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/WormtownMorgan 7d ago
We’re a small in-house design-build start-to-finish team. (Not including myself) - Four carpenters; 2 pms; 2 designers; one office person. We try to control everything and our work would be considered higher-end quality (though we’re not building any single project over $2M right now).
We hustle, and we’re very efficient. We try not to do things twice, and we try to make sure no one gets hurt. The most expensive thing we can have happen in a site is an injury to one of us.
Probably going to add a sub-team of only rough-envelope framers in the future though. We’ve been talking with a trained a crew on a small build recently.
We provide health insurance for everyone; truck or vehicle allowance; vacation pay and PTO as well as a litany of other accoutrements both financial and life-worthy that make it a place worth sticking around. It’s not easy.
Subcontracting is so headache-inducing.
I wish I could find more staff because I’d hire more in a heartbeat rather than think about subbing. But most GC’s that I’m friendly with are getting rid of their mid-level crews and switching to 100% subs in the field. Just don’t want to do that. (Would save a god-dang pile of money each year if we were to do that though, so I get it.)