Builder News is reporting that home builders worry about the lot supply in many markets lagging behind demand. Municipalities’ failure to keep pace with their processes makes penciling in the next 24 to 36 months’ land strategy a big challenge.
Lot supply is a bigger worry than labor or lending availability right now. It makes sense that if you can’t get home sites, the other two issues shrink measurably as headaches to builders.
A big reason builders and developers give for land coming online so slowly is human bandwidth, and not just their own. The post-Great Recession cutback in local and regional government officials, engineers, planners, inspectors, even clerks, has ground the process in many of those localities to a trickle. Projects logjam while there's too few municipal personnel qualified to green-light them for a next stage of development, evaluation, and approval.
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