DEL.ICIO.USMETRO ATLANTA
Builder gets back to basics, house by house
Cruising in motor home, sleeping in unsold houses, John Wieland tries to remake company
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, April 05, 2009
There’s no telling who was more surprised at 7:15 a.m.: the drywall worker who showed up to do minor repairs or the man who had been sleeping on a mattress on the floor upstairs.
The laborer walked into an unsold John Wieland home he thought was empty — and there was John Wieland. That’s how Day 26 began on Wieland’s home-sales promotion tour, covering five cities in four states.
Bob Andres/bandres@ajc.com
Laura Ragin and John Wieland meet at her new house so the builder can hand over a ceramic model of the ‘Wiebago,’ the mobile command center that ferries Wieland around the Southeast as his company tries to reach its goal of selling 101 houses.
Bob Andres/bandres@ajc.com
Wieland juggles running a business and meeting with real estate agents and prospective buyers from his Winnebago.
In an effort to boost home sales, Wieland, 72, has vowed to live like a gypsy until 101 of his houses go under contract. That means eating prepared meals he microwaves in his “Wiebago” motor home, and sleeping in unfurnished, unsold homes. The 101 refers to getting back to basics by selling value and a sense of place.
On the tour, which began March 6, Wieland juggles running his business and meeting with real estate agents and prospective buyers. The 39-year veteran of the industry wants to know why people aren’t buying when prices and interest rates are low, and choices are abundant. Is it job insecurity? Is it a belief prices will fall even more?
“Every home I sleep in I try to figure out, ‘Why hasn’t it sold?’ ” Wieland said as his driver, Bobby Harris, navigated the 4-miles-per-gallon Wiebago — a Winnebago dressed as a billboard — around south Fulton and Cobb counties.
John Wieland Homes & Neighborhoods builds traditional housing for the move-up buyer. Its 60 communities pepper Nashville, Charlotte, Raleigh and Charleston, S.C., in addition to Atlanta. The company grew rapidly in the 1990s, with sales peaking in 2005 at 1,800 units. Since then, business has fallen 75 percent and the work force has been cut to 280 from 1,100.
On night 25 of the tour, the Wiebago parked at a four-bedroom home at the Legacy at the River Line community in Mableton. Across the street were graded homesites where work has stopped. More than halfway to his 101 goal, Wieland hauled two black luggage bags upstairs, one containing clothes, the other sheets. Assistants carried in the small mattress.
“This isn’t normally my gig,” he said, breathing hard after tucking a sheet under the mattress on the carpeted floor. “I need a personal trainer to help me make my bed.”
Before turning in, Wieland works, catches up on news and prepares a meal all in the motor home. Dinner that night was Stouffer’s sweet and sour chicken, heated in the Wiebago microwave. A neighbor surprised him with a knock on the door and a bottle of wine and a wine opener. That was like hitting the jackpot, he said the next morning, showing the unopened bottle, to be enjoyed later. (“I had a little scotch last night.”)
The Wiebago headed to company headquarters in Smyrna, where Wieland signed ceramic replicas of the big vehicle that will be given to new buyers, led a design meeting and consulted with tech specialist Chuck King. The generator that powers appliances in the Wiebago quit working.
“The big problem is my Lean Cuisine is thawing out,” Wieland told King, who fixed the problem and showed the technically challenged millionaire how to use a laptop.
At the design meeting, Wieland employees in Charlotte and Nashville joined via video to hash out changes to house and green space plans.
“This recession is a sea change in how America looks at a number of things, and one of them is housing,” Wieland said during the ride to that meeting. “We’re not going to want to put as much of our investable capital into a house. We had this terrible shock: House values don’t always go up.”
So the mission has changed: Build more-compact homes at a lower price without sacrificing the architectural details buyers love.
“I’m not sure the customer understands the breakfast table concept,” Wieland told the architects as a house drawing was displayed. He questioned the wisdom of building a walking trail that doesn’t go far, ringing a grassy mall with trees that eventually will obscure views, and locating a children’s play area away from the parking lot. “I’ll never forget the letter I got from the woman who had to walk 40 feet to the playground,” he told the group. “She was outraged that we would inconvenience her.”
Wieland is Atlanta’s best-known homegrown builder, but his construction career began with a thud. He and a graduate-school chum in 1970 started a Carrollton-based building materials company with an orange logo, nine years before Home Depot opened its first store. It flopped.
“We took everything we learned at Harvard Business School and applied it — and ruined the business,” he said. Undecided about whether to stay in Atlanta after that misfire, Wieland queried friends about what to do, and they all said the area was about to explode. He decided to try his hand at home building, and asked a banker friend to recommend a builder. Then he went to the builder’s site and hired the workers.
After the design meeting, the Wiebago rumbled on to a home under contract in south Atlanta, where the buyer was given a ceramic motor home.
“I just got an offer on the house you slept in at Le Grande,” Wieland real estate agent Adrienne Hood told her boss at the house. Le Grande is in south Fulton.
“Now you’re talking,” Wieland said. “That’s good mojo.”
At the next stop, another community in south Fulton, Wieland treated real estate agents to lunch. Seated at a table, he sought their advice. Refreeze the partially thawed Lean Cuisine dinners or toss them?
He looked pained when the agents said play it safe. That’s not this style.
.JPG)
-1.JPG)
Services »
