East Texas Homes

of Longview. “It’s kind of a bedroom/retirement community of the Dallas metroplex,” Alston remarks. “There’s a lot of lakeside living here, bed & breakfasts, and we get a lot of retirees. Then, we also have a lot of industry here, too, so we’re seeing a lot of new families come. We have close to 90,000 people in Longview, and our sister city, Tyler, is a little bit larger than us.” Alston adds that the company’s homes are split evenly between custom homes and specs, and he tries to schedule construction so that their two sales cycles don’t conflict. “Typically, the timing on a custom house is less sensitive in terms of when it comes to market,” he explains. “There’s a definite selling season in real estate and it’s not over the Christmas holiday season through New Years – those are the slowest parts of the season. So, if you can schedule your customs to be through those times, it can work better for your sales cycle. Typically, though, when we start a spec, at least within the last 18 months, they never finish as a spec; we have sold almost every house before it’s finished and it becomes a custom at that point.” Regarding the competition in an active market, Alston says that East Texas Homes has several advantages. “We’ve solidified our partnerships with vendors and suppliers and we have a management structure in place that most entry-level builders don’t have,” he asserts. “So, even though we’re a small company, we have a machine at work that’s tough to compete against unless you have a lot of volume. In other words, builders who are trying one, two, three, four, five houses a year just don’t have the buying power that we have; they can’t leverage technology like we can; and they don’t have relationships with the labor force like we do. So, it’s tough to compete against us.” Long-term, Alston says he wants to see continued growth, but that doesn’t just mean building more houses. “For me, new housing starts is not the best indicator of growth,” he states. “Market diversity, for me, is the best indicator of growth. What I mean is, we don’t just want to start and finish an arbitrary number of new homes; we’ve had years where