Roadmap to Building Your High-Performance Homebuilding Business

Hi, I’m Bob Deeks. I am a builder and renovator out of Whistler British Columbia. We work the sea-to-sky corridor from Vancouver all the way north to Pemberton. And in this masterclass, I’m going to share some of my advice, some of my experiences, the good, the bad, and the ugly on how I developed my home building and renovation business. And some advice to you on how I think that you could either develop your business or some opportunities for you in terms of getting into the business. And what are some of the things that I would strongly recommend that you consider as you move into the new home and renovation business, whether it’s in British Columbia, whether it’s in Canada or anywhere else around the world, because it’s all the same. Some of the things that I’ll talk about will be how do you build high performance? What are some of the things that you consider when you’re getting into that high performance space and some of the things that you need to know to understand where the building code is going and how you’re going to meet those new expectations.

I am the president of RDC Fine Homes. We’re located out of Whistler, British Columbia. You might remember Whistler from the 2010 Olympics where all the alpine venues were. I always had a passion for skiing. I grew up ski racing, and when I graduated from university, I really thought that the one thing on my bucket list at that time was to spend a winter at a mountain ski resort and ended up in Whistler in 1983 for a winter of skiing and worked in the ski school. In those days, Whistler was not nearly as busy, of course, as it is today, and there was very little work. And so after spending the winter in Whistler as a starving ski instructor, I swore I had put that behind me and I would never come back. Fast forward five years and I was actually between jobs and a really good friend of mine was back in Whistler and said, Hey, you should come on out there is great skiing and they need help within the ski school.

So I came out for two months, got a cushy job teaching skiing. I had a background in ski racing, so ended up helping out with the Whistler Mountain Ski Club. And one morning after far too many drinks, went out with a friend and ended up buying two vacant lots on Alta Lake. And all of a sudden there was a career shift in front of me. I had bought two lots and we had decided we were going to come out and build a spec house. So you might wonder what was my background. I had a commerce degree and was working in advertising. So I had very, very little background on construction other than helping my father renovate his cottage as a younger person. And I had renovated a house in Toronto and just was in the position where we had sold that renovated house and had some money.

And so overnight was now a property owner and decided to be a developer. So changed my career course, didn’t go back to advertising. Came out in the fall of 1988 with the plan to build a house, sell it, and spend a little bit of time in Whistler. So moving forward to the spring of 1989, the bank was astute enough to recognize that we had no background in building houses and we were much too high a risk and declined our construction draw mortgage application. And so there I was in Whistler with two vacant lots that I really couldn’t afford to keep because of course I couldn’t sleep on them. And so the market conditions had shifted. We turned out, we sold the two lots, made some money. I had started coaching ski racing in the winter for the Whistler Mountain Ski Club and without really giving it too much thought, took the proceeds from the sale of the lots and bought a house.
And so in 12 months, I went from working in advertising in Toronto with a commerce degree to moving to Whistler and becoming a homeowner and really didn’t know what to do with myself beyond coaching, ski racing in the winter. The only skillset that I really had that I thought was saleable in the community was a carpenter. So I got myself a job as a carpenter without really any background in carpentry, and spent the next year between April and November doing concrete forming. So I got a really good education in concrete forming. And then over the next couple of years had the opportunity to work for an exceptional builder and really developed a passion for building custom homes. And so came out in 1997 for a couple of months and have lived in Whistler ever since. Our journey to becoming a high performance builder, specializing in doing Net Zero new homes and renovations really started in the late nineties when I had an opportunity to actually go and build a spec house.

And the house on the property had been significantly renovated five years before. Now they hadn’t done a great job on the renovation, but the home had a lot of usable materials and I just could not see myself taking that house and dumping it into the landfill. So I posted an ad classified ad in the local paper, which was essentially house for free as long as you come and remove it from the property. And I had a guy who showed up gung-ho. He brought a team of 20 people for a long weekend and they hand demolished the house. They took all the materials, took all the nails out, they packaged it all up, and I believe he went up north in Pemberton and he used all those materials to reassemble a new house. And so that was really my first foray into sustainable building practices. And over the next couple of years really became interested in what could we do better, both from an energy perspective, from an indoor air quality perspective.

So we got involved in installing heat recovery ventilators in the late nineties, which I think at this point was very, very early on in the development of ventilation standards. We tripped over David Hill’s Company Eneready. So we became a big fan of the Eneready HRVs and slowly started to begin to understand what it was that we had to do to build a better house. In 2003, a colleague of mine who was a prominent builder in Whistler, phoned me up and said, we are going to start a chapter of the Canadian Home Builders Association in Whistler. Would you like to join? I knew nothing about the home builders, but really recognized that we were building in a bubble. It was a very small community and we were very isolated. And I think at that point I was really desperate to try and figure out how to do things better.

