Editorial
Front Page - Friday, December 24, 2010
Busy December signals the beginning of good times
Erica Tuggle
Art Johnson, owner of Mountain City Construction Company, says December has been a surprisingly busy month for their construction business in renovations and new home building. Johnson has seen many changes in his years in the industry and says Chattanooga’s construction sector stays consistent most of the time with business.
- Erica Tuggle
Art Johnson, owner of Mountain City Construction, says he’s positive 2011 is going to be a good year in Chattanooga because of the new businesses coming into town that havebrought a positive attitude toward construction and remodeling with them.
“Attitudes have changed and you can see it in the press, the politics and local news that it is more positive,” he says.
He says December has been booked with remodeling jobs, which is another encouraging sign for the future. The first half of this year started off well, but after the tax credit was ended, a lot of business came to a screeching halt, which he says could have been avoided if the credit was phased out instead.
You can take Johnson’s advice on matters like these with the name recognition he has earned with his projects and skills that he has been using in this business since he started in his senior year of high school.
“I have always had an aptitude for looking at things and figuring out how they were built,” he says. “I remember back in elementary school taking these aptitude tests that said what you were good at, and mine always said construction.”
Born and raised in Chattanooga, Johnson first began working for W.F. Cotton, local builders, who realized Johnson’s knack for construction, took him under their wing and showed him how to build houses. From there, Johnson had a small company with his father in the ’80s, worked for Chester West Inc. in Huntsville and worked for a Nashville company called Custom Homes that did projects for artists like Randy Travis and Conway Twitty.
After that, Johnson returned to Chattanooga to work with Bell Development for 17 years. Three years ago he and his partner/wife, Realtor Karen Riede, brought all this experience together to start Mountain City Construction. He says now he has learned the differences in working for yourself in construction.
“When I worked for builders, I watched the costs and how I was spending their money. The difference between that and now is I’m spending my money,” he says. “When I was spending their money, I probably just went with what I knew was right. When you are spending your own money, you can over think things you probably shouldn’t, and I had to learn how to be a businessman. I knew about business, but actually knowing it and practicing it are two different things.”
Through his years of experience, Johnson has seen the whole spectrum of where this business can go. When he worked with his father’s company, the interest rates were 21 percent and houses couldn’t be given away, he says. Yet, Chattanooga has always been a consistent market and never gets as over inflated as the rest of the country, he says.
“It’s been steady but slow this year. We could be a whole lot busier, but we are fortunate enough that we are able to pay our bills, and I’ll be here next year and years after if I can make it now.”
Mountain City Construct-ion does more than just build custom homes; they also rebuild, renovate and resale foreclosures, do home renovations and also do 203K loans with homebuyers who buy a house in foreclosure but don’t have the expertise to do the renovations. They also do punch lists for those selling their home that need to decide which work has priority funding after a home inspection report.
The husband and wife team does jobs from $200 to $200,000, depending on a client’s needs and diverse options. Building custom homes, depending on the size (and with weather cooperating) takes about 100 days to finish a 200 square ft., $200,000 house, he says. But a lot of that estimate depends on if the homebuyer has their ducks in a row.
“Before we move the first scoop of dirt, we sit down and lay out exactly what it is they are going to put in the house – the colors, the whole bit – so there are no delays on their part. Once you get all that stuff laid out, building the house is the easy part,” Johnson says.
The homebuyer influence also determines the trends that Johnson sees in his daily work. He says granite surfaces have become popular and are widely used now that prices have gotten down to where they can be competitive.
Solid surface floorings, like tiles and hardwoods, are popular even in starter homes because those prices are becoming more and more comparable with carpet, and it’s much healthier when the dirt is not piling up under a carpet surface, Johnson says.
Another big trend in custom building is energy efficient installation and eco-friendly additions. With remodeling jobs, he says there has been a big switch to energy saving and insulated windows as well. Although, Johnson says, the Southern Building Codes in Chattanooga he has been building by for years are very similar to a green house’s requirements.
“To build an eco-friendly house, the steps are not that much more. The funny part about it is that people want to pay for things they see. They love to have an energy efficient home, but since they can’t see these additions, they tend to not want to pay for them,” he says.
Because these trends promote healthier living, Johnson says he thinks they will continue, although he does count the stainless steel appliances and concrete countertops as a passing fad.
Johnson, his wife and his five children enjoy the outdoors and in the summertime like to go to the lake, the pool and sit in the sun and enjoy life. That is not to say that he doesn’t enjoy his work also.
“The reason I like it so much is that it is rewarding. Every day is so different and every project is different and when you get finished you can say, ‘Wow, I
did that.’”
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