There's a sexy side to Real Estate Development. You might imagine new fancy buildings, big jumbo printed out plans, or Tony Giarratana types who go all in on a hunch. Currently, in our case, the sexy side is when a house goes on the market. You see a big price tag and have hundreds of people congratulating you on finishing the house and how excellent it turned out. You send everyone and your mom the Zillow link and wait to hear what buyers think about it.

Don’t get me wrong, that part is great. However, the less sexy part is the year leading up to that. All gas, no brakes, as you work to keep 100 people working together (on budget!) while staying on schedule. Not very easy.

Hermes recently opened up in Wedgewood-Houston and it led me to do a deep dive into their company. Hermes deliberately keeps their entire process in house and uses that constraint to their advantage. Everything is done by hand, they never have more than 300 tradespeople per shop to avoid creating a "factory," and they use only one artisan per bag. None of that is accidental. They firmly believe that the lack of automation is what allows them to keep their soul.

This mindset is exactly what we're working to do with Highmark. There are tons of things that technically can be delegated, but we still do it. While I do believe firmly in scale and systems that automate our day to day (see last week’s newsletter!), we still work very hard to keep our fingerprints on everything. I don't have to go to the city to talk to the head of mechanical trades to find out why we can't trench electrical cabling in East Nashville, but I choose to, because what we learn from those questions and from doing unscalable things is exactly what we incorporate into our next builds. We could technically buy pre-produced architectural plans online, but meeting with our architect at Panera Bread and debating the best place to put a bedroom and its closet is exactly what makes this so fun and our projects so uniquely Highmark.

Too many people automate and systematize in order to get away from doing the actual work. If you get so removed from the work that you lose the perspective and ability to influence it, at that point, why are you even around? We’re 425 days in with 8 houses in progress, complete, or under our belt. My day to day looks incredibly different than it did on day one, and it should. But I still make a concerted effort to get out there and actually see what's happening, and I don't plan on that changing.

One last thing before we go.

I have a degree in economics, so I'm going to nerd out for a second. Now that we're getting more data points on the market, we're in a pretty unique position to see what a luxury home buyer in Nashville actually wants. We get an insane amount of feedback on the houses every day from buyers who walk them, and putting that together with more quantifiable metrics gives us a great gauge for what the market is looking for and how quickly it can absorb luxury homes at luxury prices.

We don't want to build from a spreadsheet and end up with some frankenstein house because people said they loved certain variables. But it's cool to have data behind things we only had a feel for before. Lots of kitchen cabinetry space is obvious to us. What's less obvious: EVERYONE loves a Lazy Susan. Maybe it's just novel. But we've gotten so much love for the one we put in Lumenhouse (our Japanese / Scandinavian inspired house) that I think that little detail is a real driver.

Below are three houses we have on the market now. You don't need a four year degree to see that 801 Virginia Ave is our most beautiful and impressive house to date. Once we have the complete data story after she sells, we’ll be able to understand what people liked the most. Anyways, the next five are going to mog her ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.