Florida leads South on construction spending: reports

The housing market is one of the U.S. economy’s most important drivers, a maxim most exemplary in Florida.

In the same way the real estate industry’s collapse magnified the effects of the global recession in Florida, its resurgence in recent years has helped fuel a construction and sales boom that is having positive macro effects across the economy.

In the second quarter of this year, U.S. consumer spending was the highest it’s been since late 2010, with a substantial number of people plowing money into homes, according to a report by Carter Machinery, a Caterpillar machines dealer.

Florida’s Hillsborough County, and specifically Tampa, led the Southern states with $618 million in construction permits as of the second quarter of 2013, followed by Georgia’s Fulton County, with includes metropolitan Atlanta. A land grab in Tampa has developers bidding up prices for speculative home lots, as The Real Deal previously reported.

Miami-Dade followed with $468 million in construction permits, according to the Carter report.

In a separate report released today, McGraw Hill said that South Florida had signed construction permits totaling $3.7 billion so far this year, compared to $2.98 billion 12 months ago.