Literature on factors affecting number of houses built Is there any existing literature on the various factors affecting the number of houses constructed in a particular city over, say, a given month? Factors might include: quality of housing stock, a lagging value of housing sale price, house price to earnings ratio. 

Preferably, I would like to see literature that describes the relative importance of these factors, perhaps by running a regression--so that way, when I do my own regression on the factors, I can compare the magnitude and direction with existing research. 

Anything related to this would be useful too; for example, if there is no paper which predicts the number of houses built, then something which gives, say, a utility yield for constructors would be helpful.
It won't help much with the high frequency variation of interest to you but this is a famous and important paper on this topic:


  I process satellite-generated data on terrain elevation and presence
  of water bodies to precisely estimate the amount of developable land
  in U.S. metropolitan areas. The data show that residential development
  is effectively curtailed by the presence of steep-sloped terrain. I
  also find that most areas in which housing supply is regarded as
  inelastic are severely land-constrained by their geography.
  Econometrically, supply elasticities can be well characterized as
  functions of both physical and regulatory constraints, which in turn
  are endogenous to prices and demographic growth. Geography is a key
  factor in the contemporaneous urban development of the United States.


The Geographic Determinants of Housing Supply (Saiz (2010))

This paper may also be useful:


  The long-run price elasticity for alternative specifications of new
  housing supply is estimated using U.S. annual data for 1950 through
  1994. The basic model expresses residential construction as a linear function of new housing price and the prices of construction inputs.
  Long-run elasticities range from 1.6 to 3.7, suggesting that new
  housing supply is price elastic. Residential construction responds to
  both the real interest and expected inflation rates, but other
  construction cost variables perform poorly. However, the results are
  sensitive to the time-series processes underlying the variables. A
  modified model that expresses residential construction as a function
  of changes in input prices, rather than their levels, produces a
  long-run elasticity of about 0.8 and a significant inverse
  relationship between new housing supply and the construction wage
  rate.


The Long-Run Elasticity of New Housing Supply in the United States: Empirical Evidence for 1950 to 1994 (Blackley (1999))