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Building a New Home? Have Patience.

Submitted by Cheryl Bourland on July 26, 2016 - 1:57pm

Everyone has fantasized about building their dream house, but not everyone has considered how long such an endeavor takes. New data from the U.S. Census Bureau's 2015 Survey of Construction may help you find the answer! The report determined that, on average, single-family homes built in 2015 took about seven months to complete, including an entire month just to get the construction permit! However, there were significant differences in timeline between different regions and different building scenarios.

Overall, houses built specifically for sale were completed in the shortest amount of time, taking a little over six months to complete on average. On the flip side, houses by built by their owner took almost twice as long at just under a year. In between these extremes, homes built for rent took about nine months and homes built for the owner by a contractor took a little over eight months.

There was also significant variation in building time depending on which region of the country the home was being built in. Here are how the different regional groupings broke down by average time to completion, from longest to shortest:

  1. New England: 10 months
  2. Middle Atlantic: 10 months
  3. Pacific: 8 months
  4. East North Central: 8 months
  5. West north Central: 8 months
  6. West South Central: 7 months
  7. South Atlantic: 6 months
  8. Mountain: 6 months

The survey also tracked data on the time required to obtain a permit by region. Once again, the Mountain region was the quickest, taking just 15 days on average to receive the permit. Here is the full breakdown:

  1. West South Central: 35 days
  2. Pacific: 31 days
  3. New England: 28 days
  4. South Atlantic: 27 days
  5. Middle Atlantic: 27 days
  6. East South Central: 25 days
  7. East North Central: 23 days
  8. West North Central: 20 days
  9. Mountain: 15 days

Other interesting findings of the survey include the fact that homes built within a metropolitan area were completed about two months faster than homes built in non-metro areas, and that 62% of all new homes built were sold while still under construction.

Source: Time to Build a Single-Family Home in 2015