And I saw joining the Home Builders as a way to get a better education and to connect with the broader community of builders to learn from them. And once we joined the Home Builders, we really never looked back. It opened up an enormous door of opportunity and education, the courses that CHBA BC put on, we very quickly engaged those. I got my staff to do them. And by 2006, we had engaged with the Built Green program and we finished our first built Green Home. We got Built Green Gold, which was the highest standard at the time, and that really was our stepping stone to Net Zero construction. 2008, the Equilibrium Program sponsored by CMHC federally was being launched, and I sat through a number of presentations on building a Net Zero. That’s what Equilibrium was. It was a gateway to try and figure out how to do Net Zero houses.

And I made the decision at that point that we were going to be the first builder in BC to complete a Net Zero house. We made an application through the Equilibrium program. We weren’t selected, but I had designed a house, I had a client. And so we forged ahead and we, as a consequence of not having to engage in the program, we’re able to get in the ground a little bit earlier. And so I think we really did finish one of the first houses that had an EnerGuide label that established that we had built a house that produced as much energy as it used through the Hot 2000 model. It had solar panels on it, and we used it as a demonstration project for the 2010 Olympics. The owners moved in after the Olympics were over, and we had a thousand people or so I think through a number of open houses to demonstrate in those days, which was a very, very new concept, which was this idea of a Net Zero ready house.

And so that created a stepping stone. I was part of the group that developed the Net Zero standard for CHBA nationally, which is now the Net Zero label that builders across the country who are members can engage with in a great way to get up to speed on building high performance houses. Of course, now we have a new federal code that’s coming out that will require Net Zero construction by 2030. And in BC we have had the BC Energy step code since 2017, which has been a voluntary energy code that municipalities could adopt. And so the Net Zero education that we had has been a great way for us to get up to speed on how to meet the new code requirements. And it’s been very exciting to also be part of that code development sitting on the standing committee for energy efficiency with Codes Canada through the development of the national standard and also participating on the BC Energy step code development.

And as I still am involved with that as the co vice chair of the BC Energy Step Code Council, I’ve been now in the industry for 30 years. I started my company in 1993, so we’re heading towards our 30th anniversary. I’m really excited about the changes that are happening in the industry, the opportunities that are out there for us to continue to build better houses. One of our taglines is Healthy Homes for Happy Families and building a better House technology has really transformed what we build and how we build. 10 years ago, most houses were built to the same standard that they had been built for 40 years. With the advent of technology and the BC Energy step code that is shifting very, very rapidly. And so while a lot of people look at the energy step code as being a focus on energy efficiency, we figured out a long time ago that the things that made a house energy efficient were the things that also built a better house.

The thermal performance values, the insulation in the walls and the ceiling and the foundation, the strategies to make it airtight that created a house that had very even temperature distribution. It was thermally much more comfortable. Airtight houses enable you to control your own ventilation, so dramatically improves the indoor air quality within the house. They’re more durable. So this has sort of been our journey is figuring out how do we leverage the changes that are coming to continually look at how we build a better house for our clients. And a big part of that, of course is as housing becomes more and more expensive is how do we do this in the most cost-effective way we can. We’re a luxury home builder. I think sometimes people view luxury home building as having clients who are not all that concerned with cost. I can tell you from 30 years of personal experience, our luxury clients are just as concerned with cost as everybody else.

And so we’re always under pressure to try and find better ways to do things that deliver on value for our clients. And then of course, technology is opening up all these new opportunities from home integration where you have a single keypad that will operate your in-house audio, it’ll operate all your televisions, it’ll control the temperature in individual rooms in the house, it’ll operate your blinds. And so that’s creating very exciting opportunities for my staff and our clients to explore what are the opportunities that people have as they design and build their new houses. My involvement both with the home builders and the co-development process has been very, very engaging. One of the things that for anybody who’s getting into the industry I can’t recommend strongly enough is get involved with your local home building association, volunteer some time and get on a committee. That’s where the best learning outcomes are.

That’s where you’re going to meet your most exciting peer group. You’re going to have an opportunity to share with people who are aggressive in trying to figure out how to do things better. And so as I’m getting older and we’re developing a company that has more opportunity to stand on its own feet, it doesn’t need me project managing. It doesn’t need me day to day trying to make sure that we hit payroll. And so it absolutely has freed some time up to contribute to the industry, particularly with Codes Canada to help develop the codes for tomorrow. And those are codes that are practical for the building industry that bring a level of affordability to them and are safe so that we develop new strategies for high performance buildings that ensure those buildings are going to be durable for the warranties that the builders have to adhere to and for the clients that are going to move into them.

