New Home Construction Asheville Has Positive Forecast

We have seen and felt an uptick in activity in both home remodeling and new home construction Asheville and the surrounding area. It is great to be out on the road and see more contractors bustling around. Buncombe County’s recent report proves our feeling is catching on! See the report from the Asheville Citizen Times below:

Building permits for new houses showed a 20 percent increase for 2012 as the Asheville-area real estate market continued to heal from the Great Recession.

“Based on what we see now, the trend is certainly positive,” said Dale Akins, a real estate research expert who runs The Market Edge in Knoxville, Tenn. “Most markets bottomed out in 2010 or 2011, and now are showing huge numbers that indicate restored confidence.”

But building isn’t exactly booming. Buncombe posted 613 new building permits for 2012, up from the 512 the previous year. That’s still less than half of the 1,749 permits filed locally in 2007 before the financial meltdown.

An excess number of million-dollar homes on the market drives up the average price of a Buncombe County home to $405,000, the second-highest in the state behind the Outer Banks market, said Don Davies who tracks the Asheville real estate market.

The median price, or the middle of all home prices around Asheville, is $290,000, or about $40,000 more than the state median.

Davies points to the lowest inventory of homes for sale in a decade.

“When we see those levels getting to what we saw in 2003, that’s when we start to see the trend line shoot straight up,” he said.

But Davies cautioned that land sales aren’t keeping pace with other indicators. “We have right at 1,900 pieces of raw land on the market in Buncombe County, but we’re only selling 25-35 pieces a month. That’s not picked up much.”

Also troublesome is the near record amount of time that it takes a house to sell, Davies said. “Back in 2007, we had an inventory of 2,600 homes but only an average of 119 days on the market. Today we have a lower inventory — about 1,800 homes, but an average of 224 days on the market.”

Still Davies sees the market trends continuing to improve. “It’s a slow crawl, but Asheville continues to attract people from all over.”

Akins told Asheville homebuilders last week that predicting market demand is difficult. But given Asheville’s desirability as a location for retirees and continued low interest rates, both existing home sales and new building should continue to grow in 2013, he said.

Source:  Asheville Citizen Times

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