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and vendors who can help him provide a better service to his clients. That’s not to mention “the friendships and the camaraderie that happens in the building industry.”
“All of that happens at all of our meetings, those relationships are strong and I can always make a call to somebody,” Amato said. “If I’m looking for access to a market or knowledge about a town, somebody who works in the town, there’s somebody who has experience in all of those elements and there’s a lot of camaraderie that occurs through that.
“It takes my knowledge and grows it exponentially.”
As president of the Shore Builders — and as someone who has toured homes in about a dozen different markets — he now hopes to spread that knowledge to others in the custom homebuilding space.
“Here in New Jersey, it is broadly spec builders, but we do have a number of custom builders that are involved,” Amato said. “And one of the things that I want to do is try to share the value that I’ve found in the association with other custom builders locally.”
The affiliation has also yielded
new business opportunities. For instance, CMM is partnering in a 26- unit beachfront condo development in Long Branch that is being built by PRC Group, a longtime builder that is also based in Monmouth County.
“It’s amazing to me the kind of connections you make when you’re part of an association like this,” he said, noting that the project should deliver some time next year.
AS PART OF ITS GROWTH IN RECENT YEARS,
CMM in 2013 launched the unit known as CMM Service Plus, seeing a new opportunity in maintaining and servicing the homes that it
had built. It also provides a path
to sustaining relationships with longtime clients, Amato said, noting that he does not market the service beyond existing clients that live in a CMM-built home.
“I think it’s been a real success,” he said. “People like having us come back to do work on the house that we built for them.”
As a Shore builder, CMM was undoubtedly impacted by Hurricane Sandy. The firm responded by
focusing on existing customers who needed repairs — despite the vast opportunities for new construction — as it sought to manage its
own resources and deliver the
best possible outcome for those homeowners.The company would do repairs on dozens of homes over the next five years, Amato said, recalling one key headwind: Vendors during that time were driving up prices from one year to the next,
“so it was very hard to keep costs under control and try to deliver for clients.”
“That was the biggest challenge,”
he recalled. “It wasn’t whether you were going to be able to get the work. It was how you were going to be able to get it done and make sure you were managing costs.”
CMM has long since completed
its Sandy-related work. All of
its current projects are new construction, which typically entails getting involved with a client from the earliest stages of design. Doing so can help the firm offer a more predictable and manageable price for the project, he said, although there are still plenty of challenges for custom builders.
According to Amato, that includes the unpredictability of securing state and local entitlements. Both can
add months to the design phase and delay the start of construction, he said, echoing a long-held concern among New Jersey developers.
“When additional constraints
are put on that, it makes it more challenging,” Amato said of the land use and permitting process. “And I’m finding out that that’s true whether you’re building a single-family or you’re building a thousand homes.
It is a concern across the board for every builder in New Jersey, and as
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