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Season 2 Kickoff: Who We Are, What We Build, and Why It Matters (EP37)

Trust the Process Podcast | Season 2, Episode 37 | 26 min | with Krista & Michael

Episode Summary

Welcome to Season 2 of the Trust the Process Podcast. In this re-introduction, Krista and Michael share who they are, how Trust Home Builders came to be, and what it really takes to grow a custom homebuilding company in today's Southern Nevada market. From early infill projects to the larger developments now underway, they walk through the path that led here and where the company is headed next.

What We Cover

  • How Trust Home Builders started and grew into a brand

  • The pipeline: 100+ homes planned over the next two years

  • How a builder adapts and keeps projects moving in a shifting market

  • Why a small, agile team can make high-impact decisions fast

  • What's ahead for Season 2

Listen to This Episode

Full Transcript

Krista: Real builds, real decisions. You see the finished houses; we uncover the steps it took to get there. I'm Krista, that's Michael, and this is Trust the Process Podcast. We talk construction, real estate, and development, pulling back the curtain on the new home industry, the market, and the trends shaping it all. Today is a quick re-intro: who we are, how we got here, and why we do what we do. You'll hear how we have 100-plus homes ahead in the next two years, what it really takes to keep projects moving in a choppy market, and why small teams can make $200,000 decisions on the fly. If you're building or just curious, this one's for you. Let's jump in.

Krista: Welcome back to Season 2 of Trust the Process Podcast. I'm Krista, joined by Michael, and we've grown a lot. Our first season was really well received, so thank you for finding us and enjoying what we're doing. We thought it was important to recap who we are, what we're doing, and why it matters, especially for people who found us later in the season. So I'll start with myself. Michael and I have been friends going on 18 years now, collaborating over our love of new home design and construction and interior design. We've worked together over the years on flips and custom home projects. Last year I officially joined the Trust Home Builders team as Director of Marketing, Client Relations, and Sales. I come from a background in new home sales and marketing with other builders, so I bring about 15 years of experience, and I'm really proud to do it. Trust Home Builders is a custom builder, and Michael is our owner and our resident expert. He started in real estate, became a broker, and is now a builder and developer with tons of experience and know-how to share. So Michael, take it from here, give us a little intro on yourself.

Michael: I don't know how I follow that introduction, but I appreciate it. Thank you, and welcome back to Season 2. To everyone who stuck with us, our following is larger than we ever thought it would be, and we're humbled and flattered that people want to listen to what we have to say. I told Krista it's got to be in the Geneva Convention somewhere, a crime against humanity to make someone listen to me talk for 45 minutes about home building, but clearly enough people like it.

Krista: So many people have houses, know houses, or sell houses, but they don't know how you get from raw land to a home someone is actually living in and enjoying. Those steps in between are a mystery for many, and that's the gap you fill.

Michael: I agree. We all have a domicile, we all live somewhere, even if it's our mom's basement, and that had to be developed and built to code. Houses are relics of the years they were built. I've always been drawn to real estate and houses because they're little time machines in their own way. They provide memories, and a city is nothing without its houses and the residents in them. That was a huge draw for me, a fire I couldn't put out. My degrees are in biochemistry and pharmacology, not business or real estate or construction. It's all self-taught, from a passion I was never able to turn off. Sure enough, I became a general sales agent about 12 years ago. I did that for only about a year and a half, and because my advanced degrees let me become a broker without the usual experience, I jumped in head first and opened my own brokerage with agents working for me, after only 14 months in the business.

Krista: That's a little side note about Michael. He doesn't really have an endpoint, he's willing to try anything and ready to go out on the skinny branches to learn something new. One time you said it perfectly: I'll jump, I don't even need to know there's a parachute, I'm ready to jump, and I guess I'd better build a plane on the way down.

Michael: That gets me into hot water sometimes, I definitely get over my skis. Midair I'm like, oh, hold on, there's no parachute, I should have checked. But like a piece of carbon crushed into a diamond, under that pressure you either crack or you become a diamond. It's an internal choice: this is really challenging, am I going to make it a learning experience, develop new skills, develop business acumen off my instincts and hope it's the right call? Thankfully it's worked out. I'm very happy with where we've landed as a company and where I've landed personally. So we felt there was enough there to start a little podcast: we basically have our work conversations and every now and then turn on the camera and start recording.

