In a span of eight weeks between 2008 and 2009, Dave Spetrino, saw about $1 million of his credit lines dry up. The disappearance of Plantation Building Corporation’s safety net, forced him to make a drastic change. One Monday afternoon in January 2010, he laid off 12 of his 22 staff.

“We cut our overhead from $140,000 a month to $40,000 a month,” said Spetrino, who founded the building firm in 1997. His survival strategy was to cut deep and then hire back as needed. Now, he is starting to hire back, but strategically.

The majority of his staff used to be managers. At one time, he had an accountant and a nationally certified interior designer on staff at his company, which is known for its custom homes and historic renovations in the downtown area.

After the layoffs, his remaining staff took on managing projects and becoming more hands-on in the field. Last July, he started adding more talent to his team. He hired the company’s first LEED accredited professional, Daniel Spann, whose previous apartment and multi-family construction work in the Greensboro/Winston-Salem area had caught Spetrino’s attention.

In May, Spetrino brought on Kasey Valente, who now leads clients through the homebuilding process of selecting designs from existing plans. Most of her clients will be building in the Brunswick Forest development in Leland.
Valente has been a licensed real estate broker with Intracoastal Realty since 2006 and will continue to hang her shingle there while being Plantation Building Corp.’s New Homes Specialist. She will exclusively list Plantation properties eventually.

“When the opportunity came up, there was no way I was going to pass it up,” said Valente, who has listed and shown Plantation Building Corp. properties for about five years.

Spetrino projects his company will build about 20 homes this year, 12 of which will be in Brunswick Forest. “That’s a pretty big chunk in our company and that’s why the investment in people like Kasey is paramount,” he said.

It took about a year of planning for the company to enter the Brunswick Forest development. “We had to be very specific about the decision to make that investment in the community. And in turn, we looked for a community that we believed had enough things going on to attract the type of buyers we needed,” he said. Plantation Building Corp. sold its first home in Brunswick Forest in May last year. It is in the Shelmore neighborhood, which features modern bungalows in the $300,000 to $375,000 range.

“My plan is to diversify their product,” Valente said. She’d like to add single-floor living, aging-in-place and energy-savings plans to the company’s offerings while maintaining the trim work, fixtures and flare Plantation properties are known for.

Spetrino’s directive to Valente is to sell one home a month. “It’s not like we’re looking for all of the work, we’re looking for those clients who do appreciate the quality and things we provide as well as the extra attention to the design-side,” he said.

Although he will be the first to confirm that homebuilding and construction is nowhere near where it used to be, his company is taking small steps towards realistic growth.

“The fact that we’re hiring people and that we’re hiring them differently than we did in the past, helps us reduce our own learning curve and gets us back into profitability that much more quickly,” he said. “This will be our first year of profitability since ‘07.”