Havlicek Builders:
‘LESS HOUSE, MORE HOME’ is the slogan of today’s homebuyer By JONATHAN BILYK
Nearly 10 years after the crash, George Havlicek is liking the momentum he’s seen building. Since 1983, Havlicek and his company, Havlicek Builders in Geneva, have built hundreds of luxury homes in and around the Tri-Cities. And, after a trying decade, Havlicek says it’s starting to finally feel more like old times in some ways, and good in other ways, too. “Are things where they were, or where they should be?” he says. “Probably not. But building is up, and it’s up quite a bit.” Across the country, the number of new homes being built and sold has risen to levels not seen since the pre-Great Recession real estate boom of the early to mid-2000s. At the depths of the Great Recession, sales had tanked at 300,000 to 350,000 homes sold per month. With still lagging existing home sales – and still not quite keeping up with the pace set at the market’s peak in 2007 – new home construction and sales activity has surged, as homebuilders across the country have sold 500,000 to 600,000 new homes every month since 2015. In July 2017, for instance, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported builders sold 571,000 new homes. While that was down about 9 percent from July 2016, June’s sales totaled 630,000 across the country, which was slightly up from the same month the year before. That improvement also is reflected in surveys conducted by homebuilders, who are revealing a sense of optimism in the market also not seen for quite a few years. “You’d go to homebuilder shows and it was like a ghost town,” Havlicek says. “Now, it feels a bit 24 | OCTOBER 2017 | KANE COUNTY MAGAZINE
more like old times.” However, while the new housing market may be finding a new groove, the homes that are being built indicate that it is in many ways a new groove. Havlicek points to his latest development, Cooper Woods in Geneva, where the new homes are reflecting the needs and wants of today’s buyers. He noted the homes there were featured in the Northern Illinois Home Builders HOME & LIFESTYLE
Association’s most recent Cavalcade Tour of Homes, which offered a glimpse of 22 model homes in six counties. For starters, Havlicek says, buyers of new homes – for the most part – appear to not be particularly keen on the idea of building giant homes on the edge of a cornfield. Buyers, he says, are seeking homes inside of town, preferably as close to “the center of the action” as possible. That is particularly true of www.kcchronicle.com/magazine