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by: Kenneth Johnson
Topics include: cost breakdown sheet, spec home building, carpenter sub, building spec homes, lumber list, job notebook, spec building, architectural approval, framing sub, larger builders, spec builders, title insurance costs, sales overhead, listing catalog, small builders, volume builder, finish hardware, lineal feet, varnish work, production overhead, garage entry, rough carpentry, selling brokers, lot purchase, percent gross profit
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Book Description:
The goal of this book is to address each of the business management concerns involved in the successful production and sale of a "spec" home.
Reviews:
Practical Business Advice: If you're looking for practical information about spec home building and marketing presented in a straight-forward way, this book is a great resource. The book's strength lies in its strong focus on financial issues including evaluating the profit potential of projects in advance, dealing with subcontractors, marketing spec homes, designing for profitability, and many other topics. The author stays on topic and provides plenty of discussion. It's hard to imagine anyone in this field who would not benefit from this wide-ranging catalogue of important topics and knowledgeable commentary by someone who has clearly been there and done that.
Extremely helpful for experienced or novice builders: This book occupies a much-needed and underserved niche: it offers professional advice from an experienced spec builder on how to succeed in this challenging and enjoyable field. As a builder with over 20 years of experience in contract building for clients, we really wanted to take our business to the next level of creativity and profitability by moving into spec building. We were worried, however, that we would make some terrible blunder in site selection, financing, or project design. This book offers detailed and methodical information on every aspect of the spec building process. We are very grateful to Mr. Johnson for sharing his years of accumulated wisdom and experience with us.
Mostly Excellent. This book is well written, straight-forward, professional, and detailed. It needs updating, but has been a tremendous resource and is an absolute requirement for anyone entering this business. However! This book includes a very small section on "dowsing" as a valid technique to determine if a land parcel has a water source, allowing it to be purchased for development. Dowsing is where the cartoon character takes a Y-shaped stick to find gold or water. All forms of dowsing have been found to be complete pseudoscientific nonsense--the realm of con-men and self-deceiving psychology. Including it in the book is not only a failure of the publisher to review the scientific validity of the book's information, but could cause the readers significant financial loss. This section undermines the validity of an otherwise accurate book focused strongly on realism and numbers.