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BRENTWOOD — Back in March 2005, a busy five-hour Brentwood Planning Commission meeting pushed sleepy planners well past the midnight mark.

On the agenda were such items as whether to approve the 274-lot Taramore subdivision on Split Log Road, Old Smyrna Road’s Wolf Chase neighborhood that was seeking revisions and a proposed 140-lot project on Edmondson Pike.

What a difference a few years and a growth slowdown make. Last week, the planning commission completed its duties within 10 minutes with no regular agenda items listed for consideration.

City Manager Mike Walker, who has headed Brentwood’s operations since 1990, said shorter meetings overall aren’t just in the imagination. There has been less growth to discuss. The reason, he said, is partly economics — the national building slowdown — and also because of math — the city had more than 1,000 available and vacant lots ready to go once the tough builder times hit.

“Historically, we’ve averaged about 250 homes a year,” he said. “Fortunately, we started to see the building slow down before the real bad market hit. If you’re building 250 to 300 homes a year, you can clear that inventory of lots in about three or four years.”

At the moment, there are 753 platted lots available in Brentwood.

More growth on the horizon

In these tough times, developers are scaling back in purchasing more land to set up subdivisions in exchange for building on what they already have. In many cases, banks might also be reluctant to finance buying new residential housing property to reduce their investment risks.

“Banks are not going to loan money to a subdivision when there is that much inventory out there. It’s all a matter of market supply and demand,” Walker said.

Big tracts of potentially developable land still exist, especially around the Split Log Road area.

That’s not to say that there hasn’t been some building action in Brentwood in the past couple of years. The long-talked about development of what was known locally as “flagpole property” at the end of Mallory Lane finally seems to have the green light and will likely become Mallory Park II office park.

But it’s just that there have not been as many massive projects containing hundreds of lots as there were in what Walker called the “boom-boom, go-go years” of the past — a time period around 2002 to 2005.

But there is a small sliver of hope that growth is coming out of the doldrums and may produce longer meetings soon.

In 2010, there were 140 new housing starts. That’s compared to an abysmal 68 in 2009.

“That’s a 100 percent increase. It’s at least a sign that things are turning around,” he said.