Customer Reviews

Building Spec Homes Profitably: The Professional's Guide

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book occupies a much-needed and underserved niche: it offers professional advice from an experienced spec builder on how to succeed in this challenging and enjoyable field.

As a builder with over 20 years of experience in contract building for clients, we really wanted to take our business to the next level of creativity and profitability by moving into spec building. We were worried, however, that we would make some terrible blunder in site selection, financing, or project design. This book offers detailed and methodical information on every aspect of the spec building process. We are very grateful to Mr. Johnson for sharing his years of accumulated wisdom and experience with us.

If you're looking for practical information about spec home building and marketing presented in a straight-forward way, this book is a great resource. The book's strength lies in its strong focus on financial issues including evaluating the profit potential of projects in advance, dealing with subcontractors, marketing spec homes, designing for profitability, and many other topics. The author stays on topic and provides plenty of discussion. It's hard to imagine anyone in this field who would not benefit from this wide-ranging catalogue of important topics and knowledgeable commentary by someone who has clearly been there and done that.

The book was alittle dated. It made me feel that I was reading a book from the late 80's. The content was very good - I would just like to read a 2000's version

This book is well written, straight-forward, professional, and detailed. It needs updating, but has been a tremendous resource and is an absolute requirement for anyone entering this business. However! This book includes a very small section on "dowsing" as a valid technique to determine if a land parcel has a water source, allowing it to be purchased for development. Dowsing is where the cartoon character takes a Y-shaped stick to find gold or water. All forms of dowsing have been found to be complete pseudoscientific nonsense--the realm of con-men and self-deceiving psychology. Including it in the book is not only a failure of the publisher to review the scientific validity of the book's information, but could cause the readers significant financial loss. This section undermines the validity of an otherwise accurate book focused strongly on realism and numbers.

Aside from the poor writing style, the financial data is very out of date. A complete revision using more recent financial data is needed to make this book relevant. Also, there are no real regional references. What markets is the data relevant too? How would one adjust the methods to different regional markets? Overall a pretty light treatment.....

The book does offer some good information but that particular information is so basic and just plain common sense it wasn't much help.

The biggest problem I have with the book is how "dated" the information is. It makes it difficult to conceptualize the actual scenario being described. On the authors behalf he admits that the book is dated in the foreword.

With all that said, because there is a lack of any other books on the subject (that I have been able to find) this book is worth getting.

There is no press date to know when this book was printed but the author's "Recommended Readings" are books printed between 1954 and 1987.

Great Book! Highly recommended. Johnson gives practical straight forward advice garnered from years of experience.