Getting your player ready...
Five years ago builder Dave Pagano was an experienced builder who knew Denver’s inner city areas like Highlands and Berkeley, and was doing four or five homes a year. Now he’s the hottest custom builder in town — around thirty homes a year that are centered around Berkeley’s red-hot Tennyson Street, but reaching through Highlands and into areas like Washington Park, where potential buyers can’t find anything like him.
Pagano is the Denver franchise partner for G.J. Gardner Homes – billed as the biggest builder nobody ever heard of: real custom and semi-custom homes with detailing and personal service, but at prices that lean more toward production scaled housing. Last year G.J. Gardner’s output in just the seven-county metro area ranked it as the city’s 14th largest builder – not counting what additional franchise partners are doing on estate-sized sites out in Elbert County, and in Northern Colorado (franchisees in Loveland and Fort Collins); as well as Colorado Springs, Cheyenne or Grand Junction.What Australian-founded G.J. Gardner has done in Colorado is re-create the custom building experience on a market-wide scale, at the time when consumers face a housing market totally dominated by national corporations that deliver a highly packaged product. “There are plenty of buyers out there for whom the corporate building experience just doesn’t work,” says Brook Swientisky, Colorado Division President of G.J. Gardner, building homes here for nine years. For builders like Pagano, with good knowledge of local buyers and available home sites, that can mean triple-digit year-over-year growth from their first full year with the company, Swientisky notes. Part of that owes to the buying power and the more sophisticated purchasing, design and estimating systems that G.J. Gardner provides, as well as to what the marketing and branding can bring to a builder with limited bandwidth. Meanwhile, G.J. Gardner nurtures what its smaller builders are already doing well – talking to their customers, and working with local communities, often concerning smaller site opportunities that mega-builders won’t touch. Right now, G.J. Gardner has opportunities waiting for builders with those credentials – good knowledge of untapped markets such as Boulder, Arapahoe or Summit Counties, and with a track record of making customers happy, while wanting more of them. The experience could be toward luxury-custom homes (Boulder and Summit Counties, areas of Centennial and Greenwood Village); or toward production-scale enclaves (eastern Denver, Aurora) where there’s a substantial market now for low-maintenance homes, for infill sites. The place to begin exploring a move to G.J. Gardner is at GJGardner.com/franchising, followed up by a call to Brook Swientisky and his team. Meanwhile, in a market where buyers are getting less and less value for the dollar from resale homes, G.J. Gardner offers one-of-a-kind situations that match needs that large builders aren’t delivering: New homes in mature urban neighborhoods, patio ranch homes, semi-custom homes, and homes designed for acreage lots. You can find G.J. Gardner builders in Denver (303-327-6211), Adams County/Brighton (303-658-0146), Douglas County (303-660-4467); Cheyenne (307-638-2030), Colorado Springs (719-495-7664), Lakewood/Golden 303-271-1020), Loveland (970-669-0822); Parker (303-840-9346); Fort Collins (970-663-4428), and Grand Junction (970-245-7542). WHERE: G.J. Gardner, franchised custom builder with builders all along the Front Range; custom design & service at production-scale costs. Franchise opportunities available for experienced builders looking for growth PRICE: From upper $200s to $2 million WHEN: Check design center for hours
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