Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
South Florida housing
Starters fall and rise by county
Industry sees steady demand for homes coupled with dwindling land on which to build.
Builders started fewer homes last year in Palm Beach County, but the decline wasn’t for lack of demand, a new analysis shows.
The county had 1,964 housing starts in 2016, a 12 percent decline from 2015 and an 8 percent slide from 2014, according to figures compiled by the Metrostudy research firm.
David Cobb, regional president for Metrostudy, attributed the dropoff to short-term delays in builders being able to acquire and prepare lots.
More than 6,000 vacant, undeveloped lots are in the pipeline countywide, and those should translate to increased construction in 2017, Cobb said.
“We’ll see the starts rebound a little bit,” he said. “There’s not been a falloff in the interest for new houses.”
Broward builders started 1,386 homes last year, up 5 percent from 2015 and 17 percent from 2014, Metrostudy said.
Despite the increase, home-building in Broward remains limited due to land constraints that are exacerbated by the environmentally protected Everglades. The annual starts in lesspopulated Martin and St. Lucie counties combined surpassed Broward’s yearly total, Metrostudy said.
Miami-Dade had 2,810 housing starts last year, an increase of 18 percent from 2015 and nearly 1 percent from 2014.
The Metrostudy figures include single-family homes and townhomes, but not condominiums.
South Florida builders have been busy during the past few years filling demand following the housing meltdown of 2006-11. Still, severe land shortages across the region are tempering enthusiasm for the industry in the long term.
“In other places, like Orlando, the Treasure Coast and Atlanta, you have more room to spread out,” said Truly Burton, executive vice president of the Builders Association of South Florida. “We don’t have that opportunity now.”
Though Palm Beach County has more available land than Broward, the lots already are controlled by a few large builders or development companies, limiting opportunities for smaller builders, said Scott Worley, a past president of the Gold Coast Builders Association.
“There just are not the large, 300- or 400-acre parcels that were [common] back in the 1990s,” Worley said.
PulteGroup Inc. is beginning sales on the first of 916 homes and townhomes planned for the former Gulfstream Polo Club west of Lake Worth.
Minto Communities is planning a 4,500-home development in the newly created town of Westlake, north of Wellington in western Palm Beach County.
Meanwhile, a Bostonbased development company is planning a 2,000-home community on Southern Boulevard west of Wellington.
Jim Carr, principal of CC Devco, is skeptical of the market for new homes in far western Palm Beach County.
Buyers interested in moving so far west will do so if they get good deals on the homes, but those are hard to come by, Carr said.
“The land is very pricey, so [builders] can’t give the consumer an advantage on price to get in there,” Carr said. “Affordability is an issue.”
CC Devco’s Bonterra in northwestern Miami-Dade County had 649 housing starts last year, the most of any community in a sixcounty region of South Florida, according to Metrostudy.
Sunrise-based GL Homes had three communities among the top 10 for starts in 2016: Tuscany near Delray Beach with 243; Seven Bridges near Boca Raton with 171; and Valencia Cove near Boynton Beach with 147. The only other community in Broward or Palm Beach in the top 10 was CalAtlantic Homes’ Watercrest at Parkland with 137 starts.