New home builders keeping busy

Coffs Coast Advocate/Bruce Thomas

A SLUMP in housing construction which has closed a Kempsey brick-making plant is not yet reflected on the Coffs Coast.

Two Coffs Harbour building firms said yesterday they were busy building houses.

They said the months of wet weather were causing them more problems than the global financial crisis.

Boral's Kempsey brick-making plant is about to be mothballed, with the company's manager blaming a slump in the NSW housing market.

The plant's executive general manager Nick Clark told journalists this week the NSW housing market, which was the major destination for the Kempsey bricks, was down 50 per cent from its 2003 peak and 20 per cent down on 2008.

He said the plant had enough unsold stock to last two years and the plant's 19 employees would be paid all their entitlements.

Meanwhile the general manager of GJ Gardner Homes Coffs Harbour, Alan Varley, said yesterday they were having 'a really good run'.

Mr Varley said while he had heard conflicting comments around town, he thought generally the Coffs Harbour industry was 'doing okay'.

He said the closure of any source of building material had an effect because of added transport costs but he did not think the Boral closure would have a big effect.

He said GJ Gardner Homes had been 'very aggressive' in their marketing earlier in the piece, including running seminars for first-home buyers in other towns like Macksville and Bellingen.

Mr Varley said while they were seeing fewer first-home buyers than expected, probably because it was difficult for young people to get loans, they were seeing second- and third-home buyers and a few investors taking advantage of cheap finance.

The first five months for 2009 had been as good as any they had seen for some years but the wet weather had had a tremendous impact on building progress.

“We are about 15-20 slabs behind in our construction program,” Mr Varley said.

A spokeswoman for Coffs Harbour-based Blue Ribbon Homes said they had received a huge amount of inquiries in the last four months.

Interestingly she said they were seeing quite a lot of older people who were previously renters and who were now building their first homes.