Fluvanna County leaders got a shock last month when Furniture Brands International’s Creative Interiors announced that it planned to close its doors in Carysbrook next month, taking its 170 jobs with it. The closing comes at a time when the county’s economic prospects are slim. It also comes at a time when the area’s real estate market, along with the markets of surrounding counties, is, to put it gently, slow.
While the closing of Creative Interiors, one of Fluvanna’s largest employers, has a huge effect on the former employees, what impact will it have on the real estate market? Some, but not much, say two Fluvanna realtors.
The upcoming closing of Creative Interiors, one of Fluvanna County’s largest employers, shouldn’t really affect the real estate market says Daniel Rothamel, area realtor: "Fluvanna’s economic destiny is tied more to Charlottesville and Albemarle than it is to Fluvanna at this point."
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"I don’t really think it’s going to affect the real estate market," says Daniel Rothamel, an area realtor. Like Albemarle and other counties surrounding Charlottesville, says Rothamel, Fluvanna serves as a bedroom community for a lot of its residents, most of whom work in and close to Charlottesville. "It’s not as if people had been moving into [Fluvanna] County to work there."
Cecil Cobb, the chair of the Fluvanna Board of Supervisors, says that while losing 170 jobs will have a major impact on the county, most of its residents work elsewhere. "We don’t have any industry, really, or very little," says Cobb. "Mainly we’re a bedroom community. People work mostly in Charlottesville and Richmond."
Creative Interiors is a division of Furniture Brands International Inc., which also recently announced the closing of another of its plants in North Carolina. The Fluvanna plant produces ready-to-assemble furniture that is sold to big-box retailers like Wal-Mart. Employees will be out of a job by November 23, and if they decide to move, they’ll encounter a sluggish real estate market.
"I would imagine it’s going to have some effects," Realtor Betsy Gunnels says about the closing. If some employees are forced to quickly sell their homes to take other jobs, they’ll have to fight a glut of housing on the market. "It’s going to be added to the list of possible housing going up on the market," says Gunnels, "and we already have a pretty substantial list here."
Gunnel says she’s sold over 50 homes this year, though she notes there are 364 active listings in Fluvanna, roughly double of what the county would normally have. "The market already is stressed a little bit more than what we’re used to because of other issues," says Gunnel, referring to recent problems in the lending markets.
But the overall effect of one of the county’s top employers closing isn’t the cataclysmic event it could be in other areas.
"Fluvanna’s economic destiny is tied more to Charlottesville and Albemarle than it is to Fluvanna at this point," says Rothamel.
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