Tom's Seminar Presentation: The Greater Charlotte Home and Landscape Show

Homeshow seminar ppt

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How to Avoid a Remodeling Nightmare: Choosing the Right General Contrator

HILARIOUS video! Tom will be speaking this weekend at one of the Greater Charlotte Home and Landscape Show's seminars (1/27-29). He will be opening up the seminar with this great clip that shows just how frustrating home remodeling can be. His seminar is entitled "Remodeling: What You Don't Know that Can Cost You" with a Q & A to follow.

Come see us at booth 438 and 440 at the Cabarrus Arena. 

How to Negotiate with Your Builder

By: Mike LaRuffa

Today, buyers have the luxury of being able to negotiate prices on homes. However, that strategy for negotiating changes when it comes to buying new from a builder rather than purchasing a re-sale. What is the biggest difference?  A re-sale seller is dealing with equity, the difference between what they paid for the home and what they can sell it for. A builder is dealing with materials, land, overhead, plus profit, for a builder, equals sales price.

The typical builder has the following expenses that all add up to 100%… land 18%, materials 50%, overhead expenses 15%, marketing 6%, permits, fees, warranty 3% and profit 8%. So, for a $200,000 house, the profit is only $16,000, not the mega bucks that most buyers think a builder makes. All the other costs are essentially fixed, meaning that the only place to negotiate for the builder is their profit line.

If you are looking at a home that has to be built, be mindful that the builder is less likely to discount the base price of the home since they are building it to current values. Instead of jumping the negotiating gun, ask about the incentives being offered that have been factored into the pricing. This is a good place to get the biggest bang for your buck.  Builders have a markup on options so giving them away has less impact to their bottom line than reducing the overall base price. Furthermore it helps preserve appraised values that reflect general value in the neighborhood and are important to you when you are getting your loan.

If you are looking at an existing inventory home, your negotiating strategy may be a bit different. First, determine when the house was completed. This is importance because builders factor in some interest (overhead expenses) to carry the house until sold. When that runs out, builders start to eat into their profit, so they may be more willing to negotiate. Dropping the bottom out of the price even on aged inventory is still not a preferred strategy due to degrading appraised values. You may want to suggest items that can be added to the home that you would purchase anyway after you move in…additional landscaping, appliances such as refrigerators or washer/dryer, decorator items such as shutters, blinds or special paint colors.

In closing, keep in mind that even though builders are eager to sell their homes; they also need to turn a profit. In your house hunting travels you may find that the builders that are still in business today have survived because they offer a good value at a fair price and they stand behind their product when you need them!

Charlotte, North Carolina Builder to Exhibit in an Upcoming Home and Landscape Show

We have doubled our exhibit space this year so that we can include an on-site design center!

Come see us at booth 438/440

Tom will be one of the featured seminar speakers at the show!

Schultz Custom Homes and Remodeling

Charlotte and Cabarrus County's Premier Custom Home Builder and Remodeler

Passive Homes... What are They?

ENVIRONMENTALLY friendly and conservation-minded building techniques have been around for decades. But only in recent years have standards, like the LEED certification from the U.S. Green Building Council, been developed for builders to follow.

Any additional energy needs can be generated by renewable sources. The institute says a passive house uses less than a quarter of the energy of a traditionally powered home.

There are about 32,000 passive houses worldwide, most of them in Austria and Germany, according to the institute, which is in Darmstadt, Germany. A number of buildings in New York City are being retrofitted as passive houses, including a multifamily development in Brooklyn at 96 St. Marks Avenue.

“Historically, green homes have fetched a premium,” said Brendan Aguayo, the developer of the St. Marks Avenue house, “and we feel ‘passive house’ is the most tangible type of green home.” Mr. Aguayo, who is working with a development partner, Martin Handler, added, “I’ve seen green homes fetch anywhere from a 5 to 30 percent premium.”

Mr. Aguayo said he did not yet know what the condominiums would cost; they are to be completed in January. Passive-house technology has added about 10 percent to the construction costs, he said.

More multifamily passive-house developments are on the way in New York, including new construction. Marshall Sohne, the president of Passiv House Xperimental, expects to break ground this month on an eight-unit condo building at 138 Sackett Street and a two-unit condo building at 107 Union Street, both in Brooklyn.

Mr. Sohne also intends to start construction next year on an eight-unit rental development nearby at 211-213 Columbia Street. Even though meeting the Passivhaus standards adds 10 to 15 percent to the cost of construction, the resulting low energy costs offset that, Mr. Sohne said.

