Residential resurgence: demand for new homes is strong, but builders don't want a boom if it comes with a bust.

• Author: Carroll, Ed
• Position: Recovery of Alaska's residential construction industry

Demand for new homes is strong, but builders don't want a boom if it comes with a bust.

Alaska's residential construction industry will continue a strong recovery this year from the dark days of the late 1980s. Builders and planners in the state's population centers expect a healthy increase in new home construction, with economic stability, reasonable interest rates and pent-up demand sustaining the homebuilding trend.

While housing construction has not returned to anything like the peak of the early '80s, builders and bankers say the residential marketplace is at a comfortable capacity now, growing out of a boom-and-bust cycle. As a result, subdivisions left vacant since the great real estate crash are being built out nearly 10 years later, the fly-by-night contractors have been largely weeded out, and the demand for larger, more expensive "move-up" homes is high.

"There's a significant interest in new homes around Anchorage," says Doug Askerman, executive officer for the Anchorage Homebuilders Association. "Certainly nothing indicates that sales will be any less than last year - it's going to be more - the question is, how much more," he says.

In Juneau, Chris Roust, a building official with the community development department, points to pent-up demand for housing and voter rejection of the capital move initiative as breaking the logjam that held back home construction there. "We expect, from what we hear from bankers and developers, that 1996 will be better than last year, which was very strong," Roust says.

Dave Dillard, owner of 3-2-1 Construction Co. in Fairbanks, has turned down requests to build custom homes this year so his crew can take on 24 custom condominiums on the banks of the Chena River. "It's a strong market this year, that's for sure," Dillard says, pointing to a strong Fairbanks economy bolstered by the addition of high-paying jobs for the area's developing gold mining operations.

Pat Vincent, executive officer of the Kenai Peninsula Homebuilders Association, says that group's members are expecting steady growth, with neither boom nor bust. "People are anticipating a year similar to last year, which was a good year for the construction business," Vincent says.

And in the Mat-Su Valley, Jeff Hall of Palmer-based Hall Quality Homes looks forward to a second strong year. His company built about 25 houses in 1995. "I expect it to be a lot like last year - maybe a little better," Hall says, adding that Valley building could...