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Mr. Weiner, a 53-year veteran of the housing industry, was a hands-on executive who remained active in his business, Leon N. Weiner & Associates, Inc., of Wilmington, until becoming ill in late October.He was inducted into the National Association of Home Builders Housing Hall of Fame in 1979."Leon...
With closings of 3,200 units this year, Morrison Homes can't be counted in the ranks of mega builders. And when it comes to product purchasing, its size has not been a huge asset, acknowledges Morrison's head of purchasing and construction, Greg LorenzettiIncrease your purchasing power," Morrison...
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Manufacturers, builders, and supply chain analysts say production home building is on a direct course for buying materials, delivery, installation, and warranty services in separate pieces."The answer is unbundling, which he says takes the "smoke and mirrors out of what a supply chain does for a...
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When Meadowmont, a 1,200-unit master planned community in Chapel Hill, N.C., donated land for an elementary school four years ago, the community's children were supposed to be guaranteed access. Although no one interviewed for this article has opened his or her site to advertising, they've all left...
Finding good executives, particularly division presidents, has turned the business into a poach fest. Even the current economic downturn provides no protection against employee pilfering.
One of Tom Miller's precepts at Drees Company is that it never hurts to ask. And so he did. In early spring, he put to the city of Erlanger, Ky., a proposal. He suggested that two of home building's frequent adversaries embark on a joint effort to develop a park and open space system.A dual...
Paul Robertson, the CEO and president of Robertson Brothers Co., realized that a new business form offered his family-owned company a better way to structure its projects as well as manage outside and inside investors.The Bloomfield Hills-based firm was founded by Robertson's father and uncle in...
For years, the landowners of a California tract of land known as Northern Territories have watched Sacramento County grow around them. "There was a lot of discussion around where that line ought to go," says Robert Sherry, a principal planner for Sacramento County.
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Even though the market overall is heading downward, analysts continue to tout the stocks of the home builders. Why?
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At Murphy Farms, a master planned community in the Dallas suburbs, the upstairs master bedroom has become a thing of the past. "[These buyers] don't necessarily want to be segmented or categorized in how they live," says Jeff Kingsbury, vice president of sales and marketing at McStain Neighborhoods...
Successful home building is much more than just closing large numbers of units, yet volume remains a distraction in the industry.
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In the process of acquiring substantially all The Jones Company's home building operations in St. Louis and Indianapolis, Centex Homes will add approximately 800 units to its annual tally. Combining that with Centex Homes' financial strength, training and development resources, and national buying...
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A bill, recently passed by Calif. Gov. Gray Davis, mandates state-wide water-efficiency standards on all residential washing machines. Passage of the bill, AB1561, makes California the first state to adopt water-efficiency standards for residential clothes washers and is scheduled to take affect...
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The reverse mortgage industry, which had a robust year in 2001, is poised for record volume again this year. The most common type -- FHA Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECM) -- are on track to increase 64 percent in fiscal year 2002 over the previous fiscal year.
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The goal of creating abundant, clean energy came closer to fruition as several companies collaborated in the debut of a fuel cell used to power a $1.7M mansion at the Parade of Homes in Denver.
The Home Depot has been busy creating a space to sell lawn and garden products. Upon completion of the deal, The Depot will be among the largest turnkey suppliers of flooring to the residential construction market.
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By Jill Ralph. The results of J.D. Power and Associates' 6th annual home building survey are in. Among the findings: the top scores are higher than they were in 2001 in all but one market. Below is a listing of the top scoring builders in the 16 markets surveyed:[INSERT LIST]Published in BIG...
With its latest East Coast acquisition, KB Home has made its way into a third Florida market.
The Arizona-based company pushed its strategic growth plan forward a notch with its purchase last month of Perma-Bilt Homes. Before this deal, Meritage had a presence in three of the seven largest home building markets: Dallas, Phoenix, and Houston; this acquisition adds Las Vegas to the...
Industry observers are fond of saying that the biggest builders wield unprecedented clout when it comes to buying products. That seems to make sense when you look at the enormous volume concentrated at the top.
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Site organizes tool information by tool type, with links to detailed product information.In addition, TOOLS OF THE TRADE Online readers will find the complete contents of the current issue of TOOLS OF THE TRADE magazine, subscription information, and links to contact the editors directly. A full...
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Merloni also sells a Web pad that lets consumers download recipes for particular dishes to the oven. The homeowner downloads a recipe from the appliance company's Web site.
