Lots of interest in housing.

• Position: North Carolina - Industry Overview

Builders hammer away to put a roof over buyers racing against rising mortgage rates.

The dust flew in June when Charlotte-based Pulte Home Corp. tore into Union County clay. Twenty-six days later, a new $117,900 three-bedroom house stood on a landscaped lot.

Urgency characterized North Carolina residential real estate in 1994, and while the Union County project was meant to demonstrate Pulte's quick-build technology, the residential market was moving fast.

In the first six months of the year, statewide single-family residential building topped $2.7 billion statewide, up 10% from a year earlier. Sales of existing homes tracked by multiple-listing agencies held the same percentage lead over the previous year's record pace. Prodded by fear of rising interest rates, buyers who had held off leaped into the market, says Ken Mitchell, executive vice president of the 12,500-member North Carolina Homebuilders Association. On the coast and along the Piedmont Crescent, labor shortages were about the only thing that restrained the market.

Andy White, Pulte marketing director, explained his company's demonstration project this way: "The new-home market is overheated, and delivery times are creeping up. We didn't want the public to get the idea they can come in off the street and get a house built in 26 days. But we did want to demonstrate what can be done."

What's being done across the state is dizzying compared with the snail's pace that characterized the market only a few years ago. Crescent Resources Inc. is developing Ballantyne, a 4,500-home golf-course community, which when complete will cover 1,756 acres between Charlotte and the South Carolina line.

Developer Roger Perry's 1,100-acre, 2,000-home Falls River community in north Raleigh was under way on one of the Triangle's largest remaining tracts, and 1,200-home Meadowmont, a similar mixed-use development, was taking shape on N.C. 54 east of Chapel Hill. In Greensboro, Koury Corp.'s 2,000-unit Grandover Resort and Conference Center was growing around not one but two golf courses.

Grandover, like Ballantyne, is targeted at upper-income buyers. When the first of its 1,700 homes go on the market early this year at $200,000 to $450,000, they will feature automated electronic systems that provide sophisticated entertainment options, security and computerized temperature control - all designed by Duke Power Co.'s DukeNet Communications Inc.

But the market for housing in North Carolina in 1994 was by...