Coles considered selling Jade’s uncompleted homes to another builder but couldn’t reach an agreement with anyone. So Coles and his friend Padgett came up with a plan for Jade to finish what it had started. Jade trimmed its staff to four: Coles, Burks-Riva, a field superintendent and another office-based employee. Staff salaries also got a trim—by about 20 percent—and employees lost their benefits. “It hasn’t been easy, but it’s been worth it,” says Burks-Riva. “I wanted to see this through. I knew [the company] hadn’t done anything wrong.”

Vision Homes let Jade move into its office on Blaikie Court, east of I-75 off Fruitville Road, at no charge (the two companies share expenses for equipment and supplies) and agreed to serve as a consultant to help get Jade’s homes finished. “You have to lead by example,” says Padgett. “It’s all about doing the right thing. I wanted to do it for the industry. The homeowners deserve to be in their houses.” Padgett held an employee meeting to make sure everybody in his company was on board. The move created additional work for a few Vision employees, but that wasn’t seen as a bad thing by anyone involved.

Coles and Padgett sat down face-to-face with Jade’s subcontractors to explain the situation. They negotiated payments of between 50 and 80 percent of what the company owed at that time, with assurances that the subs would be paid in full for all future work.

“The only way to execute [the plan] was to have the industry come on board,” says Padgett. “Most everyone did except for a few subs. They understood and made it work. That takes a lot. The subcontractors were the real heroes. Jade Homes had a tremendous reputation and had always treated its subs well, and now they were doing the same for Jade.”

Sarasota-based Lonnie Miller Aluminum was one of the subcontractors. “At that time, some people said, ‘Why negotiate down?’” says Miller, who’s worked with Jade Homes from the beginning. “But I thought, ‘Why not get a little something rather than nothing?’ It was a bummer to have to take the blow, but that’s part of being in business. Jade Homes has been good to work with. They always paid the bills on my end until this last problem they had.”

Gregg Brown, president of Port Charlotte-based Gregg Electric Corporation, saw Jade’s plan as a way of “recouping a portion of some of the money I was going to lose if they did completely close up. I was going to incur some loss; it was just a matter of how much,” he says. He also realized that working with Jade to finish the homes would help keep his company’s name in good standing and would provide him with work at a time when the construction industry had slowed down considerably. “It was a good business decision from that standpoint, so I decided to see how things worked out,” he says.

With its overhead trimmed and its outstanding bills whittled down, Jade could focus on the work of actually completing its homes. The money to do so was already in the bank. As Coles explains it, when a customer chose to build a home with Jade, they obtained a construction loan from a lender. When they closed on the loan with the lender (which had to be done before construction commenced), Jade would receive a 10 percent deposit of the price of the home. Then during the course of construction it would receive six construction draws from the lender, with the lender ensuring that work was progressing as it should. The final draw would not be disbursed until the home was complete and a certificate of occupancy had been issued by the building department in the city or county in which the home was built. At that time, the owner’s construction loan would convert into a mortgage.

Of the 75 homes either under construction or under contract at the time of the shutdown, 57 have been finished as of this month. Of the remaining 18 homes, seven had not been started and the homeowners decided not to build, seven were being finished by the homeowners, and four were inventory homes that are now completed and for sale.

Sarasota resident Wayne Underwood, who contracted with Jade to build two homes in North Port as an investment, says he was alarmed when he first heard of the company’s troubles. “After I was able to contact Andrew, we had a pretty good conversation and then a face-to-face meeting where he told me his intent,” says Underwood. “I had enough confidence in the guy from that meeting that I said, ‘Hey, let’s go ahead and get these things finished.’”