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The prolific homebuilding pace at Neal Communities sometimes obscures the fact that the firm has had major successes in launching related businesses.
Several years ago it was a mortgage entity, then a custom pool building company. Others include one unit for high-end homes and one for interior design. The secondary business lines accomplish two goals for the company, a regional homebuilding leader that recently surpassed 10,000 homes: It makes things easier for customers and facilitates better internal quality control.
The latest Neal Communities' foray into new business lines is brokering homeowners insurance. It comes in the form of Fiducia Insurance, a joint venture partnership with Tampa-based Lykes Insurance. An arm of a prominent Tampa business family, Lykes Insurance has made a concentrated effort to grow its commercial and personal customer base on the Gulf Coast in the past three years.
The idea is for Fiducia — Italian for trust and confidence — to provide homeowners insurance consulting for both Neal Communities clients and build a book of business outside the homebuilder. Access to a fresh pot of customers like that is unusual in homeowners insurance, a main reason executives are excited about the venture.
“We are not familiar with anything else like this in the United States,” says Tampa-based Lykes executive Fritz Archerd, who helped put together the partnership last year. “It has been a great combination from the get-go. Everyone has been very happy with it.”
Neal Communities and Lykes each own 50% of Fiducia Insurance. The firms split the startup costs and overhead, which includes the salary of Fiducia's one full-time sales employee, Beth Joseph, who has been in insurance for 14 years. The two firms, adds Archerd, also split revenues 50-50. “This is a true business deal,” Archerd tells Coffee Talk, “not a referral service.”
The joint venture idea stems from a lunch meeting Archerd had with Neal Communities President Michael Storey two years ago. The pair, friends in the area homebuilding community, chatted about ways to form a partnership.
Joseph works from an office in Neal Communities' Lakewood Ranch headquarters. She speaks regularly there with the Neal sales team, a built-in relationship that would take months, maybe years, to develop through networking. Joseph says that proximity, and the ability to work with clients from the earliest stages of the new home buying process, is “unlike anything I've ever done before.”
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