The Congress of Residential Architecture

Yup. That's right. A "custom' design, for the same price as a stock plan. Like a black hole sucking in house plan sales and further undermining the house plan industry, and surely destabilizing the low end design market.

http://www.freegreen.com/Custom-House-Plans.aspx

I'm sure everybody will spit on this and complain that the design is not good enough, or the service not personal enough... sure, sure. The truth is this is innovative. They have just monetized an activity that they did without cash flow up till now - creating new product. And while the designs this produces may not be good enough for some CORA members the fact is they are being designed by architects, they are being designed with a sustainable bias, and they will be flat out head & shoulders better than the status quo mcmansion plans whose sales they will replace. And this is what I consider "New Business Models".

Greg - I agree. We need more of this. Their services address, and hopefully capture some of, a large segment of the market that architects ignore and can not attract based on the traditional model of architectural service delivery. Their answer to a question about whether this is a custom house design or not is on their website:

So it's better than a stock plan but it does not pretend to be a custom plan. It's like buying an off-the-rack suit and getting it altered. It is not the same as having a suit tailor-made.

I believe that if more architects offered this kind of service, as well as custom design services, architects would be seen as a key player in the home building process. But we have marginalized ourselves to such a degree, we are seen as an expensive luxury. Maybe the tide will change. It would be good for all of us and it would mean better houses will be built.

Absolutely right Bill. This is aimed squarely at a wide gap in services offered.

And as I said - it eases the pain of creating a collection of house plans if you can make at least a small amount from the necessary activity of creating them in the first place.

Yes this is what residential designers and some architects have been offering for years.

Here a idea:

Why not have us become that change agent? As I review the site, it does not look that hard of process to create. Since Greg has a plan with them, he can tell us how the process with them work and how to prefect it. If we can have a section on our website showing the public what real professionals can do, then maybe CORA can be that public voice on better design.

What can I tell you about the process of working with them? I've said before that its a good platform for starting to sell house plans - the web store is already built - you don't have to make one yourself or pay to have one made. They already have heavy traffic through their site so you don't need to build web site traffic - that can take years. And you can promote your own works with a link to a page that shows only your product. Even if selling plans does not become a big income generator it exposes people to your work, and it can be a way to demonstrate better design. And I think I've said before that we can brand ourselves with CORA to promote the values of better design.

Greg - Do you know what their visitor numbers are? I'm curious as to what qualifies as heavy traffic. 100 visitors a day might be heavy traffic for one site and 1000 might be heavy traffic for another. My reason for asking is I don't know how to evaluate website performance and I'm trying to learn.

I don't know their stats - really you should contact them - speak with Dave Wax, tell him I sent you. Be aware that the number of plans downloaded from their site exceed the sales of any other conventional plan publisher which is why they claim to now be the biggest plan publisher in the country. And that is wholly with their own designs - not an agglomeration of other designers as you find at most plans sites.

If you want to do independent research you can use a site like Alexa. Dang uploaded images don't show - I'll embed it:

Thanks, Greg. I'll contact them. It's nice to hear success stories.

statbrain reports 5,946 visits per day

I just found out my website is getting 5,230 visits per day.
This is after about 8 years online.
They are advertising $1950 to sell an under 2,000 SF plan, modified.
That's about a dollar per square foot.
Not a bad fee to modify at that rate.
If they are designing from scratch, that is a model that cannot be sustained.
Actually, they can make this work on volume.
Or outsourcing.
But you have to have volume if you are paying architects to do work.
They can't be sitting around waiting.

Great, that must mean you are rich now.

Chris, that visitor count means nothing unless you have solid sales.
Very slow right now but I have more inquiries in the last two months than 'normal'.
I also have Google Adwords running which entices people to jump off quickly.

John - They are running on VC right now. They are paying architects here in the US to develop their plans. This staff is developing plans on an ongoing basis, so all they have done is taken an activity that develops no cash flow and turned it into an activity that develops some cash flow. That is a no brainer - Anything they develop on this custom basis then turns into a stock plan and fills out their design offering. Their wall sections and other details on these designs are very standardized so their production on these are very fast. The design process is very limited - not like a custom commission, so little chance of a runaway client.

John - That's the number of visitors my site gets per month! At least according to Google Analytics. But statbrain.com says half again that amount and when it comes to my other site, www.williamhirsch.com, statbrain shows ten times as many visitors as Google Analytics. I wonder which one is accurate.