Ahhh…building permits.

This topic just makes our heart beat wildly in statistical syncopation. The data points do, slightly more seriously, offer a glimpse into high-level trends in new residential homebuilding. They help us show where, what kind, and how many new housing units are being built in specific counties and cities in our region.

Drawn from the US Census Bureau’s Building Permits Survey (BPS), these data “provide national, state, and local statistics on new privately-owned residential construction.”[1] We have gathered up, on this tracker, historic annual data from 1980 to the present to show annual trends. Additionally, this application will update monthly to show more recent, trailing 18-month trends at a regional, county, and city level.

We have two goals with this “dashboard”: (1) provide an easy means of visualizing trends, and (2) provide analysts and researchers a useful frontend from which they can filter and download data for further exploration (look for the download button in the lower-left corner of each page on the application).

Access the dashboard by clicking here or on the screenshot below. Then keep reading below for a few noteworthy trends!

Here are some takeaways from the data:

  1. Across the 11-county metro region, residential permitting activity has been on an uptick, albeit an unsteady one, since the depths of the Great Recession; the peak was in 2022.
  2. However, since 2009, only in one year (2022) has the collective metro area seen its annual permit total eclipse the 40-year average, which is around 35,000 permits.
  3. 2022 is a notable year for another reason. For the first time since 1980, the metro area in 2022 collectively issued more multi-family permits than single-family permits; this nearly happened again in 2023.
  4. Multi-family permitting activity sees more of a saw-tooth trend across many of the metro’s counties; this is likely due to the relatively fewer permits issued, compared to single-family permits.
  5. Forsyth County’s single-family permitting trends are down since a post-Recession peak in 2015 of nearly 3,000 permits issued. The county is on pace to have its lowest permit total since the trough of the Great Recession in 2009.
  6. Over the last 18 months, the City of Atlanta has issued over 10,700 combined single- and multi-family building permits, a number that exceeds permitting in Cobb and Gwinnett Counties combined over the same time period.

This tracker features a page called “Monthly Trends” that will be updated (fittingly) once a month, so check back from time to time to see the newest data.

[1] From the BPS documentation linked above.