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Of course few builders can match Centex's deep pockets (rumor has it the company spent around a million dollars on the project), but anyone can profit from its research and reasoning that went into the site.To orchestrate the redesign, Centex hired Blair Kuhnen as vice president of Internet...
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For our task/time needs we use Microsoft Project, which works well for us. For now, we've defaulted to Microsoft Project and Excel, but as they are not integrated, we ran into trouble keeping them both current.
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If you saved the installation CDs, and if you've kept all your data files in a central folder like "My Documents," you can re-install your applications one-by-one, then move data over using your office network or a pile of disks. Bottom line, Alohabob still burned up a weekend, but was far less...
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Do you assume that most people who work in high-tech jobs prefer new homes that act and look high tech?
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The maker of the Construction Tracker software system has introduced a scaled-down version for the rest of us.
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In May we looked at @Last Software's Sketchup (www.sketchup.com), a great tool that lets builders quickly create presentation drawings.
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Hardware manufacturers Linksys (www.linksys.com) and Netgear (www.netgear.com) now both offer power-line networking products that use existing 110-volt electrical wiring to carry computer data.
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Did you know that adding more light to a room without regard to how that light is delivered can actually make it harder to see? Research for the guidelines was funded by Andrus but carried out by the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.
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Materials take-off modules are now available for the leading computer aided design (CAD) programs. That introduces another layer of complexity to CAD management and version control that for a production home builder can represent a major shift in work processes.
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"We're not trying to be a big company, we're trying to be a great company," says CEO Mike Hall.These days, Hallmark buys land free and clear and then puts it into building mode.
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Luxury and custom home buyers are the most discretionary buyers. They already own one or more homes. They have the money to buy what they want.San Diego-based Marketscape conducted the informal focus group sessions to find out how respondents would "tweak" even the most glamorous of residences for...
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New studies from the EPA suggest that one in three people who purchase a home today have someone in the family with allergies. With "tight" homes now essentially mandated in virtually every building code, and mold litigation on the rise, addressing indoor air quality is no longer an amenity. It's a...
But Murphy isn't just an enthusiastic local, he is the third-term mayor of Pittsburgh who had a major vision to get the city's many brownfields back into use and to attract people back to the city. When completed, the $300-million-plus project, a combination of public and private funding, will be...
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While most product warranties today come with written warranties, many states also enforce implied warranties. Unlike warranties provided by the manufacturer, implied warranties cannot be "limited" by the fine print of the warranty document.
Why it worked: Semi-custom homes allow buyers to pick and choose without going through the long and sometimes fearful process of building a custom home.
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Why it worked: Location, location, location, and a variety of product (18 models ranging in price from $186,990 to $405,990) resulted in 655 home sales in six months--all without models.
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Why it worked: Traditional neighborhood infill development puts homes and shopping within walking distance of workplaces in an area where congested commutes are common. Rivermark partners--Centex, Greystone (part of the Lennar family), and Shea--build small pods of homes in six neighborhoods...
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Emmanuel House, in Santa Ana, Calif., is the second HomeAid Orange County project completed for Mercy House Transitional Centers. Emmanuel House is a 16,000-square-foot, two-story, classic Craftsman-style home that blends with and complements its historic French Park neighborhood.
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The housing sector may not be as hyper-sensitive to interest rate developments as in the bad old days when government-imposed ceilings on both deposit rates and mortgage rates controlled the flow of credit to this sector. There's no question that these rate developments gave housing a second wind...
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The NAHB has moved and redesigned its Web site, now at www.nahb.org, and it is definitely worth a look. The NAHB has made it a priority to create and maintain a state-of-the-art Internet presence for the home building industry and housing consumers.
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Growth restrictions proposed by the American Farmland Trust would sharply increase the cost of housing and price hundreds of thousands of families out of the housing market, says the NAHB.Growth restrictions are part of an October report, "Farming on the Edge," from the American Farmland Trust...
It's no secret that fiberglass insulation is an important product in the on-going effort to make homes weather-tight and more energy efficient. If you want to reduce noise infiltration and transmission in your interior walls, ceilings, and floors, fiberglass insulation can take care of that, too.
Fireplaces are so popular that according to figures from the Arlington, Va.-based Hearth, Patio & Barbecue Association (HPBA), 60 percent of all new homes built in 2000 had at least one.Wood-burning fireplaces used to be the preferred product among Americans, but Jim Hussong, vice president of Kozy...
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How do you design high-density attached housing that fits into a single-family, small-lot neighborhood?
Working with "green" building materials hasn't always been easy.When a builder wants to use a green product, he typically has to go through 60 phone numbers to find a supplier and arrange shipment," says Guelberth, who has been selling green products in one form or another for almost 20 years.
