Housing responds to policy faster than almost anything else because the purchase is financed and the payment depends directly on the mortgage rate. That makes residential construction a classic leading-indicator of the wider cycle.
Permits lead starts by roughly one to three months and are less weather-sensitive, so they are the cleaner signal. Both series are reported as seasonally adjusted annual rates and both carry very wide confidence intervals, so single months should be treated as noise.
Example: permits run at a 1.35 million annualised rate, down from 1.52 million a year earlier. That 11% decline in the pipeline implies construction employment and residential investment will weaken over the following two to three quarters.
Related: home-sales, leading-indicator, mortgage-backed-security, annualised-rate, business-cycle