Warmington Gets a Jump on Remodeling : Building: The developer says that if the year-old business flies, he can see a whole string of shops.

ORANGE —  Bob Warmington isn’t considered a trailblazer in the county’s often trend-setting building industry, but his decision to set up a remodeling company certainly has set the longtime residential and commercial builder apart from the crowd.

Big builders in Southern California just don’t do that kind of work.

Developing residential tracts in Moreno Valley and Lancaster or Laguna Hills is one thing. Remodeling a 1960s ranch-style home in Garden Grove is something else. Few companies are adventurous enough to try both.

“I don’t know of any other major builder in the area that has a remodeling subsidiary,” said Philip Bettencourt, a Newport Beach development consultant and president of the local chapter of the Building Industry Assn.

But Robert P. Warmington, chairman of the Warmington Co. in Costa Mesa, had two longtime employees who wanted to start a remodeling business and knew what they were getting into, so he figures he’s now way ahead of the pack.

“I have gotten a few comments from other builders,” he admitted, “and none of them have said they want to get into the business. But then, most home builders have a certain mind set. They only want to build homes.

“I’m more of an opportunist who just happens to be in the building industry. I’ll take advantage of any good opportunity I see.”

Warmington Remodeling, which quietly opened its doors 12 months ago, is the outspoken builder’s bid to get his corporate foot into the lucrative and growing remodeling market.

If the company makes the grade--and all signs at the end of its first year are that it will--Warmington figures there is no reason that the three-person office in downtown Orange can’t serve as the flagship of a string of Warmington Remodeling shops located throughout the state.

It certainly is a big enough market. The Remodelors Council of the National Assn. of Home Builders estimates that Americans will spend $110 billion on home and business remodeling this year, up from $105 billion in 1990. And most of that was done by small independent contractors.

“Most home builders don’t want to try,” said Leslie Levine, a spokeswoman for the National Assn. of the Remodeling Industry. “When you are building new homes, you build what you want and then sell them to people who see them and like them. When you do a remodel, you are dealing with the homeowner every day, and there is a lot of hand-holding, a lot of psychology involved. It takes a different approach.”

The remodeling business is booming in Orange County, too. As new construction slumped severely, permits were issued for $232.7-million worth of residential remodeling projects and $399.4-million worth of commercial, industrial and retail remodeling in the county, according to the Construction Industry Research Board in Burbank.

That made 1990 the second-best year on record for residential remodeling and the fourth-biggest year ever for non-residential remodeling in the county.

Numbers such as those made Warmington sit up when longtime employees Bill Bruce and Hix Knightlinger came to him at the end of 1988 and pitched the idea of setting up a separate company to do residential and commercial additions and alterations.

And while remodeling traditionally picks up in a recession, Warmington insists that the current building-industry crunch had little to do with his decision to go ahead with the new business.

“The size of the market intrigued us,” he said. “And we are in Orange County, where homes are getting so expensive, and there is not that much land left for new homes. More and more people here are deciding to alter and add on to bring their old houses up to date rather than buy new ones, and that is going to continue.”

Bruce said that the remodeling industry is dominated by small independent contractors, whose stability, credibility and workmanship is not always the best. He figured consumers would readily turn to a familiar name in the home-building arena.

“There are a lot of good ones (remodelers) out here, but there are bad ones, too, and with the Warmington name behind us, we aren’t going to do shoddy jobs and disappear.”

Bruce and Knightlinger were given the go-ahead soon after presenting Warmington with a business plan for the proposed new venture. But it took a year of planning before the two were ready to open for business.

They rented an old Craftsman-style bungalow on Chapman Avenue in Orange, less than half a mile east of the traffic circle, and patched and painted the downstairs. In January ,1990, they put up a sign, hired Cheryl Rojo as office manager to round out the team and opened the front door.

The business plan called for the company, serving as general contractor, to take it slowly the first few years. The first profits were projected for 1993. But the Warmington name proved a stronger attraction than anticipated.

“We became self-supporting in the first year,” said Knightlinger.

The only advertising the remodeling unit has done involved sending announcement cards to 2,500 architects, engineers, subcontractors and others in the building trades that had worked on various Warmington projects over the years.

“We probably have gotten 500 calls and 100 referrals from those cards and five jobs in the first four months that we were in business,” Knightlinger said. “And another 100 people have driven by and seen the sign and called up or walked in.”

The fledgling company’s landed its first job, a $70,000 garage and family addition and kitchen remodel in Santa Ana, on March 21, he said. By the end of the year, it had logged 11 jobs: an industrial refurbishment in Santa Fe Springs; remodeling a commercial building in Costa Mesa; tenant improvements for an office suite in the posh Center Tower building in Costa Mesa and eight residential remodelings.

“We lost a few, too,” Bruce said, “because we are not always the low bidder. We don’t want to be the cheapest remodeling contractor in town. We won’t turn down a job, but we are ultimately aiming for the high end of the market.”

That quest has taken the two men far from their home base already this year--their first job of 1991 is an extensive remodeling of a home in Palos Verdes.

Plying A New Trade Remodeling vs. New Construction While the dollar value of new construction fell 6.8% in 1990, the amount spent on remodeling continued a pattern of growth established in the ‘80s. In billions of dollars New Construction ‘90: $129.8 Remodeling ‘91*: $110 *estimate Residential In thousands of dollars ‘90: $233 Nonresidential In thousands of dollars ‘90: $399 Source; Construction Industry Research Board, U.S. Census Bureau