And I think the other thing that found really exciting over the last 10 years is developing a better business. At some point, I’m going to need to transition. I can’t be a builder forever, and I’ve got this business that now has a mind of its own. We have warranty that extends back many, many years for clients. We have responsibilities and trying to set up a business that after I choose to go and do something else is sustainable and benefits the clients that we had in the past, the clients that we have today and the clients that we’re going to have tomorrow. And even more importantly, benefits the staff who have put so much effort into building a great organization. And so I think that that’s my second passion now is developing a system within RDC Fine Homes that continues to deliver on our core values every day, not only for our clients, but also for our trades and most importantly for our staff. And so they’ve got this career opportunity in front of them for as long as they want to be part of RDC, they know that they’ve got a place to work that is going to continue to deliver a paycheck to support them and their family for as long as they want.

What do we specialize in? What’s our secret sauce? When we started, absolutely, we were the leaders. I know we were the leaders in delivering that better built thermally comfortable, high indoor air quality, energy efficient house. We knew how to do it. That niche in our market has very, very quickly been pulled out from underneath us, the BC energy step code requiring people to build to step three across the province in December. That’s the standard that we viewed as being a really high performance house in the mid two thousands. So whether you like it or not, as a builder, you are becoming a high performance builder. And so for us, we recognized a few years ago that we were going to have to shift gears. What did we want to be recognized for? I always knew that customer service was important. It took me way too long to, as I noted earlier, it took me way too long to figure out what were the things that really made our clients happy, what were the things that really annoyed them?

And what I’ve come back to is we are working very, very hard on a system that creates predictability. It creates predictable outcomes in terms of quality. It creates predictable outcomes in terms of cost, and it creates predictable outcomes in terms of schedule. And we want our clients to wake up every morning while they’re in construction with a smile on their face. And then when we move them into that house, we want to make sure that they wake up every morning or as many mornings as possible with a smile on their face because they love their house. And so the secret sauce is working with your team to develop a system that day in day out creates those predictable outcomes in exactly the same way we’ve grown. We have I think six project managers. We’re still struggling to make sure that everybody does things in exactly the same way every day. It’s not only the project management teams, but it’s also what gets done on site. And so I think that’s going to be an ongoing journey for us and something that really excites me is working with my team to continually develop those systems that make sure that we deliver the same result day in day out. It doesn’t matter which house is getting built, it’s getting built to the same standard with the same system that creates those same predictable outcomes for our client.
As I noted earlier, until very recently, the industry in Canada was building houses in the same way that we’d built them 40 years ago, which was not a bad thing. I mean, Canadians are renowned worldwide for building great houses. We had reasonably good insulation values or thermal performance values, but we are in a new age where we are now being dictated to by government through codes on the energy performance of what we build in the province of British Columbia. This is now a performance based standard where you have to use the services of an energy modeler, you have to use an energy model. And so it is creating an accountability in what we build that never existed before. Previously until very, very recently, there were prescriptive things that you had to do. There was a visual verification from your building code official that you had basically done those things, but nobody really sat on top of you and tested what you were building.

And so today, as we move to performance-based codes, which is what we have in British Columbia, we now have to recognize that what we build is going to be tested. And of course in British Columbia, we have a relatively stringent warranty process where that also creates some accountability. And I think what’s really exciting for people and the opportunity is really learn how do you do this in a cost effective way? How do you engage with your team to make sure that you’re taking advantage of the new products and technologies that are out there? I know change can be difficult, and particularly for builders who have been building the same way for a long time, there’s a real comfort zone there, and as you step out of it, it creates more risk. So my best advice is really find great partners to help you on this journey because you really don’t have any choice.

While British Columbia is going to move province wide to step three of the BC energy step code for houses, the rest of the country is going to very quickly follow suit as the National Energy Code for part nine buildings and houses comes into force. Every province in the country is at some point going to have a mandatory energy requirement within the building code that is different than what you’re used to today. So when we talk about partnering with your trade professionals, find an energy advisor that you can trust somebody who has experience and can guide you along this pathway to cost effective high performance houses, look for designers who have experience in building high performance houses and renovating high performance houses. This is a very difficult journey on your own. And then I loop back to the resources that exist within your local home building association.

There is no better place to figure this out than engaging with your peer group through CHBA. I guarantee you that the members who are there, they are willing to share, they’ll share the good, the bad, and the ugly. I mean, the one thing that I really hope for builders who are coming into the industry today is that you don’t have to learn the same way that we did. I have lots of colleagues who build high performance in the province of British Columbia particularly, and we all learn through the school of hard knocks. It costs us a lot of money, and I think we’ve led the way to some degree to demonstrate the strategies that you can use that are cost effective and safe. But the only way that you are going to find that information is to engage with your peer group. Do not be afraid to share your experience with others.

