Contractor retools business

“The Gemballa house will sell today,” reads the sign, referring to a custom-built spec home in Bigfork that has been on the market for more than three years, and is currently listed at 30 percent below the cost at which Stoddard built it.

“I’m trying to stay positive,” says Stoddard, the owner of Stoddard Construction and Design. “We just keep dropping the price. We finished it in October 2007, which is right when things got bad.”

The Bigfork contractor’s high-end custom houses have for years been recognized in the Flathead Building Association’s annual Parade of Homes, earning top honors in 2002, 2004 and 2007, including a “People’s Choice” award for the 4,750-square-foot,

$1.5 million “Valhalla” home in Bigfork.

The spec house’s failure to sell, he says, is an example of how the buckling economy and stagnating housing market have affected his business.

At the height of the building boom, Stoddard was overseeing construction of three or four new homes each year, all of them designed in the signature Craftsman style, complete with Douglas fir timber framing, cedar shakes, rustic oak floors and cherry cabinets.

His workload has since been cut to one-third of what it was, and he’s been lucky to build one new home a year since the market collapsed.

To make up for the lost work, Stoddard supplements his income with remodel jobs, adapting to the market by reinventing himself and filling a growing niche.

The remodel work involves building additions for homeowners who sense an upturn in the economy but aren’t optimistic enough to sell and rebuild. It’s hardly as lucrative or as gratifying as designing and building award-winning homes, but tacking on additional bedrooms and bathrooms is better than no work at all.

“And I should be grateful for it, because there are guys who have nothing, who haven’t worked in years,” he said.

Currently, Stoddard is drawing up plans for a tasteful 2,800-square-foot addition to a Bigfork home. Because it’s already late in the year, he probably won’t break ground on the project until January, but so it goes.

“I’ll take it,” he said. “In Montana, there are guys willing to work when it’s 10 degrees outside or colder.”

Contractors who flooded the Flathead Valley in 2004 and built a surfeit of houses in the $500,000-to-$1.5 million range created at least 10 years of real estate inventory on the market, Stoddard estimates. There are 140 properties in that price range listed between Columbia Falls and Swan Lake, and since 2008 only eight have closed or sold.

Many out-of-work contractors bailed when the market crashed, and subpar builders, those who got their licenses to capitalize on the exploding market, have been weeded out through the process.

With much of the riff-raff gone, Stoddard envisions a more level playing field when the valley rebounds, which he’s certain it will.

“It will pick up again. As long as we get a project here and there, we’ll be OK,” he said. “It might take a while, but I think it will pick up again.”

Reporter Tristan Scott can be reached at (406) 260-4197 or at tscott@missoulian.com.