What A Day, What A Week, What A Life!
I am blessed to be alive in a time where (once we get do get through this home market downturn), I will have a sense of perspective that I would never have had if the road never got so bumpy. When a home builder, such as Miracle Home Builder’s , who is used to seeing several new home sales a week , can go several weeks without a single prospect, …what a week! When we get used to getting so many sales phone calls on any given day that we need to literally pick and choose who to call first, then turns to not getting more than a call or two a day,…what a day! And , when my life, which ( business speaking) was revolving around and was so connected to zooming to the top of the Home Building “heap”, suddenly finds the flurry of mind-numbing decisions and frantic paced interaction with a whole building full of a giant workforce, turn into some empty desks and a mostly blank appointment calender, a fast-forward life is seemingly put into slow-motion and pause, …what a life!
The foxhole mentality (you know, the one that finds God most needed when the artillery shells are blasting closest) , the mentality that you had only seen in other ’s lives, comes very close to my own home. Each week that passes, makes this new slower pace seem more normal and acceptable, making that faster pace seem like it may have been just a dream. Existing in this “new” housing market , if nothing else has given a 20/20 perspective to just how good we , as home builders, really had it. If only we could hold on to this perspective, that would be a very good thing.
Unfortunately, I know that once this home sales roller-coaster starts rolling upward again(all roller coasters do, you know) I will likely see these past few down-market years as a distant memory, an awakinging to re-start that frantic pace once again. As much as I want to keenly remember the lessons of frugality that this tough home season has taught, I know that humans speak of learning from history but few really do. Look at 911 for example. Look at the death of a loved one. No, we never forget the pain or history, but as time passes, the pain does not sting as acutely as living in the day.
Tonight, moments before this posting, one of my sales folks nexteled me to say that he signed some very nice clients to building a new home. I was naturally happy, both for us and the client(really, I do still get a legitimate high out of seeing other’s happy, and I wanted to share and hear about those folk’s smiling moment). Yesterday, I went to Office Max and purchased a big dry-erase board to put congratulation notes in our foyer for the 5 other homes or lots that were sold last week at Miracle. In the past several weeks, I have seen a dramatic positive up-turn in our home building business.
I spoke to a friendly competitor (I do have a few legitimate ones) today, and he expressed that he too , had signed a new home contract last night, and had a good January. When this whole down-turn came, I didn’t see it coming. Fortunately,by God’s grace, we were able to weather the storm better than some builders who had big investments in land and lots. If you don’t know, as a custom builder, we don’t own land. I saw many small builder’s buckle under the pressure and change professions. I saw several big name builders go out of business or come close to it. When this market starts to make it’s come-back, I don’t think I will see it coming any more than when it got here.
I look at the data on how many website visitors Miracle is getting each day and I see a spike since late December which has climbed higher, ever slightly higher, day by day, week by week. Does that mean we are now out of the down-market? I am feeling that old fast-paced excitement creeping back, at least for this week, and the last few. I dare not even guess whether this is a trend or a blip on the radar screen. For now, I am satisfied that we are doing quite fine but I sincerely doubt we are out of the woods just yet. Unemployment is still down but all the experts (boy, did I see a lot of those financial-type-experts at the recent International Home Builder’s show/Vegas) confidently say, the worst is behind us by several months. Home values are coming up. Wisconsin should see a 3.5% increase in home values this year alone. Wisconsin home sales should be up 25% from last year and 50% more next year over this year! Interest rates are still down to about as low as anyone has ever seen, and consumer spending confidence is up as well. Add that to another huge home buying/building “first” that the government is paying folks to buy/build homes, and we might just have the “perfect storm’ of home buying happening.
I do kind of feel like the car dealer who ALWAYS says NOW is the best time to buy a car. If he always says that, it seems dishonest. Even so, it can not be denied that this is far better than I would have imagined even several months ago. The biggest trouble folks have of needing to sell an existing home first ,before commintting to buying a new home we addressed a while back in our current promotional offering. But this blog is not meant to sound too “overtly” self-serving, so on to the bigger point.
The bigger point is that tonight I feel a giant smile inside me . Not because of tonight’s sale(that certainly helped…a bit), but because I feel that the days, and weeks, AND years, of this down-market has given me a re-born appreciation of just how special it truly is to build homes and make people happy in the process. That smile is for a deep satisfaction that, for me, I am in the right business. I have seen the best and the worst and would not trade a minute of the worst since it gives a deeper appreciation of the best. Good or bad, I am having a blast designing and creating some some of the most awesome new home ideas! ideas that I might not have thought of in a great market, only in a poor one. Thank God for the blessing of creativity.
On another note, if you want to see some pretty neat new photos of my Ellison Bay model ranch we had in Kenosha, our webmaster just added them to the photo gallery and to the Ellison Bay page. I am always interested in your feed-back.
Next time, I will give you some of those new neat ideas and try to stay a tad less preachy. Thanks for allowing me to share some reflections.
Blessings,
Tom Hignite
