Realty World Tri-Shasta

I was online browsing through Record Searchlight and found this article that might interest some of you Shasta County home buyers out there right now. This article was written by Scott Mobley.

PRICES DROP FOR AGREE PARK HOMES

Even affordable housing projects are subject to the laws of gravity in a buyer’s market.

Take AGREE Park — the Shasta Builders’ Exchange’s living laboratory for “Affordable, Green and Energy-Efficient” home construction that is winding down after 2½ years of planning, building and demonstration.

The Redding Redevelopment Agency has put $751,267 into AGREE Park, never intending to get much more than half its money back. Agency officials have always placed great value on the exhibit itself.

Now the agency expects to net $271,160 from the home sales, or roughly 36 percent, according to a recent report.

But that’s good news for lower-income buyers interested in one of the homes. A 1,150-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bath AGREE Park house once expected to sell for $175,300 will now be marketed for $104,000 to income-qualified buyers, according to the report.

The housing bubble was still bulging in late 2006 when the Shasta Builders’ Exchange enlisted three member architectural firms to design environmentally friendly homes that would be affordable to families earning between 80 percent and 120 percent of Shasta County’s median income — currently $44,650 and $66,840 for households of four.

These days, housing prices and mortgage rates are so low that all three will be sold to lower-income households, according to the report.

Trilogy Architecture designed the smallest home, at 850 square feet and meant for the lowest-income buyer. The two-story, three-bedroom and one-bath house features a built-in car port, ductless heating and cooling to minimize energy losses, and 24-inch framing to cut lumber use.

The Trilogy home will sell for $95,000, close to the price originally contemplated.

Kibler & Kibler designed the mid-sized home, a yellow single-story bungalow originally meant for a household earning the median area income and able to afford a $175,000 purchase price.

This single-story, 1,050-square-foot, two-bedroom and two-bathroom home will now sell for $100,000, or two-thirds of the price initially contemplated. The home’s green features include a tankless water heater, extra-thick blow-in-blanket insulation and a radiant heat shield in the attic — all intended to save energy costs.

Nichols Melburg & Rossetto designed the largest, most expensive of the three homes, a single-story stucco and tile bungalow. Its energy-conserving features include a straw bale wall and a swamp cooler that uses no more energy than a 100-watt light bulb.

Crews are dismantling the homes and preparing to truck them from a lot next to Exchange headquarters in east Redding to the Parkview neighborhood just south of City Hall.

The Exchange had initially hoped to sell the homes for their construction costs, and forced designers to work within strict budgets.

But the costs of developing the Parkview lots — roughly $33,000 apiece — were never figured into those housing costs.

Nor was the cost of dismantling the homes, moving them across town and putting them back together.

The Exchange will reconstruct, landscape, market and sell the homes itself, rather than rely on other nonprofit affordable housing builders to do those jobs, as originally contemplated.

The agency will not contribute any more money to reassembling the homes on their lots, building detached garages for the two larger houses or planting drought-resistant shrubs around them, according to the report.

The homes will remain affordable to lower-income buyers for 45 years.