a look at this housing unit absorption graph:

Given how much we are hearing about Florida markets experiencing higher vacancies and rent declines, some builders appear to still be confident in demand growth for Orlando housing units. 

Let’s move on to Lafayette, Indiana. It’s a fairly small college town/research market, but builders appear to be coming out of Q1 with high expectations of growth, with 1,779 units already permitted. For reference, the most units permitted on record were just over 2,000 in all of 2023:

This means 2025 might be the year with the highest number of units ever permitted for Lafayette. Time will tell if the market will be able to absorb such a number of units. 

Finally, we move on to Columbus, Ohio. Developers have caught on to the Ohio capital’s growth:

Just over 4,000 units have already been permitted for 2025. If that pace continues, it will surpass 2024 with the most supply permitted. This means investors should be mindful: The word is out, and opportunity brings competition.

More Markets With Q1, 2025 Optimism

Using data from CoStar, I took the number of new units under construction in Q1 per market and divided that number by the total amount of units in a given market to get the percentage of total new supply under construction. Theoretically, markets with a higher percentage of new units under construction should be more optimistic than markets with a lower percentage.

Interestingly, Lafayette is on this list. (Perhaps their permit-to-groundbreak time is less than one quarter?) But most of these markets are small. 

Let’s take a look at only the biggest markets (over 600,000 population):

It is interesting to see five popular Florida markets here, given most markets in Florida have cooled into buyer’s markets, with many properties seeing price declines. And permit-to-ground break times don’t appear to be that long (on average) in Florida. There must be a few builders in the state that think the long-term demographic trends of housing needed in the Sunshine State are in their favor.

Provo, Utah, doesn’t surprise me, given it’s one of the hottest and most appreciating markets in the country. Kansas City, Missouri, does surprise me, as it’s not a market I often hear being called “hot.” However, it did experience some of the highest rent growth in the country in 2024 due to solid demand and not as much supply being built (until now, it looks like). 

And it’s interesting to see Richmond, Virginia, on the list. It seems builders are quite confident in this market’s ability to absorb supply, given it also permitted more units in Q1 2025 than in Q1 2024.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, while it’s hard to make broad strokes about builder optimism at the market level, some markets in the Midwest and Florida appear to currently have more builder optimism than other markets, as well as a few other hot markets (demographically speaking), such as Provo and Richmond.