Stone Treatment: The Pros Go Home

   Not surprisingly, the boom in residential stone is creating a corresponding boom in the residential stone-care market. Some companies are even becoming residential-care specialists.
   And, while more residential consumers are realizing the importance of good on-going maintenance to their new stone, more needs to be done if all buyers are going to live happily ever after.

DIVERSE MARKET
   There’s little doubt that more stone in people’s homes translates into a greater need for maintenance. Less certain is the size of the actual customer market for residential care, and what companies are doing to capture it.
   On the one hand are companies such as Coastal Building Maintenance and Professional Stone Care of Miami, where Jeff Noyes, director of business development, says that residential work is strictly an offshoot of the firm’s commercial emphasis.
   “Some of what we do is maintain the common areas of high-end residential condominiums,” he explains. “In those cases, it’s not unusual for me to get a phone call from the owner of a condominium unit or they’ll see the company van parked out front.”
   And, while Coastal is happy to pick up those residential jobs – which Noyes believes are increasing – it’s not a market the company is currently going after.
   Joseph Smith, owner of Marblelife of Delaware Valley in the Philadelphia suburb of Media, Pa., also does a lot of commercial work. However, he, too, has seen the demand for residential care grow.
   While Smith says some demand for it has always existed because of the marble that went into many high-end homes during previous generations, much of the residential work he gets today is from contractors dealing with problems even before clients move into their new homes.
   He attributes much of the work to a lack of knowledge of the materials.
   “We have tile installers who now are now installing marble and other natural stones,” he says. “They sometimes will wash it with vinegar, which was commonly used on ceramic tile to remove grout haze, but vinegar is acidic and will cause etching or loss of finish on a marble installation.”
   Improper sealing techniques also causes a lot of repair work. Other contractors on a new construction site will sometimes cause scratches or damage to a new installation that need to be corrected before settlement.
   On the other hand, people such as Pamela Calloway, president of Calloway Marble Restoration in DeSoto, Texas, and Timm Sowders, president of Paragon Stone Care in Vancouver, Wash., say they’ve become residential care specialists and their markets are booming.
   Calloway estimates her suburban Dallas business increased 15 percent to 20 percent per year in the past five years. Although she also does commercial work, most of her business comes from private homes.
   Sowders says Paragon does the occasional commercial job in the Portland, Ore., metropolitan area, but he says he’s given out more than 5,000 business cards in the past three years.
   “In the Portland area there are three other companies who do what I do and there’s room for more,” he says.
   However, there different reasons for what’s making the business grow. Sowders says he gets plenty of calls from people selling and installing stone that don’t know how to recommend care to their customers.
   “They’ll call and say, ‘What should we do?’” he says. “We’re at the point where many of the stone houses in Portland refer people to us when somebody calls them with a question.”
   Calloway, too, says much of her business comes from referrals, but she believes the fabricators and installers are doing a better job educating their customers about stone care.
   “They’re telling consumers it takes a little more care than they would think just off the tops of their heads,” Calloway says. “It still depends on who’s doing the work, though. Some just tell the homeowner to go to the local big-box store and buy something off the shelf, so it’s not across the board.”

REPAIR…AND MAINTENANCE
   For some consumers, it’s a need to correct a major problem with a particular piece of stone, but for others it’s just a desire to give their floors or countertops the best care possible.
   Andrew Falvey, president of Waltham, Mass.-based New England Marble Restoration, says that company started in the restoration of stone projects, but expanded into importing, distribution, fabrication and installation.
   While he says more people are informed about the need to have their stone projects sealed when they’re installed, they’re still in the minority. Falvey says it’s not uncommon for people to wait to call him until they’ve developed major issues with their stone.
   “We get contacted a few years out when things begin to look worn,” he says. “Especially with marble, we get called because it’s badly stained or scratched, and we need to diamond-grind it and repolish it.”
   Robert Evans of Marble and Stone Restoration and Service in Salt Lake City agrees that his company often gets called when there’s a big problem. As with Smith, he says often its because people aren’t told how to maintain softer stones, such as marble and travertine.
   “Maybe the cleaning lady will use the wrong product – say, vinegar – on it,” he says. “Or there may be a spill of lemonade or wine that will etch the surface. We’re also finding that carpet cleaners are getting into the business of cleaning grout, but when they get to stone they haven’t been trained how to take care of it, and more problems arise.”
   Still, there’s a lot of interest in plain old on-going maintenance with stone according to Gary White, owner of Absolute Granite and Restoration Co. in San Francisco, and James Paley, chief executive officer of Santa Ana, Calif.-based Atlas Marble and Stone Care.
   White also operates a full-service stone shop, and he says a great deal of what he does with stone care simply involves fielding calls from people and recommending the best products and techniques they can use to care for stone themselves.
   Paley agrees that that’s frequently all people need – along with a periodic resealing – for much of their residential stone.
   “Most homeowners, if given the right kinds of cleaners and some training, can take care of it themselves, so they don’t have to have a company likes our come in on a regular basis,” he says.
   A lot of what Atlas offers to people is information, such as with the company’s Website, which features a stone-care guide that explains proper care for a number of different surfaces.
   The company also offers a yearly reminder that inspection might be needed; Atlas will do the inspection at no cost to check for problems. While it varies from homeowner to homeowner with their lifestyle and the care they give the stone, Paley says his company still only reseals floors every two to three years on average.
   “I saw a couple yesterday who’ve been in their house for five years now,” he says. “We cleaned and sealed their floor before they moved in and the travertine still looks great. They use the solution we provide and follow proper procedures and they just need light maintenance after all that time.”

