TimObrien_web

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, O’Brien began to notice that other area builders were be- ginning to jump on the bandwagon. “Initially, people didn’t think we would make it through 2007 and 2008,” he relates. “And then 2009 rolled around and people starting scratching their heads, wondering how we were able to still be in the game. What we found was that other builders in the marketplace start- ed copying some of our specifications; some of the things that we did on the energy effi- ciency side. It was amazing. I’d be out in the field, driving around and: ‘Holy Cow! They just switched their insulation package or their wall sheathing to what we’re doing.’” O’Brien reports that the company’s primary buying demographic are previous home own- ers who are building a new home for the first time. “About 40 percent of what we build is on speculation; 60 percent is semi-custom,” he explains. “So, the clients are coming to us and building from our portfolio of plans and personalizing them with certain pre-set options, such as structural options and alter- native room layouts. We’ll customize a little bit, but we’re not a ‘custom’ homebuilder. We have a portfolio of home sites throughout the marketplace and about 95 percent of what we sell is built on home sites we control – not owned, but optioned.” TIM O’BRIEN HOMES Recently, Tim O’Brien Homes opened a brand new community, which O’Brien says is going to be the first net-zero energy commu- nity in the state, and one of the few in the Midwest. “It will be neutral on electrical con- sumption and production,” he declares. “These homes will produce as much electrical en- ergy with solar panels as compared to what the home consumes on an annualized basis. We have 34 lots in this neighborhood and every home is going to be built with net-zero features that have to meet the EPA’s Net-Zero Energy requirement.” In the future, O’Brien would like to expand that vision by building a community that is completely off the grid. “Part of our three- year plan is to build an energy-independent community, where energy consumed is all produced onsite, whether that’s communi- ty geo-thermal wells or community solar systems. It will require the utility board of a municipality to be in support of the con- cept; we can’t just go in and create our own mini-power plant without the utilities’ and municipalities’ approval. But it does happen in other parts of the country and North Amer- ica; it happens in Canada quite frequently and Colorado and Texas have a couple of electrically-independent communities.” O’Brien prefers to assign his company’s success less to his creativity and pluck, and more to the company culture that pervades the 10-year-old firm. “We spent a tremendous amount of time developing our core values