Housing Data Brightens, Just Around the Corner
Attention! Attention! There’s good news. Real good news–but it’s around the corner. That means you not only have to be able to see around the corner, you have to be able to survive to get there.
Only issue is, those who wait to see around the corner or wait to get there, probably won’t do either. It’s a matter of meeting it at least half way.
The good news is that demand for new housing units–new single-family homes, and multifamily homes, homes for young adults, and homes for families, and homes for soon-to-be-retirees, and homes for senior, homes for longtimers, and homes for new-comers–should average north of 1.7 million per year, starting in January through 2020.
That means that if you remove the “noise”–the volatile ups and downs–that will occur during the next decade, the need for a new housing unit will occur about every 20 seconds, seven days a week for as long as it will take a bunch of us to make it through to retirement and beyond. That’s a trend an economy on the brink can take encouragement from, providing that economy on the brink can maintain fortitude and pay back some big funny money bills in the next year and a bit.
Here’s the money slide from Eric Belsky, executive director at Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. Eric’s entire forecast–”What Next? Home Building after the Storm Fully Parts–willbe exclusively available for those who register here for the Big Builder ‘09 Virtual “Accelerate the Positive” event, which goes live Nov. 16-20, at a laptop or desk top near you.
Click Image for enlarged version of slide.
See? In no uncertain terms, even if international immigration slows–which anecdotally, anyway, people are already noticing–the need you’re destined to meet in the market for new housing should provide good livelihoods for those who are able to get there from here.
There are things we can count on happening that will help us possibly tolerate the severity of the path to normalcy. Uncertainty is a given. Foreclosures are a given. Questions about whether home mortgage interest rates can hold at a low level are a given.
So too are at least two profound changes to any company that wants to make a business in new housing: 1) what you were making before you have to make less expensively now and for the foreseeable future; and 2) what was selling itself before now most certainly will not sell if you don’t sell it.
For instance, few doubt that Lake Pleasant, in Peoria, Az., in the Northwest Valley area outside Phoenix, and soon within easy-access of the 303 loop set for completion by 2012, will be a thriving recreation-oriented community some time during the next decade that Dr. Belsky has mapped for such tremendous demand.
But can developer/home builders coax the process along a bit, and bring the market to them?
Our
Big Builder ‘09 Virtual event will shed some light on the possibilities of what we’ll see happen with parcels that are clearly in a path of growth, but the time it will take to get on and move along that path of growth is unclear.
We’ve designed a program that hinges on challenging talent, expertise, and experience with a problem just like the ones your team have to overcome every day. Look at a piece of land and decide whether you can add value to it, operate profitability on it, and market and sell homes on it.
Taking on the Lake Pleasant Heights challenge is a team whose local knowledge, operational skill sets, and ability to scope the marketplace for opportunity would be the envy of any single organization. Big Builder has the honor of having them work together on what boils down to this question: How will any builder manage to bring operational, marketing, and land use best practices to bear on land that is valuable–some day–but is currently stuck in a vacuum of evaluative inertia?
We’ve asked Newland Communities’ Kimberley Clifford, T.W. Lewis president/coo Kevin Egan, Silver Fern Management principal John Fortini, Shea Homes’ Jim Jenkins, MB3 Inc. segmentation and community marketing wizard Michelle Mace-Basha, and award-winning BSB Design architect Brad Sonnenberg to lay out the challenges … and then overcome them with ideas.
The Team did a SWOT–strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats–analysis that highlighted two all-too-evident challenges. One is that the community lies next to the mammoth Vistancia master planned community, which offers similar “location” and a host of home product types positioned to meet the desires of nearly every imaginable home buyer group. Another is that the topography is tough, and can represent a high magnitude of difficulty both from a land use strategy perspective, and an operational/access standpoint.
The group has opted to turn the “weakness” and “threat” points into opportunities. Led by Mace-Basha’s granular analysis of potential buyers she scoped through her disciplined demand analysis, the Phoenix Dream Team has fixed on two potential “ahas!” in their approach.
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Make the tough topography part of the value in views, natural beauty, and distinctiveness.
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Counter-balance the magnitude and variety available in Vistancia and other surrounding master plans with a more intimate, personal ethic.
The team, which has been preparing a land plan, streetscapes, product types, a marketing and sales plan, and a business pro forma for all of about five weeks, will go live with their vision for Lake Pleasant on November 17th, as part of an exclusive Big Builder week of Virtual Web casts.
If you register to take part in the Big Builder Virtual program, here’s just some of what you’ll get.
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More than a dozen exclusive “best practices” webcasts, aimed at everything from reinventing your business model to driving your sales team to plotting out a process improvement plan for operational excellence.
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Highly exclusive market intelligence analyses on five of home building’s most important markets of the moment — Atlanta, Dallas, D.C., Phoenix, and Southern California.
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Insight into where your operational opportunities, your land strategies, where your risks and where your rewards are for the near and longer term.
And we’ve got Eric Belsky like nobody else does. He’ll lay out what the landscape in 2010 and beyond looks like so that you can prepare for what’s really there, and not just wait around for the good news that’s coming around the corner.
November 2, 2009 | Filed Under
Financial Crisis,
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