By NEAL WAGNER / Managing Editor

ALABASTER – The housing market in Shelby County’s largest city has seen a nearly 245-percent spike since 2010, and ended 2015 with the highest number of new homes since the economic recession hit in the late 2000s.

The Alabaster Department of Building Safety recently released its year-end numbers for 2015, verifying the best news the city’s housing market has seen in several years.

At the end of 2015, the department had issued 100 new home building permits for projects valued at about $26.6 million. By comparison, the city issued 75 new home building permits in 2014 for projects valued at about $16.7 million.

“We issued seven permits for new homes in December, bringing our total for the year to 100 new homes,” Ward 7 City Councilman Tommy Ryals said during a Jan. 25 meeting. “That’s a long way from 2010.”

The average price of each new house constructed in 2015 was about 20 percent higher than it was in 2014. In 2014, the median price for each new house was $222,290, while 2015’s median new home price rose to about $265,568.

“This means our home values are going up, which is a good thing,” Ryals said.

Ryals said the city is not looking to return to the “uncontrolled” growth the city saw in the 1990s and early 2000s, and said all houses built in the city over the past couple of years were approved several years ago.

“All of these homes being built are homes that were already on the books,” Ryals said. “None of it is new subdivisions, it’s just filling out subdivisions that have already been started.”

Last year brought an increase in every type of permit – such as new commercial buildings and residential additions and remodels – compared with 2014 and the past several years.

In 2015, the department issued nine new commercial building permits for projects valued at about $13.5 million, compared to four permits in 2014 for projects valued at a total of about $3.1 million.

In the residential addition and remodeling sector, the city issued 140 permits in 2014 for projects valued at $2.2 million, compared to 233 permits for projects valued at $3.9 million in 2015.