KB Home inks deal to buy 664 SoCal land parcels.
What seems to add to some of what I am hearing, this is definitely good news. Another contractor I talked to who was on his own, is getting hired back to his original job at another big Southern California builder. I don’t think there will be a crazy boom, but good projects in the right areas sound about right this go around.
As of sometime last week it feels like building is slowly making it’s comeback. A couple of jobs put on hold are slowly coming off of hold. And we are hearing about some new good projects every few days. As I still think building front runs the US economy by at least a year, this is great news. I feel as though we will be in a good position as we are still making it through what seems to be the worst building recession the country has seen.
I was thinking about Green Roofs this morning. We have a project where this would be the best possible design for LA City SUSMP requirements. But the expense is just so much that the idea was thrown out as soon as it was mentioned. With this being such a great design it’s too bad that the City or State doesn’t help subsidize certain designs to help green developments.
Plan checks for the sake of plan checking. I can’t figure this out, but it makes sense. Lately I have noticed that plan checks are starting to ask for corrections that already exist on the plans. I have talked to multiple architects and they are saying the same thing. This does seem to be a way to justify the plan checkers job. But this, at the expense of slowing down building during a pretty bad economy. I am hopeful this does not become the norm as this only seems recent during the past 6 months. For any developers I would give you a heads up that this will delay your build for at least 3-4 months. For any Engineers or Architects I would say to throw some obvious errors onto the plan so real errors can be marked up.
Visited a job site yesterday in Palos Verdes and the house is coming along nicely. Talk about some tall walls!
