Homearama 2013, organized by The Home Builders Association of Greater Cincinnati, starts Saturday and runs until July 28.
Six new houses were built for the show at Carriage Hill, a 400-acre residential development in Liberty Twp. off Princeton Glendale Road/Ohio 747. All houses were pre-sold for prices ranging from $850,000 to $1.2 million, according to the builders association.
Show visitors will see home theaters, an indoor sports court, 18-foot high ceilings, outdoor verandas and a Cincinnati Reds-themed room, among other features.
The housing market is better, but sales of high-priced homes in the Cincinnati market have not returned to the same levels seen before the economic downturn. Construction of custom homes was virtually non-existent from 2008 and even into 2011, builders say.
But six- and seven-figure sales prices are rising back.
“Carriage Hill started out with high-end lots, and we were wondering if builders were going to pay a market value to premium for lots in Butler County,” said Mark Meinhardt, president of real estate agency Star One Realtors, which has main offices in Fairfield.
During the home building slowdown, builders often paid discount prices for lots of land to build on.
“But that concern has proven not to be a concern,” said Meinhardt, who is on the board of directors for the Cincinnati builders group. “Right now in this market, there is a demand, probably a pent up demand, for more custom homes.”
Prior to the housing crash in 2006, 38 mostly existing homes sold in Butler County for more than $600,000, according to the Multiple Listing Service of Greater Cincinnati Inc. The same year, 532 homes sold for $600,000 or more in all of Cincinnati.
The Multiple Listing Service tracks mostly sales of existing homes, recorded in the system by real estate agents. Builders can record sales with the listing service, but most sales tracked are for existing homes and not new construction.
But the figures show the trend described by builders in the field. Upper-end home sales in the county and region sank to seven houses sold for more than $600,000 in 2011 in Butler County, and 270 total that year in the Cincinnati market of Butler, Clermont, Hamilton and Warren counties.
From January through the end of May this year, two houses sold for that much in Butler County, and 133 in the four-county region.
The vast majority of Butler County homes sold in this price range are in West Chester and Liberty townships, also according to data provided by the Multiple Listing Service to this newspaper.
On average, the price of all homes sold in Butler County in May, the most recent data available, was $151,338.
“We deal with luxury homes and custom design, and there’s definitely a resurgence in that area,” said John Ballantyne, 2013 president of the Cincinnati builders trade association, and owner of the home construction company, The Leland Group Inc.
After the market crashed in 2008, “permits for custom building virtually stopped, so many of us started doing a lot of other things,” such as remodeling existing homes and outdoor living, he said.
Things in the luxury housing market are now improving for several reasons. There’s been some upsurge in the stock market, and the economy is a little better. The uncertainty created by last year’s presidential election has passed, Ballantyne said.
“It’s the same buyer that we had back in 2008 and before, but they all kind of waited for a while. They put all their plans on hold and now they’re coming back,” he said.
For show builder Jack H. Wieland Builders Inc., based in Fairfield, June of 2012 to June 2013 was its first consistent year in eight years for business, said vice president Jeff Wieland.
Wieland built “The Carolina” at Carriage Hill for Homearama.
“From June of last year to this year was the first year where I wasn’t worried about where our next job was going to be,” Wieland said. “We’ve been across the board because we build houses from below $200,000 and up to $4 million and $5 million, and across the board we’ve been steady.”
This year, Wieland Builders is on track to construct about 20 houses throughout the area. That’s better than in recent times, when there were several years the company built four houses. But back in 2004-2005, they were building 50 to 60 houses a year, Wieland said.
“I think there a lot of people that are like me where you want to see more than a couple years of consistency before you go and start taking that plunge and taking some risk again,” he said.
“I think some people are jumping up and down right now thinking it’s back, and I don’t feel comfortable saying that it’s back. I feel like where things are going really good, but you don’t know if it’s here or not,” he said.
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