“With most of our members responding before the November elections, confidence levels remained unchanged as they awaited the results,” said NAHB Chairman Ed Brady, a homebuilder and developer from Bloomington, Illinois. “Still, builder sentiment has held well above 60 for the past three months, indicating that the single-family housing sector continues to show slow, gradual growth.”

The big question mark for builders right now is labor, or lack of it. Across the nation, the shortage of skilled labor has builders paying more out of pocket and delivering homes far more slowly than potential buyers might like. Construction workers, many of them immigrants, left the business during the housing crash and never returned. If the Trump administration takes a hard line on immigration, as promised, the labor crunch could worsen.