Santa Rosa construction company brings high-tech vision to a traditional trade

Sean and Jenna Pearson had been searching for a contractor to rebuild the home they lost when the Tubbs fire swept through Coffey Park in Santa Rosa three years ago.

They found a builder they liked, a large well-known firm in the area.

But when the Pearsons sat down to sign paperwork, that contractor mentioned, nonchalantly at the last minute, that there would be a nine-month delay before work on their house could begin. It was a deal breaker.

Eventually, the couple went with a different builder, a newly minted company with Sonoma County roots and a distinctly modern vision for how to go about building a home. Using technology as a primary tool, Homebound Inc. seeks to carve out a space in the homebuilding market by taking customers swiftly from design, to build, to move in.

The residential developer was born in 2018, eight months after the North Bay fires — by people directly affected by those infernos. Jack Abraham, a founder of the company, lost his Kenwood home. Co-founder Nikki Pechet’s Napa house was spared, but just barely.

With thousands around them struggling to rebuild, competing for a limited number of contractors, engineers and materials, Homebound gave customers a more efficient path. The tech-driven Santa Rosa-based company offers a dramatically streamlined design selection. Customers can use the company’s digital platform to work with architects to design their home, then choose finishes — light fixtures, countertops, faucets — without having to attend in-person meetings, an added bonus during a pandemic.

Those time savings appealed to the Pearsons. Both work full-time: Jenna as an X-ray technician, Sean as an accounting manager at Vintners Resort on Barnes Road. Their son, Rowan, is 2.

“Just being able to pop online and pick some finishes, from our phones or a computer, was truly helpful,” Sean Pearson said.

For busy professionals who can’t spare “the incredible number of hours it can take to be your own developer,” said Keith Woods, CEO of nonprofit contracting trade group North Coast Builders Exchange, of which Homebound is a member, “I think this can be a pretty good choice.”

The 2 ½-year-old company has raised over $50 million in funding, and is intent on growing. Sadly, the profusion of wildfires in the American west are making that possible. Homebound now has 150 clients throughout California. While many customers are rebuilding homes destroyed by the Tubbs or Woolsey or LNU complex or SCU complex fires, others are not fire survivors. They’re simply trying to build a house in those areas, but struggling because the labor market is stretched so thin.

“We want to help anyone, anywhere build a house,” Pechet said.

Technology with personal touch

Immediately after a disaster like the Tubbs fire, “all the local labor gets eaten up,” Pechet said. The company solves that problem by bringing laborers to the disaster, but only after screening them and insuring that their work is high quality.

“They’re very big on vetting the people they have,” said Sabrina Swanson-Schneckloth, a Homebound client who is also rebuilding in Coffey Park. A landscape designer who often works with general contractors herself, she described Homebound’s standards as “rigorous.”

“The people they hire have to be good at what they do, and they have to be speedy at what they do,” Swanson-Schneckloth said. “And that is fabulous, in my mind, because I’ve worked with slower, less competent folks, and it’s really painful.”

While Homebound is looking to establish an identity as a tech-savvy, new age construction company, Pechet knows that it can’t be impersonal — that its employees need to have a good bedside manner, as it were. Homebound’s success, she said, depends on coupling “the slickness of the technology product with the human aspect. Someone has lost their home. We need to help them not only get over that, but start to dream about the next chapter.”

That is why, Pechet said, “when we enter a market, the first thing we do is try to find a Jon.”

Deep roots in Santa Rosa

Jon Cromwell is Homebound’s head of construction in Northern California. He started in the business at 15, spending summers as a laborer, ripping roofs off houses. After graduating from Montgomery High School, he went to work for Cobblestone Homes, building houses in Santa Rosa’s Fountaingrove section. He was promoted to superintendent at the age of 19.

He then went on to work for two other builders. “I wanted to learn how to do it myself — framing and plumbing and pouring foundations — not just tell people how to do it.”

After five years with Sonic, installing fiber optic internet systems throughout the Bay Area, Cromwell realized that he missed building houses. Unlike the commercial projects he’d been doing, building a house entailed a relationship with the owner.

“You’re with them a year or more, you’re in their house, you’re part of the process, you become almost family,” he said.

“I’ve built houses for people that I see ten years later, and you run into ‘em and it’s a big hug. I was missing that.”

Homebound hired him in June 2019. His new employer’s heavy emphasis on technology was not problem, thanks in part to his background at Sonic.

The construction field, he allowed, “can be stuck in the Dark Ages. It hasn’t moved along with everything else. A lot of guys still want to do things that way, but the advantages and time-savings of this technology” are dramatic and invaluable.

’It’s heart-wrenching’

There was, and is, an acute local need for people in his line of work. Some of the Fountaingrove homes Cromwell worked on as a teenager went up in flames in the Tubbs fire. He lives on Los Alamos Court, off Los Alamos Road, where the Glass fire took a severe toll in late September.

“It’s heart-wrenching,” said Cromwell, who has deep roots and close ties in the community. He is the athletic director for St. Eugene’s CYO, whose formidable girls basketball team he coaches. “The entire hill behind us is gone and burned.

“We take our walks every night, and it’s a reminder of the need that’s out there, and that I can help,” he said.

“We’ll get work out of that, yes,” Cromwell said. “But the fact that (fire survivors) can go to somebody they can trust, and who isn’t going to take advantage of them, I feel pretty good about being part of that.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.