New homes are popping up all across Naperville.
The city’s director of TED said this year will see the most homes built since the city’s record of 8,400 homes in 1998.
“We’ll be somewhere around 8,000 this year. We might get close to it, but I don’t know if we’re going to pass it or not,” Director of TED Bill Novack said. “We need a few strong months to surpass it.”
City officials said the numbers have been steadily increasing since 2010.
New home construction is up across the country, with 1.13 million private housing starts in September according to the latest numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
That’s six percent higher than September of 2016.
Lakewest Custom Homes President Dan Jurjovec attributes the increase in part to an improving economy.
“Interest rates remain extremely attractive,” he said. “The advent of a lot of online resources like houses.com and Pinterest give people a confidence to go ahead and navigate a custom home building experience.”
Jurjovec said his sales went down during the subprime mortgage crisis but began increasing steadily in 2012.
“I think consumer confidence was zero at that point,” he said. “People were very reluctant to make an investment in anything and certainly a house being the largest investment any person is probably going to make in their lifetime becomes a pretty easy one to table for a couple of months or a couple of years.”
With more people investing today, Jurjovec said one interesting change is buyers choosing a smaller footprint compared with pre-2008 homes.
“I think that thinking is completely different now. People design and build homes that are specific for what their needs are,” he said. “They prefer quality square footage over just the biggest building we can possibly place on a given site.”
These numbers differ greatly from pending sales of existing homes, which are at the their lowest in nearly three years.
That decrease is due mostly to a lack of supply, according to the National Association of Realtors.
Naperville News 17’s Beth Bria reports.
