Local home starts up 28.5% last year
Jan. 17—Daviess County homebuilders picked up permits to build 388 single-family homes in 2021.
That's the most in the past five years, and it's a 28.5% increase over 2020.
The breakdown shows 302 permits in 2020, 277 in 2019, 220 in 2018 and 228 in 2017.
But it's still far below the local residential construction peak in 2003, when 589 single-family houses and 79 multifamily units were built at a cost of $47.61 million.
Builders say they could have built even more homes last year if they hadn't been dealing with supply chain issues and not having enough skilled tradespeople.
The National Association of Home Builders says there are 300,000 unfilled jobs in the construction industry.
That's partly because many of those laid off during the Great Recession never came back.
Richard Stallings, executive officer of the Home Builders Association of Owensboro, said the Great Recession of 2007-09 slowed building dramatically for a decade.
"There were approximately 5 million to 6 million fewer homes built (nationally) over a 10-year period than should have been," he said.
Owensboro and most of the rest of the country are still seeing a housing shortage.
The Greater Owensboro Realtor Association lists only 154 homes on the market at the end of December.
That's down from 329 at the end of 2019.
Business Insider said, "In the years leading up to 2007, there was more home construction than there was demand. This led to a housing bubble and a financial crisis. After this period, it seems the U.S. has had the opposite problem, where there is buyer demand but not enough new homes are being built.
"There were about 20,000 less (home) starts per million people in the 2010s than in previous decades."
Supply chain issues have raised the cost of building materials for more than a year now.
The NAHB reported this month that rising lumber prices have added more than $18,600 to the price of a new home already this year.
"Over the past four months, lumber prices have nearly tripled, causing the price of an average new single-family home to increase by more than $18,600, according to NAHB standard estimates of lumber used to build the average home," it wrote.
"This lumber price hike has also added nearly $7,300 to the market value of the average new multifamily home, which translates into households paying $67 a month more to rent a new apartment," the association wrote.
According to Random Lengths, as of Dec. 29, the price of framing lumber topped $1,000 per thousand board feet — a 167% increase since late August.
The NAHB said it calculated these average home price increases based on the softwood lumber that goes into the average new home, "as captured in the Builder Practices Survey conducted by Home Innovation Research Labs. Included is any softwood used in structural framing (including beams, joists, headers, rafters and trusses), sheathing, flooring and underlayment, interior wall and ceiling finishing, cabinets, doors, windows, roofing, siding, soffit and fascia, and exterior features such as garages, porches, decks, railing, fences and landscape walls."
Keith Lawrence, 270-691-7301, klawrence@messenger-inquirer.com
