Adrian Willanger
Seattle home builder Martha Rose’s secret for making sure her newest hi-performance homes, City Cabins on Queen Anne Hill, are sold expeditiously can be traced back to her business survival strategies implemented over the last 3 1/2 years in a tough Seattle real estate market.
Some of the lessons she learned pre 2007-2008 still hold true today, delivering a quality built energy efficient home in the right location is still the goal. Pretty simple strategy while the market was hot and bidding wars on homes was normal, when the market cooled most builders need to ante-up if they wanted to stay in the game, this proved to be a major game changer driving many builders that were highly leveraged out of the spec home building market.
Rose during the last decade has been building some of the greenest homes in the Pacific Northwest understands the new rules of engagement. Starting with land costs, their last two projects had an extremely long development and platting process before construction could begin, the unexpected delays couldn’t have happened at a worst time. The local real estate market started to slow down in July of 2007 and has continued until spring of 2011, during this time Rose’s company, Martha Rose Construction, Inc., completed two communities, Queen City Eco-Village and Fish Singer Place, both were certified Green communities and faced discounted selling prices to make up for overpaying for land cost during boom times.
Lessons learned
To be successful with the City Cabins on Queen Anne Hill project Rose needed to purchase the land at a fair price and the building permit process needed to be expedited. The land was purchased without allot of competition from other spec-builders and the building permit was put through Seattle’s new green expedited building process taking less than ½ the time of normal permitting.
When the home building market was hot, 2004-2007, Rose was delivering more than the industry standards in their new homes. Choosing to build to the highest level of the Built Green program, Rose has continued building hi-performance, hi-technology homes but this time paying closer attention to the right location, right amenities, and the right layout. Abandoning the old adage of “if you build it they will come” and instead building with a market and price point focus.
City Cabins are now in the framing stage and are scheduled for November 2011 completions, for more information contact Adrian Willanger 206 909-7536.
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