I know that the best builders in the industry are always welcome to share with you. And in fact, I get calls relatively frequently from people asking for advice on how did we do this? Where are we going? What do we recommend? I’m always available if somebody has a question on a product or a technology that they’re looking to use. We are an industry that is very good at sharing. And so use that resource through your local home builders chapter to your benefit and your team’s benefit. So you you’re not learning those expensive lessons that a lot of us have had to have had to learn When the two thousands hit. And there was obviously some opportunity with regard to high performance in houses. One of my motivations absolutely is we were a new company. We were trying to find our place in the market, and I quickly recognized that there were very few people in our industry who were really positioning themselves as green energy efficient home builders.

And so I decided at that time that that was the place for us. We could hammer out a unique place in the market by marketing ourselves as energy efficient green home builders. And so then we started to look for different ways to enable us to stand apart. And so as I noted earlier, we did our first built Green Canada build in 2006, and then I was looking for the next thing and I went to a presentation on rammed earth. And you might say, well, what is rammed earth? Well, rammed earth is a system of building using what they call as a mass wall. So you’re using sand and gravel in the province of British Columbia with our seismic and snow loads. We had to add some Portland cement to it. And you tamp that material down inside a form, much like a concrete form, and you build these mass walls that are essentially made out of compacted sand and gravel and a little bit of concrete.

And you might say, well, why would you ever build a house out of just basic sand and gravel with a little bit of concrete? Wouldn’t it fall down? Well, interestingly, Ram Earth has been around for more than a millennia. There are parts of the Great Wall of China that are rammed earth. There are existing structures in China that are well over 2000 years old that are built out of rammed earth. It has been proven as a technology that stands the test of time. And so I went to this presentation and they showed me buildings built in France after the French Revolution that were Ramed Earth. There were buildings actually, there was a renaissance of Ramed Earth in the Southern United States after the Civil War. Ramed Earth was very popular in areas where there was a lot of economic hardship. And so in certain areas where the right sand and gravel existed, and some clay people could actually build their own houses.
So they were very, very comfortable houses to live in. The thickness of the walls generally kept the houses reasonably comfortable in winter, and then they were cool in summer. And so I went through a presentation, I thought, that’s it. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to become ramed earth builders because that’s the next great green thing. And so I sent two guys off to Ramed Earth School, spent way too much money and designed and we built a Ramed Earth spec house. It turned out to be not that green. The footings that we had to use to support the weight of the walls were five feet wide and 12 inches thick. So all the concrete that we were saving in a typical foundation actually ended up going in the footings. The house was beautiful. It was cost a fortune to build. It was incredibly labour intensive.

Of course, none of that was really explained to us when we went to school, learned how to do this, and in the end, we built a beautiful house and I lost my shirt, somebody. We had a client who bought the house. Eric Carlson of Anthem Properties bought the house. And to this day, every time I see him, he’s like, this is the best house I’ve ever had. He shared with me, he said, I’ve built every house that my family has lived in, and in the end, you built me the best house I lived in. So a good experience on that side, but really in the end, it was not a really green sustainable strategy for building houses in Whistler. It was incredibly expensive and was absolutely the wrong way to enter into the development industry. We also were introduced to some advanced technology advanced we thought was advanced on hyper-efficient heating and cooling systems.

And so I got really caught up in the excitement of this new technology. I didn’t really grasp how complicated it was when we started. I jumped in with both feet. We committed three projects to this heating and ventilation system that was not proven. It turned out to be incredibly expensive to install and it didn’t work. So one of the key lessons for me in the last 30 years is keep it simple. There are a lot of shiny things out there. There’s a ton of new technology bombarding us every day. Take it a small piece at a time and really look for technology that is simple. If it’s too complicated, your trades won’t understand it, your staff doesn’t understand it, your design professionals don’t understand it, and it is going to haunt you for years. And yeah, that foray into that heating system haunted me for a good six years, and I spent money replacing it, fixing it, modifying it.

That was one of the most painful lessons for me on that. But it was a very, very good lesson and keep it simple. And so it extends to whether you’re building, you’re building envelope, your framing systems, the installation you use, the sticky products you can put on the outside of your house to benefit air tightness. They all have a very steep learning curve and be very careful in terms of what you engage with. And I can’t repeat this enough, is simple stuff works best. One of the things that I think is the most frustrating, the most difficult part of building a house is the owner of the company. In the end, I have very little control directly over what goes on every day.

