(AJC) — When the metro Atlanta housing market began to spiral downward out of control, many builders were taken by surprise. Land and speculative inventory, once seen as assets, quickly became liabilities as sale prices and acreage values fell. Homes sale prices are now 22 percent off the April 2007 peak, according to the latest S&P Case-Shiller Index. And housing starts are down nearly 90 percent from 2006, the metro area’s “bubble period,” said Eugene James, head of the Atlanta division of the research company Metrostudy. “This is not necessarily a bad thing,” he said of the dramatic decline. “We never should have been building as much as we were.”
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