In this video, you get to meet Stroud Homes Pokeno Pukekohe builder Mike Wilson. Learn why he decided to join a Stroud Homes building franchise.
Video Transcript:
Mike Wilson: Hi, I’m Mike Wilson. I’ve been building for about 17 years right throughout the Franklin area. So, what led me to Stroud Homes? I was, sort of, at the point in my life where I was a labor-only contractor for a lot of other groups around here, and I just wanted to make that next step.
Me and my wife took it on, and we haven’t looked back ever since. I started from the ground up. So, we used to walk onto an empty section, build it from the block right up to pretty much handing over. So, it teaches you a lot, gives you a lot of experience.
When they first told me what they could do and what there was available with the franchise, I was just used to being on the tools [SP] six or seven days of my life. When I looked into it and since we’ve learned all those systems and processes, it’s pretty amazing. And it shaved a lot of time off a lot of the build process.
We can price a house in 24 hours. What used to take me 4 weeks will now take me 24 hours because of our systems. We’ve got over 130 sets of floor plans. We’ve got different facades, so you can change the look of the home.
We can customize plans to suit someone. But we try and steer the client away from that because our plans go through a vigorous vetting process before they make it to our website.
Everything has been checked: daylight, hallway space, wasted space. We pretty much cover all bases when it comes down to a house design. At Stroud, we’ve got 81 standard inclusions. That’s what we price our standard houses with, stone benchtops, level-entry showers, 900-wide freestanding oven. Our clients usually just pick the color of that spec. It’s that high.
So, the biggest thing for me that’s changed is getting off the tools full-time. It’s definitely a big adjustment after being on them for 17 years. It’s, sort of, all you know, but I have really enjoyed it.
Starting to see a bit more family time now, you know, try and leave early on a Friday afternoon and go and hang out with my kids or fishing with the boys, or something like that. So, things have changed a fair bit.
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