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5:53 a.m. • 2-11-12

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Triangle House Construction Slowing


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Triangle House Sales Slowing
Triangle House Sales Slowing

For all the growth in the Triangle, the national housing crunch is starting to creep in and home sales are slowing.

New home building permits are down by 9 percent in Wake County compared with last year, but the economic impact goes well beyond buyers and sellers. Jobs are on the line.

From the siding crews to the mortgage lenders, an estimated 50,000 people in Wake County make their living off building homes. Housing-related jobs account for about 10 percent of the economy.

“Furniture companies, people who sell window coverings, landscaping companies – its not just trickle down. It’s kind of a spider web,” said Trish Hanchette, KB Homes’ division president.

Hanchette said the Triangle has been blessed with a steady housing market, but slowdowns have implications.

“You have to be concerned. There are people we employ. We care about those people,” she said.

“It does appear as if the overall national slowdown is beginning to be felt here,” said N.C. State University economist Mike Walden.

That bodes well for home buyers as builders compete for a shrinking market share, according to Walden. The problem is that plenty of jobs depend on that market.

“This is a big, big industry, and anything that's going to slow down that industry could have noticeable effects on things like our overall employment rate as well as our unemployment rate,” Walden said.

The home sales slump is clearly hitting the local real estate industry. Applications for real estate licenses are down about 60 percent.

RELATED TOPICS: Wake County, Job Losses

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And real estate agents SHOULD get paid significantly more than the guy who put in the door. An agent has invested time, money, and effort into selling the house. The guy who puts in the door has not even invested in the door itself.

Good...Just what we need: controlled growth and less real estate agents. Its about time they got a real job and earn their money. They get paid more for opening a door than the guy who put the door in.

Oh No! what will our ilegals do? A lot of them are working in house building jobs.

To wcnc:

Waht is the difference between buying a house for $500,000 but having it worth only $400,000 when you try and sell it and investing the same half million in the stock market and losing $100K?

People take losses on investments all the time. Yet it seems that only when it is in the housing market is when it becomes sacred.

And remember, one person's loss in California is another person's gain in North Carolina. Even if they take a bath out west. when they do sell that house, they will be able to take the sale value and buy something bigger here. And with all that cash floating around to purchase less expensive houses in NC, our prices go up, benefiting those locally who are selling.

And this is not a zero sum gain. One loss in the west is not directly offset by one gain in the southeast. Though there will be losers there will be more winners in the long run.

So what are those 14 million supposed to do? I would strongly suggest that they see the handwriting on the wall and go back to school. Get a degree in any one of hundreds of lucrative fields. Learn a trade. Start a second career on the ground floor part time and work your way into management.

And for those who simply are not capable of learning anything except semi-skilled manual labor, well, there will always be people who have made it financially and need laborors to move things around, cut lawns, and do other semi-skilled labor things. Given the gross shortage of teachers and nurses alone, the education and health care industry could probably absorb a significant number of those folks -- if they had the training and education -- over the next 10 to 20 years.

We were once an agricultural society. Then came manufacturing. Now is service. Next will be information. After that, who knows? Leisure? But folks had better be prepared when dynamic shifts in the workforce start happening.

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