2000 Brought a Boom in Apartment Construction

With home prices climbing past the reach of many families and apartment vacancies almost nonexistent, developers in Ventura County are building rental properties at a pace unmatched in a decade.

Builders obtained permits last year for 988 new units of multifamily housing--the most since 1991, according to figures released this week by the Construction Industry Research Board.

Industry specialists say construction is desperately needed, with vacancy rates hovering at 2% countywide and waiting lists at many complexes ranging from 20 to 100.

But they cautioned that last year’s growth is more of a statistical blip than a trend.

“This just happens to be a small window of time where there was land zoned to accommodate them,” said Dawn Dyer, president of Dyer-Sheehan Group, a Ventura real estate consulting firm that tracks apartment trends.

“It’s by no means the start of a stampede of apartment buildings sprouting up all over the place. There is very little land left that’s potentially developable, and virtually none of it is multifamily sites.”

Furthermore, experts agree the new units are too few and too upscale to quench demand for rentals or make the county’s overall rental stock more affordable. The median rent on a two-bedroom apartment is $1,200 countywide.

“We have had such a dearth of apartments in the last 10 years in this county and others that any amount of new construction that you could reasonably put into one year would probably not perceptibly impact prices or supply,” said Mark Schniepp, director of the California Economic Forecast Project.

Most multifamily units permitted last year are concentrated in three upscale projects in Oxnard, Moorpark and Camarillo.

Development firm Trammell Crow is building a 373-unit townhome-style rental complex, the Alexan Parc Rose, near St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard. Monthly rents for one-, two- and three-bedroom units with garages range from $1,300 to $2,100.

Archstone Communities is building a 312-unit Mediterranean-style apartment complex in Moorpark. Monthly rents there are expected to range from $1,000 to $1,600, a figure that could rise by summer when the first units become available.

Pardee is building the 160-unit Corte Madera apartments in Camarillo. Rents have not yet been set, but each two-bedroom apartment will include crown molding and a fireplace.

While not as high as last year, the number of multifamily building permits issued in 1999 also offered a bit of relief. In that year, 780 multifamily permits were issued countywide, about half of those as part of another upscale complex, the 404-unit Tierra Vista by Essex in Oxnard. That compares with an average of 263 such permits between 1995 and 1998.

Michael Genthe, a partner with Dallas-based Trammell Crow, said plans for the company’s new townhome complex had been brewing since 1995, when job growth was starting to build in the county.

“We saw an emerging demand,” he said. “[Ventura is] the tightest county with the least amount of supply throughout Southern California.”

Many of the new jobs were in high-tech, meaning workers would be earning salaries that, if not high enough to buy $300,000 homes, were at least high enough to rent upscale apartments.

While the plans moved forward, low vacancy rates were driving up the median rental price. It’s now high enough, Genthe said, to accommodate the sort of rents these new units command. The Alexan Parc Rose complex is geared toward households with incomes of $60,000 or more.

Permits for overall housing construction were down moderately, from 4,442 single- and multifamily units in 1999 to 3,971 last year. Still, 2000 saw the second-highest number of residential permits issued countywide since 1989, just before recession settled in and stalled home construction through the first half of the 1990s.

Despite the current healthy building pace, Schniepp said it’s not enough to keep up with job growth.

“We’ve created 18,000 new jobs and permitted 8,400 new homes,” he said. “We need another 3,000 units, like right now, to accommodate what we’ve created in terms of jobs.”

Between now and 2020, slow-growth laws adopted by seven of the county’s 10 cities and for its unincorporated areas are expected to impede new construction while limiting sprawl. Affordable-housing advocates say this will further increase the demand for multifamily housing.