Stocking up on home designs

Husbands and wives feuding over custom home designs used to make Terry Hughes feel like a marriage counselor.

There’s no more of that for the home builder-turned-designer. He’s shifted his design work in a new direction: stock plan sales.

Now, he’ll never meet most of his customers.

When Hughes and the three designers at his year-old company, Blue Line Home Design, aren’t working on custom commercial and residential projects, they create stock plans, put them on their new Web site and sell them again and again. It’s a change from working with clients and designing homes to their liking, one at a time, and it looks to be a growing trend in the world of home design.

The Internet allows Blue Line Home Design and companies like it to compete with the big boys while avoiding expensive book publishers and direct mailings.

Industry experts say stock home plans aren’t stealing customers from custom design work. Instead, stock plans are gaining their own following among people who otherwise might not be able to afford an architect or custom home design. The average cost of a stock home is considerably less than the cost of custom design work, which runs into the thousands of dollars. Blue Line’s designs, for example, range from $420 to $825, depending on the square footage of the house and the number of copies needed for the builders, plumbers, electricians and others.

The national stock home design market is growing, both because notable designers have started doing stock designs and custom designers are realizing they “have equity in their files” every time they create a design, said Steve Mickley, executive director of the American Institute of Building Design, of which Hughes is a member. The institute is a nonprofit organization of home architects and designers.

“The fact that you have a lot of notable designers that have entered into the stock plan industry, that has just totally changed the perception from the buyer’s point of view,” he said.

The Internet continues to fuel the growth, said Jeffrey deRoulet, president of the House Plan Marketing Association.

“Now it’s hit light-speed Internet, and that has lowered the barrier for entry into the industry for designers (and) made it a lot easier to get their plans to the public,” he said.

Hughes said customers like stock plans because they’re faster than waiting for a custom design and they “see what they get. They can look through thousands of pictures of homes and pick out what they want in the privacy of their own home.”

Hughes turned away requests for custom work for three to four months to focus the company’s efforts on creating several dozen stock home designs. On June 1, he launched his Web site, www.bluelinehomedesign.com, with 24 designs. It now has renderings and blueprints of 33 homes and three garages, and most all of his stock plan customers buy copyrighted blueprints via the Web site, although he still gets inquiries via telephone, he said.Craftsman style homes, of which there are 13 on the site, are the most popular, he said.

Commercial work through Blue Line Design, Hughes’ original company, still accounts for about 80 percent of his income, he said. Stock designs are a small part of his home-design business, at about 10 percent, with home remodels making up about 25 percent and custom work the remaining 65 percent, he said.

But Hughes sees the role of his stock designs growing; in the next 12 months, he expects close to $250,000 in sales of stock home plans, he said.

“For just thinking up an idea, that’s pretty good,” he said.

Web sites have allowed small companies to side-step contracts with publishers of home design books and magazines, who can take as much as half of the revenue from sales of designs.

“On the books, I have to give away a tremendous amount of royalty,” Hughes said. “On the Web site, it all stays in my pocket.”

Still, Hughes said he just signed several book deals that will put his designs in books to be sold at stores around the country to catch those people who don’t want to buy on the Internet.Those books will carry homes with names familiar to Inland Northwesterners. There’s the two-story, 3,075-square-foot “Sandpoint,” for example, or the one-story, 2,607-square-foot “Kalispel Peak.”

“It’s just a marketing ploy. A shameless marketing ploy,” Hughes said. With number designations, rather than names, “there’s no sex in there. It doesn’t sizzle. And they tend to remember a name more than a number.”