The Los Angeles wildfires are amplifying many of the usual steep challenges for those who want to build or buy new homes in the region.
January’s firestorm destroyed or damaged more than 12,000 structures around Altadena and Pacific Palisades. To gauge how that changes the real estate game for local homebuilders and their customers, we chatted with Richard Douglass, president of Trumark Homes’ Southern California division.
His instant analysis acknowledged the vast uncertainties: “It depends,” he said. It’s an unprecedented unknown.”
The big wildcard within Douglass’ thoughts is how fast reconstruction goes.
Suppose the push to rebuild quickly is successful.
In that case, that building boom will create one major headache for anybody trying to develop housing – whether it’s replacing fire-damaged property or any new construction. Southern California finished 2024 with construction staffing just below its all-time high.
“There’s not enough labor,” he says. “We would not have enough people to build.”
Conversely, imagine the construction landscape if bureaucratic delays seriously stall reconstruction. The already stiff competition among house hunters seeking newly built homes will be expanded by fire victims who opt not to wait for plan approvals.
Trumark had 1,000 visitors in Chino Hills for its January grand opening of the Shady View neighborhood, where prices start at $1.4 million. The builder, which this year will debut nine other Southern California projects – from north San Diego to Covina and Orange County – has already sold 67 of Shady View’s 159 single-family houses.
Yet Douglass warns that a lethargic fire reconstruction doesn’t mean everything built by homebuilders will be an easy sell.
Great locations will sell briskly, but ”if you drive 2 miles and have a product with competition then I’m in a dogfight.”
Douglass’s three-plus decades in the local homebuilding game make him a bit jaded. He thinks slow reconstruction is the most likely outcome, with bureaucracy a repeated hindrance.
“Construction is the easy part. All the stuff before that is the hard stuff,” he says. “We’re making this way too hard.”