Business View - February 2015 27
30 miles northeast of San Antonio – when an immi-
nent change in that company’s leadership prompted
him to give his fellow Red Raider a call.
“I was in the Dallas area and he called me and told me
the guy who owned the company he was at was looking
to get out of the homebuilding industry,” Jenkins said.
“He told me we could pretty much just take over. I had
a wife who was pregnant at the time and convinced
her to move to the Hill Country, and off we went.”
The new operation’s main task as it grew, he said, was
to take everything its leaders had learned during their
time with mammoth homebuilding conglomerates,
and simply strive toward the contrary – specifically
as it related to the bait-and-switch techniques they’d
seen employed in model homes.
“We really hated the games that the national builders
we worked for played,” Jenkins said.
“They’d have model homes that were decorated with
hundreds of thousands of options, and then they’d
show the price to the customer with apartment-grade
finish-out – never telling the customer what the house
actually cost the way they saw it – and it just caused a
lot of frustration.
“We decided to price our homes with the same level of
finish-out that we show in our models, so there are no
surprises. What you see is what you get. If you like this
house, I’m pricing this house to where you can recre-
ate this level of finish. We just find that honesty and
discussing what things actually cost up front is a lot
better than trying to trick a customer, showing them
a low price knowing it’s not what they want. Then they
CONSTRUCTION
