Local and state election results will hopefully give a boost to homebuilders – and housing affordability – in the Wilmington area, according to participants in a panel discussion on Friday about the post-election market.

Shawn Horton, owner of Wilmington-based Trusst Builder Group, said, “It’s really local that matters, local and state, and we had some really important folks that support our industry get re-elected, and they'll remember we were a big part of supporting them in those elections… I believe they will because they have in the past.”

Horton was one of five real estate industry professionals to speak during the Cape Fear Sales & Marketing Council’s (SMC) builder panel breakfast, held Friday morning at The Surf Club in Wrightsville Beach. The title of the panel was “The Newly-Elected Housing Market: What Tuesday's Results Mean for 2025's Business.”

Among the unofficial results, local Republican incumbents won most of the state legislature seats on the ballot. Rep. Deb Butler, a Democrat who ran unopposed, also retained her seat.

The results are not just unofficial but somewhat up in the air for the New Hanover County Board of Commissioners, the entity with power over New Hanover County's development ordinances that can make local homebuilding more or less expensive. The county board's Republican incumbents Bill Rivenbark and Dane Scalise, along with Democrat Stephanie Walker, received top vote counts. Coming in fourth with 249 fewer votes than Walker was Democratic incumbent Jonathan Barfield.

The county, however, still has about 1,500 absentee ballots scheduled for approval and counting on Nov. 14, along with 1,912 provisional ballots received during in-person early voting and on Election Day, according to a county news release.

Turning to the issues the election brought up, builders Horton and Holly Overton, vice president and one of the owners of Charter Building Group, were pleased with the spotlight put on affordable housing by candidates on the national level. Overton said the public now realizes it’s a nationwide problem, not just a Wilmington-area concern.

“I think that's going to help us get a lot of the things we need to get done for affordable housing,” she said. “We'll have more public support for those things.”

Horton said the National Association of Home Builders has a multi-faceted plan for improving housing affordability, “things like eliminating excess regulations, promoting careers and skilled trades ... and I think there's a renewed focus on that.”

While more tax credits, lower taxes and other potential federal changes could boost the housing industry, the impact of other parts of President-elect Donald Trump’s stated platform are hard to predict, such as his push for a 60% tariff on goods from China.

“What people fail to think about is the fact that a lot of U.S. companies are using a lot of inputs that are coming in from abroad,” said Mouhcine Guettabi, Wilmington's regional economist who also sat on Friday’s panel. Thinking through tariff ramifications “is the most challenging aspect of this conversation. And then there is the immigration component, and obviously that has very much a housing bent because labor costs could increase quite significantly .. that's just from a purely economic standpoint,” Guettabi said.

The good news for the Wilmington area at the moment is that overall, “we’re in good shape,” he said.

The questions going forward, Guettabi said, are “how does the consumer potentially react to tax changes and to what extent do we continue seeing both economic activity that's coming in from other regions but also people potentially relocating.”