From NAR-

With housing inventory at record lows, it now may be more important than ever to build more homes. There are about 500,000 fewer homes available for sale across the country compared to the average number of listings in the last 5 years. As a result, the housing inventory shortage has pushed national home prices in March to a record high of nearly 330,000. If home prices continue to rise at this pace, many would-be homebuyers will be priced out of the market, hurting homebuying activity.

The National Association of REALTORS® tracks the number of building permits issued by metro area every month and identifies the top 10 markets with the most and least single-family building permits issued within the last 12 months. The purpose of this blog series is to identify where housing construction is rising and where we need to address the issue of underbuilding at the local level.

At the national level, housing starts surged in March by 19% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.74 million units, the highest level since 2006. In fact, this increase in housing starts was well above expectations. Along with housing starts, building permits are also a leading indicator of housing activity for the upcoming months at the local level. Building permits provide an estimate of the number of new housing units that have been authorized by the government. Specifically, in March, single-family building permits rose in 42% of the metro areas across the country.

The analysis includes data for 260 metropolitan areas across the country. Find the areas with the most single-family building permits issued within the last 12 months ending in March (expect large metro areas to have the highest number of single-family permits due to larger population) below. While 10 to 12 months is the typical time that it takes to build a single-family home, more than 14,000 new single-family homes have already been added or they will be added soon to the market in the following months.