Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

Group debates quality issues

Las Vegas housing industry trying to improve caliber of construction

Las Vegas home builders and trade contractors are trying to educate their work force and improve their product with a quality assurance program certified through the National Association of Home Builders.

There are many challenges in the housing industry driving the need for such a program, Jim Hostetler, director of construction for KB Home, said last week at a forum sponsored by the Southern Nevada Home Builders Industry.

Among them are adversarial relationships between the trades and builders.

"The pieceworker's out there going as fast as he can so he can make as much he can in as little time, sometimes without regard to quality," Hostetler said. "The sole responsibility for quality assurance falls with the site superintendent. The trade partner then looks at this as aggravation."

Hostetler was among several builders and contractors who discussed the merits of the program and how it has helped their business at the forum held at the Clark County building department on Russell Road.

There are 88 local companies participating in the program, which started in November 2001, with 11 of them certified.

"Part of the reason for the program was to raise the bar for our trade partners and raise the bar for the home building industry," said Steve Hackney, president of Southern Nevada Home Builders and Christopher Homes in Las Vegas.

The forum covered topics such as measuring quality assurance performance, increasing productivity and efficiency, identifying and eliminating "hot spots," reducing warranty claims and call backs and strengthening the inspection process.

Southern Nevada's chapter is the first to take the national program that was designed for framers and apply it to other trades, Hackney said.

Sean Cavanaugh, general manager of Gypsum Construction, said his company was "the guinea pig" for the program here.

It took him about a year to get certified, culminating with an intensive third-party audit of his company, from looking at his books and paperwork to interviewing workers in the field about their skills and knowledge.

"This has become a passion for me," Cavanaugh said. "Why? Insurance reasons, quality, education. It's the guy that's actually doing the work on the home that we seek to educate. There's our hero. The most important man on the job, the guy that's building your home. The guy on the job site has to understand what he's doing."

Implementing quality assurance from the office to the field results in increased customer satisfaction and saves thousands of dollars on the bottom line, Hostetler said.

Rich Priesing, owner of Hearthstone Homebuilders and chairman of the SNHBA's quality assurance program, said it provides a formal training ground for workers as opposed to on-the-job training.

"A lot of time the bosses know how a job's supposed to be done, and he talks to the foreman. He gets 80 percent of that and he talks to the worker, who gets 80 percent of what the foreman told him," Priesing said.

"It's not because guys are in a hurry, but they don't know the whole picture and things get missed. It formalizes a system of checking the work."