With plenty of screwball mortages yet to come due, an uptick in the residential construction industry won’t appear until mid-2010 to 2011, say Ed Sullivan, the chief economist for the Portland Cement Association. And even that won’t happen unless there’s some improvement in the pace of sales and a reduction in inventory, he says.
Of the forecasters we follow here at ConstructionPundit, Sullivan was the most pessimistic last year at this time–when just about everybody else thought the bubble would go on forever. So I tend to trust his judgement. More details on his report can be found here.