Those involved in the local housing market say the burst of the U.S. housing bubble several years ago largely marked the temporary end of “spec” or pre-designed homes, the result of a market surplus brought on by mass residential foreclosures.

Now, with few new houses going up, some builders are turning elsewhere to make a living.

Jackie Cook, longtime owner of Cook and Son Home Builders in Carrollton, said the last time his company actually built a spec home was in 2006, and the market was already beginning to show signs of deterioration. At that time, his company built five homes that were completed without prior commitment from a buyer. The first few homes sold after a year. It would take more than two years for the last two to sell, and that’s when Cook realized he needed to change his business model.

About a year and a half ago, he made the decision to start doing more remodeling until the market picked up, and since then, he has taken to doing whatever people need of him. Sometimes it’s something as remedial as cutting grass, but as long as he’s keeping the lights on and food on the table, Cook said he’s happy. Currently, he and his staff have spent the last week building a pier at a house in the Fairfield Plantation community.

“We have done anything to make a dollar,” he said. “We’ve been blessed because we have work, but it’s still been hard.”

Cook said that over the last two years he has placed bids on countless projects, but an influx of jobless contractors has made the process little more than a crapshoot.

“Where there used to be three or four [contractors] bidding on projects, now there can be 15 or 20,” he said. “It’s tough to compete right now.”

Mike Meyers, owner of Meyers Construction in Carrollton, said that his business had been strong up until the housing bust, but once the market dropped, his work dried up completely. While things are looking up in the market, he said, the improvement has been slow.

“It was a total shutdown where I had nothing. I mean nothing. If my wife hadn’t been a nurse, I would have had to sell my tools and do what I could to keep up,” Meyers said. “Things are picking up a little bit, but they’re nowhere near where they used to be. They’re not even close.”

Sales of new single-family homes plunged 33 percent in May to a record-low level after a federal subsidy for home buyers expired, according to the Commerce Department.

People are still buying homes, said a representative from Appraisal Associates, who did not want to be identified. But the majority of those homes are foreclosures being sold at a below-market rate, she said, and new homes aren’t being built. At the same time, banks have instituted increasingly strict lending policies, she said, and it’s harder for potential buyers to get the loans necessary for home ownership.

“There’s so many homes available on the market, and they are almost all coming from foreclosures,” she said. “There’s so many subdivisions that have not been built out, and they’re not going to be built out because of all the foreclosures.”

The dip in consumer confidence in recent years has also been blamed for the lack of home construction in the area. And the fear is taking its toll on those who have previously relied on a burgeoning housing market for the majority of their business.

Tallapoosa Planning Coordinator Patrick Clarey agrees.

“We have very small developers here, and they saw the way the market was going,” he said, “and as soon as the market collapsed they stopped building.”

Clarey says that while Haralson County has not seen the same high numbers of foreclosure that Carroll County has, the area has seen a steady drop in new building permits in the past five years.

“In 2005, we peaked [in Tallapoosa] with 123 building permits; however, since 2006 that number has gone down quite a bit.”

In 2006, the city saw only 63 new building and renovation permits. By 2008, the number had decreased by more than half to only 28. So far, in 2010, the city has had 14 new building or renovation permits, and Clarey says he expects to have a total of 30 by the end of the year.

Clarey says Tallapoosa has fared relatively well during the recession, only averaging four foreclosures a month.

“Last year, a lot of those were repeats of people going into and out of foreclosure,” he said. “So it’s really not as bad as it sounds.”

Unfortunately, new construction he says has still come to a virtual crawl.