East Texas Homes

EAST TEXAS HOMES That first home, built for a friend, began to have far-reaching reverberations: “Over the next few months, we watched the neighbors in that neighborhood react in a positive way. They started cleaning up their yards, they started painting their houses, and taking pride of ownership,” Alston continues. “And we found out by working over there, that a lot of those people in those older neighborhoods felt neglected by the city. Their roads weren’t being kept up, or they occasionally got a bad neighbor who didn’t take care of their house, and they felt kind of helpless. But when they saw some new development come in, it re-energized them. And it not only brought their property values up, it gave them a little pride of ownership back. That was inspiring to us and it sparked what we have done since then.” So, the company began to focus on building very affordable homes in older neighborhoods. “In that market, at that time, an affordable house was probably $75,000 for a three-bedroom, one-bath, thousand-square-foot home,” Alston reports. “We were the only one building at that price point at that time, so we had no shortage of customers. We built and we built, and then the crash of 2008 happened. But what we expected to happen really didn’t - we didn’t lose business at all. What happened was we picked up customers from the next tier up – the folks that were in the $150-175K homes who could no longer afford that. Because interest rates were going up or the lending requirements were increasing, they had to step down into a more affordable home. So, that just created more demand for the product we were providing at the time. We watched a lot of other builders fade away and stop building during that 2008-11 period, when we were just ramping up.” The City of Longview began to notice that East Texas Homes was adding property value to these older neighborhoods and began to partner with the company, helping to subsidize the permitting process by utilizing state monies and applying programs that hadn’t been put to use for some time. “We really partnered with them to identify areas of Longview that needed development,” say Alston, “and that anchored our place in the market.