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At The Vineyards, a development under construction in Coachella, Calif., buyers will find all the amenities they've come to expect.And, the 45-foot-by-95-foot lots will leave room for the RV. This type of desert living doesn't come cheaply.
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Does it really make sense for a commercial real estate firm to own a home building company? The company outlined the three options it was exploring for Brookfield Homes, which contributes roughly $1 billion to Brookfield Properties' $8 billion in total annual revenue.
For the most part, buyers love this bargain basement approach to real estate sales, but some city officials are pulling their hair out, as homes that they say should have been demolished go on the free market and sell to clients in South Africa or California. The most perplexing aspect of Burton...
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Immigrants make up 14 percent of first-time home buyers, according to "New Americans, New Homeowners: The Role and Relevance of Foreign-Born First-Time Homebuyers in the U.S. Housing Market," released from Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies in August. Joint Center director Nicolas P...
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Only 27 percent of Californians can afford to buy a home. In some areas, such as San Francisco (17 percent), the affordability situation is even worse.Impact fees are a significant culprit, averaging $65,000 per house in most of the Bay area.
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Since September 30, the latest HGTV (House and Garden Television) program, "Public Places, Private Spaces," has been airing Monday nights.Viewers can visit the Web site to find the manufacturer and color and every other detail needed to actually do what they watched.
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In August, Shaquille O'Neal signed a deal to buy and renovate Section 8 housing in Colorado.
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Kelly Daniels, director of operations at Arvida's highly successful 10,000-acre Weston community in southeastern Florida, knows how to build houses quickly and efficiently. Take measure of your results: Schedule daily, measure your capacity daily, analyze delays daily, and create closed-loop...
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A new development about to get under way just south of Santa Fe, N.M., Rancho Viejo--a 21,000-acre ranch that was used as grazing land for more than a century--represents a major change in local zoning, thanks in part to a new type of software. CommunityViz visualization software helped Santa Fe...
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How much would your buyers spend to organize all the tools and other junk they store in the garage? Whirlpool may have a marketing challenge on its hands; it will be interesting to see how the company handles it.
For Woodstock Building Associates, 2002 has been the year of the $300,000 remodeling job. Consumers typically use 25 percent of refinancing cash-outs on home improvement, according to a University of Michigan and Federal Reserve survey cited in the Credit Suisse report.
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In less than two weeks, more than 2,500 people applied for the 93 affordable apartments at One Church Street, San Francisco.
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In July, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, Calif., test drove a new technology called "10-Gig" that multiplies Ethernet data speeds tenfold, to 10 gigabits, or 10 billion bits per second. For now, the technology requires high-performance computer equipment, but it has huge commercial...
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Add to the list of unintended consequences of changing the immigration rules, the length of time foreigners can visit the United States. The NAR thinks such rules would hurt vacation home sales.
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The town of Duck, N.C., has raised the ire of local builders and their affluent clients, by enacting a six-month ban on new homes with more than six bedrooms. About 20 permits for gigantic homes were issued--far more than the normal development pace.
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Expansion-minded Standard Pacific Homes is contracting in Texas. The Irvine, Calif.- based company, which has built homes in Texas since 1978, recently announced it would leave the Houston market.
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When Builder Homesite and eBay Real Estate recently announced they would hold a series of online home auctions, the Concord, Calif., iBidCo, which specializes in online and live new-home sales events, was conspicuously absent, even though iBidCo had business relationships with the two parties...
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Target stores are taking aim at nesting lovebirds all across America with a new promotion. Lindal Cedar Homes and architect Michael Graves have partnered to design a house, which will be the grand prize in the Michael Graves Dream House sweepstakes.
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Every builder's least favorite spore has gone national. The consumer-friendly bill offers builders no liability protection for past or future mold claims, according to the NAHB.
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Florida is the place to be for West Coast-based builders this year. Meritage paid $46.6 million in cash and debt for Perma-Bilt.
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Affordability is one of the major challenges facing home builders in California. But in California where there are far more requirements and constraints and where the approval process takes far longer, that same 5,000-square-foot lot sells for $203,000.
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With all the turmoil in the markets, Americans feel bullish about real estate.
The new range had the power and look of a commercial stove but the ease of installation and safety features of a residential product.Also new in 2002 is Armstrong's Urban Settings vinyl collection, a minimalist design that mimics the look of metal, stone, and concrete.
If the home building industry harnesses the power of experience during the shopping phase, it overlooks or ignores it during the latter stages of the home-buying experience.