Programs & Services

Prep-to-sell

Over the past 25 years we have built or remodeled over 1,000 homes for resale. This not only makes us excellent at that, but it allows us a unique experience based knowledge as to what should and should not be done to improve a home to help sell it.

There is a order of priority, of return on investment, that allows us to know what items of disrepair are most important to fix and which proactive items are most profitable to spend money up-dating. Most home owners are just guessing, having no or very little previous experience in these matters. Even real estate agents & designers, although they may have seen or been in 1,000+ homes in their careers, they weren’t actively making decisions to prepare them all to sell, they were just looking and judging the finished product based on their opinions.

To maximize you profit in selling you home requires a number of steps and knowing what to do or not do in many situations, as each house, location & market is unique although “best practices” of experience can get us 80% there, with the remaining 20% based on each unique situation/property, hence the importance of depth/breadth of experience in this specific endeavor.

That said, if you are interested in selling your home in the next 6-24 months, we have project coordinators that will come out to walk your property, talk about your plans on when & where to move to, go over all the steps from sorting trash from donations from yard sale, to whether we have financing that will allow you to move out and into your knew home first, what work can be done to get to various price points to sell at and how much profit you’ll likely see, what work can be done while you live there vs what should be done once you move out, etc.

Additionally, we often have clients that have the equity in their homes to allow for pre-sale repairs & prep to be made, but they don’t want to refinance, so we have access to programs that with B+ credit will allow up to $50k to get your home repaired, maintained & ready to sell for max price with the funds being reimbursed/paid from closing proceeds.

Particularly for clients that are older, often retired, perhaps widowed or no family in the immediate area, the idea of getting their home de-cluttered, fixed up and ready to sell is just overwhelming. Dealing with 5, 10, possibly 15 different venders/trades people to repair plumbing, roof leaks, touch up paint, electrical, change light fixtures, pressure wash, clean gutters, etc is just daunting.

Each trade/vender will usually have a minimum charge to come out, often $500-1000, so when you add them all up, it can become costly and very time inefficient as it takes a while to get all the various bids, interview people, schedule them all in the proper order, then meet them one by one on different days, what a mess!

In contrast, we get a combined but itemized bid to handle all of the related items. We then have a project manager that runs all the other crews/individuals so you don’t have to be home, you can already have moved even. These are crews both external & internal that we use every week, all year long on various projects, so they are a known quantity, they are all insured and have been doing their trade/service for a long time. Most importantly, our cost is usually 50-70% of doing it with individual trades/service people, saving you not just time and hassle, but a good bit of money.

Once you’ve moved out, we remove nails from walls, do final paint touch-up, remaining stuff hauled off and have your home cleaned, ready to be listed & shown. Just to give you a reference point, on a 2,000sf house, most of our clients’ existing maid services bid $1,000-1,500 to clean the whole house, last one our cleaning people did was $400, so in each step of the process, we are working to make your experience smooth, painless, quick and affordable!

Again, if you or someone you know is looking to sell you home in the next 6-24 months, please contact us to schedule for one of our Prep-to-sell lady consultants to come meet with you, explain all the necessary steps in the process, etc, then assuming you like what you’ve heard, one of our Prep-to-sell estimators can come out to put together the cost on the various options you went over with your consultant so you can see the numbers on paper.

Either way, this service is “on us”, we just want to help and there are no obligations to use us at all, but we know you’ll be blessed by gathering your options and having them explained so you can figure out your own timeline and what’s best for you as home owner & investor!

Borrow our Subs

Over the past 25 years of building and remodeling homes, we’ve realized that many of our clients have unique ideas about how they want to get their projects done or built. Sometimes they don’t need a general contractor to run their job.

If this is because they only need one or two things done, maybe just some plumbing fixtures changed out, some flooring installed or some new gutters put up? Then, since you don’t need us to help manage multiple crews/tasks, we are glad to share our sub-contractor for that trade, so you can deal with them directly and save some money.

If this is for a more involved job that does require multiple trades, then perhaps you have some experience in construction from earlier in life or are a DIY home owner looking to start getting into home flipping or doing your own project? If that’s the case, again, we’re glad to help to that level. How? Well, if you are reasonably experienced, we can also let you use our subcontractors, but since it’s not just one trade, i.e. gutter guys, roofers, painter, etc then we mark them up 1/2 the amount we would if we ran the job. Now this is a pretty significant savings as you’re now not paying any mark-up on material, nor for any of our project management time, just 1/2 the normal mark-up on the sub-contractor crew(s).

