April 2001
Feature
On the B-to-B side, Beazer is going national with MH2 Technologies, after testing that firm’s hand-held scheduling devices for superintendents in Las Vegas and Dallas.
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In California, a deadline for builders looms. On June 1, the nation’s most stringent energy standards will take effect, requiring an average cut of 14 percent in energy use for all new homes built.
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Courtyard Design [3]
Buyers love these spaces for aesthetic reasons, but the benefits of courtyards go well beyond their looks.
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We have all talked about customer satisfaction and JD Powers may be measuring it, but being successful in a tight economy requires it.
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Factory-built housing companies suffered a downturn in profits in 2000.
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In this second installment of our year-long series on the start-up of a new home building company in Sarasota County, Fla., we look at the Total Quality Management underpinnings upon which the firm is founded.
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Emphasizing that sustainable design need not be only an option for the wealthy, the Chicago Departments of Housing and the Environment have launched Green Homes for Chicago, in which five homes will be built on scattered sites and then sold to...
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A strong housing market has home builders leap frogging one another for better positioning in a tightening economy.
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In a Former Life [9]
A bucketful of consultants, lots of floor sweepers employed by their fathers, real estate agents, accountants, lawyers, even a dentist — every home builder or building exec got his or her start somewhere.
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Kitchens designs need to make room for frou-frou and function.
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Christopher Gibbs has seen a lot of changes during his 30-plus years in the home building business. Arriving in California in 1969, Gibbs worked for Trammell Crow Residential Partners and JM Peters.
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Rather than seek new geographic areas for expansion, Emerald Builders sees plenty of new opportunities in its established markets—Houston and Phoenix—and in its two newest markets, Dallas and Austin.
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Unless you’re one of the top five Giants, building 17,000 houses in a single year seems unattainable. And for a nonprofit organization, it’s improbable.
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Lennar Corp. of Miami ranks first in the Giant 400 this year, reporting 22,560 closings in 2000 for housing revenues of $4.9 billion.
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Since 1918, the Orleans name has been synonymous with residential real estate in the Philadelphia market. Last year, Orleans Homebuilders Inc. took a proactive approach to the shrinking local land supply by moving into Virginia and North Carolina...
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A geographic diversification program launched four years ago is paying big dividends for Sunrise Colony Co., a land developer and home builder headquartered in Las Vegas.
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Denver’s healthy housing market, a product line that requires no exterior maintenance, and the integration of diversified businesses helped Littleton, Colo., builder Village Homes climb to 69th in the Giant 400 this year, up from 82nd last year...
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Watermark Communities Inc. (WCI) of Bonita Springs, Fla., is different from many of the Giants in two ways: it owns and operates most of the amenities in its communities, and it has been very successful with a market niche most home builders...
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The net income of the top 25% of all builders is two and a half times that of their peers left behind. Why settle for average when working smarter is so much more profitable?
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Details give attached homes unique appeal in high-density setting.
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Security Alert! [21]
Imagine losing all of your professional experience in an instant. Say you go to sleep and you wake up and you have no memory of your company’s operations, the people, the processes, the customers, the systems and how it all operates.
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It started a few months before this year’s NAHB Show. A phone call here, an e-mail there and a quick question in a hallway: “We’re going to NAHB to find a really good software package—what do you recommend?”
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This steady diet of news about an economy gone soft has created a case of national nervousness that has some predicting, as Chicken Little once did, “the sky is falling!”
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Waiting in the Rocks [24]
A few miles from where I write these articles, around the other side of the mountain, there stands a house on the side of a granite slope. The house is multilevel in nature and it is notched into a hillside of solid rock.
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Wall Street Reversal [25]
The dot-com carnage has the moneymen paying attention to the sticks-and-bricks business of home building.
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In this time of exploding technologies, the options available to new home buyers are virtually endless and quite sophisticated. From T-1 lines for high-speed Internet access to whole-house energy management systems—it’s all here, and then some....
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