And, as many of you know from experience, the opposite is true as well—that housing activity tends to experience relatively large declines in economic downturns. In particular, residential fixed investment declined an average of about 15 percent annually during periods defined as recessions, compared with an average annual rate of decline in GDP of just 2 percent in those same periods.
These numbers illustrate that residential fixed investment is particularly sensitive to where we are 1/3  BIS central bankers' speeches  in the business cycle.