Getting your player ready...
Six years ago, if you’d set out to build yourself a home, you basically had two options: Find a production builder, with tract-home prices and a limited choice of designs and lots; or find a custom builder, and take your time getting a plan that’d have a higher square-foot cost. Now fast-forward to today’s stronger Colorado market and there’s a new kind of builder on the scene; one that offers all of the plusses that custom builders had, but with production pricing and speed.
“We’re the world’s largest custom builder that nobody’s heard of,” says Brook Swientisky of G.J. Gardner Homes – custom franchise builders with much more flexibility in offering sites and plans than small pickup-truck builders ever had; while giving the volume price advantages tract builders get.“We’re the best of both worlds,” Swientisky adds. G.J. Gardner built its first Colorado home in 2007, 13 years after Australian builder Greg Gardner started to franchise his proprietary building system to small builders. Now Gardner is the sixth-largest builder down-under, the very largest in New Zealand, and builds enough homes here and in California to make it onto Builder Magazine’s top-200 U.S. list. Along the Front Range, Swientisky has ten operations that show just how flexible building can be in the information age – thousands of designs that run from $2 million (typical range of old-styled custom builders) down to as low as $200,000. (G.J. Gardner brought one in UNDER that figure this year for a Colorado Springs family, lot included, in just four months). You can see two of those homes today, one that does a trick no mega-corporate builder can match: building custom for a scrape-lot in an established Denver neighborhood. That home, 4392 Winona in Berkeley, also has a ‘granny flat’ atop a 3-car garage, now allowed by Denver city code. G.J. Gardner could do you one of those for $170,000 – whether you were to use it for Grandma, or for a paying renter. And G.J. Gardner is very much into green, solar, and energy efficiency. “Before you spend a penny on building, you should understand exactly what you’re doing,” says Swientisky. A site at GetTheFactsUpFront.com educates buyers on the process, whether you’re building urban, or way out in wide-open spaces. G.J. Gardner has franchises serving ten locations: Adams County/Thornton – (303-658-0146) Boulder – (303-442-0636) Denver – (303-327-6211)
weekdays 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. PHONE: 800-229-1561 WEB: Mark Samuelson writes on real estate and business; you can email him at mark@samuelsonassoc.com. You can see all of Mark Samuelson’s columns at DenverPost.com/RealEstate.
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