To put this in perspective, new construction framing typically runs $6-9/sf under roof. Our framers typically run $3-5/sf, $3 if truss construction, $4-5 for stick built depending how complicated. If we build your custom home, we charge cost + 20%, if we remodel your home, we charge cost+ 40%. So if you’re building a new home and use our sub but run your own job, pull your own permit, then you would pay us 10%, so $3.30 to $5.50/sf depending type & complexity of the framing. Normally you would pay $6-9/sf for the same. Would you rather use our known sub crews that have been framing for 10-30 years and pay that lower amount, saving all the time of hunting for framers & getting bids, or would you rather use our framers? Yeah, if people know about our offer, they pretty much take us up on it 😉

We call this program “Borrow our Subs” and it includes pretty much every trade for home remodeling or building a custom home.

As a bonus, we’ll also give you our preferred material suppliers and access to our builder’s discount should they not be willing to give you your own account.

To put this in perspective, we save 2-20% at Home Depot on our pro account, 2% lumber, 5% doors, 10% plumbing/light fixtures, 20% on paint. Now there are some things that if you buy them from Home Depot properly, in quantity and with our discount it’s much less than builder suppliers, drywall would be a good example. Our drywall hanger crews carry the boards in from the driveway for $1/board, instead of having commercial drywall suppliers hoist it in through a removed window or on carts. We save about 20% on our drywall cost by doing it this way…

Same time, we never, I mean never buy trim from Home Depot. Depot is almost $1/linear foot for quarter round molding that installs where the flooring meets the base boards, Floor & Decor is 70-85 cents/lf, our supplier is 30-35 cents/lf, 1/3 of Depot and less than 1/2 of F&D.

So between having access to our sub-contractors and our suppliers with discount, we set you up as your own general contractor or DIY home owner/investor to minimize cost & hassle, while maximizing success & profit.

Should you end up needing some structural work done, including engineering or come across a project that’s bigger than you are comfortable running, then we would be glad to get you a bid as “general contractor”. One time this is very common is with investment properties, as it’s legal for you to pull your own permit once every two years for residential work so long as you are the owner and it’s your primary residence, but if it’s a rental property or property you don’t live in, i.e. “investment”, then you’ll need someone like us to pull the permit and run that project.

For many, this will allow you to have more control over your project, while saving some added money. Either way, this is a lot of info to digest, but we’re glad to take some time to explain it and answer any questions you may have, so call us to find out more 🙂

Coach to Build

We used to partner with clients more often to help them pull their own permit, we had banks that would write their construction loan in their name, put the money in their account and let them pull the permit to build their own home. Then when framing materials doubled over night, then tripled over the next few months in 2021, many of those “self build” home owners ended up unable to finish building their new homes. Framing material went from $60k to $120k to $180k in months. I knew a self-builder building a $2m house, framing material is usually about 10% of the total budget, so he went from $200k to $600k, but was able to sell some stuff or use lines of credit to get completed.

Most full time speculative builders stopped building for a year as the framing material was so expensive, they couldn’t make any profit when selling, so they just stopped. Eventually this allowed framing prices to go down and people got back into the market and started building again. Home prices also went up 10-20% for a few years and helped make them profitable to build, but for the DIY Self-builders 2-3 years later was too late, they were in default and the banks ended up taking back those homes and selling them to other builders at a discount to finish.

Meanwhile, the local community banks that were writing those “self build” loans started to stop as they had all these deals that were stuck or a mess, home owners couldn’t come up with the needed added funds, the banks couldn’t give more as the appraised values hadn’t gone up enough yet, the loans were 1 year interest only, so there wasn’t much added time to figure it out. In Spring of 2024, the last local community bank we knew of with this program was told by the regulators they had to stop, that was United Community Bank here in North Georgia.

Now some of these banks had towards the end started to require that a licensed builder was acting as coach or co-manager, but that option only lasted at a couple banks for a few years, it is also long gone.

So now, if you are building with cash or lines of credit, not bank construction loan, it’s your primary residence, you can pull your own permit and build your own home. The plumber, hvac & electrician pull their permits underneath yours just as they would under our permit. You can even do your own plumbing, hvac & electrical work by signing an additional affidavit, but the municipalities (Counties, Cities, etc) have now started quizzing and checking that it’s really you doing the work, not an unlicensed sub or friend.

