David Barista is Editor of Professional Builder, Custom Builder and HousingZone.com, properties that combined reach more than 200,000 residential design and construction professionals. David has covered the U.S. construction industry for more than a decade and has won numerous editorial awards, including two Jesse H. Neal Awards.
Last month, the Professional Builder editorial team hosted judges for our annual National Housing Quality Awards program, which for the past 18 years has honored the best of the best home builders, remodelers, and trade contractors for their quality management systems and processes.As past NHQA applicants and winners can attest to, this program is...
At a time when the housing industry is facing a severe glut of inventory, depressed real-estate values, tighter lending standards, and a lethargic path toward recovery, it seems ludicrous to even mention the terms “lot” and “shortage” in sequence.
Yet, during the past few weeks alone, I have heard several prominent home...
While we’ve spent the better part of the past four years analyzing just how dramatically the housing market has changed during the great bubble burst — shrinking home sizes, historically low housing starts, the glut of foreclosures, more-stringent mortgage requirements, and even the threat of the mortgage-interest deduction going by...
New-home sales guru and Professional Builder columnist Bob Schultz is conducting a free sales and marketing webinar tomorrow at 2 pm EDT, titled “Bootstrap Sales and Marketing for Builders.”Schultz says that even in this slow market thousands of buyers are out there looking for new homes every day. It's important to build a sales...
The April 2011 issue of Professional Builder features our latest report on the adoption of building information modeling (BIM) and 3D design tools in the home-building market.Beazer Homes, Oakwood Homes, and Winchester Homes are among the builders that have made the switch to BIM technology and never looked back.These firms are benefiting from BIM...
Last month, I had the pleasure of spending a day in Seattle speaking to local home builders and remodelers about the growing importance of social media in their overall marketing efforts.Of the 30 or so people in the room, about 60 percent said they currently use one of the “big four” social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,...
If there’s one housing sector that is poised for a strong recovery in the next 12 to 18 months, it’s the rental housing market, namely apartment buildings.If you’re not evaluating the apartment sector, it may be worth consideration for your local markets because it appears that conventional funding sources may soon become more-...
While conducting research for this month’s report on “16 Tips For Driving Consumer Traffic,” I came across an interesting fact about technology and consumer behavior.Next year, for the first time, it’s expected that more consumers will access the Internet using a mobile device than a traditional desktop or laptop computer....
This past September, we wrote extensively about the state of builder and buyer financing, which no doubt is one of the most-difficult challenges home builders face today.For weeks after the issue had hit our readers’ desks, I received nearly a dozen letters from builders stating how our special report was spot-on, and that they feel “...
This past September, we wrote extensively about the state of builder and buyer financing, which no doubt is one of the most-difficult challenges home builders face today.For weeks after the issue had hit our readers’ desks, I received nearly a dozen letters from builders stating how our special report was spot-on, and that they feel “...
The 2012 NAHB study “What Home Buyers Really Want” shows a decided preference for crown moldings. Sixty-two percent of respondents rated crown moldings the third most...
Seattle architect Ross Chapin knows all about designing smaller, smarter homes. Chapin, principal of Ross Chapin Architects, Langley, Wash., has long been a proponent of...
In Florida, one of the states hardest hit by foreclosures, scheduled foreclosure auctions were up 55 percent in April versus a year ago. In New Jersey, they increased 91...
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