M/I Homes: Meck County’s busiest homebuilder in 2012

Listen to this article

For many, 13 is a dreaded number, a cursed pair of digits to be avoided at all costs. But ’13 might be a year of luck and plenty for some Charlotte-area developers and real estate and construction companies.

Starting with this story, The Mecklenburg Times is kicking off a 13-part series on people and companies worth paying attention to in 2013. There’s no science behind our list; simply, our reporting and research have us thinking that these 13 will be among the busiest and biggest newsmakers of the year. Who knows? We could be wrong.

First up: M/I Homes, 2012’s leading homebuilder in the Charlotte area.

Check back with us to find out who the other 12 are.

CHARLOTTE — Charlotte-area homebuilders of all stripes can’t help but watch M/I Homes in 2013.

The Charlotte division of the Columbus, Ohio-based titan led all homebuilders in Mecklenburg County last year in the number of building permits issued and their total value, according to data compiled by the Home Builders Association of Charlotte.

And in the entire Charlotte-area market, including areas outside Mecklenburg County, M/I sold 354 homes in 2012, up 40 percent from the previous year, said Tamara Lynch, spokeswoman for M/I’s Charlotte division.

As for the thing to watch for M/I in 2013, it will probably be the production builder’s development of new building lots, particularly outside of Mecklenburg, Lynch said.

That’s likely to be an industry trend in Greater Charlotte, observers say. Except for some undeveloped and developing areas of Huntersville, there isn’t a lot of developed or even developable land left in Mecklenburg.

That is partly because of the geopolitical structure of the state and its population centers. Of North Carolina’s fastest-growing major metropolitan counties, Mecklenburg, at 546 square miles, is one of the smallest, said Emmett Curl, a top appraiser with Pearson’s Appraisal Services.

Because Curl is based in the Raleigh area, he is familiar with the far larger Wake County (857 square miles), home to Raleigh. And because he’s been representing Pearson’s in its work fixing Mecklenburg County appraiser’s office in the wake of the much-maligned 2011 property revaluation, he’s become a keen observer of the largest high-growth areas in the state.

Curl said Mecklenburg is plain running out of room.

“I’ve been a little bit surprised at the small number of empty parcels and of empty lots,” Curl said. “Almost everything I’ve seen typically had a structure on it, certainly a larger percentage in other (high-growth) areas that I’ve seen, and certainly more than Wake. There are very few available lots — or tracts of land” to develop into lots.

Bill Miley said that’s because Mecklenburg County’s most desirable lots — called “Class A” lots, in part because they’re near “nodes of population” — are running in very short supply, down to 22 months, when a 28- to 32-month supply is “equilibrium.”

“And almost all of those Class A lots are already owned or spoken for by builders,” said Miley, Charlotte-based analyst for Metrostudy, a housing data-collection and -interpretation firm. So for most practical purposes, there really are no available Class A lots.

On the other hand, lower-class lots can’t be given away, in part because they were developed so far away from the city during the housing boom, when developers thought they would sell.

“Class D lots are at a 202-month supply,” Miley said, “and I’m not even going to tell you about the Class F lots.”

That’s why M/I and other big production builders (such as D.R. Horton, Pulte Homes and Ryan Homes) will be developing their own Class A and Class B lots in 2013.

“They’re going to be self-developing for the next 18 to 24 months,” Miley said. “They’re hiring people to find land.”

And the sweet spot that M/I will be looking hardest at will largely be in between: just outside the Mecklenburg County line, but still bordering the city of Charlotte limits, Lynch said. They’ll include the Harrisburg area of Cabarrus County, the York and Indian Land areas of Lancaster County and Stallings and vicinity in Union County (one of the fastest growing counties in the state, according to the U.S. Census Bureau).

That won’t necessarily be easy. M/I has already been thwarted last year in developing its own subdivision in Stallings because of neighbor protests and local government action. And even in Mecklenburg, M/I is still negotiating with the town of Huntersville over the company’s proposed Avery Park development, months after it was first introduced.

And, of course, M/I will also continue to build — and build a lot — this year. Among other places, look for construction crews to be at work on new M/I houses in the Antiquity mixed-use development in Cornelius, where M/I has the right of first refusal on any empty, detached, single-family house lots, Lynch said.

Bottom line: To follow M/I Charlotte in 2013, don’t follow the money. Follow the land.

Tony Brown can be reached at [email protected], (704) 247-2912 or on Twitter at @tonymecktimes.