They come back to the system that you have within your company to ensure those consistent results, and that’s something that you have influence on. You hire your staff, your staff are accountable to you, they’re accountable to your system, and so you have a lot of influence over your team. You cannot successfully build a great house without a great team of subtrades. Your subtrades don’t work for you, and so your accountability levers are fewer. So how do you find the best trades and how do you make sure they understand your system and they deliver on the type of build that you have sold to your client? How do you find the trade that delivers on that high performance promise? So some of these things you can do internally as a general contractor. We have our own carpenters, so we typically do our own foundations. We do our own framing so we can manage that thermal comfort because we do it internally, but we can’t manage the electrical side, we don’t do the plumbing, we don’t do the mechanical side.

And I think one of the most challenging parts of the shifting sands of housing technology has absolutely been heating and ventilation systems. Very, very important that you look for a mechanical contractor who understands the needs of a high performance house. He knows how to do a calculation to determine the heat loss and heat gain for the different rooms in their house, and they can apply that to modern technology to deliver on that promise of thermal comfort. I think your mechanical contractor, the guy who’s going to install that furnace or that heat pump or that hydronic floor, they are one of your most important clients. And if there isn’t somebody in your neighbourhood or in your region who’s up to speed on that, then I take the responsibility, find somebody who’s interested in learning and take them under your wing and help them become educated. There is a ton of education opportunities out there.

If they need help, show them the way because in the end, that’s only going to benefit you. We have had this experience like everybody else, you have a client with a budget, you’re fighting to try and get the cost of the house down to the budget, and so you desperately look for that trade. Who’s going to come to the table with that low price that meets your budget expectation as you’re trying to get sign off on that budget with your client. And so you hold your breath, you bring that guy on with the cheapest price because right now that’s what your client wants. And then down the road, the cheapest price does not deliver on the expectation of the high performance. And then who becomes responsible for the delivery of the high performance expectation? Well, it becomes you the builder. One of the things that we definitely have learned the hard way, and I think we’ve unfortunately learned this lesson more than once, is if you’re truly going to deliver on a high performance house that meets the client’s expectations and hire the trades that are charging what they need so that they can educate their staff and that they’re profitable, there is no point in hiring trades that are shaving their margin to the point where they can’t deliver on what you need or are not building a profitable business.

So you have to look for those trades that are engaged, that are keeping themselves educated, that understand their business, and are charging enough to make a buck, align yourself with them, treat them well, communicate clearly to them and partner with them going forward. I think your trades and your staff are your greatest assets to delivering on the promise you’re making to your clients. They’re equally important and you need to treat them in the same way. So I noted I get calls every once in a while from people who are interested in building a better house or building a high performance house right now, if have an experience of building homes in the way that we’ve been building homes for a long time, typically you’re building a two by six wall, you’re putting an R 20 or R 22 fiberglass bat in it. You’re putting six mill poly that’s taped and sealed to the inside of the wall assembly and you’re drywalling in it, away you go.

That’s been our basic code for a long, long time. Nobody blower door tested it. So you did your best job visually that you could to tape and seal that air barrier up, air barrier and vapor barrier up, and you’re good to go today as building codes move to higher and higher levels of energy efficiency. Now we need to look for different wall systems and there are thousands of different ways that you can put a wall together to get a higher performing wall. So people call me fairly regularly to try and find out what is it that I’m doing, what are the products we’re using, what are the strategies we’re using to try and meet the energy model’s expectation on is it an effective R 26 wall or an R 30 wall? So that’s certainly something that I can share my best advice on the way that you build your house and the materials and strategies that you use for the metrics that you need for energy efficiency is work carefully with your energy advisor.

They can help you with that sort of Rubik’s cube or that puzzle of, do I put all my insulation in the walls or to put it in the ceiling or I put it in my slab. They can give you some very, very good guidance through that integrated design process on where you should start to put your investment. You can run the budgets based on one type of material versus another. Going back to keep it simple principle is use materials that are easy for your staff to install, use materials that they’re used to. There is a lot of stuff off the shelf that you can adapt, do things in a slightly different way that will deliver the results that you need to meet both the energy model expectations and your client’s expectations. Foundations, we see a lot of people now transitioning to insulated concrete forms or ICF, so I get people calling me interested to know what’s my experience with ICF?

Is it a good material to use? And absolutely, again, find a brand that your staff can easily understand how it goes together and then stick with the same thing. So once you have a system, stick with what you train your team on it and try to avoid the sales pitch from the guy that is promising that if you just use this new building wrap or you just use this new tape or you just use this new ICF somehow miraculously you’re going to have a better house and it’s going to save you a lot of money. Look for new systems that you understand. Find somebody who can explain to you how to do it and then stick with it.

