Building Spec Homes Profitably: The Professional's Guide

by Kenneth V. Johnson

Professional guidance from a veteran spec home builder... A complete system to reduce risk and ensure profits in spec home building, no matter what the economic climate. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0876293577
• ISBN13: 9780876293577
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: R.S. Means Company
• Length: 200 Pages
• Weight: 1.51 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 8.5" x 10.9"

Customer 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.

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.

Excellent

Great Book! Highly recommended. Johnson gives practical straight forward advice garnered from years of experience.

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.