Breaking new ground – again and again
Homestead Northwest Devco builds the american dream
by Lauren Kramer

When Lynden resident Jim Wynstra established Homestead Northwest Devco in 1995, his goal was to answer the city’s need for affordable housing. Greenfield Village in Lynden was the company’s first residential community. Over the past decade, Homestead has broken ground and built new homes throughout Skagit, Whatcom and Island counties.
“The demand for new homes is very strong,” said Doug Ellis, general manager for Homestead since 1996. “My sales people probably average three-to-four home sales per month, per development.”
With a staff of 110, Homestead works on several different projects simultaneously, building up to 200 homes a year. That number will increase to 300 this year, and up to 500 in years to come. The majority of the new homes are pre-sold, and if there are houses built on speculation, “usually they’re sold way before they’re even finished,” Ellis says.
Chances are you’ve seen some of Homestead’s work. The company takes credit for BayCrest’s 150 single family homes in Birch Bay, 23 single family homes in Semiahmoo’s Stonehaven, and is currently building duplexes at the Lynden Golf Course. They’re finishing up a development in Oak Harbor, and have three more developments on the horizon in Anacortes.
To say Homestead is busy is a dramatic understatement.
Last year, the company’s gross sales were $50 million.
One of the reasons the company is able to construct so many new homes at once is that they’ve created a highly efficient, streamlined process for home building. “We have our own panel shop, a large warehouse in Lynden where all of the walls for our homes are pre-built in a dry, solid environment,” Ellis said. “This speeds up the process, because it literally takes only a couple of hours to stand the walls up, and you’re ready to build the next floor of a home, or the roof.”
The company also has its own trim shop where it constructs porch detail, exterior trim work, fireplace mantels, shelves and some of the finishes and details used on its homes.
But Homestead also uses a variety of subcontractors and suppliers, and Ellis is quick to credit his vendors for the company’s success.
These vendors include Westside Building Supply in Lynden, lumber supplier Frontier Industries, Van’s Plumbing & Electrical in Lynden and Lynden Sheet Metal as the primary HVAC suppliers and installers. Thanks to these and an assortment of other vendors, headaches are few, Ellis said.
“We’re very fortunate to have the group we have, because they take very good care of us, do a great job and we just don’t have issues with them.”
In terms of competition, Ellis can’t name any one competitor for Homestead. “There’s talk of big national companies coming this way, but they’re not competing with us now,” he said.
One major challenge the company deals with on a daily basis is finding new properties on which it can build homes. “We currently control about 1,500 opportunities for individual homes in the three counties, - which means we either own them or are in the process of buying them, - but that’s never enough,” Ellis said. “We’re constantly looking for new opportunities.”
Part of the problem is a shortage in the quantity of land zoned for urban growth and supplied with services and infrastructure – meaning water, sewer, electricity and gas. But much of the land that is zoned for urban growth is discovered, on closer inspection by a wetland biologist, to be wetland. When this happens, the land becomes unusable, because the cost of working with a wetland is prohibitive for most developers.
“I don’t think we’ll run out of land, - we’ll just have do greater density housing,” Ellis said.
The company is also expanding its reach into Eastern Washington at Desert Canyon Golf Course, and to the southern Washington coast at Ocean Shores.
Each home is sold with a 2-10 warranty. “The two-year warranty covers anything, and the ten-year warranty is structural,” Ellis said.
While each development does not have a showroom suite where prospective buyers can tour a home and see what they might buy, the company does have a design center at its head office in Lynden. Buyers visit the center where they can choose to upgrade their homes’ features and finishes, opting, for example, for a different model of Kohler faucet, or a spa bathtub instead of a regular bath.
When it comes to selling the homes, Homestead utilizes its own staff of sales people most of the time, resorting to realtors only occasionally. John Wynstra, Jim’s son, is a sales manager, while another son, Alex, is involved in construction management. Jim’s daughter, Julie Shumate, is the design center specialist, so Homestead is still very much a family business. “Jim is hands-on with home concepts, and enjoys looking at the plat layout and its overall design,” Ellis said.
He credits Jim, the company owner, for creating a large company with a mom-and-pop feel. “Our motto is that we’re here to have fun and make money, and you have to enjoy what you do and be happy to be here,” Ellis said. “We don’t breathe down people’s necks and micromanage. We give our staff a chance to go out, do their job and do it well. And it works.
“Our staff turnover is very low, which is a reflection of the fact that our staff is glad to come to work, and the workplace is a fun place to be.”
Ellis is one of those staff, and though the company’s work has been highly successful, it’s also been a lot of fun, he says. “You’re producing something that will turn into the American Dream for people,” he explains. “When you’re producing that, and doing it well, it makes for a great job.”