Ethical Homes

The Post discusses how, after discovering widespread violations of building codes in at Clarksburg Town Center, Montgomery County has suspended any new construction projects in that have not yet broken ground, to make sure that all pending projects do comply with the codes.

The article explains how this freeze is expected to cause significant delays in construction in MoCo, and to drive up prices there. Will there be any effect on neighboring regions throughout the Metro area? I can see two ways that it might, and the possible effects are exactly the opposite. On the one hand, some buyers who were looking in MoCo might now start looking in PG County, or DC or VA, as the supply of new homes in MoCo gets tighter; that will cause some spillover price increases in those areas due to the resulting higher demand. On the other hand, there is currently a shortage of skilled construction workers in the Metro area, so it can be expected that the crews that were scheduled to be working on those MoCo projects will now be quickly diverted to other projects in nearby areas, potentially accelerating their completion, and in turn increasing the supply. That increase probably won’t outpace the higher demand, so the net result might still be a small bump in prices in the rest of the Metro region, but it will be interesting to see how this plays out.