Analysis of Revisions to Monthly Seasonally Adjusted Estimates of New Residential Construction Statistics
Each month the US Census Bureau publishes preliminary estimates of Building Permits, Housing Starts, Housing Completions. The US Census Bureau releases these estimates to provide government and private data users with early measures of new privately owned residential construction and new residential sales activity. A necessary part of the process of issuing these early data involves the issuance of subsequent revisions. The revisions are primarily the result of the replacement of imputed data with data which are reported in subsequent months. The "Range" shows the largest decrease (or smallest increase if no months
revised down) and largest increase (or smallest decrease if no months revised
up) over the 12 months. The "Average" is the arithmetic mean of all 12 months.
Ideally, this would be zero if the positive and negative revisions equaled
each other. The "Absolute Average" is the arithmetic mean of the absolute
value of the revision. This indicates the average size of revision without
regard to sign. [PDF] or denotes a file in Adobe’s Portable Document Format. To view the file, you will need the Adobe® Acrobat® Reader available free from Adobe. Analysis of Revisions for New Residential Construction in PDF Format. For questions, visit our Question and Answer Center at ask.census.gov or contact the Residential Construction Branch at (301)763-5160. |