The Census Bureau's Wilmington metro is three counties: New Hanover, Pender and Brunswick. Add them together and single-family building is up a modest 5% this year. Split them apart and you get two very different markets — one county carrying almost all the new-home growth, and the county the city sits in quietly trading houses for apartments.
4,828
1-unit homes authorized, Wilmington MSA, Jan–Aug 2026 (4,613 in Jan–Aug 2025)
74%
Of those in Brunswick County — 3,556 homes, up 11%
−9%
New Hanover County single-family, Jan–Aug 2026 vs. 2025 (772 vs. 849)
+68%
Units in 2+ unit buildings across the metro (1,582 vs. 940)
Brunswick is the new-home market
Brunswick County authorized 3,556 single-family homes in the first eight months of 2026, against 3,211 a year earlier. It topped 460 homes in five of those eight months; its best month in all of 2025 was 459. August alone brought 486 — 77% of the metro's 631. That's Leland, just across the Cape Fear River from downtown Wilmington, down through Southport, Oak Island and the beach towns to the South Carolina line.
The metro line has been unusually steady since spring: between 618 and 646 single-family homes every month from March through August. If you work single-family in the Cape Fear region, that consistency is the good news. The catch is where it sits.
New Hanover is building up, not out
New Hanover County authorized 772 single-family homes through August, down from 849. Pender was down by a similar share, to 500. But New Hanover authorized 943 units in multi-unit buildings over the same months, up 18% — 55% of all the new housing units in the county. New Hanover is one of North Carolina's smallest counties by land area, and its new housing is increasingly an apartment building, not a subdivision.
Multi-unit counts are lumpy: one apartment permit can add a hundred or more units to a single month — Pender's February alone had 288 units in multi-unit buildings, against 63 in the six months since. Read the eight-month totals, not any one month.
What TarSignal actually covers
Our Cape Fear feed reads New Hanover County's permit system, which carries the City of Wilmington, unincorporated New Hanover and Carolina Beach. We don't pull Brunswick or Pender permits today, so the county carrying three-quarters of the metro's new homes isn't in our daily feed yet. The Census numbers above are how you see it coming anyway.
Six weeks inside New Hanover
From August 17 through September 27, New Hanover County issued 1,939 permits. 1,142 of them — 59% — were stand-alone electrical, mechanical and plumbing trade permits, the same pattern as Greensboro: the sub's work is filed on its own rather than buried in the builder's permit.
- 108 new single-family homes were permitted — about 18 a week, at a median declared value of $318,000. Nearly two-thirds of them (67) were in unincorporated New Hanover, not inside Wilmington's city limits.
- 97 of the 108 name the builder, and the builder list is short: 33 companies in all, with the top five filing 62 of the homes (64%) and the top ten filing 72. For a rough-in trade, five relationships cover most of the county's new-home work.
- 28 permits were for power before final — electricians energizing a building early so HVAC can dry it out and finish crews can work. They landed on 14 addresses, including a 50-unit apartment building, a three-story 342,000 sq ft parking structure and a shell building for a future tenant. That's the moment flooring, cabinets, low-voltage and punch-list trades get scheduled.
One thing not to do with this data
Don't add up the dollar values on New Hanover's commercial electrical permits. Each one carries the whole building's declared value, so a single project split into ten electrical permits shows up ten times — one address on Government Center Drive appears at $30.4 million on each of ten permits in these six weeks. Use the building permit's value, or count buildings, not permits.
How to work it
Treat the region as two jobs. In New Hanover, the volume that's growing is multi-unit: watch for the building permit on each apartment building, then the power-before-final permits that tell you finishes are next, and use the short builder list for single-family. In Brunswick, the homes are coming at more than four times New Hanover's pace; the Census figure tells you the work is real, and the builders working Leland and the beach towns are the calls worth making first.