Plunge Forecast for Commercial Construction : Real estate: New building countywide is expected to fall nearly 80%. The retail segment may be especially hard hit.

Commercial real estate construction, hobbled by a sluggish economy and tighter loans, will drop nearly 80% in Ventura County this year from 1991 levels, analysts predicted Wednesday.

If the forecast proves accurate, the slowdown will come as bad news to county construction workers already hard hit by a lagging home-building industry.

Construction of retail, office and industrial buildings is expected to drop to 525,000 square feet this year from more than 2.4 million square feet last year, said researchers with Grubb & Ellis Commercial Real Estate Services.

According to the company’s semiannual forecast, the decline is not expected to be spread evenly. While office construction is predicted to be off by a little less than a third, construction of retail stores is expected to fall by more than 90%, the company reported.

Thad W. Seligman, the company’s district manager, attributed the building slowdown to the amount of speculative building in the 1980s.

“The ‘80s was a decade of acquisition, and the ‘90s will be a decade of disposition,” Seligman said at a news conference at the firm’s Oxnard office.

Bad loans left over from the building boom have made traditional lending sources tightfisted, Seligman said. “It’s not likely that there will be any new construction capital available in the next several years,” he said.

While a slowdown in commercial construction would help reduce high vacancies in existing buildings, it would severely affect construction workers, Seligman said.

“What nobody has added up during the recession are the jobs lost in the real estate and related industries,” Seligman said. “The job losses are really, really significant.”

The unemployment rate among the 6,000 members of the county’s building trade unions is 23%, a union official said.

“It doesn’t look good. It’s scary,” said Bob Guillen, the executive secretary of the Ventura County Construction Trades Council, which represents 27 trade unions.

Guillen said about 40% of union surveyors, who help prepare a site for construction, are unemployed, suggesting that construction will slow down in the coming months.

When work at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard and at Amgen in Thousand Oaks is finished, “we’ll have quite a few members out of work,” Guillen said.

Guillen said many construction workers will hold on for another four to five months, but then move on to other jobs. “During the last recession, everybody went to be longshoremen,” he said.

But few union members would be willing to relinquish the pensions they’ve established during 15 to 20 years in construction, Guillen said. He said unions will probably issue withdrawal cards that would allow the members to return without paying new initiation dues.

Guillen called for an increase in public works projects to sustain construction workers during the recession.

Eugene H. McKnight, an investment properties broker for Grubb & Ellis, said the slowdown has made lenders more cautious. In response to years of speculation, lenders are now requiring more investment from the developers, he said.

“The good news is that the prime rate is now at 6 1/2%, while it was at 9 1/2% a year ago,” McKnight said. “The bad news is that no banks and fewer savings and loans are willing to make those loans.”

Seligman predicted that the drop in market value of real estate holdings would result in lower overhead for businesses and eventually lead to a brighter economy.