I think a lot of us, we get into home building because we really love building houses. What we were very naive on and what we didn’t anticipate is when we built these great houses, we also got clients. It took us a long time to really figure out how to manage our clients properly. Your client is your most important asset besides your staff, and you really have to engage with them in a meaningful way, understand what their expectations are, communicate clearly to them. This is all stuff that you’ll get in books and you can pick this up everywhere, easy to read about, hard to apply. And as we headed into the arena of high performance initially and trying to engage clients and understand their expectations, we like a lot of builders thought, okay, green buildings on the horizon, there’s going to be people lined up who want green, sustainable energy efficient housing.

And so off we went trying to sell energy efficiency. And I figured out very quickly to our benefit that when I talked to energy efficiency, particularly when I got technical, people’s eyes glazed over and I lost their attention. When I go back to my earlier comments about what is energy efficiency deliver in a better built house, we quickly figured out that what people were really interested in was an evenly heated and cooled house. Everybody’s used to growing up in a house that was drafty and cold in the winter and was too hot in the summer. So we started to really focus on these are the things that we can do for you that will deliver that more comfortable house. And then indoor air quality. Doing whole home ventilation with heat recovery was a very, very easy sell. When we started to focus on the air quality within your house, it was going to smell fresher, it was going to have fewer contaminants, it would be better for your family.

And so as we started to understand that we could sell on the benefits of a better built house that was also energy efficient. So in the early days, there were not a lot of people lined up for energy efficient houses, but there were a lot of people who were lined up to buy a better house. And so we really started to understand the speaking notes that we really needed to have to engage people and then really questioning them around what their expectations were. Because if I ask somebody, would you like a house that’s more comfortable? 99% of the people are going to say yes. Do you want a house that has better indoor air quality? That’s another yes. So while they may not want a house that’s energy efficient, they want those other things. And once you explain to them that the more comfortable house with the better indoor air quality comes as an energy efficient house.

Now it’s not so difficult to sell energy efficiency. Of course, the landscape has changed a lot in the last 20 years because energy efficiency is getting codified, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to sell your clients on those benefits that come along with energy efficiency. And what’s really important is to make sure you understand your client’s goals and expectations and then sell to those expectations. There’s no better way to gain a client’s trust than understanding what they want and then selling it back to them. We do a questionnaire for all our new client intakes, and that becomes our greatest sales tool because they’re telling me what they want in a new house. So then I can sit down in front of them and I can parrot that back to them and say, yes, we have a strategy for better indoor air quality. Yes, we have a strategy on distributed audio. We can do a fully integrated house because I know that that’s what they want. The one thing that I think has been, it’s taken me a long time to understand is what are the levers that motivate your client? What are the things that upset them? Where do you lose your clients? Where does conflict come from?

The thing that I would be able to share, and I think this is something that we all feel is whenever we become intimidated, whenever we’re scared, whenever we become anxious, we have trouble managing our emotions. And so when people are involved in building a house, they’re spending a lot of money. And while they will develop some trust with you as a builder, as they sign the contract, it takes a long time to really solidify that trust. And until you really have the trust of your client in the back of their mind, they’re going to be anxious and they might be afraid. And so when you have a misstep that can create a lot of conflict. And so it took us a long time to really understand that and develop some strategies to connect with our clients in a way that made sure that we understood their expectations and we were meeting them every week.

And then when we didn’t meet their expectations, there was a communication loop that enabled them with confidence to tell us right away, Hey, I’m not very happy with this, or I don’t think we’re doing the right thing here. The worst thing you can do is to allow your clients to feel that they’re not empowered to put their hand up when they don’t think things are going right. And to let that go for months at a time, bad news does not get better with age. And so if people are frustrated and you allow that to build up and there’s no way for them to release that, that’s when we really create a lot of conflict in our industry. And it’s really unfortunate that when you ask people what are some of the things that they least look forward to doing, one of them is building a house.

I’ve lost clients who we engaged in the early phase as they started to look at a new house, and then they had colleagues and friends who would tell them, you don’t want to do that. Building a house is the worst experience you could possibly have. Nobody comes in on budget, they’re always late. It costs too much money. You should just go buy an existing house and do a simple renovation. And so that’s a story that as home builders, I’m passionate about trying to change that story because if you engage with the right builder who understands how to learn the expectations of their client, has a good communication loop and has a great team, then home building can be a great experience. And we have lots of clients over the years who will tell you that building a house with us was a fantastic experience, and I know there’s lots of fantastic builders in British Columbia who can line up and show you clients who also had a great experience.

