posted 10 years ago
Need some more info? When you say you have some jobs lined up as a trades person or GC? What do you enjoy, hands on, management, manufacturing, sales, design, building homes, remodels, etc? Knowing this alone can help you decide or to set your business up to protect yourself legally and your insurance, along with where and how to market and focus your skill set and training.
My son is a great salesman, he's college age, I'm not. He started working for another company selling roof jobs now he has his own GC company with lots of sales, yes word of mouth by customer satisfaction primarily. Now that we are grown to a point we use our website to point large commercial investors to it so we are working on it now. We are starting to look at lots in subdivisions with restrictive covenants that is making it very difficult for other than cookie cutter junk homes, and there is no where else to go outside of way out in rural and the sales will be risky out there. So we are trying to "fit in". I think our renovation and restoration will do as good on a small scale, until we start taking 15% profit on million dollar homes but that's a long ways away. Every time I go look at what is on the market I am just amazed at what builders are making off junk! So to play the game I have to get third party testing like Energy Star "Indoor Air Plus" and HERs rating so the banks will qualify our builds under "Energy Efficient Mortgages" (EEM) which allows any cost to save energy like in the envelope to be consumed in the buyers loan. They have a stranglehold on the market making it difficult for a natural builder to compete but I think I can get them on the Indoor Air Plus since most conventional homes will fail miserable nor can they get the Home Energy Rating a natural build gets by default. Glad we don't have an energy code or standards yet, or they twist that to manufactured products too. The banks are interesting too, some only approve certain builders and they all build exactly the same way....I don't think they can really tell a good one from a bad one, they come inspect them before they make a payment too. I don't see the point that's why we have framing inspection....Just to give you an idea of what you get into when you try and build natural homes in a American subdivision where the "Architectural Control Committee" or developer makes it difficult.
I do not remember seeing alot of available lots to build on in the Portland area when I was up there a couple years ago. Some challenging hills, trees, moisture fungi restoration I bet.
Paramount Natural Design-Build Architect, Engineering Services, GC, LLC.