The Building Boom Is Prolonging Market Pain

US: The building boom has helped push unemployment to around its lowest level in more than 50 years. That is perplexing investors who want to see the Federal Reserve switch course on interest rates.

Construction spending and employment have risen to new records this year, boosted by government outlays for infrastructure, a domestic manufacturing renaissance and a wave of apartment building that got off to a slow start during the pandemic when prices for building materials, such as lumber, were sky high.

Construction companies with jobs ranging from airport overhauls to bathroom renovations say they have enough work booked to maintain payrolls—for years in some cases. Even home builders, who slowed down last year when rates began to rise, are ramping up into spring.

The persistent strength in a sector that is usually among the first to suffer job loss when borrowing costs rise is undermining investor hopes that the Fed’s aggressive interest-rate increases would quickly slow inflation and rejuvenate the stock market.

It also threatens to upend bets in the market that recession and lower rates are on the horizon. Investors are trading government bonds as if rate cuts will come within the next year and buying technology stocks, bitcoin and other speculative assets that surged when borrowing costs were near zero.

The issue for investors is that the longer it takes for construction activity and employment to decline, the longer it will be before the central bank can cut rates.

“Through this whole cycle, many have expected a much faster slowdown than has occurred,” said Bob Elliott, co-founder and chief executive of asset manager Unlimited. “Macroeconomic cycles take years to play out.”

There are signs of slowdown, to be sure. Apartment construction is expected to decline once the latest batch of buildings is finished. Problems at regional banks are drying up financing for some projects. Spending on home improvement and repairs is forecast to decline over the next year, the first contraction since the depths of the foreclosure crisis in 2010, according to a closely watched barometer of the remodelling industry.

“Maybe we’re starting to see the effects of higher cost of capital on interest-rate-sensitive sectors,” said Anirban Basu, chief economist at trade group Associated Builders and Contractors, which said its measure of construction backlog declined in March to the lowest level since August. “The Federal Reserve raises rates until something breaks and something is starting to break.”

Even when construction employment declines, the effects might not be felt immediately in the broader economy. During the relatively fast-crashing 2008 financial crisis, the number of people working in residential construction peaked in April 2006 and had fallen roughly 15% before overall employment began to drop about two years later, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show.

The 2008 crash kicked off a deep recession and a years long home-building slump that left the U.S. severely short of housing.

Meanwhile, millions of homeowners are locked into historically low mortgage rates, which is keeping existing homes off the market and stoking demand for new construction, builders and analysts say. New-home sales climbed 9.6% in March, the Census Bureau said.

PulteGroup Inc., the country’s third-largest home builder, Tuesday reported record first-quarter revenue after selling 6% more houses at a 9% higher average price than a year earlier. Executives said they are adding sales and construction staff and building more spec homes, especially those aimed at first-time buyers.

“They don’t have a home to sell. And so they are not hampered by the low interest rate,” said Chief Executive Ryan Marshall. Pulte’s shares are up 47% this year and among the leaders of the S&P 500 stock index, which has gained 8.6%.

Employment in residential construction has been buoyed by the biggest burst in apartment building since the mid-1980s. Apartment projects were delayed after the Covid lockdown because of the budget-straining expense of building materials, such as lumber, which shot to more than twice the pre pandemic high and added millions of dollars to construction costs.

“People couldn’t build their projects, so they kicked the can down the road,” said Ivan Kaufman, chairman and CEO of Arbor Realty Trust Inc., which lends to landlords.

Though prices for lumber and other materials have come down, developers now face construction financing that is about twice as expensive as it had been and landlords are unlikely to be able to offset greater borrowing costs with rent increases, which should hinder new projects, said Mr. Kaufman.

So far, the roughly $50 billion decline in residential construction spending over the past year has been more than made up for by gains in commercial projects, including highways, hotels and hospitals. A record $108 billion was spent building factories last year, and the amount has risen this year, to a seasonally adjusted annualised rate of about $141 billion in February, according to Census Bureau data.

Some, such as those in fields that the Biden administration has made national priorities, such as semiconductors and electric vehicles, are supported by government incentives. Others are being built by big companies that can fund projects without borrowing.

Graphic Packaging Holding Co. is building a plant in Waco, Texas, to recycle old cardboard into new paperboard and said it would cover the $1 billion cost with cash over three years of construction. A similar facility that Graphic completed last year in Kalamazoo, Mich., required as many as 1,200 workers from 38 states.

The 2021 infrastructure bill and last years’ climate, tax and healthcare law are pumping money into industrial projects—such as renewable-energy facilities and railroad expansions—that promise to keep workers busy for years.

John Fish, CEO of the Suffolk construction firm, said the Boston-based company is focusing more on government-supported construction, such as airport upgrades. Suffolk employs roughly 2,500 and contracts with another 25,000 or so. It has three or four years of work lined up, including the renovation of Terminal C at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport, which won’t start until next year and isn’t scheduled for completion until 2026.

Home remodeller Jay Cipriani said his staff of 34 has plenty of kitchens and bathrooms to work through this year. But he said he’s getting fewer calls for new jobs and expects a slowing economy could make some prospective clients think twice about nonessential projects: “Maybe we don’t put in that fish pond this year.”

Most property investors spend considerably more time watching interest rates than bond markets.

That makes sense. The Reserve Bank cash rate has an obvious relationship with mortgage repayments, borrowing capacity and investor sentiment, while government bonds can seem far removed from what someone will pay for an apartment in Sydney or an office building in Melbourne.

