Developer wraps up Columbus project, but won’t build again here anytime soon. This is why.

Longtime Columbus real-estate developer Bud Allen is putting the finishing touches on Summit Pointe, his high-end rental property off Williams Road on the city’s north side, and is now looking for future projects.

“We’re wrapping up a few extra units that we were able to sneak in, but we’ve got 176 units up there, and we’re 100-percent leased and have been since we started. It’s just been a great project for us,” said the president of Allen Development Group, which does both commercial and residential work.

But the Columbus area doesn’t appear to be on Allen’s radar for the foreseeable future. Instead, he has targeted the faster-growing cities of Alpharetta, Ga., Charleston, S.C., Chattanooga, Tenn., and Nashville, Tenn.

“I don’t have any other plans in Columbus right now,” the developer said. “I’m a little disappointed in the job creation here. Our commercial business is basically the same as it has been the last 10 years. We just aren’t seeing the population growth and job growth here that we are in other areas.”

More: Home sellers have advantage over buyers in current Columbus housing market

Allen pointed to Newnan, Ga., off Interstate 85 and on the southern edge of the Atlanta metro area as an example of building disparity. He has researched that growing community for possible development and found more housing permits on the books there than in Columbus.

“You can build a thousand homes, but if you can’t get people to buy them or rent them, that’s what concerns me,” Allen said. “The only reason we’re not doing anything else in Columbus right now is I’m just concerned we would be cannibalizing our market. I’m worried if we go out here and build a bunch of stuff, we’ll just get people moving from one place to the next.”

In a recent interview, Reynolds Bickerstaff, co-owner and chief experience officer at Columbus-based Bickerstaff Parham Real Estate, expressed concern that there’s not enough homes — new or resales — coming to the market to boost prices and overall business. Housing in general tends to ripple to other areas of local economies, with buyers and renters making other purchases to improve, decorate and maintain their residences.

“I think when you look at it, everybody always wants to talk about new-home construction sales. Nationally, that’s only 10 percent of the total market. But it can have a great impact on the local economy because some builders are larger than the average,” said Bickerstaff, estimating 40 percent of the Harris County market north of Columbus is new home construction.

For Allen, he expects to begin construction on his Alpharetta housing development before the end of this year. Like Summit Pointe, it will be quality single-family homes with garages that are rented and not sold. It will be smaller than the Columbus property, however, with between 100 and 120 homes on the site.

“I expect within a year or two we’ll have three or four (developments) under construction at once. We’ll have them coming on about every six months, depending on what we run into with zoning,” said the developer, who sees the second city being either Charleston or Chattanooga, with Nashville closing out the construction spree outside of his home market.

Like Allen, Bickerstaff said a new major employer coming to Columbus certainly would be what an economic doctor would prescribe for the Columbus area.

“We desperately need one,” he said. “We’ve made up some ground from the textile mill-era of the late 1990s and early 2000s, but we need to catch up with some of these other communities.”

The most recent data from the Georgia Department of Labor shows the Columbus metro area with 121,100 jobs in February, which was 800 higher than one year earlier. The February unemployment rate was 5.3 percent, down from 5.7 percent in January.

Earlier this year, the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the University of Georgia projected Columbus will add roughly 1,000 jobs in 2018. But that would be a growth rate of 0.8 percent and considerably less than the 2 percent projected for Georgia as a whole.

This story was originally published April 5, 2018 at 3:58 PM with the headline "Developer wraps up Columbus project, but won’t build again here anytime soon. This is why.."