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Products

  • Warm Front

    As many heating costs rise, heating a home is becoming increasingly expensive for your buyers. Good insulation and an efficient furnace or heat pump can help, but you can also give your buyers an energy-efficient supplemental heat source that will not break the bank: a pellet stove or insert.

     

House Blend

  • Ray of Light

    AS THE HOUSING INDUSTRY REELED THIS summer, several retirement and active adult communities seemed to flourish. Pulte Homes' Sun City neighborhood in Carolina Lakes, N.C., for one, closed more than 600 homes during the 12 months ended June 30, according to the Charlotte Observer. And two of Shea...

     
  • Money Matters

    IT HAS GOTTEN A LITTLE EASIER FOR DEVELOPERS and builders to borrow money for green building projects thanks to a recent launch by Second Angel Bancorp (SAB) of a lending program aimed at such projects.

     
  • Take a Walk

    SO, WHAT'S YOUR WALK SCORE? It's a question that home buyers could start asking, thanks to a new application on the popular Google Maps Web site. The score measures the walkability of an address on a scale of one to 100, with 100 being a perfect score. A high score means it's close enough to walk...

     
  • The Big Trade-Off

    THE AVERAGE AMERICAN FAMILY devotes more than half of its income (52 percent) to housing and transportation combined, according to a study put out by the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership and the Center for Neighborhood Technology, two nonprofit research groups that crunch Bureau of Labor...

     
  • House Blend: November 2007

    - Actor Brad Pitt along with real estate developer and philanthropist Steve Bing announce plans to build 150 affordable and sustainable homes in New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward. - Efforts to keep homes affordable and satisfy buyer demand for low-maintenance living have affected builders' choices in...

     
  • Building Code Concerns

    The NAHB, along with a coalition of building-oriented trade groups, has serious questions about the energy-saving goals and administrative provisions included in the House version of energy legislation passed last August.

     

Inside Story

  • Putting Politics Aside

    Even before the Federal Reserve cut the Federal funds rate by 50 basis points on Sept. 18, President George W. Bush stepped in front of the White House press corps and offered his prescription for housing and the mounting number of foreclosures.

     

Success Stories

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    Heads Above Water

    Water is a central element in the site plan development of BridgeWater, which was built on reclaimed phosphate-mining land and includes five deep, crystal-clear lakes. As a result, 90 percent of the lots in the community have a lake view. In brainstorming names for the lakes, the sales and...

     

Top Shelf

  • Top Shelf: November 2007

    This month's top shelf products include the sleek Aspire three-speed fan control from Cooper Wiring Devices, M-Shield paperless multilayer reflective insulation, and the Stone Veneer Mortar from Sakrete.

     

First Draft

  • Skin Deep

    Q: Times are tight. How can we cut back on the number of floor plans we offer without losing curb appeal and creating streetscapes that look monotonous?

     

The Numbers

  • Uncertainty Reigns

    Football coaching legend Vince Lombardi once said, “Confidence is contagious and so is lack of confidence, and a customer will recognize both.”

     

Tech Tools

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    Poised to Grow

    The downturn has left little room for good news, but the story of James Otis, a partner in Accord Development in Glenwood Springs, Colo., reminds us that there's always housing activity somewhere.

     

Features

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    Rally The Troops

    At 9 A.M. on any given Monday morning, new-home sales associates across America are picking through trays of bagels and drinking lukewarm coffee before their weekly sales meeting. The sales manager might come in at 9:10, look hopefully at everyone and say, “So, how's traffic?”

     
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    Reach for the Skies

    Emaar signs are everywhere in Dubai, the now legendary city/state of only 1,500-square-miles with roughly 1.4 million people (about the size of San Antonio). Huge plasma displays touting Emaar communities greet visitors at airport customs. Blue-and-yellow flags and billboards carry the company's...

     
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    The Waiting Game

    It's 113 degrees on one mid-July afternoon in Phoenix, and Eric Brown is outside landscaping a 1961 vintage home he recently purchased and is renovating. A year after leaving Artisan Homes, a company he founded in 1998 and sold to Engle Homes in 2004, Brown is ready to come in from the swelter and...

     
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    One Door Closes, Another Opens

    For most people, losing one's job can seem like the end of the world. To be discarded after spending years in dedicated service to a company can be extremely demoralizing. And the job market can be a very uninviting place for those in their late 40s or early 50s.

     
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    Farm System

    DEBATES OVER DENSITY USUALLY OCCUR IN urban and suburban locales where land is scarce and tensions over traffic are high—not in zip codes where greenfields stretch out as far as the eye can see. So at first it seems odd that the small town of Fowlerville, Mich. (population 2,800) would put issues...

     
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    Lofty Thinking

    When Christopher Homes developed plans for the first two mid-rise buildings to be unveiled as C2 Lofts, the thought was to stick its toe in the water and see how buyers would react to a vertical housing type not indigenous to Las Vegas. Let's just say that since then, the builder has taken the...

     
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    Bright Spots

    The housing market is hurting everyone, and 2007 will surely go down as the year many builders crashed and burned. But there are a few Teflon ventures that have managed to defy the odds and rack up healthy sales in an otherwise weary landscape. And they aren't necessarily using incentives or...

     
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    Facing Fire

    When the June 2007 Angora Fire burned its way into the residential streets of South Lake Tahoe, Calif., firefighters were ready. The neighborhoods, unfortunately, were not.

     

National Beat

  • Everything You Need

    The International Builders' Show (IBS) is the one place in the world a home builder would expect to find “Everything You Need Under One Roof,” and that's exactly how the February 2008 show in Orlando, Fla., is being billed.

     

Walkthrough

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    Warwick, N.Y.

    Cloth, whiskey, and $350 in cash bought the 101,000 square feet of land that the town of Warwick, N.Y., now sits upon. Granted by the governor in 1703, the exchange was secured by 12 colonial speculators from 12 Munsee Indian chiefs. Located in Orange County—named for William III of England, the...

     

Other Articles

  • Facing Fire

    When the June 2007 Angora Fire burned its way into the residential streets of South Lake Tahoe, Calif., firefighters were ready. The neighborhoods, unfortunately, were not.

     
 

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