There is a peculiar thing about land, and anyone who has ever owned a piece of it knows it well, though few ever say it out loud. Land remembers. A man can leave a piece of land for thirty years, come back, and find his own boyhood waiting for him in the shape of the ground.
When a landowner thinks about selling, the picture in their mind usually stops at the closing table. We would like to replace that picture with a truer one. Because the closing table is not where the story ends. It is where it turns. And having watched what becomes of land after a family lets it go into the right hands, we can tell you: the after is the best chapter, and the seller wrote it. So come with us a few years down the road, to a picture of what we work toward on every place entrusted to us. Call it eighty acres, with one home and one family’s lifetime on it. Here is what it becomes.
Picture a couple in their early thirties standing on eight acres they closed on last spring. There’s a good well site up the slope, a spot for the garden where the morning sun lands first, and a view they haven’t gotten tired of yet. What they don’t have is a house. They’ve priced a stick-built place with two contractors, and both bids came back with a number and a shrug, because nobody can promise what lumber, labor, or the permit calendar will look like by next summer. That couple isn’t real. But there are thousands like them across rural America right now, and two developments this month bear on their situation. One came out of Washington. The other has been quietly rolling off factory floors for about seven years.
There is a number that quietly governs a great many American dreams, and most of the families dreaming them have never once looked it up. It is the price of lumber. This week, that number did something worth telling you about: it fell to its lowest point in a year.
Developing land is our work. But we’ve never believed a company’s job ends at the property line. What you do for the people around you says as much about you as anything you build, and we’ve tried to build a company that remembers that.
