Alexander Alford is the Director of Construction & Development at ROMAIR, a real estate development, design, and construction company based in Northwest Florida. ROMAIR is primarily known for crafting high-end communities and luxury homes along the state's 30A corridor.
Hosted by David Hill, Regional Managing Director of Saunders Real Estate in Arkansas, this episode of In Our Expert Opinion Podcast explores ROMAIR’s journey from custom homebuilding to large-scale master-planned real estate developments. David and Alexander discuss the complexities of resort-style construction, the importance of craftsmanship, and the unique challenges of development in the Florida Panhandle.
Below is an excerpt from the interview. Listen above for the full podcast.
Alexander Alford, Director of Construction & Development at ROMAIR
Tell us about your company. ROMAIR was founded 22 or 23 years ago by Jason Romair. Jason has traditionally been a home builder up and down the Panhandle here in the Emerald Coast. He was primarily doing custom homes–kind of one-offs–and continued that through the Great Recession in 2008. He was fortunate enough not to get caught like a lot of other home builders and real estate developers did at that time. He was in a good position with his business and had minimal debt.
[Jason Romair] was fortunate enough to partner with [The St. Joe Company] as a preferred builder for WaterColor, a big master-planned community on Highway 30A. I think it's 1,100 units, but Jason probably built 300 homes in WaterColor over the next eight to nine years. That really took his business from one-off custom homes to production home building in that timeframe from 2010 to 2015.
Right now, I'm in one of our construction offices at Kaiya Beach Resort, which is a mixed-use community just west of Alys Beach. Overall, we're a master-planned community, we're the owner, the general contractor, and the developer. We wear all hats here and have our own brokerage on site. Separately, we still have our homebuilding business, which is still very active.
What challenges have you faced? One of the biggest things is that the architectural level we're executing here at Kaiya is as high as it gets. Alys Beach is next door, and they've got great craftspeople. They've trained the level of craftsmen here in the subcontractor base that is familiar with this product, but it's not easy.
Just like everywhere else in the country over the last handful of years, especially heightened with COVID, the labor pool is extremely limited here–not just from a management and office side, but from a subcontractor base side. When I was in Miami, great tradespeople were a dime a dozen, and you had people knocking down your door trying to work with you. Here, it just doesn't exist. There's such a tight crew of people who are capable of executing this level of construction.
In this episode of In Our Expert Opinion Podcast, Alexander Alford of ROMAIR joins Saunders Real Estate's David Hill, to discuss custom home building, production homes, resort development, and master-planned communities.
A broader challenge for us has been, on the Kaiya side, we're a small business. We're not [The St. Joe Company], and we're not EBSCO who is developing Alys Beach. It’s us as individuals, and we pour our heart into this every single day, but on the frontend of a development of this scale, a very typical question we get from buyers is, “What assurances do we have? What if something happens to Jason? What if something happens to Alexander?” It's a really fair question because we're not as robust infrastructure-wise as one of these big, publicly traded companies. But, it's something we've been able to navigate super well by being conscious not to overleverage or overextend ourselves and just through a lot of hard work to get this place built and derisk this for investors, homebuyers, and customers.
Has the labor shortage been alleviated? It's a little bit better now. The labor pool, I won't say it’s loosened up, but there was a time there during COVID where jobs would sit for weeks or sometimes even months with some of the supply chain stuff. When we were “behind the eight ball,” so to speak, and we would be pushing subs or vendors on the Kaiya houses, some of them would toss their hands up and be like, “Man, this is hard. I can go build 10 houses at [Watersound Origins] and get paid the same amount.” So, it was a delicate balance that we had to toe the line of during that time, but it's improved a little bit here in the last year and a half or so.