The News:ĭave Erickson, founding president and ceo of Grand Oak Builders, announced that Atlanta-based Grand Oak Builders acquired Overland Park, Kan.-based Lambie Custom Homes, Inc., a 44 year home builder. Army, the time is right now to start the wheels turning for a new normal next chapter.
Like many a successful, cycle-proven homebuilding entrepreneur before him Dave Erickson decided that, while the time was right in 2019 to sell the business he'd built – Grayhawk Homes, out of Columbus, GA to American Southern Homes – up from scratch, fresh out of the U.S. start to spool up into an almost involuntary muscle memory of that original calling. They start-up, build-up, and turn over the assets when housing economic cycles reward the timing and valuation of a transaction.Īnd then, as the natural history of a builder plays out – around the same time non-compete clauses run their course – the juices, the fire in the belly of a homebuilder, the resolve to get back in the game. Too, they often evolve in serialized incarnations. The natural history of this rather rare species of human business individual – whose livelihood strives toward making new homes and neighborhoods for people – tends to contrast sharply with many other career paths.īuilders, in nature, character, and evolution, often behave atypically.Īnd we don't often enough recognize that as a good thing.Įntrepreneurs, whether they work within the framework of residential construction's multi-regional Fortune 100 enterprises or as founder-principals of their own homebuilding operations, are at the heart of homebuilding, in its suburbs, its urban cores, and its rural backwaters. In a sweeping, swooping, turbulent business environment, vibrating around inflationary forces, interest rate increase impacts, powerful demand triggers, and ongoing supply-related information vacuums – a context that would seemingly stack heavy odds in favor of large enterprises over nimble, counterpunching local subdivision builders – the phenomenon crystallized. This morning it dawned on us, fully formed. An astonishing phenomenon has gnawed at us for years.