Krista: That's it. These are conversations we're having either way. We spend a lot of time discussing the market, the industry, and the marketing pieces, how are we going to price this new community, the land Michael's looking at, projects coming into the company. We bounce ideas and brainstorm together anyway, so it was a simple thought: what if the camera was rolling? If someone's interested, great, and if not, we're still doing the work we'd be doing anyway.

Michael: Exactly, we're busy anyway. And here it is, Season 2. To go back to how we even became a home building company, which I skipped: I ran that brokerage for several years, and I still have it, small but vibrant. About seven years ago I started building my first infill homes on little parcels I'd find, one from the city, a couple bought out of bankruptcy, just small stuff, a home a year. It took forever, like a garden you have to keep tilling. All self-funded, no one would give me money to build houses. I took a second on my house, used savings, and got a personal loan for my first project. I paid cash for the land, which was $40,000, cheap, back in 2015. Then I begged, borrowed, and stole, that's not an admission, to get the money to build that first project. I met a great general contractor in the process who's my business partner today; we've known each other 10 years now. That first house took a year and a half because I didn't know what I was doing, and it was a $300,000 house, nothing fancy. But it parlayed, and with Ryan's connections and mine, we got busy doing some build-to-suits. I earned my grit that way, building with someone else's money but also dealing with their emotions, which is way worse than just paying interest. I'll just pay interest.

Krista: It's its own skill set for sure.

Michael: During COVID I broke from a partner on my brokerage and started my own true brokerage, about six years ago. At the same time, I created a logo for a home building and development company and said, let's see what kind of trouble we can get into.

Krista: I still remember the day you shared it with me. You said, I think I'm doing this now. That logo's fantastic. Let's go.

Michael: That's probably still in our texts. Fast forward, and now, I don't even know how to count them, we've got six custom homes in South Shore, a six-home subdivision at Serene, a six-home subdivision at Argos, a five-home subdivision at Westridge, a 24-unit townhouse project in North Las Vegas, and a 79-unit townhouse project downtown. So we'll turn over well more than 100 homes in the next two years. It's crazy to think that what was a logo five or six years ago is 100-plus keys being handed over, probably 120 over two years.

Krista: To homeowners who get to enjoy the privilege of homeownership and the passion and pride you put into each home.

Michael: Exactly, even the townhomes, a lower price point closer to the median sales price, great for entry level. They're still a brainchild of ours that we get to watch grow to fruition. It's satisfying to hope that in a hundred years those homes have turned over several times.

Krista: They might be ready for us to come in and do a renovation by then.

Michael: Right, and we'll just be a disembodied face on a screen by then. So that's where we're at, trying to recount the last five or six years and the next two. We're about a six-person team: a project manager, my partner who's the senior project manager, Krista over marketing and client experience, an in-house sales agent, an in-house designer, and by the time this airs we might have another person. We're growing very quickly. Krista likes to compare us to a startup, because we are, moving fast and learning as we go. I tell her all the time, we're building the plane in the air.

Michael: I get a thrill out of it. I like that we're not stuck with old policies, old ideas, or old management. Everything is new, everything is uncharted, and I find it gratifying to be part of its growth, which has been breakneck speed. We've weathered supply chain disruptions, bad markets, rates going from 4% to 6% in six weeks, 3% to 6% in a year, we've built and sold through all of it. I keep a watchful eye on the real estate market as a broker, but also because what we build is mostly build-to-sell. So these are our own investments, I own them until they're done and turned over to a buyer. You have to know the market, keep your head on a swivel, know what's coming in legislation, building codes, energy codes, and city planning. Some of our communities are in common interest communities governed by design review and HOA boards, so you have to navigate that and handle the emotion. You have to keep a steady stream of investors and capital, and great relationships with banks and lenders to keep projects funded. When you're new, you don't have corporate bond money like Pulte or the large publicly traded builders, who can raise a bond in weeks at half the interest I pay. So we get creative, often moving things around to cover a project when the development loan didn't allocate quite enough, and you have to be willing to sit on homes longer and weather market conditions.

