Hartford Business Journal

6 Hartford Business Journal • August 27, 2018 • www.HartfordBusiness.com DON'T MISS YOUR CHANCE go to www.HartfordBusiness.com/OurEvents Nominate Today! DEADLINE 9/14 Healthiest Employers of Connecticut recognizes organizations that are dedicated to employee health and safety along with their commitment to creating a healthy workplace through implementing work-site Health & Wellness programs. Determined by an assessment administered nationally by the Healthiest Employers Group (Springbuk, Inc.) honorees are chosen based on six key categories- leadership commitment, foundational components, strategic planning, communication and marketing, programming and interventions, and reporting and analytics. The winners will be recognized in a special issue of the Hartford Business Journal and at a special breakfast event on October 29, 2018. PRESENTING SPONSOR: EVENT SPONSORS: EVENT PARTNERS: By Gregory Seay gseay@HartfordBusiness.com H ome builders Eric and Kevin Santini are plenty busy these days finishing a fresh batch of rental townhouses in their Deer Valley North development in Ellington. But for the first time in a decade-and- a-half, the Santinis have no new single- family houses on their building sched- ule — and don't foresee building any in the near term. Their only one for sale is a finished, 3,745-square-foot, five- bedroom, 4½-bath dwelling at 29 Ab- bott Road in Ellington. Built on "spec" in hopes of attracting a deep-pocketed buyer, it sits unsold at $699,500. Santini Homes, experts say, is far from the only Connecticut home builder sweating out a housing slump that, coupled with rising tariff-related costs for imported lumber and other building materials, higher municipal permit-inspection fees, plus a labor shortage among certain trade skills, has drastically cut new housing starts. Even with Connecticut recently com- mitting another $62 million in grants to add or upgrade the state's more than 20,000 units of affordable housing, in- cluding in five Hartford area communi- ties, home builders/remodelers say they don't see a clear path back to robust demand for new homes anytime soon. "It's the Connecticut economy,'' said Eric Santini Jr., a principal in the family's decades-old homebuilding enterprise based in Ellington and president of the Home Builders & Remodelers Associa- tion of Central Connecticut (HBRACC). "If you don't have strong job creation, you're not going to have housing starts.'' In 2017, when Connecticut gained only 1,800 jobs, cities and towns in the state authorized 4,547 single- and multi-family homes with a total value of $1.2 billion, which was down 17.4 percent and 25.2 percent, respectively, from 2016 and 2015. There were 296 housing permits is- sued in the 104 Connecticut municipal- ities tracked by the U.S. Census Bureau during the month of June, which was down 9 percent from a year earlier. And while the number of permits issued during the first half of 2018 (1,922) is ahead of last year's pace, it is well be- hind benchmarks set in 2016 and 2015. Meantime, the number of new hous- ing permits issued annually over the last decade pale in comparison to pre- Great Recession levels, when nearly Ellington home builder Kevin Santini, of Santini Homes LLC, says Connecticut's sluggish economy led to a dip in demand for new houses and slashed his family's production this year to a single, unsold "speculative'' unit at 29 Abbott Road and forced them to focus on townhome construction. Expanding the spec's livable space and piling on amenities into the $699,500 unit at no extra cost, Santini hopes a planned Labor Day weekend open house will draw a buyer. HBJ PHOTO | BILL MORGAN Housing Slump Weak demand for new homes a quandary for CT builders

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