The Commerce Department reported Thursday that construction of new homes and apartments fell 15.5 percent to an annual rate of 550,000 units last month from November.
It was a much weaker showing than the pace of 610,000 that economists were forecasting and ended 2008 on a dismal note.
For all of last year, the number of housing units that builders broke ground on totaled just over 904,000, also a record low. That marked a huge 33.3 percent drop from the 1.355 million housing units started in 2007.
HALL COUNTY
Hall County Building Inspection Services reports that the number of permits issued last year for new, single-family homes totaled 289. That's down from 910 in 2007 and 1,333 in 2006. The figures for 2006 ended years of rapid residential growth in the county during which scores of new subdivisions were built, some of them including hundreds of homes. During that time, four-digit new home permits were the rule, not the exception.
(AccessNorthGa.com's Ken Stanford contributed to this story.)
http://accesswdun.com/article/2009/1/217081