Three Hammer Construction advertising?

June 27th, 2008 at 10:07am Alex Gary

I may be way off on this but I can’t remember seeing or hearing prominent Three Hammer Construction advertisements in the past few years.

The company, which has long been the most active home local home builder, didn’t need to. It was building subdivisions all over a five county area.

But I heard a Three Hammer ad on the radio the other day and spotted a billboard ad as well.

To me that’s just another indication of how slow things have gotten in the residential construction industry. For the past several years, Three Hammer wouldn’t have had to advertise. We have maintained a real estate database at the Register Star with every land transaction in Boone, Ogle and Winnebago counties since the beginning of 2003.

I went through it and found all of the Three Hammer Construction sales I was sure were homes built and sold and not vacant lots. Here is what I found:

2003 — 376

2004 — 387

2005 — 345

2006 — 404

2007 — 296

2008 — 64 through June 16.

These totals don’t include Three Hammer’s Stephenson County or Rock County, Wis., subdivisions. Still, as you can see it’s a long fall from 2006.

Still, if you add up the sales, the company has built and sold at least 1,872 houses in Boone, Ogle and Winnebago counties since the start of 2003. If you conservatively average out the house size to be three people, that’s 5,616 people living in Three Hammer houses built in just the last five years.

If Three Hammer were a village, it’d be the ninth largest in the Rock River Valley. There are more people living in those houses than in all of Oregon, Winnebago, Poplar Grove, Byron and Cherry Valley, to name a few.

Another thing about the company, they never talk to the media. I even grew up with one of the heirs to the Three Hammer kingdom and they don’t talk to me. I don’t take it personally. That’s just their policy. But maybe that will change as well.

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