| Best Companies |
Whoever said charity begins at home was one-upped last October 3 when millions of Americans watched crews from Shea Homes donate thousands of dollars in time, resources and labor to build a new house for the Garay family of Los Angeles on ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. When HomeAid America and ABC offered Shea CEO Bert Selva the opportunity, he says he "couldn't say no" to helping this n...
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| Perspective |
Sitting in the audience at a recent real estate forecast meeting, one of the speakers offered this insight: "The lack of prime terra firma on which to build and develop is one of the biggest problems confronting industry players." Not exactly news, is it? However, what followed the statement, which by now sounds obvious to most builders, cast a new light on the land issue.
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| PATH Report |
Build a home — start to finish — in three weeks, and complete the site work in just six days? This was just one of several challenges for Nationwide Custom Homes, the modular home builder behind the PATH Tutorial Townhouses at the International Builders' Show in Orlando this January. Built by Nationwide in partnership with Professional Builder, the matching townhouses were designed ...
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| News2Use |
Recent research at the Lusk Center for Real Estate at the University of Southern California shows persistent racial gaps in U.S. home ownership rates. However, that bad news has a good side: there's an untapped market, especially in America's cities, for new housing targeted to minorities. The research also shows these prospective buyers have not only the will to purchase homes, but the money, ...
The Sharrow Group, a Rochester, N.Y.-based executive search firm specializing in the housing industry, has created a quick checklist of questions a builder should ask prospective management hires during interviews:
Architectural Traditions — designers and manufacturers of crafted doors, windows and hardware — created a program on its website where builders and consumers alike can design doors specific to the house being built. Visitors to the site first select an interior or exterior door. The process then guides visitors through a series of options, allowing them to choose the door type, door...
Many a builder has faced the quandary of building homes with steel, which can be costly but more consistent or building with wood, which can warp and be labor intensive. One company has brought an innovative solution to the marketplace. FrameMax, a company specializing in steel framing technology, provides a viable solution to the wood versus steel dilemma.
Wood University, the free online education portal of the APA-The Engineered Wood Association, now offers a course on building structurally sound wood-framed structures. WU 201: Design of Wood Connections is broken down into four successive/progressive/consecutive units: Each unit focuses on a specific area of wood joinery and can be completed in one hour.
A National Association of Realtors' (NAR) study of second home purchases recently revealed a wave of new speculators in the real estate market. With investment home sales making up 23% of the real estate market, homebuyers are turning to real estate more and more as a vehicle for financial investment to diversify their portfolios.
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| Best Companies |
Whoever said charity begins at home was one-upped last October 3 when millions of Americans watched crews from Shea Homes donate thousands of dollars in time, resources and labor to build a new house for the Garay family of Los Angeles on ABC's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. When HomeAid America and ABC offered Shea CEO Bert Selva the opportunity, he says he "couldn't say no" to helping this n...
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| The H.R. Dept. |
The Job Offer Letter. In its simplest sense, the template for a job offer letter might be fairly generic. Hitting the right hot buttons for a job offer letter requires some thought and preparation. The same process that goes into composing a job offer letter is similar to that of selling a new home: The best sales counselors spend a great deal of time on the front end leaning what the buyer wan...
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| Learn |
In Financial Management - Part 1, we discussed the importance of setting up a solid accounting system to accurately measure what has happened in the past so we can make better decisions for the future. In Financial Management - Part 2, we discussed the importance of: We also introduced Chris Smith, a 45-year old custom builder who has been in business for six years.
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| Lessons Learned |
Imagine with me, for a moment, if Paul Tagliabue, Commissioner of the National Football League, were to receive a letter like this from an upset Detroit Lions fan*: Dear Mr. Tagliabue, I am a long-time, loyal fan of the Detroit Lions — owner of one of the worst records in football for more than a decade.
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| Build |
As reported in the January 2005 issue of PB, building science is a systems approach to home building that considers relationships between a home's components and its environment. The goal of building science: to optimize occupant health, comfort and safety; maximize energy efficiency and structural durability and reduce builder and contractor callbacks.
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| Selling Strategies |
It's a busy Saturday afternoon and one of your sales associates has just finished working with a customer. By chance you overhear the customer whispering to her friend, "I don't care how much it costs, I want it anyway." Stunned, you step back and think, "I can't believe it. Did that customer just say what I think she said?" Go ahead and believe it, it's entirely possible.
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Accustomed to building a handful of homes each year topping out at about $350,000, David DeBord was ready for a new challenge that would become his first New Urbanist outing, his first plan drawn by an architect rather than a designer and his first attempt at a significantly more upscale home. President of DeBord Custom Homes, based in Virginia Beach, Va.
If you're searching for melancholy, look up one of the Giant 400 home builders who sold his company two or three years ago. Unquestionably, he'll tell you he had reason to believe the market was at its peak — the very best time to cash out. But now he's looking at the recent performance of his peers and realizing, if he stayed in the business, he'd have the same money and he'd...
West of the Agua Fria River, in part of Phoenix's West Valley, Vistancia stands quietly, respecting the land and natural history of the desert around it. In Terracina, a gated T.W. Lewis community, and one of the 11 neighborhoods in Vistancia, lies Triana. Triana became the best-selling model for Tempe, Ariz.
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| News2Use |
With Orange County known as a land-limited area for building, the auction of the four-parcel property of El Toro — a famous Marine Air Station — has been a big deal for builders because of its implications on land development. Sold during an online auction held by the Defense Department, the final bid came in at $649.
At the recent Midwest Builders Show in Chicago, Norman W. Nagel, CPA, a partner with Warady & Davis LLP, told a builder audience the scarcity and price of land, and difficulty getting entitlements, are factors leading many Chicago area residential builders to seek opportunities in mixed-used projects.
The influx of baby boomers into retirement age is making senior housing one of the biggest market segments in the industry. In January, the Seniors Housing Council of the National Association of Home Builders presented the "Best of Seniors Housing Design" awards in Orlando, Fla. This award program honors communities across the country that best meet the needs of senior homeowners.
A new book from marketing communications agency Partners+Simons is a must-read for marketing professionals wanting to grow their brand and drive demand. The firm's Marketing Tool Chest: Developing Brand and Generating Demand in the New Era of Accountability is compiled from interviews with more than 100 top marketing officers from some of the nation's most successful companies.
Florida technology services company, DiscoverTec LLC, specializes in Web site design, hosting and maintenance. The firm, through its director of Web development Jesse McKay, recently shared its guidelines for firms thinking of updating their Web sites. To determine whether it's time for an update, McKay says, "A static Web site — your typical five-page electronic brochure — may only...
To help builders comply with the Total Maximum Daily Load (TMDL) program established under the Clean Water Act, the NAHB has posted a 32-page TMDL Tool Kit on its Web site. The tool kit — available as a free PDF download — is a useful tool to help builders analyze maximum allowable pollutant loads as well as helping document how they will manage those loads, both of which are requir...
April is National Landscape Architecture month — a fitting time to draw attention to the importance of home builders to the American Society of Landscape Architects, and a new opportunity involving the professional society's annual awards program. According to ASLA's latest Business Indicators Survey, residential projects comprise 40 percent of annual billable hours by landscape architect...
The Michigan Land Use Institute's Follow The Money report blasts decades of "profoundly misguided" state policies in Michigan that amount to "subsidizing sprawl" while fostering obesity and white flight from neglected cities. If research bears these claims out, then suburban builders could suffer when infrastructure expansion fails to keep pace with market demand.
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