Myrtle Beach Eyes Austin’s Boomtown Crown
Falling mortgage rates will inject new life into homebuilding, but don’t expect the pandemic hot spots to be where all the action is.
A new edge in housing.
Photographer: Allison Joyce/Bloomberg
Cities such as Boise, Austin and Phoenix defined the pandemic housing boom. Now, as falling mortgage rates raise the prospect of 2024 being a strong year for homebuilding, new “edge” markets are seeing a surge in activity.
This is because three factors that dictate where builders put up houses have changed: the land they control, the economics used to underwrite new deals, and signaling from the stock market about how aggressive they should be. It’s all pushing builders away from the big growth markets of the 2010s and into areas that haven’t been built up — or bid up — to the same extent.
Winston-Salem and Asheville in North Carolina along with Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, figure high on a list of metro areas that saw big increases in single-family housing permits in the first 11 months of 2023, compared with the same period in 2021. On the other hand, permits dropped 30% for Austin and Phoenix, and 21% for Boise — with those three pandemic-boom cities faring worse that the 19% national decline.