New US housing starts rose an unexpected 9.1 per cent in June, but economists cautioned against interpreting the jump as evidence of a bottoming of the US residential property market.

The commerce department said the surge to a pace of 1.066m units was driven by multi-family construction in New York, where new building codes were enacted last month. Meanwhile, single-family housing starts across the country dropped 5.3 per cent to their lowest level since 1991 and overall new home construction, setting aside multi-family homes in the northeast, dropped 4 per cent.