“The tenant will figure that out,” he said, “and be willing to pay a higher rent for the savings they’ll get on energy and possibly for the improved quality of life they’ll experience. It’s a quieter apartment.”

Passive houses have not yet caught on in this country for a variety of reasons, said Ken Levenson, the architect who designed 96 St. Marks and the president of NY Passive House, an organization that advocates for passive housing and educates professionals in the techniques.

First, Mr. Levenson said, energy costs are much lower in America than in Europe. Also, most of the necessary components are made and sold in Europe and are not available here. Few architects or builders are trained in passive-house techniques, and most homeowners are unfamiliar with the concept.

Doug Mcdonald of Westport, Conn., who has been living in a retrofitted 3,800-square-foot passive house for a year, said it was strikingly different from a traditional home.

“You can feel it the moment the door opens,” Mr. Mcdonald said, explaining that those who have experienced passive houses recognize the feel of the air immediately. “We live in short sleeves and T-shirts year round,” he said. “My house sits at 73 to 74 degrees with relative humidity of about 45 to 50 percent all year round.”

That comfortable living environment is achieved without a furnace or central heating system, and Mr. Mcdonald has no energy bills. “I live in a zero carbon house,” he said. “I consume no gas, no oil, nothing.”

What he does have is a ventilation system, called an energy recovery ventilator, or E.R.V. Simply put, inside air is pulled through the ventilator, and its heat is transferred to membranes; it is cooled and exits as exhaust. Fresh outside air is at the same time being pulled in and is warmed by the membranes that trapped the exhaust heat. The principle is known as counterflow.

Triple-pane windows and 23-inch-thick walls create an airtight home in which Mr. Mcdonald’s family can barely hear any outside noise. And by filtering the air, the ventilator offers an asset unavailable through traditional technology: It keeps carbon dioxide levels low.

“When you wake up after sleeping in a passive house,” Mr. Mcdonald said, “you never have that sort of ‘ugh’ feeling. It’s incredible, because you wake up with the best sleep ever, because it’s incredibly oxygenated air.”

He said the ventilator reduced heating and cooling energy use by about 90 percent. The energy source for the other 10 percent could be a pot of boiling water or a clothes dryer. Or it could be sunlight, as passive houses should be oriented to maximize exposure to the sun’s rays.

Mr. Aguayo, who has installed energy recovery ventilators in the two-bedroom units at 96 St. Marks, acknowledged that with many of the components for passive houses not made in the United States, it costs more to create passive homes.

But that can be offset, he said: “I anticipate that our next retrofit will be considerably less in costs and time, now that we’ve worked out some of the kinks and come up with ways of doing a few things differently.”

The Passivhaus Institut is developing strategies to make the construction of passive houses more efficient and achievable in any climate, said Wolfgang Feist, the director of the institute.

Dr. Feist, who built an early passive house in Darmstadt, in 1991, says that the roots of passive structures go back as far as the 1930s.

One of the more recent areas of the Passivhaus Institut’s research may well be applicable to apartments in New York City. The institute has developed techniques for building cantilevered balconies without creating a “thermal bridge” to the outside that allows heat to escape, Dr. Feist said.

In Europe, the additional cost of building a passive structure is now about 4 percent, Dr. Feist said; in the United States, where overall building costs are lower, it is about 6 percent.

Passivhaus’s energy-use standards are more stringent than those of the U.S. Green Building Council, which issues certifications for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED; or the federal government’s Energy Star for Homes program, Mr. Levenson said.

An Energy Star home might save 15 to 20 percent energy on heating, while under LEED, “it would be considered to be superb if you had 30 percent,” he said.

“So the Passivhaus standards,” Mr. Levenson said, “where you’re talking up to 90 percent reduction in heating and cooling, really changes the whole paradigm.”

Visit our website to find more information on 'green building' practices!

Read to learn about our new client referral incentive program!

Harriet's Story: Kitchen Remodel by Schultz Custom Homes and Remodeling

Harriet Dalrymple’s kitchen provides a perfect example of a situation in which we changed and redefined a living space. 

Harriet had recently lost her husband before we met, and was understandably devastated by the loss. The two of them had always talked about remodeling their kitchen which they felt was an outdated and dysfunctional. After her husband died, Harriet decided that it was time for change. 

Upon our first meeting, we listened to Harriet. What we sensed was that there seemed to be a disconnect between her and the rest of her family when she cooks. This disconnect caused her frustration because cooking was special to her. 

