UA’s Center for Real Estate Teams with Home Builders to Produce Comprehensive Report on State Home Building

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – The Alabama Center for Real Estate at The University of Alabama is teaming with the Home Builders Association of Alabama to collect, analyze, store and disseminate a new comprehensive monthly report on the state’s home building industry.

The UA Center has been working on the format for several months, according to Grayson Glaze, executive director, and plans to introduce the new report this month.

“This is truly an exciting partnership with HBAA,” Glaze said, “and we expect it to have a significant impact on the housing industry in the state as well as consumers.”

Since 1999, UA’s Alabama Center for Real Estate has partnered with the Alabama Association of REALTORS and continues to produce monthly reports that provide useful information associated with existing home sales and housing affordability, Glaze said.

“The new construction report will complement this report, allowing the center to provide even greater coverage for our real estate stakeholders and consumers in every corner of the state,” Glaze said. “With the help of the Home Builders Association of Alabama, we plan to look at building permits, housing starts, new home sales and median new sale costs,” Glaze said.

“In addition, we will provide information on the economic impact of construction in the state, employment numbers, remodeling information, and the price of home building materials and look at the top builders in the state.”

Dr. J. Barry Mason, dean of UA’s Culverhouse College of Commerce, in which the Alabama Center for Real Estate is housed, said outreach activities are an important component of the business school’s mission and that the partnership between the ACRE and the HBAA underscores that importance.

“There are immense changes and challenges facing the real estate industry, and with the partnership with HBAA, our Real Estate Center will be better equipped to anticipate, analyze and report those trends to the community,” Mason said.

Amy Dunavant, president of the Alabama Home Builders Foundation, said the collaboration “will greatly benefit Alabama’s homebuilding industry as a whole through the data collected, analyzed and reported to the media throughout the state.”

In order to collect and catalog the data from the HBAA, ACRE will use student interns from the UA real estate program who will be supervised by the center’s research coordinator. Bill Evans, ACRE chairman, said the use of student interns is a key component of the initiative.

“As an adjunct faculty in real estate at the business school, I have interacted with these bright students,” Evans said. “One of the interns who worked to set up the report is now a real estate analyst with Grandbridge Real Estate Capital in Birmingham, and another is an honor student majoring in economics and computer science. These students are the future of real estate in Alabama.”

MarketGraphics Alabama, a real estate market research and consulting company, will assist ACRE in compiling the new report. MarketGraphics Alabama provides current market data, as well as projections, on the supply and demand of housing and land in their market areas. More information is available at www.marketgraphicsalabama.com.

The report will be released monthly to coincide as closely as possible with the release of national residential building permit data, Glaze said.

“We will continue to develop content to keep the report fresh and meaningful and will include statewide economic data and demographic trends that impact the home building industry.”