Another ‘green shoot’: Demand for construction begins to rebuild

The age-old question when trying to call the ‘bottom’ is: Do you wait for the data to look good, or is it enough for the data to stop getting worse?

A recent article in Bizsense bounces between these two extremes.

One the one hand:

New home construction is still down 34 percent from 2008 levels in Chesterfield. And overall activity (commercial, new homes and renovations) is down 50 percent from the first quarter of 2008, when Chesterfield issued 1,566 commercial and residential permits totaling $118.1 million.

In Henrico during the first quarter, new single-family home permits dropped 48 percent from 288 homes in 2008. Total permits fell 33 percent, and their total value fell 48 percent.

On the other:

Bud Ohly, president of Eagle Construction, said they have 11 homes under construction there, with permits approved for more.

“Things are a lot better than they were six months ago,” Ohly said. At the time, construction had halted, and the master developer Unicorp was straddled with liens and lawsuits.

In the first three months of the year, he said, they have sold eight units, which was everything they had available. Of the homes under construction, he said they are building a few of them on spec.

Our take is that if you wait until everything is ‘better’, you’ll have missed a MAJOR opportunity provided by today’s market.

You can read more about this here.

For more information, see Richmond VA New Homes.