Residential revelry

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Is the Charlotte housing bust history?

It just might be true, according to a detailed, day-by-day Mecklenburg Times analysis of five years’ worth of public records.

Housing permits issued for the benchmark detached, single-family home market rose to 283 last month, making it the best July for home construction in Mecklenburg County since 2008. That’s the year the financial crisis hit in October and burst the housing bubble the following year.

As other evidence that the housing market in the Charlotte area is back, there’s the resuscitation of so-called “zombie subdivisions” across the region, and the fact that Charlotte homebuilders are celebrating what they say is the housing boom of 2012.

“After the worst July in our history last year, we just had our best July in the history of M/I Homes Charlotte,” said Tamara Lynch, the homebuilding giant’s vice president of sales and marketing. “And that goes back to 1985.”

Lynch, who works for the second-largest residential developer in Charlotte, backed that up with sales numbers: The company sold 41 homes last month compared with 28 in July 2011.

The Mecklenburg Times analysis of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s online database of daily housing permits issued in July for single-family detached homes shows that after the bust of 2009, and two very slow years of recovery, construction of single-family homes is almost back to 2008 levels, when 304 similar permits were issued.

Detached single-family construction is considered a leading indicator for the entire residential market.

The analysis also suggests that Charlotte is doing better than the nation as a whole when compared with the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo builder-confidence index for August.

The national monthly index, released Wednesday, shows that homebuilders are less antsy. But they’re still plenty worried, especially about the country’s slow jobs market, high foreclosure rates and depressed home prices.

The national index ticked up this month to 37 on a scale of 100. That’s the highest it’s been in five years. But it’s still well below 50, the benchmark that separates pessimism from optimism.

The mood in Charlotte, on the other hand, is absolutely giddy, and not just among big builders such as M/I Homes. The little guys are smiling, too.

Alan Banks, Home Builders Association of Charlotte vice president, said he was “very bullish” about the local housing market and predicted he will be more so next year.

“Inventories are decreasing while volume is increasing,” said Banks, who is also one of two partners in Evans Coghill Homes. “As a builder, today versus the same time last year, we have twice as many projects under construction.”

Banks said he’s currently building 17 new homes.

At Classica Homes, President and CEO Bill Saint said: “We are seeing a very positive buyer-level this year, as compared to last. Our sales are up 92 percent at Robbins Park in Cornelius and Christenbury in Concord. Our home prices for sales have been from $425,000 to over $800,000. We have opened two new villages at both neighborhoods and have a third under development, due to high demand.”

Some area builders have resumed construction in what the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s Urban Institute calls “zombie subdivisions,” developments that died when the financial crisis hammer hit the housing market but are now showing signs of life.

According to a survey released Aug. 7 by the institute, here’s what’s going on at a handful of stalled developments:

• In Kannapolis, developers of Castlebrooke Manor built castle-style entrance pillars on the 108-unit parcel but little else before going belly-up. Now a new developer has plans to build 230 new homes, more than double the original number.
• At City Park, after a failed effort to put two hotels, 2,500 residential units and 600,000 square feet of retail on the site of the old Charlotte Coliseum, developers are now planning a scaled-back project to construct 284 units of multifamily housing.
• In Union County, one of nation’s fastest-growing, Stonebridge appears to be back on track. That’s where developers had dreams of 500 lots on nearly 500 acres next to a golf course. An estimated 170 lots have been approved for development. Half of those have been built, and construction has resumed on the rest.
• Formerly known as Edenmoor, Walnut Creek, in Lancaster County, S.C., is now being repaired in anticipation of a resumption of construction after three years of inactivity. New owners are pouring $6 million into repairing sinkholes that formed in the development’s streets when the stormwater system clogged from disuse.

Does all this mean that the Charlotte housing bust is indeed history? In the coming weeks, the Mecklenburg Times plans a more exhaustive analysis that may shed more light on that question. For now, M/I Homes’ Lynch is popping corks.

“Consumers know that we have hit bottom,” Lynch said. “The consumers who were ready and able are now willing.”
BROWN can be reached at [email protected] or (704) 247-2912