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Thompson tests building-supply market
Thompson tests building-supply market
By Bill Walsh
Times-Democrat Staff Writer
Despite the closing of Stock Building Supply just weeks before he opened Thompson Building Materials, manager Brian Burke is upbeat about the prospects for his new Warrenton venture.
For one, Thompson and Stock serve different segments of the market.
"We mostly compete with the building supplies that appeal to the contractor/builder or the homeowner who is building his own house or addition — that type of thing," Burke said last week.
In a slowdown, he concedes, some of his customers do drop in on the big-boxes, "and we have to deal with that, and it's a very tough thing to do," he said
"When we compete against other small independents, then we work real well; we are competitive. We both supply the same things — expertise, personal help, good, complete delivery or fast delivery, special turn-around favors."
Thompson, a family-owned business headquartered in Edinburg, Va., is resilient and quick on its feet, Burke said, and many of the builders with whom it works are eager to do what they can to keep the family business in business.
A second reason for his optimism is that builders are starting to apply the lessons that have been taught during the market downturn.
"The first correction that was made was the overinflation above the cost of the finished property," Burke said. "That got corrected pretty fast when [housing] started tumbling and people started to realize that every house wasn't going to be a monster profit.
"Then the next thing that got corrected were the land prices.
"The third thing, probably is labor, because the whole sub-contractor picture has changed dramatically. Guys who were pretty good laborers, maybe even skilled laborers, became carpenters, and, some of them, framing company owners, during the height of the business. You have a lot of transient labor that is moving on to somewhere else because there isn't enough construction to keep them here, and what is happening is people are settling back into areas of their expertise. "
When the housing market was on its way to the stratosphere, quality builders tended to be a little overshadowed and outpriced, Burke said. All that is changing.
"There is not the influx of tons of cheap, bad work around," he said, and most of the work that is being done is contracted to "people who are really organized, who really know what to do, who get their subs in to get the job done and then move on," he said.
Still, there are only so many "customers on the customer tree," Burke noted, and builders and building suppliers alike "are going to have to be competitive" and fight for every one.
Thompson Building Materials is located at 11-D Main Street in Warrenton, though the address is a little deceptive. The building is actually on Alexandria Pike and faces the side of First Baptist Church. It shares the building with Millennium Bank.
A lumber yard it's not, though Burke is operating a full-service building supply company. Two-by-fours, plywood, nails and the like are just an Edinburg phone call away.
In terms of its showroom appeal, the Warrenton location specializes in specialty deck products, doors, windows, kitchen cabinets and the hardware that they sport — all items that Burke characterizes as "engineered, specialty, smart, and well-put-together."
"We just about won't have inventory here," Burke said, "but we think this [location] is the next step in our natural progression."
Still, "if the right place came up, we'd be interested in having a yard" in Warrenton, he said.
Burke and his two local associates, Greg Amos and Joe Edwards, serve Fauquier, Culpeper, Madison, Stafford, Prince William and Fairfax counties. The larger shop in Edinburg takes care of the Shenandoah Valley and western portions of West Virginia.
Burke can be reached at (540) 347-9663.
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