Bright Spots in the Kansas City Housing Market
The nation’s sluggish housing market isn’t evident in Grain Valley, Missouri.
“There’s a housing slump?” Gary Bradley, the town’s city administrator, joked recently.
In most places, yes.
The number of housing starts across the country was down 6 percent for the first six months of 2007, according to the Kansas City Home Builders Association.
Grain Valley, where Missouri mortgage costs are affordable to the average buyer and have been so for decades, saw a 22 percent increase.
From January to May, the city issued 134 new single-family building permits, compared with 110 for the same period a year earlier.
Blue Springs also showed an increase, adding 93 permits, up from 61 in 2006, as mortgage rates remain low throughout the region.
Most other cities in eastern Jackson County and the Southland, including those in Cass County, landed on the negative side of the chart.
Lee’s Summit led the cities in the number of new-home starts, but the 233 total was down from 288 a year earlier.
Tim Underwood, executive vice president and chief executive officer of the Home Builders Association of Greater Kansas City, said local builders are still selling off a large inventory of “spec” homes constructed during a period of overbuilding of certain styles and home prices.
He thinks new-home starts will pick up when the spec homes are gone, and that this trend will be pervasive in the Kansas City housing market.
Bob McKay, Lee’s Summit director of planning and development, said many of those spec homes are in the $250,000 to 300,000 range.
He thinks a way out of the slump might be for builders to concentrate on houses in the $150,000 to $200,000 range, which happens to be the niche fueling Grain Valley’s population surge.
In Raymore, Economic Development Director Gene Thompson thinks that the city’s slowdown is temporary and that growth soon will get back on track.
“We’re not hurting nearly as bad in Cass County as other parts of the country,” Thompson said. “Our land prices out here still make us a bargain.”
SOURCE: Kansas City Star