Are Fox and Jacobs homes still being built? (Dallas, Grapevine: mortgage, houses)

[Sooners9354]

I’ve been living in home built by them since 2005 and I was only 4 years old back then now I’m older I’m just curious do they still build these newer homes across the metroplex or did they stop making homes?

[wideawake57]

In the
Metro-mess yes:

https://www.centex.com/homes/texas/dallas

[mikestrong]

They are called Centex now. Centex bought them out years ago. Part of the Pulte Homes family.

[turf3]

Fox and Jacobs started here in the 1960s building cheap and cheerful smallish houses in new subdivisions. Built to a price point, they became notorious for cheap build quality, and worst of all, for thin slabs with inadequate design and inadequate reinforcement, poured with concrete with far too much sand, pipes run in the slab, piping joints under the slab, poorly installed aluminum wiring, etc., etc., etc. By 1980 the Fox and Jacobs name was a definite "stay away".

When Centex bought Fox and Jacobs they tried to bury the name as it had the reputation of terrible quality in Dallas. However, in the early 2000s their marketeers resurrected the name, thinking that late boomers/early Gen Xers who had grown up in F&J houses might have positive memories of the names (unlike their parents who would have paid for all the work to jackhammer up the slab in the living room to fix plumbing leaks, or neverending rounds of mudjacking to try to level up the house as it tried to skate away down the street). I don't know whether the marketeering initiative was successful or not. I lived in a Centex (NOT branded "F&J") house for a few years in the early 2000s and it was a reasonably well-built house.

[Rakin]

Originally Posted by mikestrong

They are called Centex now. Centex bought them out years ago. Part of the Pulte Homes family.

Yeah, Centex was the largest builder in the US at one time. They filed bankruptcy during the mortgage meltdown sometime around 2010. They were doing a lot of shading things in building and with their mortgage company.

[ChristieP]

Our former house in Grapevine (built 1989) was a Centex. We never had any foundation problems, but there were a few quality issues, such as no junction boxes behind bathroom light fixtures, and a kink in the icemaker line that caused a slab leak 20 years later. Fortunately those were fairly easy fixes.

A family friend sold F&J houses for a while, and they had three lines of houses. The lowest line (Accent?) was very cheap and tended to be the worst quality. The middle line was better, and the top line (Flair) was the best.