Family-owned builder bucking trends in Grapevine area

A Texas boutique home builder is among the trend buckers with no intention of slowing in the face of an uncertain economy.

While national names like D.R. Horton and Taylor Morrison have pumped the brakes on construction amid diminished buyer demand, Grapevine-based Maykus Homes and Neighborhoods sees a lot of promise in northeast Tarrant County submarkets.

“We have probably a 25 to 75 percent ratio of build jobs to speculative homes,” said Eason Maykus, the company’s president. “What got builders in trouble in the Great Recession was having a lot of inventory sitting out there.”

With 20 homes under construction and 150 lots in production — all concentrated in markets like Grapevine and Southlake — Maykus reportedly has no excess homes it needs to offload.

Meanwhile, some homebuilders are still pulling out all the stops to move leftover inventory in Texas.

Eason and Kosse Maykus explained their thoughts on the state of the new-home market in an interview with the Dallas Business Journal recently.

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Here are a few takeaways:

“I think there are parts of the country that aren’t doing as well,” said Kosse Maykus. “If you think of the best place in the country, everybody says it’s Texas. The best place in Texas is Dallas-Fort Worth. Then, to be even more surgical, I think we’re in the best place, northeast Tarrant County.”

The Maykus firm has had to make concessions operationally in recent years, he said.

“In the past, you’d walk in here and tell us you want us to build a house. We start with a blank sheet of paper and do what you’ve asked. Well, we’ve realized that we would love to keep doing that, but we can’t anymore,” he said. “Our processes today are much more forward thinking, ordering windows seven or eight months in advance.”

The quality is still the same, Eason added.

“But instead of having a custom aspect on these homes, where we’re dealing with every single homeowner, we order these things in bulk and deliver a blank slate,” he said.

In terms of pricing and high mortgage rates driving down demand, Eason offers a simple solution:

“What we’ve done is we built in contingencies of 2 to 3 percent,” he says. “In a home that was on the market for $1 million, a potential buyer looking to buy a house may have seen its price decrease $50,000, and now it’s $950,000. That’s not so much a sign of desperation; that’s a sign of evaluating budgets and numbers and saying that now we can enter the market with a more affordable price than what we thought we were going to be able to.”

— Maddy Sperling