ASHLAND — Drive down Redwood Drive on the city’s southwest side and you’ll see something Ashland hasn’t seen in some time– two new culs de sac with new homes under construction and shovel-ready lots for sale.

H & H Custom Homes, an Amish-owned, Loudonville-based design and construction company, is selling the lots and building higher-end, two-story houses on them.

The company originally planned to develop the land into condos like Woodview Condominiums H & H built nearby on Walnut Creek and Magnolia drives, owner Uriah Hostetler said, but the company changed course after discovering there was more demand for single-family homes.

“There were hardly any lots available in Ashland,” he said.

Perhaps that’s why just three new single-family homes were built within the city of Ashland in 2017, according to residential construction permit data from city engineer Shane Kremser. The figure was double that in both 2009 and 2010, the years just after the subprime mortgage crisis. In 2007, 13 new homes were built in Ashland.

The problem now, Kremser believes, is not a lack of demand but a lack of supply.

Low inventory

Kremser said he regularly receives calls from people looking for shovel-ready lots, but few such lots exist.

This is consistent with what real estate agents are seeing in Ashland — demand outpacing supply for both existing homes and vacant lots.

Jerry Holden of The Holden Agency has been tracking home sales and inventory in the Ashland City School district throughout the year. His graphs show fewer homes are on the market now than at the beginning of the year, and homes are spending less time on the market before they are sold. Meanwhile, the average sale price of a home has risen.

The market has about two months of inventory, meaning that if no additional homes were listed for sale, there would be no homes left to buy in two months. Anything below six months of inventory is considered a seller’s market, according to Holden.

Home sales statistics from the Ohio Association of realtors show year-to-date, home sales in the Ashland area have dropped nine percent but the average sale price has risen seven percent.

Mary Hartley, president-elect of the Ashland Board of Realtors, said she has had clients who can’t seem to find what they’re looking for. And many people looking to move are reluctant to sell their current houses until they find their next home.

Hartley said because the inventory is low, she believes new construction would only improve the market.

“In my opinion, it does nothing but make the area more desirable,” she said.

But John Augenstein, vice president of Sutton Bank, said he has seen little to no interest lately from people wanting to borrowing money to build new housing developments.

“The builders that were doing that just aren’t there anymore,” he said. “Very few are doing any type of speculative borrowing… The risk tolerance just isn’t there, and people aren’t aggressive or ambitious about it.”

The cost of putting in utilities and infrastructure has gone up, less land is available for development and builders seem to be finding plenty of work in less risky endeavors like remodeling existing homes, he said.

Meanwhile, Augenstein said he believes if the homes were built, they would sell.

Construction underway

Hostetler said five of his 16 lots on the new culs de sac off Redwood Drive have sold, and a sixth is under contingency. The lots are being sold only to buyers willing to pay the approximately $300,000 price tag for a custom home constructed by H & H.

Another new development is planned less than a mile away on Shady Lane, where the city planning commission recently approved a preliminary plat for a proposed subdivision.

The landowner is AAA Real Estate of Ashland Inc., a company registered to Aaron Aber.

Kremser said AAA’s plan is is to extend Shady Lane, adding 12 more lots that could be purchased for new residential construction. Buyers would be able to hire builders of their choice.

The developer already has buyers lined up for some of the lots, Kremser said.

The existing cul de sac on Shady Lane was originally intended to be temporary when it was built in to mid 1970s, Kremser said. The plan was to extend the street west toward what became the old Wal-Mart plaza, where Hedstom Plastics now is located, and to connect it to another street.

The current plan is to create six residential lots on the north side of the street and six on the south side, ending in a new cul de sac, Kremser said.

Room to grow

While the H & H development and the proposed AAA development are the residential developments currently moving forward, Kremser said he sees potential for more.

“We’re hoping there are more, because there’s demand for it,” Kremser said, adding that his office has received about a dozen inquiries in the past couple of years from would-be buyers looking for lots in the city.

Some of them, he said, end up buying land outside the city if they can’t find what they want within city limits.

Kremser said there are some other sites being looked into for future development, including a large piece of farmland off Smith Road just east of Baney Road. That land is owned by Ward-Whitcomb.

New mayor Matt Miller plans to work with community leaders and professional planners to develop a master plan for the city. He told Ashland Source he feels the planning process should include “figuring out where we should work with developers to build our next residential housing area.”

“A lot of residential growth has occurred on the south side of town out the Mifflin Avenue direction, and we’ve gotten word there’s more that is going to take place on Shady Lane, but one of the things all of us that were out listening to the community during the campaign heard was the need for residential housing,” he said.

Particularly, Miller said, people are looking for homes on both ends of the spectrum — higher end homes and affordable housing.

“If you look at an aerial map of Ashland, there’s no doubt you can see certain parcels that could make a lot of sense, but we need to figure out if in fact those are the places we want to try to attract developers and try to get someone to show interest in adding these new subdivisions or whether the utilities are such that they could accommodate them in those places, so that will be part of the plan,” Miller said.