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Summit Highlights Current Real Estate Pressures

This article was published in The Pilot on May 24, 2022.

The number of people packed into the meeting room at the Senior Enrichment Center nearly reached triple digits Tuesday for a public discussion on development in Moore County.

The discussion came as several overlapping factors create questions about the sustainability and direction of the county’s growth. Planners are in the process of updating the county’s land-use plan, which is nearly a decade old. Meanwhile, a backlog of septic permit approvals has for months created headaches for homeowners, builders and developers across the board.

At the same time, a dearth of homes for sale and supply-chain troubles for construction materials have crimped the real estate industry.

Tuesday’s forum “was really just to get these issues to light, to start the discussions, to get people thinking, to get the right people in the room at the right time to have these discussions and to try to solve some of these problems,” said Commissioner Nick Picerno, who initiated the discussion.

Representatives from the county's various departments spoke on a plethora of issues facing the county, but the meeting’s highlight came when the Realtors and builders got up to the podium. The prognosis they delivered for the housing market was nothing short of bleak.

Jake Sutherland, president of the board of directors for the Mid Carolina Regional Association of Realtors Association, said that the county currently has more houses up for sale now than it has for months. That's good news, in a way — available inventory has been at historic lows for more than a year, but it's still no reason to celebrate. “Normal” inventory of homes for sale usually numbers in the hundreds.

Moore County remains an "extreme sellers' market," he said, and the 154 houses up for sale right now only account for 12.8 percent of what "we need to have a balanced market," Sutherland said.

Sutherland noted that this issue also contributes to the lack of affordable housing options in the county. Home prices locally and nationally are up as much as 30 percent year over year.

"There are bidding wars happening on most houses still to this day and that's because there's more buyers than there are homes," he said. "And until that ratio changes, we're going to continue seeing the houses being bid up and losing our grasp on affordable housing."

Travis Greene, incoming president for the Moore County Home Builders Association, said that things don't look any better on the builders' side. He said the building industry is dealing with "unprecedented times."

“We're at a point where demand is extremely high, but our supply chain is being strangled, and we're not able to build what we need to to match the needs of our town,” Greene said.

The numbers reflect this. Greene said that, in 2020, the county averaged 224 home sales per month, with 48 of those being new construction sales. In contrast, so far this year the county has averaged 169 sales per month, with an average of 36 new homes sold. Contractors have complained for more than a year of difficulties finding components for new homes, ranging from garage doors to kitchen cabinet hardware.

"We are drastically behind where we need to be in Moore County, and we don’t see a way to make that up," Greene said.

The supply chain issues happening across the board are front and center in the construction business as well, Greene said. He said that as far as timelines for construction go, the best-case scenario for a new house being built is about six months. In the worst case, it can take up to a once-unfathomable 18 months. What's more, Greene said the majority of builders won’t list a house until it’s 75 percent complete because they can’t foresee the availability of goods and services necessary to complete a project.

Greene believes the only way to solve this seemingly insurmountable problem is to work together toward solutions.

“It's not a problem that us as builders can solve or Realtors can solve on our own," Greene said. "It's a problem that we as a group have to solve together. We have to work with the county. We have to work with our municipalities. We have to work with our officials. We have to come together to try to fix this for our citizens."

County staff and elected officials agreed that unity was key to solving the issues at hand.

During two brief question-and-answer periods, audience members voiced frustration’s about the county’s growth problems. Of that handful of people who spoke, most wanted to know how the county planned to handle the burden of growth and infrastructure costs and deal with protecting agricultural areas from development.

“You have to have a balance between all the growth: residential growth, commercial growth, industrial growth, farmland,” said County Manager Wayne Vest. “It comes down to having the correct balance.”

The main way, of course, to direct growth is through zoning. Specialized court-like hearings are required for developers of major subdivisions to get special use permits, Planning Director Debra Ensminger said.

Those types of hearings, though can be limiting for opponents sometimes. Unlike most public forums where people can express their opinions, these so-called “quasi judicial hearings” restrict testimony to “expert witnesses” and evidence. County commissioners are limited to what they can know in advance and how they can conduct themselves with the parties involved.

Vest said this makes it harder for lay people to have a say in the matter.

“It puts a lot more burden on the surrounding community coming in to speak against it,” Vest said. If the county were to do away with this requirement, it would be a matter of rezoning via a standard public hearing, Vest said.

“In a general rezoning process, (people) can make comments, commissioners have more discretion,” he explained.

The town of Southern Pines is in the process of basically doing this right now after opponents of a couple recent projects complained about the restriction on input.

Presenters during Tuesday’s discussion also shared information regarding other aspects of development, such as permitting. Construction always needs to go through a series of permitting steps, and new homes that connect to public water and have individual septic systems require extensive environmental review.

Matt Garner, the county’s interim health director, spoke about the county’s septic permitting process and the long-running delays the office has been experiencing due to a shortage of qualified inspectors. He said the department was making progress on processing the list of permit applications, many of which have been on hold for at least six months.

“We are starting to whittle down our backlog,” he said, noting that two recent hires would be finished with their training in the next month or so. He also said that the recently reclassified environmental health technician position had been hired, allowing the department to be more efficient on processing applications.

Garner also demonstrated how to use new permit tracking tools on the county website. The GIS mapping tool has a permit tracking feature, which allows users to search for the status of their environmental health permit applications. There is also a dashboard that includes recent statistics on environmental health and building permits.

Later, during the question-and-answer period, Garner was asked about why subdivisions seemed to get their environmental health permits approved faster than other developments. He replied that developers tend to opt-out of the county’s permitting process and go for alternate permitting pathways that come at a greater cost but with faster processing times.

It’s yet to be determined when a follow up to Tuesday’s discussion will take place, but county officials seemed confident that this would not be a one-off. Commissioners Chairman Frank Quis did not rule out the possibility of having future meetings with more opportunities for public comment.