Krista: We build in Las Vegas and the greater Southern Nevada area, so we keep boots on the ground here, but we both study the national market too. We have followers in other states, even other countries, and we work hard to understand the industry as a whole because it affects our day to day, new policy changes, what's coming down the pipeline on the East Coast that may trickle here, neighboring markets in Arizona and Utah. A lot of our migration comes from California, Washington, and Colorado, so we watch the resale picture there. Should we take a contingency on a new home based on what we know about those markets? We keep a broader reach than just Las Vegas.

Michael: And that trickles into our episodes. You can go down the rabbit hole on construction and global commodities, concrete and lumber prices. There's an AI data center boom keeping concrete elevated, and a property recession in China affecting other goods. We'll have a whole episode on where I think future pricing is headed for raw materials and labor as 2026 plays out. I like to think of myself, and I know you're the same, as a student of the market, of global financial conditions, political tensions, all of it is relevant.

Krista: Even the logistical parts, will something cause delays in what we want, will it slow how quickly we get appliances, do we look at this brand versus that one because it's more readily available? You dealt with that during COVID, but there are still ongoing changes in manufacturing that affect logistics and how we build out our homes.

Michael: When you're developing, we've said this before, you're trying to thread a needle with a shotgun and the eye of the needle is a mile away. So many variables can change where that needle goes. You gather as much information as you can, and at the end of the day it almost never goes exactly how you thought, but I don't like to fly in the dark. I'll jump out of a plane without a parachute, but I want navigation, I'm not risk averse, but I like having my information.

Krista: And knowledge is that navigation. Understanding what we do and what the market requires at any given time is the light that keeps it from getting too dark. There are so many unknowns none of us can predict, but understanding the market, and both of us selling real estate, gives us that glimmer of light. Sometimes I wonder if it's a train.

Michael: Sounds like a BNSF diesel engine coming.

Krista: There's a lot of fact-finding and a lot of pivoting as things come at us.

Michael: I love it though. That's one of my favorite aspects of the business, how dynamic it is, and that I get to collaborate with you and make decisions on the fly without going through layers of management. On one of our lots at Serene, I walked up and got goosebumps. It wasn't until the foundation was poured and the form boards were open that I realized we should make a decision on the fly: the walls were non-structural, so let's flip the upstairs plan so the rec room has the panoramic view of the Strip. It was probably a $200,000 decision, I think the house is worth $200,000 more in its current configuration. That night I pulled the plan up in my architectural software, reversed the upstairs, printed it, sent it to the team, and it got framed accordingly. I walked it yesterday, and the joy wasn't just capturing the view, it's that we were able to brainstorm a better alternative, execute it, and see the fruits of it, and that house will be that way forever.

Krista: And because we're small, we can be agile like that. You come up with an idea, whereas at a bigger company there's policy, one person sees it, another doesn't. You get a vision and you can make the change on the fly.

Michael: Boom, executive decision, that's what we're doing. That's my favorite part of the business, the highs and lows, because without the lows you don't have the highs. We've had major setbacks in the last six to 12 months: the market got soft, some builds went over budget, some we didn't make money on, some took way longer to sell, some still aren't sold. And you know what, it's fine. It doesn't stop us, we just keep rolling.

Krista: Those are the things that, when you pull back the curtain, not everybody knows about the home building industry, and we're not afraid to share all of it with you. We've loved the podcast as one more way to enjoy what we're doing. Thank you for coming along. For those who've been with us a long time, we love the comments, questions, and notes, keep them coming. And for those newer to the podcast, we're excited to have you on board. We'll do some things differently this season, probably more special guests. So often it's an on-the-fly conversation where we just flip the camera on, so planning some guests in will be a little different for us, but your feedback tells us what's most interesting for you.

Michael: Let's do another season.

Krista: Season 2, here we come. Thanks for your time today, Michael, and thank you all for being here. We'll see you on the next episode of Trust the Process Podcast. Bye bye.

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