Local housing

prices on the rise
By Scott Nicholson
nicholson@wataugademocrat.com

Despite a nationwide downturn in new housing construction, the value of new residential construction in Watauga County rose by $2 million last year, though the number of new single-family houses declined.

In 2007, 305 new homes were constructed in Watauga County, an 18 percent decline from 2006. The estimated building cost of those homes was $104 million, yielding an average price of $305,000 for new homes in the unincorporated areas of the county.

In 2006, new-home values rose $18 million over the previous year. Average estimated new-home values were $233,000 in 2005, $191,000 in 2004, and $186,000 in 2003. In 1991, the average new home in Watauga cost $70,000.

Scott Eggers, chairman of the county’s Affordable Housing Task Force, said the group had shifted its nomenclature to target “workforce housing” and said the expanding gap between the high-end, second-home costs and those of affordable housing created some difficulties but were in other ways unconnected.

“If you pulled the individual permits, you'd see modular housing is gaining market share,” Eggers said.

“When somebody builds a $1.2 million house, that skews the average.”

The task force is working with the county to develop a series of townhouses on property the county purchased two years ago on Brookshire Road in Boone.

The 10 to 14 town homes would be sold as workforce housing with restrictions that would ensure they would remain affordable if the buyers sold them.

However, Eggers said it wouldn’t be federally subsidized housing and the county still needed to work out $400,000 in water and sewer connections with the town of Boone.

Eggers also noted that while the rising cost of new homes keep going up, those working in the building-supply business or construction trades were benefiting and therefore better able to buy their own homes.

Watauga County planning director Joe Furman said, “We’re still in the same range we've been in for the past decade. There’s not really any trend. It reflects bigger houses and not necessarily higher building costs. We tend to be insulated from national (housing) trends because of the second-home market.”

Overall value of construction, including remodeling, electrical work, single-family home construction, business construction and multi-family residential building was $141 million, up from $135 million in 2006 and $119 million in 2005. Those figures don’t include municipalities, which have their own permitting procedures.

Multi-unit residential construction also dropped significantly, from 46 new multi-family residential buildings in 2006 to 20 last year. Their value dropped from $16 million to $5.8 million.