NAHB Housing Economics and Building Material Price Reports

Three streams share one publisher. The first is the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, a monthly 0-100 survey of homebuilder sentiment covering current single-family sales, expected sales over the coming six months, and traffic of prospective buyers. The second is housing starts and permits commentary, built each month on Census Bureau releases. The third is the material price report series, which translates BLS Producer Price Index data into construction terms near-monthly.

The price series is where the dataset earns its keep. The July 2026 edition reported residential building materials excluding energy up 0.4 percent month over month and 5 percent year over year - the largest annual gain since December 2022 - with softwood lumber jumping 7.4 percent on the month and 17.3 percent annually, while ready-mix concrete slipped 0.4 percent on the month but kept a 2.2 percent annual gain. The energy component fell 2.4 percent monthly yet sat 33.1 percent higher year over year.

Around those headlines sit supporting panels: a quarterly Multifamily Developer Survey confidence reading, national sales and mortgage-rate statistics, state and local permit and employment detail, special studies, and an economic-impact model quantifying housing's contribution to jobs, income and taxes. The publisher presents all of it inside articles and charts; Datadory delivers the same substance as structured, joinable rows. Start from our building products data hub to see where it sits in the catalog.

Flat, typed and time-stamped - one reading per series, per reporting month. Illustrative rows in the delivered column order:

post_date      : 2026-08-18
series         : residential building materials PPI excl. energy
monthly_change : +0.4%
yoy_change     : +5%
note           : largest YoY gain since December 2022

post_date      : 2026-08-18
series         : softwood lumber PPI
monthly_change : +7.4%
yoy_change     : +17.3%

post_date      : 2026-08-18
series         : ready-mix concrete PPI
monthly_change : -0.4%
yoy_change     : +2.2%

post_date      : 2026-08-18
series         : energy PPI (construction inputs)
monthly_change : -2.4%
yoy_change     : +33.1%

Those four rows are a single month's material price report rendered as records. They ride alongside the monthly HMI score, the starts-and-permits series and the quarterly multifamily confidence reading, each keyed the same way, so one pull covers both the sentiment and the cost side of the market. Values above illustrate the shape of a row rather than quote a certified extract; your sample pulls the structured history.

Seven core fields make up the schema. Sentiment fields carry the survey side - the 0-100 HMI value and the quarterly multifamily developer confidence reading. Price fields carry the cost side - the materials-excluding-energy aggregate plus its softwood lumber, ready-mix concrete and energy components, each with month-over-month and year-over-year changes. Volume fields carry the demand side - housing starts and permits. Every field traces to a named NAHB analysis series, so citations stay clean.

Geography - United States national series as the spine, with state and local breakdowns for permits and construction employment, so a national demand read can be cut regionally where the underlying analysis supports it.

Temporal - a rolling panel: monthly HMI and housing starts observations, near-monthly material price readings keyed to the BLS PPI cycle, and a quarterly multifamily developer confidence survey. The referenced indicator archive reaches back decades, giving you history for backtests and escalation models rather than a few trailing months.

Granularity - indicator-level time series discussed in the reports; there is no record-level microdata such as individual projects or transactions. Read it as a high-frequency dashboard of the residential construction economy, not a transaction ledger.

API, files, or your warehouse. Daily, weekly, or hourly.

• Procurement and supplier negotiation - building products buyers track lumber and concrete movements before they reach quotes; a 17.3 percent annual lumber jump is leverage in a renewal conversation. Workflows like this sit on our price monitoring use case page.
• Demand planning for manufacturers and distributors - the HMI reads builders' intentions months before orders land, making it a leading input for product and inventory plans; methods live on our demand forecasting use case page.
• Investor and macro research - sentiment plus input costs form a compact factor pair for residential exposure, backtestable against the multi-decade indicator history; see our quant backtesting use case page.
• Policy and industry analysis - the economic-impact model quantifies housing's contribution to jobs, income and taxes, and the multifamily survey adds a developer-confidence lens the monthly cycle lacks; sizing work sits on our market sizing use case page.

Investors and quant researchers get the timeliest public read on residential construction - sentiment and input costs in one pull, keyed consistently enough to feed models; sector fit is mapped on our investors quants building products page. Competitive intelligence and product teams get early warning on where builders feel cost pressure first, which frames pricing conversations across the supply chain; comparisons run on our competitive intel product teams building products page. Market researchers and consultants get citable, named-series numbers behind housing claims without reconciling trade-press snippets; framing lives on our market researchers building products page. Journalists, academics and students get quotable monthly readings with clear provenance from the nation's homebuilder association; teaching angles sit on our journalists academics building products page.

For the same underlying figures in raw queryable form, the Census economic time series database is the stronger instrument - it serves new residential construction programs directly as rows, where this dataset supplies the economist's interpretation around them. For commodity-level annual context, USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries covers cement, crushed stone, sand and gravel in long runs.

Where this dataset wins is speed and synthesis: it converts official indexes into construction-specific readings within days of release, adds the only builder sentiment survey in the slice, and layers a quarterly multifamily view on top. Pair it with the construction industry statistics series for output and new orders, and see the full field on our best building products datasets ranking.

Four things. First, this is interpretation-grade data: the publisher writes the numbers into analysis, and Datadory structures that analysis into typed rows - you gain the economist's framing and lose nothing numeric, but the unit of account is a named series, not a raw microdata record.

Second, cadence differs by stream. HMI and starts arrive monthly, material price readings follow the BLS PPI cycle near-monthly, and the multifamily survey lands quarterly - tell us which streams matter and we will shape the sample around them.

Third, sub-national detail concentrates in permits and employment; most price and sentiment series are national. Confirm the geography you need during the sample stage.

Fourth, sentiment and price are different animals: one surveys expectations, the other observes invoices. Used together they bracket the input-cost story; used alone, either can mislead.