conarb
Registered User
Bloomberg did a piece today on the shortage of buildable land, looks like the rest of the nation is seeing what we've been going through:
¹ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-08/not-for-sale-the-best-land-in-america
Bloomberg said:This shortage doesn’t affect all the marketable land. “There’s plenty of land in the country, but it’s all in outlying areas far from the job centers. So the demand to buy homes in those outlying areas is lower than usual right now,” Burns says. “And the costs to build have risen.” Developers point to new environmental regulations, understaffed local government offices, and the painful process of obtaining building permits for raw land.
“It’s the biggest headache you can imagine,” Austin real estate investor Jerred Morris says of the permit process. “It takes a tremendous amount of time and basically ingenuity to know how to weave your way through the offices and get a permit and get things done.”
Pointon of Capital Economics says that to ***** housing starts, homebuilders are going to need to increase the price they are willing to offer for desirable land. “To do that, they’re going to have to put up the price of the homes they sell or take a hit to their profits,” he says. “And to do that, you have to pull through higher home prices onto consumers, which they may be able to do as earnings rise.” He expects to see the pace of housing starts accelerate in the next few months as that adjustment starts to happen.¹
¹ http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-08/not-for-sale-the-best-land-in-america