Homebuilding is back

Recent permit activity indicates the tight home market may be helping to put building back into Broomfield and Boulder counties.

Helping to lead the way is the city of Louisville, long missing in any significant development role, which is churning out homes and fast approaching its total comprehensive-plan build-out.

Louisville has not seen building activity such as this since the early 1990s, with 100 single family home permits issued in 2012. Not since 1995 had the city approached the century mark in single-family permits, and many of the intervening years saw two or three total permits issued.

Here, at least, those homes are selling fast. Town officials expect the growth spurt to last through 2014, when the town probably will have built out most of the available land in the comprehensive plan.

“Almost every single home was sold before it broke ground,´ said Bill Besher, community sales manager for Boulder Creek Builders in Louisville. The company will be done building 68 patio homes in Steel Ranch in October, but already had sold all the units by late May.

“There’s a huge demand to live here and this is a type of home that’s very, very limited in Louisville,´ said Besher, noting the patio homes were especially appealing to empty nesters, who wanted out of the demands of yard work and snow shoveling.

“These are lock-and-leave homes – they want to get out of taking care of a yard, shoveling snow and that kind of stuff,” Besher said. “We’re a niche building company – we cater to a certain lifestyle with a higher level of included features.”

Base prices for the energy-efficient patio homes were from $425,000 to $455,000, with higher-priced larger homes available in Steel Ranch through Ryland. Louisville also features another largely green community at North End, with beginning floor plans ranging from $329,000 to the low $400,000s.

In Broomfield, home building was also heating up. By the end of May, Broomfield had issued 104 single family building permits, easily surpassing the 38 issued by that date in 2012. The city also was on pace to easily surpass last year’s total of 138 single-family building permits.

Broomfield chief building official Tim Pate said that in comparison to last year, in which Pulte was pulling the majority of permits for Anthem, the building activity is spread throughout the city.

“We had a good year (in 2012) and we anticipate a lot more single-family going up,” Pate said. While most of the homes being built in Broomfield were moderately priced, the city also has one of the few large-scale luxury-home developments under way.

Spruce Meadows features 72 home lots for buildings starting at $900,000 on lots from one to three acres. Several independent builders have spec homes already built at that location.

In nearby Erie, building was back in vogue, as well, though town public information officer Fred Diehl said it never really left.

“We’re a little different than most cities in that we never really dropped off that far” after the housing bubble, Diehl said. “We still had steady building activity.”

Still, town officials are a little bit surprised to see that the total number of permits this year had reached 139, including townhomes and multi-family residential, which should readily exceed the 150 permits that were included in this year’s budget. Last year, the total also was 150 permits.

Diehl said the town budgetary process includes discussions with builders and developers, but Erie also has a number of developments ready to go with thousands of available building lots that are under construction or getting ready for 2014, such as Erie Farm (500 development units), Dearmin West (922 units), Daybreak (2,880 units), and Morgan Hill (572 units).

In Longmont, the building pace has picked up noticeably from 2011, when only 28 single-family permits were issued. The 39 permits issued by the end of May seemed about on pace to match the 105 single-family permits issued last year.

Permits usually are issued either late in the year before, or in the year that building is set to commence, but that’s not always the case.

In Boulder County, residences that had been damaged by the 2010 Fourmile Fire were given relaxation of site-plan reviews, if there was not significant expansion, so a number of property owners submitted their permits and are waiting to finalize that application. The county had 25 building permits issued this year, perhaps five of which were in that fire zone, which was slightly ahead of 2012, when 56 total permits were awarded, with 18 in mountain properties.

Those numbers pretty much matched the city of Boulder, which had awarded 34 single-family permits by the end of May, and awarded approximately 60 permits in all of 2012.

Lafayette reported issuing 38 single family permits by the end of May.

Superior is largely built out, reporting one new home last year, although new housing starts could come soon from the 53-home Coal Creek Crossing and the Town Center project, currently under consideration by the town board.

Despite the good news on the building front, real-estate agents are still searching for available properties, said D.B. Wilson, managing broker for Re/Max of Boulder.

“It has not helped us with overall inventory — we are still off 32 percent from a year ago,´ said Wilson, noting that new housing is not listed on the Multiple Listing Service data. “Right now there are 1,053 single-family homes on the market. Back in 2007, there were 2.300, so we’re off more than 50 percent.

“I do know there are builders ready to begin breaking ground, but it takes a lot of time for that to have an effect.”

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