Home Construction Not Expected to Dip With Oil Prices

The Kern County Home Builders Association isn’t noticing any radical swings in new home construction since oil prices began to fall.

Donna Carpenter represents the group and said numbers have been flat since 2012.

“We’ve been averaging about 29 permits per week,” Carpenter said. “The first three weeks of this year, we’ve been just a little bit under that.”

Carpenter said about 1,500 permits were issued in the Bakersfield area in 2014, which is down slightly from 2013. She said permitting has been essentially been unchanged after 2010, when the market bottomed out at around 760 permits.

“We’re now about double that,” Carpenter said. “It’s really gone up and down, and, like I said, the last three years have been relatively flat at around that 1,500 number.”

Nationally, home construction was up nearly nine percent last year.

– Anthony Pollreisz