Real Estate Agencies

Despite widespread fear that the beleaguered housing market is in the throes of a double dip, a Bakersfield developer has opened a model home in the Lake Ming area, the first step toward building a new gated community of 160 single-family homes.

Eugene Winter, president and owner of Gold Star Construction Inc., wants to put the community dubbed Lakeview at Rio Bravo on 52 acres just north of Alfred Harrell Highway off Lake Ming Road, former home of the old Rio Bravo tennis courts.

Within walking distance of Lake Ming and the Kern River, the homes will start in the high $300,000s, Winter said.

And yes, he’s aware that this isn’t an ideal economy for selling luxury homes.

“Absolutely we know this isn’t exactly the best time for coming online with a new product,” Winter said. “Do we think people are going to be lined up and sales will be really quick? No. It’s going to take a while. But we’ve got the land, and we’ve done the preparation work. We might as well get started.”

Home prices hit a new low in the first quarter of this year, according to data from the S&P/Case-Shiller national home price index released earlier this week.

The index covers 20 major cities that together comprise 80 percent of the nation’s housing market, and figures through March validated economists’ predictions that the residential real estate market was headed for a double dip.

Prices dropped 5.1 percent from a year earlier to levels not seen since mid-2002.

Meanwhile, Kern County’s 16 percent unemployment rate is keeping many would-be mortgage borrowers out of the market for even entry-level existing homes.

Winter is undeterred.

“All the oil and gas companies are hiring, and so are the hospitals and doctors offices, including nurses who get sign-on bonuses. And the legal profession’s hiring. These are not your average $10, $12-an-hour workers,” he said.

A lot of homes were thrown up quickly during the real estate boom, and Lakeview at Rio Bravo can compete with them on quality, Winter said. His homes have tight insulation and all Energy Star-rated appliances to keep down energy costs, and air filters to kill germs and bacteria, he said.

“If you’re going to offer a new product in this kind of economy, it had better be something different, and what I’m offering is different from anything else on the market,” Winter said.

Competition from foreclosures and other distressed properties aren’t a threat, either, Winter insisted.

“You can get some good deals, but you’re going to wait forever for them, and a lot of times when you get a distressed property you’re just buying somebody else’s headaches because they haven’t been maintained,” he said.

Although Keller Williams real estate agent Nicole Brown hasn’t seen any of the development’s floor plans or toured the model, she said the community at least has location going for it.

“There’s a lot of demand out there by the river front,” said Brown, who has a listing on nearby Creekside Drive. “There’s a certain kind of buyer who likes being on the outskirts of town with the mountain scenery.”

Residents who have been in the area a long time are loathe to see the wide open spaces and vistas they cherish trampled by development, and some protested when new housing tracts were going through the city approval process.

James Tucker, who lives on nearby Cattle Creek Drive, was among those who expressed concern a few years ago that throwing up hundreds of new homes would create traffic woes on two-lane Alfred Harrell Highway.

He’s since watched as some developers won approval to build only to run out of money after the market fizzled. Now, scores of dusty, unfinished lots are full of weeds.

“I don’t know how that fellow is going to make it,” Tucker said of Winters.

Gordon Nipp, vice chairman of the Kern-Kaweah Chapter of the Sierra Club, has also expressed concern about development near his home in the northeast.

Although he hasn’t seen this latest project’s environmental impact documents, Nipp said all developers should pay for pollution mitigation efforts to avoid further deteriorating the region’s already abysmal air quality.

He’d like to see new home density increased to make public transportation viable, or barring that, financial contributions to offset emissions by, say, replacing old diesel buses with cleaner vehicles.

“We’ve got some of the worst air in the nation,” he said. “They should be working with the Kern County Air Pollution Control District to at least not make it even worse.”

Nipp is resigned to the fact that some building in the area is inevitable, though, once the market rebounds.

“If we’re going to create sprawl, at least let it be out here instead of destroying good farmland,” he said.