Content area
Full text
It's June, and Howard Fingeroot is less than four months into his marriage.
The area president of what is now Pinnacle Homes by M/I Homes, Fingeroot describes a year-long courtship between his Bloomfield Hills-based homebuilding company Pinnacle Homes of Michigan LLC and M/I Homes Inc., a publicly traded Columbus, Ohio-based builder (NYSE: MHO). On March 1, the two companies made their relationship formal with M/I Homes closing on the purchase of Pinnacle.
"Within five minutes, I kind of knew this was a good fit," Fingeroot said in an interview in his second-floor office in a nondescript Bloomfield Township office building overlooking the Village at Bloomfield redevelopment project. "Literally after five minutes I knew we were going to sell to them."
Today the company, which employs about 65 locally, anticipates an approximately 25 percent increase in the number of homes it sells compared to last year.
Turbulent start
Fingeroot and his partner, Steve Friedman, started Pinnacle in 2005 after decades in the homebuilding industry with other companies: Fingeroot with Pulte Homes, which at the time was based in Atlanta, and Friedman with his The Selective Group, which he sold to Dallas-based giant Centex Corp. Friedman was a co-owner of Pinnacle and is no longer involved in the operation.
It was a turbulent time to start a company in the field as the market was beginning its downward slump and the recession wasn't far from hitting the national economy, but Fingeroot and Friedman were able to build the firm in part because it had no debt. So it began taking land positions, buying up property on the cheap as prices were devalued when people couldn't afford homes.
"From 2005 to 2008, we were kind of ramping up our land positions, not building houses but holding land," Fingeroot said. "While nobody wishes for anything like that again, I look back and...