After three decades in the landscaping business, Paul Herrmann is unsure what the future hold for his San Antonio-based company.
"We're having to go out and knock on doors," Herrmann said recently. "In 30 years, we've never had to do that."
Herrmann's situation reflects the overall collapse of Pasco County's housing market, which continues to ripple across the local economy, from small businesses to county coffers.
Three years after hitting a historic peak for home construction, Pasco County issued slightly more than 1,100 building permits for new home construction last year - an 84 percent drop from 2005 and the lowest count in more than a decade.
Combined with a national economic downturn, the past year left small business owners such as Herrmann struggling to stay afloat. Herrmann has laid off three of his eight employees and put the rest on four-day workweeks. He's not sure how long he can keep even that reduced schedule working.
"I've been having them do yard work around here to keep them busy," Herrmann said. "But that can't last much longer."
The company survived the early stages of the construction drop-off by relying on work in Lake Jovita Golf and Country Club in nearby St. Leo. Even that work has dropped off, though, Herrmann said.
The construction slowdown has also put a dent in county coffers, which have drawn millions in fees from builders over the years to pay for new parks, roads and other infrastructure.
The county collected slightly less than $18.5 million in impact fees during the 2007-08 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30. That was a third less than the previous fiscal year and less than half the fees collected as the housing market peaked in 2005.
The drop in fees for road construction forced county officials to rewrite their plans for future road construction, pushing several projects into the future when the money might exist to build them.
New construction has all but stopped - in part, because of the abundance of homes created during the 2005-2006 peak in construction. Thousands of those homes remain on the market - many of them as foreclosed properties - driving down the demand for and prices of new homes, say people in the real estate business.
"As far as new houses, they just can't compete with existing homes," said Kathy Britton, a broker in Dade City.
The Multiple-Listing Service, real estate agents' roster of homes for sale, currently has more than 7,250 homes on the market, the bulk of which are condos, mobile homes and the like. More than 520 are single-family homes. Many of those are sitting on the market for more than a year.
That's making it tough for brokers such as Britton to make ends meet.
"You really have to whittle at the overhead, and make more use of the Internet for advertising," Britton said.
With a stable of agents still trying to make a living by selling houses, Britton keeps waiting for the local housing market to level out.
"In my experience, the only way we know where the bottom was is when we're going uphill," she said.