December 2016 Shipment Report

Another surge in out of state shipments from Texas MH factories put downward pressure on shipments inside the state for the month of December and to close out 2016. The out of state surge was impressive, coming in at 637 homes shipped out which is exactly 200 more homes than the monthly average for homes headed out of Texas. That strong growth in out of state shipments for the last quarter of the year pushed the total homes hipped out up 14% over 2015.

The uptick in homes shipped out of Texas wasn’t quite enough to pull the total homes produced in Texas into positive territory, but being down only -0.5% with no visibility into the total number of floors, I would chalk that up as pretty darn close to flat.

For Texas, shipments posted their third double digit decrease for a month over the same month last year in a row. The total homes shipped of 877 marks just the second time the total for a month came in below 900 homes and pushed the total for the year down -6.8% compared to 2015.

The bulk of the decline came from single-section units which were down -9.3%. Multi-sections fared better with only a -3.8% decline over 2015.

Despite the slide in the final quarter of 2016, I am fairly bullish on 2017. The overall Texas economy closed the year with stabilization in both the manufacturing and the oil and gas employment sectors, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas is projecting stronger growth than we had in 2016. Inventories for housing markets across the state are still low, and as more and more people continue to have that same realization that Davey Crockett so famously had about where the was headed and where his old state’s politicians could head, I think most signs point to positive growth for the MH industry in Texas.

It is also interesting to note that since we started tracking shipments in 2012, the gap between titles and shipments has never been as low as it currently is for 2016 at 728 homes. That gap is only going to shrink too as we’re only at about mid-November for monthly title totals on the year. For comparison sake, the average gap for 2012-2015 was 1,473 homes. Some of the decline in the spread is due to the market shift from single-section sales making up a majority of sales to the present market, where multi-section and single-section home sales are running neck in neck. But if I had to offer a wager, I would bet that inventories across the state are running a little leaner than they will be in a couple months from now.

View the Annual Manufacturer Shipments Report.