My can of Coca-Cola is exactly the same as yours. My iPhone 6 and yours, with some personalization differences, are essentially identical from their guts to their looks. Even my 2012 Subaru Legacy and yours--of the same make, model year, and spec--are the very same, under the hood and in all its features and lines. Companies go to great lengths to formulate products to differentiate--in design, function, and customer benefits--their offering as exclusive, and of higher value than their competition.
Then they go to even greater lengths to ensure they can deliver--or overdeliver--on that promise again and again.
The same can not be said for a big home builder's homes. For example, a Pulte home with strongly similar floor plans in Naples, Fla. and the Houston market may have fundamental differences--or inconsistencies--from one market to the next. The issue is the same with any builder who builds in those two markets, and the same with all multi-market builders trying to get construction quality and customer satisfaction baselines to where they need to be. However, as much as executives at these enterprises are doing their damnedest to change what happens for each of their homes on a community level, it all comes down to a sub-market by sub-market battle to build and deliver houses they feel meet the spec and quality of their brands.
Recently, we'd heard this lament from the head of purchasing and strategic sourcing of one of the nation's top 10 home builders.
"We have a best-practice window and door flashing installation requirement to prevent moisture intrusion in those and any other penetrations in our building envelope, and we train and train around that best-practice.
"But dollars to donuts, I'll go and do an inspection at almost any of our job sites, and find that the flashing's not done right, not done according to our requirement."
Another home builder relates:
"In a number of our operational market areas, we're struggling with a quality issue on interior paint. Paint is made to bond and perform with two coats over a prepared surface. That's how they work.
"But we have markets, where the painters will go in an spray on one layer and leave it at that, in spite of our requirement. This is 'the practice' among the paint trades in some markets that are very important to us. We go in and see that our interior ceilings have basically been fogged over, and this is not up to our quality standard."
The trouble, these and other home building execs say, is that getting the trade and installer crews to do a task the right way vs. the way they do it is no mean feat in many markets.
"Paint is just one example of how we're seeing local labor practices that run counter to our standards for quality and best practice. I have a list of 19 other areas of our construction process that are the same."
Which, effectively means that you get a different house under a builder's brand and reputation in one sub-market to another. Layer in the labor capacity constraints you're seeing in markets--in Colorado and Texas and some of the middle-Atlantic states arenas--and you really start to have quality and consistency challenges that fly in the face of a product promise from one community to the next.
"Another area we have requirements is that when we're do our slabs, we reinforce the concrete with steel mesh. Not all the builders in our markets do this, but we require it for all of our houses in these markets as a quality measure.
"The thing is, when the trades pouring the slabs look at us and see our requirement for steel mesh vs. other builders that may or may not have that requirement, it's going to be a no-brainer for them to choose the jobs where they don't have to pour the slabs with the steel mesh because it takes more time and care.
"So, that's when we don't get the crews in in the timing or the cost that we model for those houses, and we pay the price for our spec."
Flashing, interior paint, steel-mesh reinforced slabs--in how many more areas that can make a big difference on customer satisfaction, warranty and call-back work, and longer tail liabilities are at variance with the labor practices that prevail in those localities?
This, it would seem, is an opportunity area for collaboration among builders who serve as general contractors and manufacturers and materials suppliers who know that their products' performance up to standard depends on proper installation and/or construction practices.
My Sherwin-Williams or Behr or Glidden or Benjamin Moore or Valspar or Dutch Boy or Dunn-Edwards or Pratt & Lambert paint is the same as yours only if the prep and application are identical.
And builders' local reputations hinge, not just on the performance of the products and materials they spec into their homes, but the way those products and materials are installed, or applied, or engineered into each of their homes. It's a case of local labor rules on whether a builder's home lives up to that builder's trust mark.