Yeah, understand your client’s expectations, have a good communication loop and address conflict as soon as it comes up. Building high performance does not have to be difficult, and it does not have to be complicated. But when you design a house over here and then you try to bolt on the energy efficiency, indoor air quality and thermal comfort over here, it can get very expensive and very complicated. So you may have heard the term an integrated design process, IDP. This is something that’s become key to the development of all our projects. We tell our clients upfront that if you’re going to work with us, we need to work together from the very earliest stages of design. And there are certain key partners that we need to bring in early on. We need to have our energy advisor at the table to enable us to understand if the design is going to be consistent with the energy thermal characteristics and the indoor air quality that we’re looking for.

It can be very, very difficult and expensive to bolt those things on after a design is completed. So that integrated process starts from day one. So we want to be at the table with our clients, with their design professional in the earliest stages so we can help make sure that that process is going in the right direction. One of the scariest things for people, as we noted, is the cost of housing. Housing is getting more expensive by the day. And if you don’t create that integrated process, clients can start a design process with an expectation of a budget of X, and by the time the design is finished and they’re going to permit and they finally budget it, it can be two x. That is not a happy day. It’s not a happy day for the client. It’s not a happy day for the architect.

And it’s definitely a bad day for the builder who thought they had a great project, and now the client is telling them, well, that house is twice as much as I can afford and I’m going to cancel the project. And I’ve seen that happen. And so our process is we get a concept design as soon as we have a concept design, we have a system that will produce a budget right away. And so that creates an opportunity that before the client has designed, spent too much time on design, hasn’t spent a ton of money on it, they get a check, is this consistent with our budget? And it gives them opportunities so they can either change the design or they can increase the budget, and they do it in an informed way. My experience has been that if you give your client a choice on spending more money or not spending money, if they have the money, they typically will spend the money.

But if you don’t give them a choice and you back them into a corner, they’re going to switch horses. They’ll either go find somebody else who will make a promise of a cheaper build, or they’ll shelve the project altogether. So that integrated process keeps them as part of the team. It keeps them informed through the process so that when you get to those building permit plans, you can be confident that you have a design that your client is excited about and they have a budget that meets their cost expectations. And then you can move into construction as a team all on the same page with a high degree of probability that you’re going to have a successful project. So as builders, I think sometimes we can become quite technical without understanding that we’re being technical. And so what is high performance? I think as builders these days, that term gets thrown around a lot.

And what does it really mean? One of the things that I’ve always looked to compare is houses to cars. And I always have recognized that the automobile industry has done a fantastic job on selling performance in automobiles that are fuel efficient. And of course, very rarely do you hear car manufacturers necessarily promoting fuel efficiency on their cars, but they’re very, very good at promoting the feeling of you sitting in that driver’s seat with your hands on the wheel and that experience of driving the car. And so high performance for a house can be very, very similar. It’s the experience that the homeowner has living in their house. And as builders sitting in that sales seat, we need to find ways to explain that in simple terms. So high performance. What is high performance? High performance, first and foremost, to me, the house has got to be affordable, right?

There’s no performance if the client can’t afford to buy it. Second, I think for me is thermal comfort, which is a house that’s evenly warm in the winter and it’s evenly cool in the summer. I grew up in Toronto in a brick house that was built around 1915 as a young teenager. I would do homework in my room on the third floor in my down jacket. I could see my breath. We had a house with water radiators, no insulation in the walls, no insulation in the roof, a single thermostat in the main living room. My father would, the thermostat never went above 61 degrees Fahrenheit, and he would come home from work at around six 30 or seven o’clock, and he would build a great roaring fire in the living room, and of course, the thermostat would be satisfied and the heat would never come on for the rest of the night.

So it was really, really cold. And that to me as a teenager, that was just the way houses were. And then of course, in the summertime in Toronto, for anybody who grew up in Toronto, 90% relative humidity and 35 degrees by the early part of June, my bedroom on the third floor was a sweat box. I don’t think I as a teenager ever slept from the end of May until school went back in September. It was so hot and so uncomfortable. And so for me, what really excites me about the houses that we deliver is we’re delivering a house that is thermally comfortable, and then indoor air quality. When I grew up, there was the ventilation, was the natural ventilation that whistled through the gaps and the framing and the gaps in the windows. So cold, drafty and yeah, well ventilated. But as we build houses tighter and tighter, then of course we need a very, very effective system that delivers fresh air to all the rooms that we live in and exhaust all that stale air from the areas that create moisture and smells, kitchens and bathrooms and that stuff.

And so that’s what high performance to me. And then high performance is a house that’s durable. If we look back to the 1970s when your new car would have rust spots on it in three or four years, to me, that was not a performance car. They rusted out. They were rust buckets and within everybody bought a new car every four to five years because the cars were done. And so as we move forward with particularly the cost of housing, we need to be really focused on housing that is low maintenance and is going to be durable for the longterm. A family is not going to be spending more and more money every year trying to repaint or fix or repair their house. And so that durability is not only in the structure of the house that we build, it doesn’t have moisture problems. The durability is built into the heating system. This is not a complicated system with a bare minimum of maintenance in terms of replacing filters and having it checked once a year. The homeowner is confident that that system is going to perform for them for the next 10 or 15 years or 20 years. We shouldn’t putting things into our houses that need constant upgrading and replacement.

