We argue that financial risk managers should focus more strongly on developing forward-looking early warning indicator systems for the North American real estate market. Based on time series data from the US housing market that focuses on the subprime crisis and the period directly after this event, we discuss possible information that such early warning indicator systems could be based on and analyze the presence of a lead-lag relationship between US housing starts and the Architectural Billings Index. We find evidence for such a relation using two different approaches, namely Granger causality tests and transfer entropy analyses. We then discuss the implications of our findings for financial risk managers as well as for ESG investors.