Builder confidence stayed mostly flat in April, nudging up slightly from a downward revision to March's findings. The National Association of Home Builders reported a 1 point increase in its monthly Housing Market Index, a measure of builders' confidence in the market for newly constructed single-family homes. April's index was a reported 47, while March was revised down to 46. As of the latest release, the index has now spent three straight months below 50, the threshold between a market viewed largely as good or bad.
Of the three component indexes measuring housing conditions, the gauges for both current sales conditions and traffic of prospective buyers remained steady at 51 and 32, respectively. The measure for expected sales in the next six months climbed four points to 57, reflecting greater optimism among builders. The HMI three-month moving average was down in all four regions. The West fell nine points to 51, the Midwest declined to 49 while the Northeast and South each dropped two points to 33 and 47, respectively.
In a fortuitous reversal for Ellie Mae, the company announced that a previously reported outage stemming from a presumed cyber-attack was in fact triggered by a confluence of factors involving network, hardware, software, and demand for service. The company commented that there was no breach of client or personal borrower data from the downtime, and that Ellie Mae has already taken steps to prevent outages in the future, including adding capacity and redistributing traffic across all of its data centers.