What’s the future of home building? I think we’re going to see a lot more prefabrication automation of how we build, how that eventually lands. I am not entirely too sure, but I do know that wood frame construction is low carbon. It’s simple. It’s cost effective. I really strongly believe we’re going to continue to build wood framed houses, and we’re going to evolve to a place where the structure of your house is prefabricated in a assembly indoors with some form of automation. Right now, the industry is, I think, really looking at all kinds of different ways from big warehouses with very, very expensive German automation equipment where there’s very little hands-on work to produce that. If anybody’s interested, look at landmark homes out of Edmonton and see they’ve got a fantastic facility there where there’s an enormous amount of machinery in there that creates automation, huge investment.
We have our own panel plant that we’re actually just enlarging right now. We’ve been panelizing all our projects all the way back to about 2010. We were using panels from others. Over the last four years, we’ve been developing our own system for panelization. It’s pretty much the same two by six wall that everybody else is using. We’re looking to expand that facility, and we’re looking at a simple automation process that’s made in Canada to help reduce the labour to produce those walls out of the factory. And so that’s certainly one place that I see this. There’s no doubt that we’re sitting in a place right now where a lot of people are afraid that they can’t afford housing. So the big challenge for our industry is how do we get better to deliver lower cost houses? One of the things that we’ve been putting a lot of focus on is lean construction.

I just sent three guys down to the United States for the Lean Congress trying to figure out how do we optimize the resources that we have to do things better and do them in less time? And in that way, we can continue to deliver houses that are affordable for the clients that come to us looking for that home or that renovation. So that’s what are some of the key messages that integrated design process, it’s so important to start to engage your entire team early on in the design process. Doesn’t matter whether you’re in the development side or you’re in the custom home side. It doesn’t matter whether you’re building new houses or renovations. Using that integrated process absolutely will deliver a better house at a lower cost, looking at some form of prefabrication, whether you’re going to do it internally or whether you look to other organizations that are setting up to do this.

And in our local area, I think more and more there are companies that are setting themselves up to do prefabricated, panelized wall systems and roofs and floors. One of the greatest advantages of panelization is it will shorten your time on site. So one of the things I strongly recommend everybody do is understand what is the cost per week to have my team on site, and what does the savings, if I can shave four weeks or six weeks or eight weeks on my framing because I had all these components delivered prefabricated that took me three or four or five days to assemble as opposed to that five or six weeks out there. Framing in the rain I get asked every once in a while is what would you tell your 20-year-old self if you could? So for anybody who is not in the home building industry today, but is passionate to become a home builder, the first thing I would tell you is go and find the best builder in your area and go get a job.
Go and work for somebody who really does this right. Figure out how they do it. What is their system? What are their strategies around hr? How do they engage their client, learn from somebody who’s doing it right? I think I spent a ton of money trying to figure this out on my own. If you’re already in the industry, as I’ve said before, join your local Home Builders Association and sit around the table with your peer group over dinner, over breakfast, over a few beers. Everybody will share their stories. They’ll share what worked, what doesn’t work, and what keeps them up at night.

We’ve made some terrible mistakes. I have very gray hair. I had a client in 2003. We sort of stumbled onto a very high value project team, my very small team. We were very excited to be able to build a very, very fancy house. We knew that we could build a great house. We did not know how to handle the client. We didn’t know how to deliver the budget information on a regular basis. We had a client and an architect that just ran away with the design. So every time I turned around, the cost was going up. We started off with a budget, I think of about $1.2 million, and we spent nearly 3 million bucks. That was painful. I did not make a lot of money on that job, and that kept me up for a long time because I just didn’t know how to handle it.

If I’d had a chance to go and work for somebody in that space, I would’ve learned a lot of lessons right out of the gate that could have set that client up for success. I think I tell my team that we deserve the clients. We get. Most clients are predisposed to being good clients if you manage them well from the very beginning. But it’s not as easy as it seems. And as I said earlier, there’s lots of books out there and you read a great book and you’re like, wow, okay, I can do that. That seems easy. It is not that easy to put it into practice. So go work for somebody. If you can’t, you’re already working. Go join your local home builders and learn from all the old guys like me. We’ll share the good, the bad, and the ugly, so you don’t have to have those expensive lessons that we learned. And when you’re my age, maybe your hair is still blonde.

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