Mary Umberger writes:
Free granite countertops! Free basements! Free financing!
You name it, builders have been offering it in the last year, in an effort to pump up that endangered species: the new-home buyer.
It got so desperate that some builders were lopping $100,000 off the list price of houses, just to keep sales moving in 2007.
But you can hand out the candy for only so long before you've given away the store, and some builders are starting to say: Enough.
"We are going to get away from these crazy incentives that have been flooding the marketplace," said Jim Hughes, executive vice president of Wiseman-Hughes Enterprises, a builder based in Wheaton. "We got caught up with everybody else -- the free $60,000 in upgrades here, or the $70,000 off a spec home there."
This is not to say that his firm doesn't want to make deals; it's that it wants to do deals on a buyer-by-buyer basis, he said. So assistance with financing, or the glamorized kitchen, or the finished basement may be available -- based on what the buyer wants.
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