Waldo Wals was standing in the back of a hotel ballroom, nervously fingering his forest green sports coat.
The Hilton Head, S.C., builder was looking over the crowd at an awards breakfast, and he wasn`t finding anyone he knew.
”I don`t know why I would know anybody,” he confided. ”This is my first convention. It`s too many days and too far away and I`ve got a lot of work back home. But they gave me an award so I came.”
Wals` award, for a custom luxury home he built in Hilton Head, was just one of many handed out at the National Association of Home Builders`
convention held here recently. But Wals attitude was typical of the more than 60,000 builders like him who journeyed here: Work comes first.
Eavesdropping on the builders provided evidence for the charge.
”Boy, I`ll tell you my feet are sore. I`ve been running all day from one end of this center to the other. Committee meeting at 8, seminars all afternoon and then to the exhibts to see about sheathing,” said one particularly harried gentleman.
”Yeah, but what about those dance halls here at night,” smirked his companion.
”Are you kidding. I`ll be in bed by 10. I`ve got to do this all again tomorrow,” was the reply.
Forget the cliches about living it up at convention time. This show has the dance acts, all right, but they`re on stage in the Dallas Convention Center helping to sell air conditioners. The scantily-clad men and women are here, too, but they`re demonstrating the ease with which spas can fit into model homes.
Nobody takes the home builders` convention lightly. Not the men and women who build 10 or 20 houses a year and not the high-rollers who venture into 1,000-acre land development. They both come to the four-day affair to learn how to make ends meet.
More than 700 speakers participate in 175 educational sessions. If the sessions feature product innovations or marketing strategies, they are sure to be packed. Husbands and wives team up, splitting the note-taking duties at simultaneous seminars.
Those builders who head local associations or are one of the 1,600 national directors pull added duty. They must attend many of the more than 400 committee and caucus meetings that begin four days before the convention opens and run until two hours before it closes eight days later.
More than 1,000 exhibitors from more than a dozen countries display their wares in the convention center on the equivalent area of 7 1/2 football fields. More than 12,000 employees staff the booths that are erected in the days before the bulk of potential customers arrives.
The exhibitors don`t go to the trouble for the fun of it. One major appliance manufacturer was rumored to have spent in exess of $1 million on its display space. The payoff comes later, when the bigger builders begin subdivisions that require refrigerators and ranges by the hundreds and the smaller builders return home to a local distributor and seek the latest models they saw here.
Every product that could conceivably be used to build a house or be placed in a home after it is built has someone here to represent it. They range from the practical–hammers, saws and power nail drivers–to the practically useless–designer toilet seats, infrared activated faucets and synthetic cane paneling.
Builders do use the knowledge they gain. But things aren`t always deadly serious.
”I attended a seminar two years ago in Houston and the speaker said to enter every contest you can because you can`t ever tell if you`re going to win. But if you do, bang, you`re a hero in town for a while,” said Kevin Kenney, a Waco, Tex., builder who indeed assured his hometown moment in the sun by winning a design contest. He was honored for inventing a better system to level concrete.
Most seminar speakers like to start out with a little wit and humor. But Capt. Michael Dallam, who began his presentation on military housing needs by saying ”Uncle Sam wants you!”, was forced to quickly clarify his remarks by adding ”but it`s on a volunteer basis–there will be no draft.”
And everybody has a little story to tell. Florida builder Jay Siegel related how he got involved with the national association`s legal action efforts.
”I was buying my first piece of land from a couple of farmers and it was a hard negotiation. I suggested to the two, who were farmers, that they might want to retain counsel. They answered, `Attorneys sort of lead you into that lithigation stuff and once an attorney leads you into lithigation there ain`t much meat left on the bone.` ” Needless to say, Siegel figured builders needed some help in the lithigation arena.
The convention has grown so big over the years that it`s one of the largest in the world. It reportedly was the biggest convention ever in Dallas. The convention center has been expanded several times already to accommodate larger shows and the predictions are that if the builders` show grows any more in the next two years it is scheduled to be here that the center may have to expand again.
In Texas, of course, things just kind of spread out when they expand and that`s the way the center has grown up–undisciplined.
”It`s horribly complicated and horribly volatile,” said Dallas builder Joseph Howell, talking about the intricacies of overseas financing, not about the convention center. ”But anybody who can read those direction boards out in the lobby and find this room can sure understand foreign capital.”
He wasn`t kidding. The group he addressed made it to a meeting room on the second level of the north wing in the arena area. Complicated? The room directly above the meeting room was the east wing ballroom.
The convention center has another peculiarity. It is one of the few (if there are any others they probably won`t admit it) in the country that has a cemetery on the front grounds.
”Most of those buried out there are S&L regulators who tried to explain to builders why they let S&Ls into the real estate business,” quipped L.L. Bowman, a Texan who heads the National Association of Savings and Loan Supervisors.
The changing role of financial institutions in real estate is a concern for builders, but Robert Hopkins, chairman of Commodore Financial Corp. in Dallas, took time out during a panel on the subject to remind the audience that his old high school–Highland Park outside Dallas–had some famous alumni. Little did he know that down the table from him was an alumni of arch rival Greenville High School, the aforementioned L.L. Bowman, whose organization oversees the people who look at the books of institutions like Commodore.
The cemetery, by the way, is actually a Civil War memorial that holds the remains of Dallas` famed sons and daughters who fought during that conflict.
And speaking of Civil Wars, there was almost one here. Near the end of a press conference featuring U.S. House members who addressed builders concerning tax reform, Arkansas Democrat Beryl Anthony (South) and
Pennsylvania Republican Richard Schulze (North) launched into a spirited debate on the question of whether government should support housing or leave it to the private sector. They were ushered out of the room before a winner could be declared.