As is common in older homes, Harriet’s kitchen was enclosed by four walls, separating the space from the rest of the home. Through active listening, we were able to isolate the root of Harriet’s frustrations. Simply stated, the current kitchen design was competing with her two passions in life: cooking and engaging with family.

Having a grasp on Harriet’s needs, we were able to redefine the space by removing the wall separating the kitchen from the living room. We added an island featuring a flat cook-top facing the living room with a pop-up hood vent. These changes now create an open floor-plan for Harriet to cook in and be with her family. Harriet felt satisfied because we listened and now her home works for her lifestyle.

REMEMBERING OUR DEAR FRIEND HARRIET DALRYMPLE

2/26/1950-4/8/2010

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"Designing for Our Human Scale"

An excerpt from Susan Susanka’s  

More Not So Big Solutions for Your Home

It’s obvious that houses are built for people, but what’s not always so apparent is that good residential architecture is designed for our human scale. What exactly does that mean, though? Human beings come in a variety of shapes and sizes, so in home design a “one size fits all” approach won’t work. But sadly, in residential construction today, with our love of bigness, houses have become vast in almost every direction. While these houses are impressive in a photograph, they are difficult to settle into because they’re simply too large. It may be desirable to design a public building so that its visitors feel insignificant and awed by its scale, but that’s hardly what we want for our own homes. Before you start building or adding on, it’s important to understand how to design spaces that will allow most people to feel comfortable. There are some standards and conventions with respect to the heights of things inside the house that can help us to tailor interior spaces to fit our bodies. The heights of windows, countertops, doors, and ceilings are all perfect examples of how we can customize our spaces to better fit our needs.

www.NC-Bldr.com

Touch, zoom, sell: How builders are using tablets to sell homes

Touch, zoom, sell: How builders are using tablets to sell homes

By: Pat Curry

By: Pat Curry

Builders embrace tablets 

Perhaps faster than any other technology in the past, the light bulb has come on for builders about the tablet. It’s more useful than a smart phone for one giant reason: the screen is so much bigger. You can blow up images and really see detail on the screen. It’s also incredibly practical for organizing and storing documents — no more carrying around floor plans, brochures, reams of sales reports, or 2-inch-thick homeowner’s manuals.

With its built-in Wi-Fi/3G/4G connection, it offers instant access to a world of research tools — for instance, Google maps for helping buyers see how long of a commute they would have from their new home to work and mortgage calculators with every floor plan that will adjust with every new selection added. Agents can take photos or videos of memory points in a plan from the model and immediately email them to the buyers, or post them on YouTube so buyers can share them with their family and friends.

Veteran new-home sales manager and consultant Dave Harding saw so much potential in the iPad for sales and marketing research, he built an entire company around it, iHave5Qs. The concept behind the company is to leverage the technology to do quick, focused consumer surveys — five questions that take less than 60 seconds to answer — and transmit the results to clients in real time. At a busy site, such as a grand opening or a new release, trained “capture agents” can talk to dozens of people an hour.

“We’ve gotten as many as 800 responses in a morning,” Harding says. In real-time, his team collects and reports information on who the potential buyers are, what they’re looking for, what they like about the plans and the community, and what they’re willing to spend money on.

Early iPad adopters 

WCI Communities is believed to be the first home builder to provide iPads to new customers.

“People are amazed we’re handing them an iPad,” says Connie Boyd, WCI’s vice president of communications and public relations. “There’s a buzz from it.”

“Once upon a time, we thought we had to build a model of every plan or you couldn’t sell it. Today, the economics don’t make sense. We compensated with this new technology.”  — Mike Sivage, Sivage Homes, Albuquerque, N.M.

One of the primary reasons behind giving customers an iPad, she says, is a “Send to a Friend” feature in the application. WCI wanted to make it easy for their customers to tell their friends and family about their new home. It’s already netted them referrals.

“We wanted people to think it was cool,” she says. “It’s not a wine bottle and a couple of glasses. They’ll use this for a long time.”

Other builders might not be handing out iPads to their customers (yet), but they are using tablets in a host of other ways. Darrell French, a community manager for Orlando, Fla.-based Adams Homes, borrowed an iPad from a friend who is a Realtor and instantly saw the potential.

“The uses are endless,” says French. “When you are walking a spec home with a prospect, you can immediately show them options to the current floor plan on your tablet. You can stand in front of the home and show them additional elevations or even landscape packages. You have everything at your fingertips.”

If a prospect likes the furniture in the model, the sales agent can take a picture and email it to them during the demonstration. If a buyer is from out of state and the builder has a question during construction, he can take a photo or video on the jobsite and email it. 

