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Oregon home builders say they’re seeing their industry turn around after the steepest job losses in decades. From 2004 to 2007, the state added more than 6,000 residential construction jobs. Then the same number of jobs disappeared from 2007 through 2009. Now, builders expect to add jobs – not as quickly as in 2004, but steadily.

“We’re starting to see an increased interest in home purchases,” said Harry Hanna, president of Milwaukie-based Sentaur Construction. “Open-house attendance is up, and we’re seeing increased walk-throughs on our houses.”

Low-priced homes are the hottest, said Bob Raczkowski, director of sales for Portland-based Legend Homes. “Buyers are still price-sensitive,” he said. “The less expensive the home, the more activity we’re seeing.”

The economy is more stable than it was at the start of 2009, Raczkowski said. “Buyer confidence is definitely higher than it was at that point,” he said. “People’s savings and 401(k)s were crashing pretty hard.”

The number of new homes sitting on the market has dropped dramatically from January 2009, said Jerry Johnson, principal with real estate consultants Johnson Reid. That could cause home prices to stabilize and then start to increase again.

“Generally, it’s a great sign,” Johnson said. “When you see market conditions where pricing is dropping rapidly, it takes a good price cut to get people into your project.”

Other factors could boost home sales, Johnson said, including the federal credit for first-time home buyers. But that boost might not last.

“There are only so many people who have the wherewithal to get into a new home,” he said. “If you take people who were going to buy a home in the next 12 months and jam them into the next six months, you accelerate that.”

“But there’s a limit to how many times you can do that.”

Jon Chandler, CEO of the Oregon Home Builders Association, sees another potential hazard ahead. Because development has dried up, there might not be enough land prepared for building.

“Right now there’s nothing in the pipeline in terms of development,” Chandler said. “Once we burn through the lots on the market right now, there’s not much going on.

“There will be a lag,” he said. “It’s a one-year, two-year process to get from acquisition of a lot to building.”

Still, the home building industry welcomes any signs of a recovery, Chandler said. “It’s not going to come roaring back, but coming back at all will be a huge improvement over where we’ve been.”

On a graph, at least, the housing bubble has found its bottom, said Nick Beleiciks, senior analyst with the Oregon Employment Department. In November 2009, the most recent month for which numbers are available, 11,000 people worked in residential construction – as many as in March 2004.

“You can see employment rapidly increasing around 2004, and it seems like it’s come down to about that pre-housing-bubble level,” Beleiciks said. “That could be an indication that employment in this sector is getting back to normal.”

That’s the hope of builders, anyway. “We’re slow, but optimistic for the next year,” said Evan Scesa, president of Creekwood Homes in North Plains. “I think the last year of gloom and doom is past us.”