Custom home builders
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Is there any custom home builders on the board that would like to share their experiences of how they have been affected by this Economy, and what measures have been taking by your company to improve business.
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The credit crunch last fall completely shut our operation down - custom and spec homes - there was plenty of buyers but no one could get a loan. We had 8 specs at the time and we had to "short sell" all of them this spring - complete nightmare! We also had 4 big custom homes to start for clients, all designed, drafted, and ready for permits. 1 has been put on hold indefinitley, 2 were canceled because clients lost their jobs, and the 4th client just dissappeared.
We re-focused our operation this summer for the re-model market and, so far, we have work lined up through the winter - god willing.
Interesting times.
jb
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Thanks for sharing your experience canoek, good for you that you have worked lined up.
We are lucky to I guess that we have work 'til years end. We do Custom Luxury homes in the Austin Area. In late 2007 we had 6 houses lined up, and those 6 became 2.
We should finish the last one by the end of 09. But, we don't have another one lined up, the good thing is that we are a design build company and we don't have to wait 'til the plans are ready for us to start making some money. And we can also pick up a design only job. -
Eddy
We are located in the Dallas area and been building for the last 5 years, things started going south last year when an investor of ours tried to micro manage a project and ended stealing his own progress draws to finance another project which forced us to take him to arbitration, the knock we took was heavy and forced us to scale our operation down significantly, currently we are focused on high end kitchens/bathrooms, design and consultation. I hope to get things going again later in the year and am currently bidding on a few projects north of Dallas.
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