The Tractitioner

As homes in a building tract go, the new ones in Woodland West, a 1,500-unit development in suburban Fort Worth, Texas, had all the features that sell.

Woodland West had the unmistakable development look, but its houses were spaced irregularly, and had variations of external finish that enabled them to be labeled ranch, colonial, rustic or modern.

Inside there was air conditioning, wall-to-wall carpeting and dishwashers, and the price was right: $12,950 to $16,950. The builder of Woodland West did little more than dig foundations and pound nails. In everything else, from making elevation surveys to placing newspaper advertisements, the development is the work of L. C. Major & Associates of Downey. Calif., pioneers in the art of tractitioning.

Tractitioning, as earnest LeRoy Cluff Major, 46, practices it, consists of planning every aspect of a housing development with a staff of specialists such as few builders possess--or can afford. In the 16 years since he went into tractitioning. Major and his employees have drawn up designs for 400,000 houses in 15 states from North Carolina to Hawaii.

Currently. Major is designing twice as many houses as he did three years ago, and he expects to gross $1,000,000 this year.

A Piece of Change. Major and his assistants are totally geared to the mass market; most of their homes sell for $10,000 to $20,000; they work on nothing less than 50-unit projects. To his builder customers. Major offers all or part of a package that begins with buyer surveys, ranges through land planning and house design, and ends with Major staffing the development's sales office. For his services. Major charges up to $200 per house sold. Builders find the fee well worthwhile.

Major's 45-man staff has an eagle eye for cost-cutting detail, designs houses so that no odd-length beams have to be sawed and two bathrooms can be linked to one $65 vent. Explains a company executive: "If you're talking about 1,000 units, a $50 bill on every house becomes quite a piece of change.'' Like many another innovator, Cluff Major stumbled onto tractitioning. Raised in Thatcher, Ariz., he planned to be an architect, but when his family could not afford to send him to college, he settled for the next best thing: home appraising. When the G.I. loan program ignited the postwar housing boom, he found himself spending most of his free time doing renderings and elevations for builders on his dining room table. Eventually, struck by the fact that "nobody was doing a good job of planning'' on the nation's mushrooming developments, he organized his own firm.

Lawn in the Middle. Major and his staff have learned better than builders what buyers look for. For men, the most important quality is exterior eye appeal. Women, who concentrate on the interior, are increasingly insistent on a second story, a spacious family kitchen, and a minimum of interior walls to give the full-sweep look. Both men and women increasingly like a master bedroom and bath suite that isolates them from the kids. Major has also learned that buyers, unconsciously, like gently curving streets and prefer width to depth in their lots. The company parcels out plots like a landlady cutting pie. on occasion has utilized odd-shaped pieces to throw in a community swimming pool. Says Major: "You can't waste land any more when it costs $20,000 an acre."

Major's business is satisfying the public taste, but, wherever he can, he experiments. Currently, he is trying hard to sell builders on the desirability of community green space: one Major-planned development now underway at Oxnard, Calif., combines the back lawns of two rows of attached houses in a single huge mall. As his next gambit, Major hopes to offer a landscaping blueprint which buyers would receive when they took title to their house and would carry out as they could afford it. Says he: "Housing is a merchandising field now. And what a merchandising idea that would be."

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