BUSINESS WATCH:

While the housing market stalls in Southern California, Chuck Villa is praying for rain.

The owner of the RCI Roofing Co. in Costa Mesa is among those in the building industry feeling the brunt of the slowest Southland home sales in recent memory. In the past two years, his business lagged as the region went through a spell with barely any precipitation and few people sought repairs on their roofs. By the time the rains returned last fall, the housing market itself had run dry, and Villa continued to sit in his Eastside office and wait for the phone to ring.

Now, he thinks, it would take a tempest to jump-start his business again.

“I’m hoping for an El Niño next year,” Villa said. “I hate to say that, but it’s good for my business when it rains.”

The number of homes sold in Orange County has plummeted in the last year as foreclosures have hit record levels and property values have declined throughout the region. With fewer houses under construction and the stagnant economy discouraging many people from investing in repairs, Villa and other business owners are doing their best to scrape by.

Robert Martinez, the director of research for the San Diego-based consulting firm MarketPointe, said Orange County had seen a decrease of 31,000 construction jobs between August 2006 and February this year. Not all those jobs, he said, were in home repairs, but the number of building permits had declined during that time as well, with activity only picking up again in recent weeks.

“There’s a little glimmer,” Martinez said. “There’s the potential for job losses at least to slow down, and the indication is that is happening.”

Around Newport-Mesa, though, it’s mostly hit-and-miss. Norman Dias, the owner of Precision Construction in Costa Mesa, has mostly avoided a drop in business because his company does work in high-income coastal areas, but he often sees the troubled side of the industry when dealing with subcontractors who come looking for a job.

“The problem for me, at least, trying to help them is they don’t have the skill level to work in my field,” Dias said. “The guys that build tract homes, what they’re told is, ‘Do it fast.’ There’s not a lot of emphasis on quality, whereas in my business, the emphasis is on quality first.”

Ivan Paz, an independent tiling contractor who lives on the Westside, recently took a full-time job as a waiter because construction work had gotten so slow.

Now, he lays tiles on the side and waits for the industry to pick up again.

“Construction, it’s like a passion,” Paz said. “And tile is even better. There’s a lot of money in it, too.”

MICHAEL MILLER may be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at [email protected].