Ouch. German construction activity slumps further in October, falling at its quickest pace in seven months. Of note, housing activity remains the weakest by some margin with a further decline in commercial building while civil engineering activity also returned to contraction on the month. HCOB notes that:<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a heavy blow for the construction sector, which was already under pressure. Across the sector as a whole, activity
\ndropped in October at the fastest rate since March this year. The most striking result was the decline in civil engineering,
\nwhere we had seen moderate growth over the previous two months. The situation in residential construction is even more
\ndramatic, with the deep recession worsening further. Commercial construction also took a hit, though the drop was less
\nforceful than the decline in housing activity. Overall, the numbers reflect a climate of uncertainty, high building costs, and
\nrelatively high long-term interest rates, which have hovered well above the levels of the previous decade for the past two
\nyears.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cThe slump in civil engineering activity shows that the large-scale infrastructure investments the government has already
\nstarted are clearly subject to bigger fluctuations. We expect growth in this sector to stabilize over the course of next year,
\nonce a broader range of public projects gets approved and rolled out.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cIn residential construction, activity is falling faster than at any other point this year. It\u2019s pretty clear that the so-called
\n\u201cbuilding turbo\u201d from the federal government – which mainly aims to ease zoning regulations and speed up approval
\nprocesses – isn\u2019t working at all. It looks like we\u2019ll need additional measures, like direct subsidies and more social housing, to
\nreally tackle the housing shortage.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cIncoming orders are shrinking a bit less than the month before, but they still signal that the construction sector isn\u2019t heading
\nfor a turnaround just yet. Confidence in higher construction activity a year from now remains low, and demand for
\nsubcontractors has dropped sharply. On the bright side, cost inflation has come down significantly and is now well below the
\nlong-term average. That could help improve profitability for construction firms.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ouch. German construction activity slumps further in October, falling at its quickest pace in seven months. Of note,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185173,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-247970","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-economy","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-economy","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247970\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}