March 2025 Residential Construction and D.R. Horton Earnings

Well, last year was the year of the “boring expansion”. This will be the year of “can anything be boring when there is an authoritarian buffoon in the White House”?

It’s hard to know the scale of things in real time. Heck, it’s been 17 years and few people appreciate the scale of the mortgage crackdown that turned the 2008 recession into a crisis. Practically everything I write about here is a question of how much weight to give various economic factors in the housing market.

So, every day in the Trump chaos era, one has to wonder whether deportations will lower housing demand, or if a decline in foreign travel and residency in the U.S will. Or an economic downturn. Or will a loss of laborers affect supply. Or will the cost of tariffs. Or will interest rates go up because of foreign capital fleeing the Treasury market, or will they go down because of declining economic sentiment.

Most of these issues, so far, appear to have small effects on the housing market. It’s hard to know if they will continue to. Or, as in the case with the mortgage crackdown in 2008, will something very important happen be baked into the marketplace before we appreciate it. Or, like with the subprime mortgage market before 2008, will we react to something we think is important and create unnecessary troubles?

It’s hard to know. And, since Trump doesn’t worry about understanding anything before he screws around with it, there is just too much going on to keep track of. It’s also hard to have deep knowledge of the details of all these things that normally change slowly but now change on a whim. How long does it take after a tariff is put in place before it affects the quantity and price of items being unloaded at the ports? There are a thousand of these questions now. It would be easy to become educated on one of them, but not a thousand of them.

So, what comes next month, quarter, or year, I feel a bit less sure of than I recently have. Unfortunately, because of all of this, having a good read on what’s happening now isn’t worth as much as it was 6 months ago. But, I will try to still let the data speak about what’s happening now.

Below are the March 2025 residential construction updates and notes on D.R. Horton’s 2nd quarter earnings update.