Housing

October's jobs report is the day's real story and it breaks the usual rule. Nonfarm payrolls beat expectations by 100,000, hitting 165,000 with 84,000 in upward revisions to August and September, and unemployment fell to 4.1 percent. Mortgage News Daily notes that kind of print normally sells off the bond market and pushes rates up, but yields snapped back to pre-report levels within eight minutes and mortgage rates held at their lows. Redfin reads the same data as cover for a December Fed hike. Underneath the headline number, NAHB flags the split: residential construction employment fell by 16,400 jobs, the largest monthly drop in the data, even as the broader labor market rebounded.

Construction Dive's thread is the midterms. Industry groups are reacting to the Democrats' midterm landslide with calls for Congress to work together on transit funding, while employers and unions stay split on the PRO Act. Voter pushback on data centers shows up twice: Tutor Perini is still eyeing $200 billion in potential infrastructure bids, almost none of them data centers, and WSP is leaning on its power and infrastructure backlog as the data center pipeline comes under question. Confidence is softer than the workload suggests, with high costs and thin demand outside that data center boom cited as the drag.