When you are building a custom home, you want to work with the best custom home builder. An experienced builder, such as an NAHB Builder 20 Club member, can save you time, money and headaches. Most important of all, an experienced builder makes building a custom home a great experience. Using a builder with proven systems and processes puts you in good hands.
Tim Hensley and the Hensley Custom Building Group are proud members of the Builder 20 Club called the Premier Builders Group. The group is part of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). Tim and his fellow builders meet annually to share ideas and solutions. For Tim, it’s a way to get inspired, to learn best practices from others and bring them home to his clients.
So, when you choose a NAHB Builder 20 Club builder, you are getting a great custom home builder–in fact one of the best–and a network of resources for answers and ideas.
Here are a few photos from the most recent Premier Builders Group meeting in Travelers Rest, South Carolina.
Learn more about the benefits of working with Builder 20 Club member from this Custom Builder magazine article:
A Think Tank for Builders
The Premier Builder’s Group, one of 31 groups in the NAHB’s Builder 20 program, gathered in Washington, D.C., for an October networking meeting with builders from five other Builder 20 clubs and presented their best practices and processes for managing contract to warranty issues.
Builder 20 Club members laud their network as a deep resource for best practices, wisdom and camaraderie.
When Heather Dosch joined a Builder 20 Club during spring 2012, she and her husband, Kevin, were in the midst of transitioning their company, John F. Buchan Homes, from being a production and spec-home builder to constructing custom houses as well.
“There’s a whole different way that you need to communicate and different systems you need to adopt when you’re going from building a house the way we want to build it to accommodating all of the unique requests—crazy or otherwise—for clients,” says Dosch, who is the CEO of the Bellevue, Wash., builder. She took the reins of her parents’ business a couple of years before joining the Builder 20 Club and says that while Buchan Homes had some built-to-order experience, having offered production-home customers the flexibility to customize, she noticed that the build cycle for custom projects was taking longer than expected. So she presented her dilemma to fellow builders at a club meeting, and their feedback convinced her to adopt a new policy that has since shaved 30 days off Buchan Homes’ build cycle.
Dosch says, “One of the things that came out of that discussion [with Builder 20 members] was, ‘Heather, you’re allowing the clients to start construction when they may only have a handful of their selections made. You need to get them to, if not 100 percent, at least 70 percent complete on the selections when construction starts.’ Just hearing that the majority of the group requires almost all the selections to be done before construction starts was one of those eureka moments for me.”
The Learning Network
Like Dosch, Ed Mahoney is a member of the Premier Builders Group—a 20 Club comprised of 17 custom home builders from Vancouver to Texas and Philadelphia to Washington state. They meet twice a year, usually in one member’s home market, for two or three days of sharing systems, processes, and other wisdom about business management topics. The program is shepherded by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), which provides trained facilitators for meetings, among other services.
Read the full article “A Think Tank for Builders” by Mike Beirne as it originally appeared in Custom Builder.
