Patrick L. O'Toole, Senior Editor, Professional Builder

Amy Rowe proves that being a GIANT killer does not require an overriding focus on what the biggest builders are doing. She and her strong right hand at Home Traditions, Dennis Snider, focus almost exclusively on serving move-up families in east Cobb County, Ga. Everything else is secondary, including what Pulte or MDC Homes might be building nearby.

Rowe grew up in a home building family in Cobb County. By age 16 she was working part time in a sales office. So when she re-entered the home building industry after college and a stint as an aerospace engineer, Rowe had a strong vision for the kind of homes she wanted to build and whom her buyers would be.

"Because we are smaller, we're able to do more little touches, more family touches, more emphasis on the kitchen," Rowe says. "We do have to do those things to compete.

"We also customize more. So when you go through one of our subdivisions, each house looks different. We get the buyer who does not want to see the same house over and over."

Custom-looking spec homes and customized service to buyers are central to that vision. The vision and a detailed knowledge of school boundaries, distances to highway interchanges and, in short, all the right and wrong places to live have proved to be a winning combination against any competition.

But knowledge of A-plus locations is only half the equation. Longstanding ties to the area mean Rowe gets a look at deals before anyone else. Because of this, Home Traditions has tied up everything from a suburban infill piece with seven three-quarter-acre lots to a 70-unit site farther out.

The firm has done this without getting into the development business, but that's changing. With prices of finished lots soaring, Rowe last year implemented a plan to become a developer to keep Home Traditions on track with its core buyers.

"To succeed against the big guys, you need to have land control," Rowe explains. "Finished lot prices today are not ones that I can pass along to the buyer and still be competitive for the buyers we know how to sell to."

Home Traditions homes typically include four bedrooms and 3 1/2 baths, and are priced from $250,000 to $500,000 or more. Most of what the company builds is in the sweet spot of the higher-end national builders that operate in the affluent north and northeast suburbs of Atlanta. Yet Rowe says the only time she gets a truly accurate pulse on how well her firm competes with the big guys is when buyers are picking between Home Traditions and Brand X.

"We take the time with all our buyers to go over the list of things we can standardize," says Rowe. "We take extra time to make them feel comfortable. And I think in caring for the customer that way, we are always getting sales over the big guys."

Rowe often defines Home Traditions' niche as "all the buyers who want a little extra TLC," so one of the company's biggest early hurdles was how to not get bled to death by customers who take a mile for all the considerable inches the firm gives. The answer was instituting a regimented, seven-step building process that includes detailed provisions for profitably handling any kind of change order required to make a customer happy. Rowe says that process allows for a lot of extra communication between company personnel and the buyer, which she says is a critically important part of Home Traditions' success.

"We meet with them all throughout the process, before any little thing has the potential to blow up and become an issue."

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