Infill Housing

Teardown-Rebuilds Are Taking Over the New-Home Market

Rather than hunting for increasingly scarce vacant lots, builders are tearing down existing properties to add new infill homes in favorable neighborhoods
May 30, 2023

A National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) report recently found that in 2021, 9% of new homes resulted from teardowns; a share that continues to rise as undeveloped lots become increasingly difficult to find. Teardown-rebuilds offer homeowners the chance to start fresh with new construction in an established neighborhood, and they also bypass the need for builders to find vacant lots.

Roughly one in five new homes result from teardowns in the Pacific region, made up of California, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii. On the low end, just 3.8% of new homes built in the West South Central region of Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana were torn down and rebuilt in 2021, Forbes reports.

“There is a scarcity of product and no more land to build on within these top markets,” [Tommy] Beadel says. “Thomas James Homes is in the markets where the average age of housing is 80-plus years, and the only viable solution is through teardown building. Teardown building allows homeowners to pick exactly where they want to be. When rebuilding an individual home, owners have the option to stay exactly where they are or pick the location where they want to be.”

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