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Former Orlando area homebuilder Nathan Cross, with a company that will do $4.5 million in sales this year, is a dream come true for a chamber of commerce official.
At least one in Sarasota.
Cross packed up and left the big central Florida city recently and moved his company, NWC Construction, to Sarasota. He wasn't wooed with incentives or subsidies or tax breaks for jobs. Cross, instead, tells Coffee Talk he's been to some builder industry events in the Sarasota-Manatee area, and he loves the people and relaxed vibe of the region. “And,” adds Cross, “it has been a builder's dream of mine to build a house on the gulf.”
NWC doesn't have any clients in town yet, says Cross. But he's confident his brand of remodeling and custom building for high-end-only clients will resonate in the market. The business model at NWC, says Cross, is full custom, not semi-custom where the cost of land deals are part of the equation in what gets built. Homes the firm builds are step-ups or last homes, not starters. “We are a hands-on operation,” says Cross. “We try to handle everything and make it all seamless.”
The flip side of that model is that to work, it has to stay low-volume, so all the hands can be focused on current projects. NWC typically handles no more than a dozen projects a year, and remodels must be at least $100,000. Some years NWC only builds one or two new homes, and the rest are remodels.
Not surprisingly, with a high-end approach like that, the recession was tough on the firm. There were two years, says Cross, where the firm didn't even surpass $1 million in annual sales.
But Cross, who has also built homes in California and Montana, says his passion comes from the customer satisfaction experience of delivering something as significant as a new high-end home or renovation. “When people are paying custom you need to give them custom,” says Cross. “We try to do something every time that a client won't find on Google.”
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