Justin Wood has spent the better part of 25 years building homes in Portland, Oregon, working alongside his father-in-law, who’s been at it since the early 1970s. It’s a true family operation, his wife handles the books, his brother-in-law runs projects, and together they’ve carved out a niche most national builders never touch: infill housing built one lot at a time inside the city itself.
“We primarily build in Portland, Oregon. Probably 95% of what we’ve built over the years has been in Portland, and we’ve always focused on first-time entry-level, first-time home buyers. That’s kind of been our niche.”
For years that meant single-family homes tucked onto Portland’s narrow, century-old lots. Lately it means something different. Oregon opened the door to duplexes, triplexes, and fourplexes on land that used to hold one aging house, and Justin’s crew shifted right along with it. He walks me through how that change reshaped what land is even available to build on, and why a teardown that never used to make financial sense suddenly does.
“Now that you can find an older home that has outlived its useful lifespan, we can go in there, take that house down, and put three or four units on there. It makes the numbers work out better to justify tearing down a house and building new on that lot.”
Justin didn’t set out to become a policy guy. The 2010 recession forced his hand, when Portland’s home builders association lost its government affairs staff and he stepped in part time to help. These days his board work stretches from the local level up to the national stage, and he’s been part of the fight over what gets built and where, including a push to protect Portland’s narrow lots from being legislated out of existence.
“I kind of spearheaded, with our state association, and helped draft some language we worked with the state on that banned the city from taking those out of the buildable inventory. They required you to be able to build on them.”
That same instinct carried into a newer effort, one that lets a builder divide a fourplex into four separate, individually owned homes instead of one rental building.
“If we’re gonna allow you to do a fourplex on this lot, we’re gonna allow you to do a land division on this lot and create four actual fee simple lots, so each of those townhomes is on its own tax lot.”
We get into what that actually changes for a buyer, and why it matters more than the paperwork suggests.
“That was a big thing for us, because that’s pretty much all we’re doing now, these middle housing with the land division, so we can sell these as fee simple lots and each unit has their own property.”
He’s also candid about why he stays so involved in association work beyond the policy wins. He talks about the informal network of builders he leans on, guys who text each other through the same permitting headaches and subcontractor puzzles, and why he thinks that kind of support matters more in this business than people give it credit for.
“I’ve got a dozen other builders, we’ve got a text chain going, and a lot of times we’ll ask each other, ‘How are you guys doing this?’…Or, ‘Do you have a good person that knows how to do this?'”
Money comes up too, and not in the abstract. Justin walks through how his company finances its projects, leaning on a local bank and a private lender he’s built trust with over the years.
“We’ve gotten really lucky, and I know not everybody has, but we have a local bank that works with us that takes really good care of us.”
There’s a moment during the 2008 downturn that still stands out to him, a call he got mid game at a Trail Blazers game that changed how one of his projects would go.
“I still remember I was at a Portland Trailblazer game, and I got a text from my loan guy…We had a seven-unit project going with them, and they called us and said, ‘We need you to bring us a check tomorrow to pay off the construction loan on it.’ And I was like, ‘Well, that’s not happening.’ My father-in-law told him, ‘You tell me the address to mail the keys, and we’ll just send you the keys, because you can either have the houses or let us build the houses, but we’re not sending you a check for the project.'”
There’s also a closer call more recently, when a run of permitting delays stacked several projects on top of each other right as interest rates climbed. Justin is direct about what that felt like and what he’s done differently since.
“For a company that only does 15 to 20 homes a year and tries not to have more than five or six houses on the market at one time, we had 20 all going at the same time, and we had 20 basically all hitting the market about the same time. That’s scary for us.”
Outside of the numbers, Justin digs into why good kids with strong job offers still walk away from construction work, and what he thinks it would actually take to change that.
“My fear is…that the only way we get people into the trades is by having to make the wages so high that it brings people in, and conversely, it hurts the housing affordability issue.”
He also shares what it means to build in someone else’s neighborhood, the small design choices he makes so a fourplex doesn’t read as a fourplex from the street, and why he expects Portland hasn’t seen real pushback yet, but will.
“I’m still waiting for the shoe to drop in Portland…you’re gonna see guys go into a really nice area of Portland, maybe tear down an $800,000 house, slap up a fourplex in that thing, with $2 million houses on either side of them, and neighborhoods are gonna lose their mind.”
He opens up a bit about life outside the jobsite too, a golf trip he mostly manages to protect from his phone, a book that caught him off guard, and how he ended up building homes in the first place after a hydraulics sales job dried up right around 9/11.
“My father-in-law asked me at the time if I wanted to come in and just build a couple houses for him, just on the side to help him out, and it helped him out and helped me out.”
This one moves through regulation, capital, community, and the people who actually swing the hammers, and it never stops feeling like a real conversation with someone still figuring it out as he goes.
About Justin Wood
Justin Wood has spent more than 25 years in residential homebuilding, focused on creating attainable homeownership opportunities for first-time buyers. His work centers on entry-level and middle housing, using tools like property tax abatement and SDC waiver programs to help working families get into a home of their own.
He’s held leadership roles in housing advocacy for years, including two terms as President of the Oregon Home Builders Association, and was appointed by Governor Tina Kotek to the Governor’s Housing Production Advisory Council to help address Oregon’s housing shortage.
Outside the industry, Justin has coached youth soccer for eight years and volunteered with Walk & Knock, Clark County’s community food drive, for more than 15 years, including six as the organization’s President.
0 Comments