Thursday, March 10, 2005

Available Building Lots in Unincorporated Dearborn County

The following information was updated from public documents, specifically, reports, files, and minutes of the Dearborn County Plan Commission and the Planning and Zoning Office. The Planning Office is NOT responsible for this report, though a copy of it was provided to them for their information.

The last time this report was done was in October of 2002. This data is for approved subdivisions through March 1, 2005.

270 subdivisions have been created in Dearborn County. This includes small minor subdivisions as well as the large ones.

The Building Inspector's office lists about 300 residential permits per year. (Some years a little more, some a little less)
Planning and Zoning tracks these permits including data on which subdivision they are in. Subtracting the housing permits for each subdivision from the lot count tells us how many buildable lots remain. These remaining lots may be sold already, but there are no homes built on them yet.

There were 9134 subdivision lots created in Dearborn County since Zoning took effect. In October 2002 there were 2768 lots left that were unbuilt. More subdivisions were added and more lots were built since then.

As of March 1, 2005 there were 3056 unbuilt lots remaining in unincorporated Dearborn County.

Of those, 1528 remain unbuilt in Hidden Valley Lake. Per HVL POA there are 1723 homes built there currently. They also estimated in 2002 that nearly 25% of their lots were doubles lots. Unless the home is built between the two lots, that still leaves an unbuilt lot that could be sold and built upon later. This same issue could be the case in some of the county's subdivisions.

Of interest, in the last 2 1/2 years there were 215 housing permits for lots that were not in subdivisions. Considering there are about 300 housing permits a year,in that time period there were about 750 permits total. In conclusion, about 17% of all non-city or town housing was outside a subdivision.

In summary, the potential building supply (not counting Hidden Valley Lake) has about a 5 year "surplus" of lots. (Hidden Valley would double this number)

This could be an average goal to allow for consumer choice as well as builder options. Considering the typical economics of supply and demand, it would be prudent for the county and for developers, builders, loan officers, and realtors to consider these numbers as they relate to taxation, land prices, housing prices, and interest rates. From a business standpoint, we need to be aware or market pressures in all these directions as we plan for the growth of Dearborn County.

If anyone would like a copy of the complete data (10 pages) in Excel format, please contact me and provide your email.
I will be happy to post any verifiable corrections to this data. If you live in (or built) a county subdivision that was created prior to 1998 and know the exact lot count and number of houses in your subdivision, this information would be helpful. County files do not contain built out data prior to 1998. I will pass on all data anyone provides to the staff at the Planning Office as well.


Christine Brauer Mueller
Willow Brook Farm
18203 Pribble Road
Lawrenceburg Township

2 comments:

Real Estate said...

It's a great buy if the property is located in a well market area. That would be indeed a great investment.

Chris Pia said...

This is an interesting article. Im not sure how I ended up on a plumbing article, but it was interesting to read.