The Home Builders Association of Fargo-Moorhead announced today that their housing permit growth has remained strong through this years second quarter. The growth is down slightly compared to last year, which had been the best year since 2005, but their overall growth remains high. Tom Spaeth is the president of the Home Builders Association of Fargo-Moorhead, and he says steady growth is aided by weather.
“Until recently the dry weather was very favorable to construction, we’ve had a few weeks of rain here that slowed a few things down.”
Spaith also says that their housing permit growth is from the oil boom slowdown and a return of labor to the Fargo-Moorhead region.
“Yeah we think it helped with the labor cause it was very very difficult to get labor for the years it was very busy out there. A lot of our labor actually left this market so we think a fair amount of it has come back to this area and it’s been a little easier to hire quality people.”
According to Spaith the growth of home builder permits in the Fargo-Moorhead region remains higher than the rest of the country.
”I think we’re sustaining really steady growth around here and I think the rest of the country is still catching up in some sense to what we’ve been doing here.”
While growth remains steady for the Home Builders Association of Fargo-Moorhead, Spaeth says any small declines in growth are simply due to normal flows of business cycles.