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Wednesday, May 22, 2005

New Kids On The Block

Juana Jordan
From the Tallahassee Democrat

The face behind K2 Urbancorp

Name: David Wamsley
Position: Chief executive officer
Company founded: 2002
Age: 40
Family: Single
Hometown: Blacksburg, Va.

Education: Graduated from Florida State University with a communications degree. Began graduate studies at FSU in interactive communications

Motto: "Make no small plans for they have no capacity to stir men's souls." - Ted Levitt, former editor of the Harvard Business Review

Companies Wamsley admires: Google, Toll Brothers (one of the top 10 homebuilders in the country), and Starbucks

The face behind Aspirant Homes

Name: Cory McFarlane
Position: president and chief executive officer
Company founded: 2003
Age: 27
Family: Single
Hometown: Miami

Education: Graduated in April 2005 from Florida A&M University's School of Business & Industry with a degree in business administration

Business philosophy: "You have to have a passion for what you do and believe you can reach for the stars."

Business/people McFarlane admires: Huffman/Tarmey architects, Harold Knowles of Knowles & Randolph law firm

Although they followed different paths to become homebuilders in Tallahassee, Cory McFarlane and David Wamsley share like traits.

Both have a passion for their work, are sticklers for detail and design, and are determined to stay away from "cookie cutter" style homebuilding.

Both also have a few projects in this year's Parade of Homes Tour.

Wamsley first entered the market three years ago after leaving the dot-com industry with no formal homebuilding and development training, except for helping to build Habitat for Humanity homes in Thailand. He now has several projects in the works, including some going up in SouthWood.

McFarlane, while attending school at Florida A&M University's School of Business & Industry, spent nearly a year working for free at a local home construction company. He also drew on homebuilding lessons learned on his own and from his uncle in South Florida. He has two projects in the tour, including one in SouthWood.

Now, both builders are in the same place - among the relative newcomers to have homes featured this weekend and last on a tour showcasing some 53 different construction styles.

This is the story of how each got there.

South Florida flavor

McFarlane's first homebuilding experience came working for his uncle Syril Harrison's construction business, Harrison Construction in Miami. There, he helped to build more than 35 homes, before taking a break after high school to run his computer business. He bought, sold and repaired computers. He did that for about three years and then sold the company.

"When I got out of the business, I asked myself, 'What will I do next?"'

Attending college seemed logical. He enrolled in FAMU's School of Business & Industry to get a degree in business management. He graduated last month.

But by the time he did that, he already had his business - Aspirant Development, LLC, - some contracts with the city of Tallahassee to build at least half of the homes in its 24-home development Carolina Oaks and two homes under construction for the Parade of Homes.

Not bad for a 27-year-old who says he learned about homebuilding on the job and by aligning himself with other builders. For about a year, he worked for free with Tallahassee builder Jana Nishimoto to learn about residential homebuilding in the Tallahassee market.

"What we build here is different than South Florida, so he wanted to see how we did things and who the sub (contractors) were," said Nishimoto, president of Homes by Jana.

McFarlane's SouthWood entry in this year's Parade of Homes is more than 5,000 square feet with a pricetag of $849,000. It features four bedrooms, three full baths and two half baths. There's a built-in aquarium in the foyer, a small movie theater and a master suite that's about the size of a small two-bedroom apartment.

There are lots of gadgets, too: remotes to control the lights, sound system, the pool's waterfalls and the home's plasma TVs - two of which are found in the master bathroom, one on the wall above the Jacuzzi tub and between the vanity mirrors.

"This was a labor of love," said Spencer Shepard, project manager and a 2002 FAMU graduate of its school of architecture who met McFarlane when he had an office in Huffman/Tarmey Architecture's building. Shepard worked for Huffman/Tarmey for five years before being hired by McFarlane. Within the next two years, Shepard will head up Aspirant's home design division.

"Everything has to be right," Shepard says of McFarlane's work ethic. "You don't know how many times I wanted to pull my hair out because Cory wanted to change something."

Nishimoto isn't surprised by McFarlane's accomplishments. He also has a home in Carolina Oaks priced at $166,000 on the tour. Neither it nor the SouthWood home has sold yet.

"He's got great ideas and I think of lot of it comes from his South Florida influence," she said. "You can see it in his house. He had to conform to SouthWood's guidelines for the exterior, but the interior is definitely Cory."

Designing the house took three months and building it took more than a year. Now McFarlane says he's set to work on other projects. He already has contracts to build another 12 to 15 homes in Carolina Oaks, a Frenchtown development behind the area's new Renaissance Center. And he has rights to build another 10 homes in SouthWood.

