We were lucky to catch up with Sue Berk recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Sue, thanks for joining us today. Parents can play a significant role in affecting how our lives and careers turn out – and so we think it’s important to look back and have conversations about what our parents did that affected us positive (or negatively) so that we can learn from the billions of experiences in each generation. What’s something you feel your parents did right that impacted you positively.

My parents grew up during the depression and they instilled in me that you never waste! My mom was an immigrant (to South Africa from Germany during the holocaust) and I was an immigrant to the USA from South Africa. There is a different mindset when you grow up in another country and immigrate. My mother was also incredibly efficient and taught that to me. Being efficient and knowing how to save money has been instrumental in my business. Building houses is not the first business I started. I have started several. But knowing how to budget and run the business efficiently has been a very important part of why I am successful. I am very thankful to my parents who are both no longer with us, for instilling old fashioned values in me that I feel are lacking in so many young kids today.

Sue, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I came into the Luxury Home Building business in a bit of a roundabout way. At the beginning of my career, I worked in Marketing, mostly for high tech companies like Texas Instruments, Sprint and Nokia. During this time, I began renovating houses on the side. I lived in many of these houses and “flipped” them and sold them and then repeated this. I loved renovating so much, I left my corporate job to pursue flipping houses full time. During this time I decided to start making tiles for backsplashes and showers. I bought a kiln and proceeded to make tiles and make my own molds. I loved ceramics so much, I started another business making ceramic crosses which I sold to local stores. Demand was so high, I had to source this out to a factory in China and was selling to over 1000 gift stores around the USA at one point. At that time, my renovation business was put on hold in favor of the ceramic cross business. I also met my husband around this time and we started a family. We continued renovating the houses we lived in, but I did not renovate full time anymore. Fast forward to 2016, we found a beautiful lot for a new house for ourselves in Highland Park, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. I decided I could build the house myself and proceeded to do so, very successfully. At this time, my other business was on the downswing and we decided I would pursue building spec houses full time. This has been very successful for me. What sets us apart is that we are obsessive about our product. I spend several hours each and every day at my jobsites, making sure the project runs smoothly and making sure subs are paying attention to small details. We employ high end finishes and the latest design trends. I spend a huge amount of time on design. Since we only build spec houses at this time, I try to create a product that will work for many people but I don’t make it boring. I try to spice up our designs with different tile, lighting and some paint colors (although we keep all of our walls and trim white). I feel like each house I build is a work of art…my personal creation… and I make sure it is beautiful. I want the family that buys it to love it as much as I do.

I am most proud of my efficiency which I get from my late mother, who I wish could be here to see the houses I build. I build houses very quickly but this is because I plan, plan, plan. I order windows and other items before we even get our permits. I make sure our subs work with each other so there are no surprises. I also pay all of our subs very promptly so they like working with us. There are other builders who make their subs wait to get paid for weeks or even months. I do not believe that is fair and pay them as soon as the job is done.

I also use social media extensively to promote our houses. I do this for 2 reasons. One is that it helps sell the houses (one of our clients came to us exclusively from our Instagram and made an offer on our house, which we accepted). The other reason is that people can follow along and see that we build an excellent product.

Lastly, after we sell the house, our relationship with the buyer does not end. If there are any issues, we fix them fast. We hope there are never any problems but small issues are inevitable and we want our clients to know they never need to worry because we will make sure they are fixed fast, and the work is done right.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Social media (mostly Instagram but also Facebook) is a huge part of our business. When I started out building spec houses, I had basically only built one house — our family house — and it had been several years since I had renovated houses for a living. So I wanted to create a presence on Instagram so that people would trust our product. I started out posting a lot of pictures of our house (luckily it is a beautiful, high end modern farm house) so I quickly gained attention from that. Then, I posted a lot of videos of the build process of that first house. It worked very well for people to see that we were responsible and built a good product and my following grew from there. I gained followers quickly and we now have almost 12,000 followers on Instagram. One of our houses sold purely from people who found us on Instagram and made an offer on the house I was building before it even hit the market. I have a loyal group of “fans” and many come to our open houses each time we sell a house. I have met some incredible people from social media who have become friends “in real life!”

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Since this was my second business, I had saved money from my first business and a lot of those savings went into building houses. I love this question because I get so many people asking me how they can get into home building or “flipping houses” and the first thing I tell them is, “start saving money.” Yes, some people can get loans but buying a piece of property and then building a house costs a LOT of money. And you will need to use some of your own money to finance this, even if you get a loan.

I grew up in South Africa to depression-era parents, and my mother was an immigrant. I learned to never waste anything and not spend money on things you did not need. I am not extravagant at all. I don’t get my nails done every week like all my friends do. I don’t buy a lot of fancy clothes. Even when I was young and single, I did not eat out all the time or buy things like Starbucks every day. Those little things add up. So when I started on my houses, I already had a substantial savings. We were lucky that we could get a loan based on our good credit and now, we operate on our own cash which makes things even easier and makes for higher profits. I don’t want to ever answer to an investor and I prefer not borrowing from a bank but we have done this in the past and might do it again if we find a bigger project such as a multifamily or the like.

I don’t want to sound like we live like paupers. Of course that is not the case. But we spend wisely. We have a nice house and nice cars, and we take nice vacations, which I believe is important when your family is busy and you want to spend time with your kids. But I love shopping at Wal-mart and I don’t care to have things like a Birkin or Gucci bag like many of my friends do….it simply does not make sense to me or make me “happy” to buy things like that. I hope this makes sense…

Contact Info:

• Website: www.berkwaltershomes.com
• Instagram: @berk_walters_homes
• Facebook: @berkwaltershomes
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sue-berk-423b3412/

Image Credits
Dallas Property Photos Jamp Rodriguez Photo