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Location: Sometimes Maryland, sometimes NoVA. Depends on the day of the week
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Too funny! My craptastic townhouse in Lorton was a Ryan built house. I here the quality has gone up since our place in the mid-80s, but I'd still shy away from them.
All good theories, and I think it was probably the cheap luxury thing that changed priorities. One of the reasons I'm inquiring is because I plan to purchase a home within the next year, and I'm wondering if I should avoid newish construction in favor of older (and more dumpy looking) 60s to 70s homes. I'll probably be getting a townhome, so noise isolation is a big concern. I'd like to be able to watch movies and listen to music without worrying if it will bother my neighbor. A single family home is probably too far out of my price range at this point.
Definitely one reason the condo pool has decreased in quality is that the practice of turning apartment buildings into condos increased in the 90's. In general, buildings built in as condos are built much better and with higher quality materials than buildings built to be apartments. This makes sense: one item is something someone is going to purchase, the other item something someone could potentially be living in for a short amount of time and trash. Yes, buildings turning from apartments to condos usually get "renovated", but this almost always only cosmetic. (This is different than, say, rehabbing an old warehouse. A lot more work goes into something like that.) When purchasing from a complex, find out what kind of homes the units were originally designed to be.
Back when there were a lot of mom and pop builders. These guys operated very local, maybe built a few houses total in a year, typical maybe 3 - 5. I knew a bunch of them, all built high quality houses, they did not make fortunes, typical might have been 15-25% net profit on each house.
They did not cut corners, cared about the work, usually had very good working relations with their crews, most of them probably also were workers themselves, they were around the job site the entire period, knew what was going on. The satisfaction was more than a money type profit, they enjoyed what they did. Many workers could do more than one craft. At one point I thought about doing it myself.
Probably in maybe the 1990's it started to be you could not make a living as a mom and pop operation. Part of it was all the extra paperwork involved in building a house, part was the way the suppliers worked, part of it was the requirements for each trade to be licensed, all sorts of reasons, things got more complicated, lot more regulation, paying a lot of non-productive types, land prices went up, how all the financing worked changed. Plus they could find workers who were competent, wanted to do the work. They typically paid a living wage, most did not try to work thru the winter if in the more northern areas. Inspections sort of meant something. They made a decent living, few probably got rich or even close to it.
Then it became to actually be a working builder, you had to sort of do more like production line type housing. The small time builder, number of houses went up each year. The lil guys tended to drop out, the grief just was not worth the money net. Lot of the former mom / pop type guys either went into remodeling or because subs to the bigger guys, retired or quit the business for some other line of work. In the early 2000's you probably had to be doing at least 50 houses each year to actually be a serious builder. Lots of changes, wages were pushed down, started to be a lot of illegals in the business, lots of greed, anything went. It was all push, push to meet an ever crazy schedule. Somewhere in there cost controls got thrown to the wind. Especially how much profit the builder expected. I knew this one guy who was at the low end of the scale, maybe doing like 60 houses a year. I figure at the end, he was probably making like 100% profit on each house, bagging maybe 5-6 million a year net in his own pocket.
This guy was a fairly good friend of mine and we used to have a beer every so often and the talk would be how could he squeeze even more profit. Not a bad guy, actually didn't build that bad a house but it was an entirely different way of thinking. He actually was a pretty hands on type guy for all the things that were happening all at once. At that point they were working completely thru the winter building houses in northern climate. Totally crazy. The bigger builders were doing hundreds, if not into the thousands of houses each year. Probably the bigger the worse it became. Those type builders were totally remote from the process. Some of the top guys might not know which end of the nail to hit.
So it is not surprising that the quality declined. There was nothing to prevent it. The idea of inspections became a bit of a joke. All that mattered was what was on some paper, most peeps that could make a difference were Yes Men, their job and salary depended on pleasing the boss and that meant more production at any cost. If you talked to any of them, they actually got very lil satisfaction in their jobs. It sure was not like the mom and pop operation of the former dazes.
The other over riding change was the amount of overhead that got build into every house increased. The amount of costs that did not relate to the sticks and bricks or labor to actually build the house. Nobody had any incentive for quality, nothing mattered about the house under construction, lots of focus on getting done to start the next one. There was no pride, it was just a job, increasingly one nobody who really cared about home construction would want. Doing it right probably could get you fired. Any real brains in the business were put to focus on how it could be made cheaper, changing the designs to make it faster to build or figuring out how to maximize profits.
The ability to regulate the process never stayed even with the changes that happened and the sheer ability to pop out houses so fast. An entire industry got created to feed off the process in so many ways. The buyers paid for it all. Only they had the ability to make real change by refusing to buy the horrible products but they never seemed to catch on to their power. Greed was King, everybody was making too much money. Nobody was responsible for anything, no matter what happened.
"they did not make fortunes, typical might have been 15-25% net profit on each house."
In the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties if you were making 15-25% NET profit- they were making a fortune. And if you think that's not making a fortune- that's mismanagement of funds.
I can certainly see 25% gross in today's money. I can only imagine what gross would have been back then
"they did not make fortunes, typical might have been 15-25% net profit on each house."
In the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties if you were making 15-25% NET profit- they were making a fortune. And if you think that's not making a fortune- that's mismanagement of funds.
I can certainly see 25% gross in today's money. I can only imagine what gross would have been back then
I am sort of basing some of it on what peeps told me. Knew some guys I worked with whose dad's were in the mom and pop side of it back when. If you can believe the info they were making like double and a bit more what an experienced engineer was making. Remember houses didn't sell for a fortune either. $40K was a pretty expensive house.
