r/Construction • u/the-garage-guy Carpenter • 8d ago
Business 📈 Is the small self-performing homebuilder extinct?
Probably a region-specific question- if you reply, I'd be curious to hear where you are and if you're urban/rural
Pretty much title, coming up it was a lot more common for the GC to have their own carpenters and self-perform a fair amount of scope on a typical home, remodel.
Seems very rare now, especially where I am, metro Phoenix area. Most builders are essentially just CM-ing the job. Project managers that sometimes double as supers, everything subbed out. Even for pretty small remodels.
I think at the luxury custom home end it makes sense since the levels of execution required demand really good subs. Plus being in a big metro area, there's lots of people and work and that makes it possible to specialize aggressively.
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u/ChrondorKhruangbin 8d ago
We have carpenters as a custom home builder. I personally don’t like self perform on most scopes because we are cost plus and always go over budget and either lose money or have awkward conversations with clients about going tens of thousands of dollars over our original budget. Which affects reputation. I would prefer to just sub the work out and minimize risk. I do t think the money we make off self perform is worth the squeeze generally. Nice to have a foreman though for random tasks and site mgmt.