But the bond market can provide one of the earliest indications that the price investors are willing to pay for property is changing.

That became evident last Thursday, when Australian shares suffered their worst trading session in months. The S&P/ASX 200 fell almost two per cent, with property among the rate-sensitive sectors caught in the sell-off as government bond yields moved sharply higher.

Australia’s 10-year government bond yield pushed to around 5.4 per cent, close to its highest level in 15 years, against a backdrop of rising global yields and renewed concern about inflation and the direction of interest rates.

For property investors, that matters because the government bond yield is effectively one of the reference prices for money.

An investor buying an Australian government bond is receiving a return while taking comparatively little credit risk. Property comes with tenants, vacancies, maintenance, leasing costs, illiquidity and the possibility that the underlying asset falls in value, so investors generally expect to be compensated for accepting those additional risks.

A property yielding five per cent therefore looks considerably more attractive when a 10-year government bond yields three per cent than when that same bond is yielding more than five per cent.

That does not mean property values automatically fall every time bond yields increase. Rental growth, scarcity, lease structures and the quality of an asset can all outweigh movements in rates, but it changes the return investors require and therefore what they may be prepared to pay.

SG Hiscock & Company made that point in an ASX Investor Update, arguing that real, or inflation-adjusted, bond yields can be particularly relevant to property because real estate is fundamentally a long-duration investment whose value is derived from future income.

The first place investors can often see that repricing is the sharemarket.

A house or commercial building does not have a price that changes every few seconds. An Australian real estate investment trust does.

A-REITs can own billions of dollars of shopping centres, offices, warehouses and other property, but their securities trade continuously on the ASX. When expectations around interest rates and bond yields change, investors can immediately alter what they are willing to pay for those property earnings.

That can create a situation where the value attributed to a portfolio on the sharemarket falls even though the underlying buildings have not changed hands and their independent valuations remain unchanged.

The two markets simply move at different speeds.

Mark Ferguson, Head of Charter Hall Maxim Property Securities, has previously described direct property valuations as lagging the listed market. Writing for Charter Hall during an earlier period of rising interest rates and bond yields, Ferguson noted that listed property was already pricing increases in capitalisation rates and falls in underlying property values before those adjustments had fully emerged in direct-market valuations.

The effect can be substantial.

Consider a commercial property producing $1 million a year in net operating income. At a five per cent capitalisation rate, that income implies a value of $20 million.

If investors subsequently require a 5.5 per cent return while the property’s income remains unchanged, the implied value falls to around $18.18 million. At six per cent, it falls again to roughly $16.67 million.

Nothing necessarily happened to the building. It could have the same tenant paying the same rent under the same lease. What changed was the return required by the person buying it.

That is also why income growth becomes so important.

A well-located property with constrained supply and strong rental growth can increase its earnings quickly enough to absorb some of the pressure from higher required returns. An ageing office building facing vacancies, refurbishment costs and an approaching debt refinancing could instead be hit from several directions at once.

Debt adds another dimension because property is one of the economy’s most capital-intensive asset classes.

Higher market rates can increase the cost of financing an acquisition or refinancing existing debt while simultaneously increasing the return investors expect from the property itself. For developers, the consequences can be even more pronounced because higher construction finance costs can coincide with lower anticipated end values.

If that happens, a project can be squeezed from both directions: it becomes more expensive to deliver at precisely the time investors become less willing to pay yesterday’s price for the finished asset.

The direct property market generally takes longer to reveal that adjustment.

An A-REIT can lose five per cent of its market value in a trading session. An office building may not transact for another year. Owners can reject lower offers, transactions can be withdrawn and valuers must wait for comparable sales to establish new evidence.

That lag is one reason listed property can be useful even for investors who have no intention of buying a REIT.

The same principle eventually extends to residential property, although houses and apartments are generally valued using comparable sales rather than capitalisation rates.

Residential property is particularly sensitive to credit. Higher bond and swap rates can influence bank funding and fixed mortgage pricing, while higher borrowing costs reduce the amount households can service.

If prospective buyers can borrow less, the number of people capable of paying yesterday’s price can shrink. Vendors may initially resist that adjustment, resulting in fewer transactions rather than immediate price falls, before motivated sales eventually establish new comparable values.

For investors, rental growth can provide an important buffer. Rising rents can help offset higher financing costs, just as increasing commercial rents can compensate for some expansion in capitalisation rates. Investors relying primarily on capital growth while accepting a low rental yield have considerably less protection when the cost of money rises.

That is why movements in listed property and bond markets deserve attention beyond the trading floor.

They provide a constantly updating view of how investors are pricing interest rates, debt, future income and property risk, often months before those changes become obvious in direct transactions.

For an A-REIT investor, that means looking at gearing, debt maturity, hedging, interest cover and the discount or premium to net tangible assets rather than simply chasing the highest distribution yield.

For a commercial property investor, it means testing what happens to valuations if capitalisation rates move 25, 50 or 100 basis points higher.

For residential investors, it means understanding mortgage costs, borrowing capacity, realistic rental income and how much of the investment case relies on future capital growth.

The cash rate will continue to attract most of the attention in Australian property. But investors looking for an earlier indication of how the market is repricing risk should also be watching the bond market.

Property prices might take months to respond to a changing financial environment. The price of money moves considerably faster.

The Building Boom Is Prolonging Market Pain

Construction employment is higher than ever—undermining bets the Fed will soon pivot

Rising Australian bond yields are putting pressure on listed property and the cost of capital. Here’s why A-REITs can signal changes in property valuations before the direct market moves.