You will be very hard pressed to get accurate data from anybody about what they are making. Everybody lies in one way or the other. The one dude I know had managed to really increase his take by serious methods of cost control. He had like only 3 subs and all of those were captive. If we would talk, he would chuckle if I mentioned certain sums. You learn to read between the lines, plus I knew about what he was paying for various things, you could add it up and then judge based on what he was getting for the final sale price of the houses. Toward the end of the last boom he was knocking down some serious net profit on each house. Wasn't paying the labor much but he had his methods.
If you are going to solve many of the housing issues, somehow must get back to the mom and pop type way of building them. Pride and something close to ethics were probably the things that resulted in the final excellent products.
I've worked in a number of those type houses built by that type builder. Most were first class type construction, real good bones for sure. Those type operations if they were all family were typically really first class operations.
There are still some of those types around in the local counties surrounding me. Folks can get housing by finding and buying some land, then getting them to build the shell to some degree. A chance for the owner to then get in a bunch of sweat equity. Do various trades work, trim out the inside, do the bath, kitchen, etc. Done right, they probably target getting the average shack for something of a final price ~$50K. Typically a basement with cement block, designs vary. I been out to see a number of those type houses, good quality construction for pretty reasonable money. The key is in getting a mom / pop operation that still cares about what they do. Corporate America has not been very kind to the home buyers.
Actually the decline started just after WWII. A lot of GIs came back from the war with money and desire for their own home. There was a huge boom in demand for houses, especially starter homes. Someone developed mass production techniques that could be applied to home building. Mass production home building started in the late 1940s (Lveittown etc) and then became more and more popular. There was still some emphasis on quality through the 1950s and then in the 1960s they really turned up the production and begin massive mass production techniques and also started cutting corners. By the 1970s materials began to get worse. Limitations on logging started to require the use of forced growth lumber. From there is was all down hill. Cost cutting techniques improved. Advanced engineering allowed builders to cheapen things up to the closest fraction. Materials continued to get worse and worse. Modern lumber is terrible. It is so bad that it is a joke. Technology is better, but quality is way way down. Workmanship is way way down. Many so called carpenters canno9t really operate any tool other than a skillsaw and a nail gun. Some do nto seem to know how to read a tape measure. I have seen huge gaps that they just cover up with drywall or carpeting. Even in multi million dollar homes.
Qulaity was still evident int he 1950s. The 1960s is a mixed bag. By the 1970s, quality was no longer a priority. By the 1990s many houses were expected to last no more than 30 years before needing rpelacement. UNless it is cuspom built and you personally supervise the construction, I would not touch a modern home. You might get lucky and get a good one, or you may get the one you built on the morning after the superintendants spouse broke up with him, or he was out all night drinking or whatever. On the positive side, technology has imoroved enought that even with a lemon house, you should not see any major problems for five to ten years or so (although there are exceptions where problem appear right away).
Are there notoriously bad mega builders that anyone would care to share? Around here, Ryan Homes has a very poor reputation in that regard, but are they all pretty much the same? Is the only way to get a home built properly to hire a small contractor and hound them every step of the way? My father did that in the 90s because of such concerns and I suppose it turned out a well.
The answer to your question is KB Homes with the worst reputation of all. Just google KB home complaints and your screen will light up the night sky. Beezer does a pretty cheap one too. If you google any builder you will get complaints, even from Pulte Homes who has the best reputation of any builder. They won the award from JD Power for best customer service year after year after year yet some people complain.
If you are talking condos, townhomes and apartments, regardless of who the buillder is, you can be assured they are building with cheap labor, cheap materials and a do not care attitude. Even the best builders throw up a few of these places a year.
When I was installing cabinets in townhomes and condos back in the mid 80s, they were 5 units to a building. The builder told me when they sell the first 3 units, the next 2 are pure profit. And they make very high profit marjins on multi family human filing cabinets.
Great posts.. although pretty depressing. I'm assuming the only homes built around here that didn't come from those types production line companies are the huge customs that cost well over a million, and not something the average joe can buy...
Great posts.. although pretty depressing. I'm assuming the only homes built around here that didn't come from those types production line companies are the huge customs that cost well over a million, and not something the average joe can buy...
Search out to see if any small mom and pop type guys are still around or find the houses that they built back when.
We still have these type operations in some counties in Ohio. Around me, in some towns, the guys live there and primarly build in that town. They do reasonably good quality for a fair price. Nobody seems to complain, the houses are very good quality. My GF has one, I do the maintenance on it, nothing much ever happens. It could have been a lil better wired but other than that it would past my inspection.
Most of these type operations work over a well defined area. They may not even work in winter. It probably works best for them if the general area is not super regulated. The regulation does nothing for quality, drives up the price and makes an environment where the mom and pop guys find it difficult to operate. Most of these guys only build a couple of houses each year.
It's what the consumer wants. Suppliers and Builders are just offering it to whom ever wants to buy it.
Yep.
Cheapness is a direct response to consumer demand.
We demand the most square feet for the dollar, and then wonder why we get cheap.
Consumers will not pay for great construction if it means forfeiting space.
Moving cheap into the market norm reduces the demand for real trade skills, so the pool of skilled tradesmen dwindles.
But.. We have always had bums in building.
Many old homes are still standing only because they have not found a way to collapse and haven't blown away yet.
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The clear dividing point.......