If you are in a position to act as your own GC, we offer 1/2 off our normal build fee to co-build or coach you, which also includes us doing your material take offs (do not trust the subs to do these, they over order material by at least 10-20%), scheduling and using our seasoned subcontractors, who happen to work behind each other all the time, so they know how to leave properly for the next trade. Our subs are way below any price a non-builder or even new builder could ever find, they took us decades to find and when our subs bid for home owners or new builders, I can tell you definitively, they bid based on what they can get, not what they charge us or their long-term repeat builders.

Of course you can also ask us questions, send photos of anything you are concerned about, have us help straighten out any messes made with the subs by over or under communicating with them, etc. but we will not be coming to the job site more than once per month on average as the whole idea of our discount is to minimize our hours driving and in the field, but instead leverage us helping you build from our office, i.e. air traffic tower so you can save 1/2 the fee, while we save 1/2 the time 😉

Primarily we tend to be in the field the most during grading/clearing and foundation work, possibly 2-3 times per month each of the first 2 months, then very little after that unless something can’t be looked at or reviewed via photos, video, face time, etc. If more time is needed on site, we’ll make it happen but at an hourly rate if it’s beyond once/month.

Lastly, if you build two homes under permit in two years, you can qualify to take the GC Residential Basic Builder’s exam and get your own license, so should you co-build one house with us, then have a friend that wants a home build, we can price it out for them at our normal full fee, but if you would like to superintend or field manage their build, I will split the fee with you 50/50, similar to you building your own home and only paying us 1/2 the fee, but once that 2nd home is build, you can sit for your own license and be independent after that, building as you see fit 🙂

This can also apply to whole house remodels, and the remodel under permit combined with a 2nd sizable remodel or new home build within 2 years will also qualify you to take the builder’s exam. So if you are looking to remodel and/or “flip” (remodel & then sell) your existing residence, this program can work for you too, assuming you are doing it with cash, lines of credit, credit cards, etc. Since a large remodel may only be $50-100k vs a significantly larger home builder budget, the odds of being able to carry the project with cash, lines of credit or credit cards is much more likely and smaller in scope, so perhaps a good type of project to start if you want to get your builder license. Then you could use your profit from that venture to buy a lot and build your own home 2nd, thus qualifying to take the builder’s exam. Just a thought…

Co-develop your land

If you own some land, typically 2-20 acres, we would love to talk with you about your options and what you could do to improve it’s value and sell it for maximum price!

We’ve had the chance to do multiple 3-15 lot mini or rural sub-divisions or lot splits over the years. In our own case, we often sold those lots then to customers that wanted to custom build their home one them, which we then did for them. Some of them we built “spec” homes, i.e. speculative home, meaning we borrowed the money, built them ourselves or with capital partners, then sold them for a profit. Similar to a larger scale sub-division, but just smaller, quainter, larger lots sizes, gated enclaves and such…

Most builders buy pre-developed lots in sub-divisions, then build spec houses on them, that’s most typical, however, because we’ve developed and split or own lots, along with building for many private clients on larger pieces of land off the road, we have much more land development experience and are much better prepared to build custom homes on large tracts of land than a typical sub-division builder.

If you owner 2-20 acres of land that you are considering selling, you may want to first explore re-zoning, sub-dividing or otherwise developing said land yourself with our assistance or partnership. Most home owners wouldn’t consider this, and understandably, there is a lot to it and quite a bit of expense in surveying, engineering, permits, drawings, etc that would make it a big daunting to a novice.

Of course no one would work on such a project, invest the necessary funds and time, partner with someone like us unless it was profitable. Profitable enough to justify said investments & time. So let’s say that we could invest $50k to increase the value of your land from $500k to 1m, but it would take 1-2 years including selling off the lots created. After the $50k expenses, you are left with $450k more profit, but 1/3 of that went to us for handling it all, so you turned $500k into $800k over 1-2 years. That would be worth doing for most clients. Of course not all land has that much potential to increase, some has less, some more, but the purpose of us sharing about this program is to just get on your radar as land/property owner and see if it’s worth having a discussion about such an option?

If so, please do reach out to us, we would love to speak in person, swap documents/info, do some “desktop” pre-research to see if there look to be viable options? If so, we would love to meet in person at the property, walk it, dig deeper and get real about whether there is a win-win scenario to be had. If not, no harm no foul, you can’t hit the ball if you’re not swinging at the ball, so call us today if you have 2-20 acres, possibly more and let’s see what options there are to profit together!