2 Decades Later, Brothers Still Building : Construction: Carl and Bruce Akins admit that having a father well respected in the industry helped their business.
How do two brothers in their early 20s begin a home building company that two decades later is considered an industry leader?
When the two are sons of a man who helped pioneer residential development in Orange County, the first guess is that they succeeded with a big boost from dad.
And Carl and Bruce Akins are quick to acknowledge their debt to Ed Akins, who moved his E.B. Akins & Co. from Pacific Palisades to Tustin in 1951 and became an early tract developer in central Orange County. He later worked for the Mission Viejo Co. and headed Irvine Pacific, the Irvine Co.’s in-house construction arm.
But Ed Akins had retired in 1973, when Carl was working as a construction superintendent for the Mission Viejo Co. and Bruce was finishing his senior year as a business major at USC.
“He loaned us $17,000 to put the company together,” Bruce recalls, “and we used that for office supplies and rent and to set up an account we could draw (weekly paychecks) from so we could survive until the first profits came in.”
The brothers said they paid the $17,000 back in their first year in business.
What they cannot pay back, however, was the benefit derived from the Akins family name and from their father’s broad network of building industry friends and associates.
Forming Akins Homes--the first of the brothers’ three companies--was Carl’s idea.
“I wasn’t focused on it like he was,” said Bruce. “He had worked with dad and with other builders during his summers out of school and went right to work for the Mission Viejo Co. when he got out of college . . . and he wanted to go out and try it his own way.”
That established the pattern of all the Akins companies. Carl, 44-year-old chairman of the group, is the hands-on manager who almost daily visits building sites and coordinates with the construction crews. Bruce, the group’s 41-year-old president, specializes in management and finance.
It was Bruce who established the group’s policy of finding joint venture partners to acquire the land on which Akins Homes are built, freeing the company from expensive loan payments for the several years it takes to process a development through the various government planning and permit agencies.
But the first Akins project was financed the old way: The brothers went to the local bank and asked for a loan. By today’s standards the numbers are almost laughable.
“We wanted to build seven homes on some land we’d bought in Villa Park,” Bruce said. “The landowner agreed to finance the land sale, so we didn’t have to borrow any money for that. We . . . submitted a construction loan application for $280,000,” he said.
“A few days later they called and said they would make the loan. It wasn’t part of the application, but we have always thought that there was a lot of comfort within the bank that we were second-generation builders and that our father would be available to see us through the bumpy parts.”
The $280,000 loan represented about 80% of the total value of the project. The seven homes were 2,400 square feet each and sat on half-acre lots. They sold for $47,000 apiece in 1974, in the depths of a recession, and all were sold before construction was finished.
Nowadays, older homes like that in Villa Park go for $500,000 and up.
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