A home under construction in Woodbrook, a Neal Communities development in Manatee County. Neal marked the completion of the company's 9,000th residence on Wednesday, July 3, 2013, with a ceremony at the home of Stephanie and Dane Martinez. Company President Pat Neal estimates that 500 employees and subcontractors are working for the company at any one time. Staff Photo / Harold Bubil; 7-3-2013.
The news is not that Neal Communities has completed its 9,000th residence since the 1970s. Every few months, the company, headed by Pat Neal, passes a milestone.
In fact, the 9,000th home was occupied in March by Dane and Stephanie Martinez and their daugher, Eva. A second child, Alyssa, is due this week. The construction event was celebrated with a company gathering on their lawn Wednesday morning.
“We admire the work done by Neal Communities,” said Stephanie Martinez, “so this is an honor.”
Since March, the company has built or is building dozens more houses — and has logged 429 sales for the year. It is on a record pace for the calendar year, with about $180 million in sales.
What is news is that Neal is holding back on us.
At Woodbrook, the Manatee County community where the Martinez family resides, sales are capped at three per month in the Celebration series of houses, which includes the White Sands model, a 3/2 ranch like the kind the Martinezes purchased in 2012. The same thing is going on in Central Park, said Pat Neal.
There is no limit on sales for the Cottage series. “They are pre-planned, the floor plans have been selected, and the options, so we can go ahead and sell them,” said Lisa Van Dillen, a sales rep at Woodbrook. Prices are going up; cottages started at $139,000 there last year and now start at $161,000, she said.
The reason for the “allocation” is that houses can only be built so fast in today’s tight market for skilled construction labor. So the company is tapping the brakes to keep up with demand and maintain quality, said Sales Director David Hunihan.
“It is really important that we don’t overload our capacity,” said Hunihan. “We don’t only want to build homes, we want to build them right.”
Selling homes at such a pace “is a double-edged sword,” said Hunihan. “You are always putting yourself out of a job.”
Pat Neal, president of Neal Communities, address some of his employees at a ceremony marking the construction of Neal's 9,000th residence on Wednesday, July 3, 2013, in the Manatee County development of Woodbrook. Four generations of Neal family members have worked in home building. Pat Neal went into the business in 1973. Staff photo / Harold Bubil; 7-3-2013.
Not quite. Pat Neal is looking for, and buying, land. He is even expanding into the Fort Myers and Naples markets, with former WCI executive Michael Greenberg heading a new development called Villa Palmeras, near Estero. Greenberg says he has 13 sales in three weeks, priced in the low- to mid-$200,000s.
Why the move to Lee and Collier counties?
“We sell 28 percent of the new homes in the Sarasota-Manatee market, and we found, particularly in Manatee County, that our biggest competition was us,” said Pat Neal. “A customer would come see Lisa about a Blue Sky model, then they would go to Forest Creek about a Blue Sky, then Central Park about a Blue Sky, and all of a sudden I was negotiating with a customer between my three communities.
“We have made six land purchases, and have others in the pipeline” in Lee and Collier counties, Neal said. “We intend to make it a big point of our emphasis.
“We sell from Exit 228 to Exit 111” along Interstate 75.
During the boom, 21,000 people worked in construction in Sarasota and Manatee counties, Neal said. Now the number is 9,000.
“So there are another 10,000 jobs that could be added if we got back to the previous levels,” he noted. “I’m not sure we want to.”
In May, Neal had 106 employees and about 500 people on its jobs every day, employed by 70 trade partners “that we pay every other week; we have a total of 400 trade partners. We would be Manatee County’s fourth- or fifth-largest largest employer if you counted all the subcontractors.”
Those 106 employees include Pat Neal, his wife, Charlene, who is vice president of design, and sons John and Michael, the latter fresh out of college. Thus the expansion into points south.
“I have my two boys; they want to have their own lives,” said Pat Neal. “They have to have their own responsibilities, too.”
“For the past two years we went over our house count for 2005 but this will be our highest dollar value that we will have - about $180 million in the home-building company, not including the insurance, title, mortgage or land businesses, which are separate businesses. About $200 million leaves the company to go to salaries or financial institutions or local builders.”
