Savant Homes has solution to cookie-cutter concept

FORT COLLINS – Building simultaneously at the rock bottom and at the highest reaches of Northern Colorado’s new home market would stretch the capacity of most builders.

For Fort Collins-based Savant Homes Inc., it’s all part of the business plan. The knack that Alan and Kim Strope and their nine employees have for creating custom designs – even for a $180,000 starter home in Wellington – has fueled a business that grew almost 250 percent since 2003.

“Our goal is to have every house we build be different from any other we’ve built,´ said Kim Strope, whose husband launched Savant nine years ago and who serves as the interior design specialist for the builder. “Working together, we’ve created an awesome team of people that has allowed us to do that.”

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Savant’s crews had a busy 2005, with 37 new homes built, most in Wellington’s Buffalo Creek subdivision. The year prior, they built 25. During the period since 2003, Savant’s revenue grew from $2.3 million to $8 million, landing the homebuilder in the No. 4 spot on the Business Report’s Mercury 100 list of fastest-growing businesses.

Staking out new, higher-end projects in Windsor for the year ahead, Alan Strope said he wanted to take the company even higher.

“We’re doing about $8 million now, but in the next two years we want to be at $20 million,” he said. “We think we can do that.”

Savant has managed to boost sales totals despite the fact that rising materials costs often whittle away profits, Alan Strope said.

“It’s been a difficult, constant battle,” he said. “Concrete, steel, everything else has been rising so fast the past couple of years. It often happens so quickly that you can’t pass it on to the buyers. It’s drastically affected our margins the past couple of years.”

Savant’s current growth target is HighPointe Estates in Windsor, a community of new homes in the $400,000 to $600,000 price range located just east of the popular Highland Meadows Golf Course. Strope said the 50 HighPointe lots he has committed to will take about two to three years to build out.

The promise that the company makes, no matter what the price range, is that buyers will have custom choices that are not often available to so-called “production” homebuyers. The ingredients in new Savant homes are some of the same that earned the company seven awards, including two first-place awards, in the 2004 Parade of Homes competition sponsored by the Homebuilders Association of Northern Colorado.

Rick Wilhoit, the computer-assisted design, or CAD, wizard at Savant Homes Inc., said he is just as likely to make custom design changes on a $180,000 home in Wellington as on a $1.8 million luxury home planned for a new golf community in Timnath.

“When I started here, they were changing their plans by hand, revising drawings,” Wilhoit said. “It took so much time. I told them that if we get auto CAD in here, we can do these in 30 seconds, while a client is here.”

The in-house design alterations, with input from clients, is a reason that Buffalo Creek’s starter homes don’t look so much as if they were stamped out with a cookie cutter.

“If you want to be technically accurate, we’re building tract homes,” Wilhoit said. “But every one of them is different. We can do anything to the house.”

Wilhoit said he and his coworkers also enjoy a work environment that fosters the kind of creativity and productivity that has made Savant successful. Because the Stopes are the parents of young children, for example, they understand the need for flexibility for their employees in the same circumstance.

“You’re as strong as your employees,” Wilhoit said. “If your employees are happy, it’s going to show up in the quality of the work. Alan and Kim really understand that.”