STONE ED
   Perhaps not surprisingly, not all markets and all residential customers are created equal when it comes to being willing to pay for on-going maintenance of their natural stone.
   Paley, for instance, says many of his customers see both their stone and its continuing care as investments that they’re willing to make.
   “They know that even if you purchase a Cadillac with a 100,000 mile no-tune-up warranty, you still have to change the oil every 3,000-5,000 miles,” he says. “Especially with the more-educated or more-aware homeowner, they’re much more open to doing regular maintenance beyond basic cleaning.”
   Calloway estimates that her company’s business is about equally divided between people who know it’s time to do something and those who have a specific problem. She agrees that there doesn’t seem to be much concern in her market about price.
   “There doesn’t seem to be a big resistance to paying for it,” she says.
   Paying a premium for care is also fueling an interest in treating stone even before it’s installed, as seen with the introduction early this year of the TEMPERSTONE™ line of factory-sealed natural-stone tiles by Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Easy Care Products.
   On the other hand, New England’s Falvey says some of the people who contact him seem to have unrealistic expectations about what his company will do. He says they often expect a pricing structure similar to a regular janitorial service.
   “A lot of the residential people are tire-kickers,” he says. “They want a premium job but they don’t want to pay for it. Our high-end clients have a better idea of what it costs to send two skilled men out for the day.”
   He’s one of several who lament having to compete with the people who work out of their vehicles and change phone numbers frequently. Stone Restoration’s Smith says he believes one of the challenges the stone-care industry faces is explaining to would-be customers the importance of having the job done by experts.
   On the other hand, he says the fact that those people are out there helps his bottom line.
   “I had two repair jobs this week for that reason, one on a residential apartment building and one on a home,” he says. “In both cases, it was to clean up messes. The residence was one of the worst I’ve seen, and it’s a shame for the client – and the industry.”
   While there’s certainly more information about natural stone available to consumers today than there was even a few years ago – thanks to everything from cable television to the Internet – there’s an overall feeling that it’s still not reaching every buyer.
   Marble and Stone Restoration’s Evans, for one, believes some of that has to be done on the sales floor. He says too often he finds softer stones, particularly marble, that have been used in applications where people are inviting trouble.
   “Sometimes the people who sell the stone don’t understand this either,” he says. “They’re letting the customer say, ‘I really like that color,’ or ‘I have to have that vein in my kitchen or vanity.’ They’re putting in stone that can be easily etched or scratched.”
   Beyond that, everyone agrees that someone has to tell the buyer how to care for that stone once it’s in – whether it’s the fabricator, the installer, or the general contractor.
   Many stone-care companies are happy to develop working relationships with fabricators or general contractors.
   “We have about 20-30 fabricators and installers who will tell people who call them on the phone, ‘We’re not experts on that; call Calloway Marble Restoration and they’ll do it the right way,’” says Pamela Calloway. “Then, we have about 10 more who – at the end of the job – give out information about us and tell their customers that when they need help to call us. It’s a pretty good deal for us either way.”
   Paragon’s Sowders is in the process of taking stone care education a step further. He’s going to begin giving seminars at home shows in his area, with samples and sponsorships from a couple of the larger stone companies in Portland.
   “They say it would be huge to get their names back in front of consumers,” he says.
   That may be an even more important consideration to stone sellers in the future. People in the care side of the stone business feel that not only will their market continue to grow, but it has the potential to keep expanding even if new sales trail off.
   “Stone is designed to last for decades, so it’s going to be there and people are going to want to take care of it,” says Sowders. “No matter if the rest of the stone industry slows down, stone care is going to continue to grow.”
   “Even when the building of new houses slows down and people stop selling as much stone, owners will still have things that need to be taken care of,” agrees Atlas’ Paley. “It’s not easy to do professional maintenance, and down the road that’s where homeowners are going to need the help.”

This article first appeared in the November 2005 print edition of Stone Business. ©2005 Western Business Media Inc.