Builder Barrels Along to Market Houses in Fontana

Southern California builders will do virtually anything to move their products, but when he took off his trousers, David Young may have gone a bit further than most.

Young of Young & Praisler Development Inc., Santa Ana, is following in the footsteps of TV pitchman Cal Worthington and others in the great tradition of Southern California marketing.

Instead of wearing cowboy boots and promising to stand on his head or eat a bug, Young is pictured in one advertisement wearing a barrel and a deerstalker cap and smoking a Sherlock Holmes-style calabash pipe. The advertising copy for Northgate in Fontana includes the sentence: “We’re beating the pants off the competition.”

Another ad plays on the similarity in pronunciation of “Holmes” as in Sherlock and “homes” by stating that Young & Praisler has “Homes for every body.”

The ads have been published widely in the Inland Empire, Orange County, the San Gabriel Valley and metropolitan Los Angeles, according to a spokeswoman for the firm.

Young and his partner, John Praisler, specialize in two-story, four-bedroom houses, with prices ranges of about $84,000 to $91,000.

The builders reason that, while there is no shortage of relatively affordable smaller houses in the Inland Empire, larger houses are in short supply. Thus, they’ve devoted their marketing efforts to emphasizing what a value the larger homes are.

The development is in the relatively undeveloped northern part of Fontana, on Citrus Avenue just north of Foothill Boulevard. The project also includes smaller houses, with prices beginning at about $61,000.