Housing nonprofit’s donors build, sell home to fund projects

A Southern Nevada housing nonprofit took a unique approach to fundraising — it had donors build and sell a house.

Proceeds of the sale of a recently completed home at Ridgeview in northwest Las Vegas’ Skye Canyon master planned community, completed by Woodside Homes and its contractors, will help HomeAid Southern Nevada fund in-kind community projects to address vulnerable and homeless populations in the Las Vegas area, said Executive Director Nat Hodgson. Recent work includes renovations at VISTA ranch in the north valley.

“Lately, we’ve been doing rehabs and projects for nonprofit service providers who do not have a grant, so they have no money,” Hodgson, who also leads the Southern Nevada Homebuilders Association, said. “We don’t want to charge them money. This will allow us to do totally in-kind projects. We’re going to cover the stuff that we actually even have to pay for.”

Woodside and its contractors began working on the three-bedroom, 2½-bathroom and 2,000-square-foot home in April and completed it in late summer. An out-of-state buyer purchased the home in the first quarter of 2021, Woodside leadership said.

The donation of in-kind labor and materials plus the profit make up the donation, or an estimated $150,000.

Kent Lay, president of Woodside Homes Las Vegas division, said his team got involved because the organization wanted to support HomeAid’s mission in line with its own expertise. Lay is particularly proud of projects that support transitional housing because of how many people it can reach at a critical time.

“What we do there affects a lot of different people, not just one family,” Lay said. “The transition is when there’s a bad time — be it illness, financial challenges, things like that — HomeAid projects are geared to those. We endorse that.”

It’s not the first charitable home by Woodside. Two raffle houses — where a contestant wins a newly built house, often netting hundreds of thousands in donations — to benefit St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have been recently completed or are being built. HomeAid opted against the raffle process, Hodgson said.

“We have a corporate responsibility to help out the community wherever we can and where we see our expertise being able to help,” Lay said. “HomeAid is one of those expertise where we can help, and St. Jude is, because they need a house and we’re able to build the house.”

McKenna Ross is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists into local newsrooms. Contact her at mross@reviewjournal.com. Follow @mckenna_ross_ on Twitter.