Home builders that advertise HEAVILY

Factual Questions
1

Here in San Diego (and maybe it works this way in the rest of the country) I hear tons of radio ads and see tons of print ads advertising homes built by Kaufman and Broad, McMillan, Shea Homes, Pardee Homes, etc. (it’s scary I actually remember the ads, but they are EVERYWHERE).

My question is, why do home builders waste tens of thousands of dollars advertising? The housing market here is so hot (even with interest rates going up) that total dumps get sold within a week. Also, when I went to buy my house a year ago, I looked at house appearance, features, the general area of town, local taxes, commute to work, etc. But beyond my realtor assuring me that the builder was ‘reputable’, I have no idea who built my house, nor do I care. In fact, who in their right mind says “Well my main requirement in buying a house is that it was built by Shea Homes!”. Beyond simply knowing that the builder has a good reputation in the home building industry, why bother advertising direct to consumers? What am I missing here?

2

For one thing, there can be a dramatic difference in the quality of work between one builder and another. You would be wise, if you were in the market for a new home, to research the background of the builder.

Most builders construct entire communities, so by eliminating one or two, you reduce the number of homes you have to see.

You do have a choice, and the builders know it. With a hot real estate markets, lots of new homes are being sold. Contractors will do whatever they can to make sure most of the new homes being bought are theirs, hence, they advertise. Remember the old rule of marketing: when business is bad, advertise; when business is good, advertise even more.

3
      • Because many homebuilders aren’t so reputable. They hope you’ll remember their names and at least check into them.
  • Much of the time, stuff happens that isn’t so much as illegal or dangerous as wrong: an aunt had a house built that was supposed to have an unfinished basement with a 9’6" ceiling. The company that was to dig and pour the foundation (a company contracted by the builder) made a mistake and dug the hole three feet too deep. When that happens, you can’t just pour three feet of dirt back in, because it is no longer solid and the foundation has to sit on solid, undisturbed dirt - so the house has an extra-airy basement. - Auntie later noticed that when the circuit-breaker box (located in the basement) was being installed, the electricians were putting it eight feet off the floor: when they measured the conduit they had measured the descent from the cieling, not the distance from the floor, and apparently didn’t see anything odd about needing a ladder to do it. She also noticed the light switches had already been installed the same way: about seven feet off the floor. The stuff did eventually get corrected, but it was something of a bother.
  • And some aren’t reputable at all: any St Louis dopers might remember more here, but a few years back, two brothers that ran one of the largest residential contractor/developer companies in St Louis fled to S. America with several million dollars of other people’s money (people who expected to get houses for that money, but didn’t). Chile? Argentina? IIRC, one brother got real sick and came back to the US for medical treatment; the other is still down there, with what’s left of the money. - MC
4

Yarster, you must just live in a super-competitive housing market. Here in the Midwest, the home builders pretty much limit themselves to the Sunday paper, with humongous Real Estate inserts.

However, I live downstate–they may do things differently in the Windy City.

P.S. My parents bought their retirement home from a local “reputable” builder, and it has given them nothing but problems. Still, there is some consolation from the fact that they discovered that he’s driving lots of other people in the area crazy, too–he’s a local boy that folks just put up with. “Oh, that’s just Steve, his houses are always like that.”

Right now he’s in the process of putting a subdivision on the obvious flood plain of a little creek. He’s dealt with the problem by installing a huge billboard that says, “THESE LOTS ARE 50 FEET ABOVE THE 100 YEAR FLOOD MARK ACCORDING TO THE ILLINOIS ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS”.

So far he hasn’t sold a single lot. There’s a limit, after all.

5
      • I don’t know quite where you are, but in the St Louis area the levies were rebuilt with sand. When the levies broke, all the dirt & silt washed over the farm fields and was still mud when rebuilding started, so they couldn’t use graders to scrape it up and put it back — so they used sand. - MC