Improving Housing Market and My New Office

Occasionally I get asked about my job and how new home sales are going these days. Finally, after seven long years, the answer is MUCH BETTER. Right now, there are five homes I've recently sold under construction all across Sussex County - Delmar, Laurel, Seaford, Bridgeville and Greenwood. There are three other homes sold already complete in Millsboro and Georgetown, Del. and Hebron, Md. We're covering the southern Delaware map here!

Photos of my first three home sales back on Delmarva

My first sale with new employer - custom Foursquare style home in Millsboro, DE

Custom designed ranch home that was recently completed in Hebron, MD.
Home pictured below is a cape cod style home I sold in Georgetown, DE.

 

Sure, I'd still like to see more sales but I did have a very busy weekend at the model home with many great prospective buyers walking in the door. It is such a relief to not feel like I have to get down on bended knee and plead for someone, anyone to buy a home. Maybe that's a little dramatic, but my career in new home sales and marketing has been one constant roller coaster ride, many times compounding the craziness that has been our life much of the past six years.

Indeed, if you have any pulse on real estate, you know that the housing market did improve in 2013 for the first time since about 2006 or 2007 in most U.S. areas. Homes are selling faster, supply is down, demand is up. The law of economics is proving itself true once again. You can ask my sister too, she had an amazing 2013 selling general real estate in Vermont & New York and is slammed at the start of 2014. For now, I intend to stick around in the industry and benefit from the improving market...hopefully big time :)

My selling environment is vastly different now than it was a year ago. Last year I was working for a Fortune 500 company who is one of the top five new home builders in the country, and the only public builder who remained profitable during the economic downturn. I had great managers and fabulous co-workers who always challenged me to excel. Each day I drove 45 minutes to a community on the east side of Richmond, Va., where my main focus was helping buyers get qualified to buy a new home. I'd had a tough start in Richmond when we first moved there, but 2013 was off to a good start.

And then March 8 happened, and things had to change.  A series of miraculous events occurred and less than two months later, I had a new job in Delaware and we were moving.

Now, I work for a small custom home builder that builds about 30 homes a year. Most of these homes are not in a community, as I was accustomed to selling, but they are built on the customer's land all over Sussex County and into Kent and the surrounding Maryland counties. It is a vastly different approach to home sales, in some ways better and others not so much. It offers me a better schedule, a 5 minute commute, salary plus commission, and the chance to lead marketing efforts. As one of just eight people in the entire company, not the roughly 3,000 at my previous employer, I do have direct involvement in the growth and many major company decisions.

At present, our biggest project is a new IDEA HOME, which is essentially both a new Model Home on the main level and a state-of-the-art Design Studio on the lower level. In total, it's over 5,000 s.f. and is situated on a major intersection (well it's really THE only big intersection) in my hometown of Greenwood. It's been a very time consuming project for all of us, but we hope the pay off is big as we intend to entice much of the beach traffic passing through from Maryland to Delaware's low tax shores. 

In truth, the whole project is kind of surreal for me. You see this new home, which will be my full-time office, sits exactly one block away from the street I grew up on. Every day when I walk into to work, I'll be just a couple hundred yards from the home where I lived for 15 years of my childhood. The home where my sister and I let our imaginations run wild in the backyard, where we welcomed home both my little brothers, where my mom had a daycare, where my friends came for sleepovers and we laughed until we peed ourselves, and where I first dreamed of life outside of Delaware. It was a simple little home that holds many memories, but never once in my childhood dreams did I think I'd be part of building an impressive new home and business on a nearby corner.

You have to understand, this is both wonderful and horrible for me. I am proud to be part of a growing company with strong moral values that is changing the face of my little hometown, but at the same time, it was never part of my dreams to be living a "simple" life in Greenwood, Delaware. Please no one take offense, this was my father's hometown and his father before him, but I wanted to go out and explore! And you know I did. My little family left Delaware for three long and somehow short years, only to return when life demanded it.

But it is good for us and for our children. And I see the Lord's hand and blessing in the work of my God-honoring employer, and I am thankful to be a part of His blessing.

As I watch this new Idea Home continue to take shape, I am excited for what it may mean for all of us and I trust that He has a perfect master plan in all of this.

And that means I did opt to politely decline when my former employer called last week to see if I was ready to come back and sell for them in Delaware.