’14 metro home-building permits at 5-year high

Detached singlefamily houses comprise majority

Home construction continued to improve in the Albuquerque metro area in 2014, with building permits issued for single-family homes reaching the highest level in five years, according to the latest report from DataTraq.

Permits were issued for 1,576 houses throughout the metro area, an 8 percent increase from 2013, and the most since 1,669 permits in 2009. A high point came in May when 193 permits were issued, the most for any month since 196 in August 2008.

“We’re happy with that,” said John Garcia of the HBA, the metro area’s homebuilders group. “There was nothing to make it better. We need an economic driver for sustained momentum.”

Nationwide, permits for detached single-fami ly homes increased 1.4 percent from 2013 to 2014, the Commerce Department reported last week.

The majority of singlefamily permits issued in the metro area are for detached houses, thus Albuquerque appeared to do better than the nation as a whole in 2014.

Building permits for singlefamily houses are running at about half the pace of what Garcia said he considers a “realistic market” of about 3,000-4,000 new homes built a year.

“You throw out the crazy highs and the depressing lows and go with the averages from other years,” he said.

Home construction has gone through crazy highs and depressing lows in the last 10 years.

A record 9,445 permits were issued in 2005, and a roughly 30-year low of 1,192 were issued in 2011.

For frame of reference, an average of about 4,000 permits were issued each year in the 1990s, according to DataTraq and HBA data.

Last year, about 60 percent of the new homes in the metro area were built within the city limits of Albuquerque, the same market share as in 2013. On an annual basis over the last 10 years, Albuquerque’s market share has been as low as 36 percent in 2008 to a high of 64 percent in 2011.

Rio Rancho’s market share for new home construction was 30 percent in 2014, in between its recent low of 25 percent in 2011 and high of 41 percent in 2009.