46 Business View - March 2015
agencies. We engage in litigation occasionally on is-
sues concerned with our industry and so, I think a lot
of the issues are the same, even some of the ways
we go about them by reaching consensus and working
on issues and engaging in old-fashioned shoe leather,
and reaching out to decision makers, and explaining
our case, and those sorts of things – lobbying, if you
will. A lot of those things are the same, but you just
have to evolve. It’s all drive by involved volunteers and
we’ve had a good professional staff for a long time.
We try pretty hard, but it’s interesting. It’s engaged
members that carry the weight, you know the old 80-
20 rule for the industry, I suppose.
BUSINESS VIEW: You mentioned the membership
number around 10,000 – has that been fairly stable?
Or has that changed one way or the other lately?
NORMAN:
No, it’s been fairly stable. We got to over
14,000 in the year 2000. I don’t have to refresh your
memory on what was happening with the housing
boom then. That was our all-time peak, but we fell off.
Our membership fell off a good bit. Housing starts in
Texas fell off two-thirds, like they did all over the coun-
try, but I think Texas, I tell people, was the least sick
of all of the patients, of the states around the country,
because even though our housing starts plummeted
and our membership plummeted and everything else,
it was a lot worse in many other areas of the country.
But, our membership dropped down from a peak of
14,000 to about 8,000, but we’re back at around
10,000 right now, which is curiously about where we
were in the early 2000’s. So a lot of companies and
individuals in companies in the industry in ’06-’07
crashed and there was some consolidation and such,
so it’s probably a smaller pool today. I say probably, but
I know it is than what was out there in the mid 2000’s,
but some would argue that everything in the housing
industry was not too great then.
BUSINESS VIEW: Out of the percentage of people
that could be members, do you feel that you have a
pretty good penetration rate out of those who could
be members?
NORMAN:
We do. We guesstimate that somewhere
north of 90 percent of all homes built in the state are
built by our members. We feel pretty confident about
that. Obviously, we have all of the large production
builders, who make up a large number of the starts.
And then we have very strong market penetration and
most of our membership penetration is in most of our
local communities. And so, there is always more folks
that can be members, especially there’s always more
builders and remodelers that can be members, but
probably even more so, there’s always more workers
and associate-affiliated members, because our mem-
bership is not only builders and remodelers, it’s suppli-
ers and bankers, and vendors, and the companies and
people that supply things and services to our industry.
BUSINESS VIEW: Let me make sure I have this right.
