Lagging Supply Causes Drop in New-Home Sales
While the home resale market continues to boom in Ventura County, sales of new homes have fallen sharply in recent months, according to a new report.
Most analysts agree the decline--detailed in a report Monday by the Meyers Group, an Irvine-based research firm--is due to falling supply, not lagging demand. A separate report by developer CB Commercial real estate details a similar shortage in office and industrial real estate.
“The demand is there,” said Bob Bray, national sales and marketing director for the Meyers Group. “There’s just not enough supply to meet the demand.”
Local developers said the report also reveals the difficulty in getting housing built in the county, a situation they claim will worsen if voters approve controversial growth-control initiatives this November.
“As a developer, any time you look at land, you always look at the political situation,”said Sandy Dunkin, vice president of marketing for Beazer Homes. “You would look at that very closely.”
Developers sold 581 new houses in the three months ending Sept. 15, a 28% drop from theprevious quarter and nearly 19% lower than the total in the same quarter last year, the report said. The number of available new homes also fell from 522 units in 1997 to 271 units last quarter, a 48% decline.
Home sales have fallen from previous-year levels nearly every month in 1998, according to research firm Acxiom/DataQuick. Only 1,222 new homes had been sold by August of this year, down from 1,354 homes in the first eight months of 1997.
Bill Stevenson, head of new-home sales at Beazer Homes’ Rancho Del Mar project in Ventura,said strict city planning rules are partly responsible for the shortage.
“It’s very tough to go through the permit process and get the allocations that are necessary to build new homes,” he said.
John Karevoll, a real estate analyst with Acxiom/DataQuick, agreed that planning regulations can be a problem. But Karevoll said that shell-shock from the last recession also kept builders from anticipating today’s high demand for housing.
“I think they just got caught by surprise with the strength of the market,” Karevoll said.
Supporters of the Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources--or SOAR--initiative say that new-home sales figures have little to do with the growth-control initiatives the group has sponsored on ballots around the county this fall.
“There are a lot of complex factors that go into it,” said Steve Bennett, a member of the SOAR board of directors. There is plenty of land within current city boundaries where housing can be built, he said.
Housing is not the only area where supply is dwindling.
Industrial and office space also remained in short supply through the second quarter of 1998, while available retail space inched up slightly, according to a report by CB Commercial real estate.
According to the report, the vacancy rate for industrial space stands at 7%, down from 7.8% during the first quarter.
Filling up the available industrial space were companies such as Fields Aircraft Spares, which recently moved to a 122,000-square-foot facility in Simi Valley, and Amgen, which recently purchased a 79,000-square-foot space in Newbury Park.
Availability of office space also has declined, dipping to 10.1% during the second quarter, the report concluded.
Leasing was especially strong in the west county communities of Ventura, Oxnard and Camarillo.
Availability of retail space rose to 7.7%, up from 7.4% during the first quarter.
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Times staff writer Coll Metcalfe contributed to this story.