One of those will be for Dave Smith, who in November moved from Lady Lake to SouthWood.

"He has some of the classiest houses in the joint," said Smith, who's familiar with McFarlane's style.

Smith recently hired Aspirant Homes to build a home for him in SouthWood because the 2,000-square-foot home he and wife moved into isn't big enough. The new one will be 3,000 square feet.

"He has everything you want and more - the molding, the appliances, extremely high quality," Smith added.

By the end of the year, McFarlane projects he will have grossed $10 million in revenue from the homes he plans to build and sell. But the money isn't what drives him.

"I like building houses," said McFarlane, while standing in the kitchen of his SouthWood home. "I like going to look at faucets...It's like a hobby. I rarely look at the clock when I'm here."

A nod to the past

Before Wamsley was a homebuilder, he helped start technology companies in San Francisco. But that career died when the dot-com industry dried up. A Seattle, Wash.-based firm purchased his company.

And Wamsley? He traveled the world for a year, where he ended up building homes with Habitat for Humanity, before returning to Tallahassee, where he had attended Florida State University.

Once here, he spent two months - dressed as though he was going to work - in Borders Books & Music researching ideas he thought he might like to pursue. He came up with about 130 ideas. Then he noticed in the Tallahassee Democrat mention of the newly published book, "Classic America: Bungalows" by M. Caren Connolly. Soon after he purchased it, he came up with his idea to mix Tallahassee's homebuilding market with styles from the 1920s.

He wrote a business plan, secured financing of $250,000 from local investors, including Fincher Smith, owner of Tallahassee's Paradise Grill, and created K2 Urbancorp.

But there was a problem - he needed to educate himself on the homebuilding process. The only knowledge he had was of building simple block homes for Habitat for Humanity in Thailand.

Over the next few years, he read books on home building and space creation. He talked to city planners, met regularly with local developers and contractors and sat in on workshops that spoke of the kind of construction he wanted to do.

Wamsley wanted to build homes and communities like SouthWood and the coastal Seaside development - communities where homes are built with regard to the proper usage of space. He wanted to be a part of the so-called new urbanism movement.

But to do that, "I knew I had to learn how to build a great house," Wamsley said. And that's where he put all his energies. Wamsley focused on creating new homes with old charm.

Three years ago, he purchased the land at Hillcrest and West Tennessee Street, the home next door to it - which he renovated -and some property in SouthWood. He hired Mark Tarmey, of Huffman/Tarmey Architecture to design the home he would build at Hillcrest. That home, he said, was his teaching tool.

"With Hillcrest, we learned the process of how to design and build a house," said Wamsley.

He just completed the 2,700-square-foot, three-bedroom, two-bath home, reminiscent of the 1920s, in time for the Parade of Homes. It's priced at $519,000.

"I'm almost hesitant to sell it," said Wamsley, who watched the house take shape from his front and back yard.

At the same time Hillcrest was underway, Wamsley started work on the 16-home community Genevieve Place off Morningside Court. All 16 of the homes, originally introduced at $205,000, are sold. They now price at about $275,000. At least 10 homes are finished.

"As a developer, K2 gets it," said Tarmey. "They have educated themselves in the whole doctrine of new urbanism....In the '70s and '80s, neighborhoods were being designed where the homes were farther apart. But the way we're putting them together now, the houses are closer together, closer to the street, the neighborhoods are safer, the traffic is slower. And everybody knows what's going on. This is what we're going back to to."

Since its beginnings in 2002, the company has grown from five to 24 people, which includes two in-house framing crews and an in-house design firm.

On the company's to-do list is a 23-unit, four-story, Spanish Mediterranean style condominium complex. There are also two homes under construction in SouthWood and contracts to build more. He's working on a project off East College Avenue, doing a renovation and building a home in Myers Park and working to finalize plans for a 36-acre mixed-use development on Capital Circle Northeast and Mahan Drive.

"We're trying to position ourselves for five years from now," said Wamsley, who eventually would like to take the company public.

Over the next three years, he's projecting gross revenues to be about $40 million. He figures the company will make about $11 million this year and $28 million the next.

Although he's discovered that being a developer and homebuilder is hard work, Wamsley's enthusiasm hasn't waned.

"The reason I'm excited about homebuilding is because there is no Nike, Hilton or McDonald's of homebuilding," said Wamsley. "If you tell somebody you want to be a homebuilder, they say, 'Go for it.' In this industry, you can become America's homebuilder. And if we do it right, we can be that company."