It’s particularly useful, French notes, because builders aren’t building as many spec houses and models now. “You have to rely on your floorplans,” he says. “You can’t say, ‘Let’s go look at our six specs.’”

Tablet technology is saving Sivage Homes tens of thousands of dollars usually spent on building model homes. The company, which is based in Albuquerque, N.M., but builds most of its homes in San Antonio, Texas, generally builds one to three models in each community.

“Once upon a time, we thought we had to build a model of every plan or you couldn’t sell it,” president Michael Sivage says. “Today, the economics don’t make sense. We compensated with this new technology. For us, we’re pretty much a pre-sale custom builder anyway. The example I use for our customers is that people buying million-dollar homes are custom designing those and they don’t have a clue what it will look like before it’s done. We have 3D elevations and renderings so they can have a good idea of what it will look like. The buyers seem comfortable with that.”

For every model home he doesn’t have to build, Sivage says he’s saving $20,000 to $70,000 on decorating alone, depending on the price point of the house. “If you’re saving $30,000 or $40,000, you can do a lot with your technology,” he notes.

Indeed. Sivage Homes has used the savings to outfit its model-home sales centers with Android tablets (much of the builder’s online collateral material uses Flash, which the iPad doesn’t support). The sales centers have been redesigned with a “Starbucks feel,” Sivage says, with casual seating and tables.

Tablet Report Contents • Exclusive Research • Tablets on the Jobsite • Designing with Tablets • Using Tablets to Market and Sell Homes • Product Review: Which Tablet is Right for You? • 99 Tablet Apps Made for Builders

Much of the information that used to hang on the walls is on the tablets now, along with information that never would have fit on the walls, including interior and exterior photo galleries of every community and interactive floor plans. “They can kick back and relax,” he says.

As buyers walk through the model, they carry a tablet with them instead of a static piece of paper. It’s loaded with all the floorplans. They can go to any plan, blow it up, pinch it, expand it, and look at the structural options.

“If the plan has an option for a dining room or a fourth bedroom, they can click on it and see what it would look like. It gives them a much more interactive experience.”

They made the switch, he says, because the company works hard to position itself as being innovative in its product design, paying attention to consumer tastes over time. They recently introduced floor plans with a “tech hub,” a centralized location for electronics. “Even with wireless Internet, you need a place for the printer,” Sivage explains.

With that emphasis in its product, the company felt it needed to reinforce that position with a comparable sales process. “We need to practice what we preach,” he says. “We’re also recognizing that the younger generation is much more visually oriented. They want to see lots of pretty pictures. There’s not enough wall space for that.”

What the tablet doesn’t replace, he says, is the essentials.
“You still need a good sales agent and good product,” he says. “Those are paramount.”

Tablets enable personalized presentations

Good sales agents are finding that they can connect with buyers in very personalized ways with tablets — and they want them in the worst way. At William Lyon Homes – California, regional VP of marketing Janet Kemmerer is dealing with iPad envy after a pilot project at one neighborhood where she gave each sales agent an iPad. In the old model, a prospect would come in, get a brochure, try to avoid having the sales agent go with them through the models, come back to the sales office, and look at the site on a topo table.

With the tools available on the iPad, it’s an easy sell to join the buyers on a demonstration of the house. “Most plans have a ‘wow’ factor,” Kemmerer notes. “We can take a quick video of the plan, pan through it, and email it to them right then.” Using an app called NearMe, the sales agent can identify nearby amenities, such as yoga studios, coffee shops, or doggie day care, that are important to individual buyers.

“I’m really excited,” she says. “I can help control a discussion. You don’t mind me coming along to the model with you because I’m providing a service. In a society with instant gratification, it’s a really great, interactive tool that can be personalized to each buyer.”

Beyond its uses in the sales office, the iPad has been useful to Kemmerer in other aspects of her job. Instead of carrying massive amounts of paper to sales meetings, she converts all her reports and site plans to PDFs and puts all of her reports on iBook. During meetings, she can take notes and send emails with action items before she leaves the room.

During a recent sales training in which the speaker mentioned three useful books, she bought all of them and downloaded them onto her iPad while she was sitting in the training.

“It’s so efficient,” says Kemmerer. “You have it all right there at your fingerprints.”

 Article retrieved from: http://www.housingzone.com/sales/touch-zoom-sell-how-builders-are-using-tablets-sell-homes

Almost as soon as the iPad was released, Tom recognized that the product could revolutionize the way he presents his renderings and plans to clients.  Tom knows that his iPad has been an invaluable tool in providing visual aids to assist clients in the decision making process.