About The Builder
Travis and Donna Mitchell
"Born to Build" has become a popular catch phrase in the building industry but a true statement for Travis Mitchell.
Travis Mitchell is a third generation home builder that may have had his path set in DNA from the early 1950's. His grand father, Lee Ridout, was a very successful home builder in the Garland, Texas area in the 1950's and 1960's. With a record of over 150 traditional style custom homes, his name and the quality of his work can be seen in the lasting beauty of these homes today.
A Texas native, at the young age of five, Travis Mitchell moved with his mother and father to the Canyon Lake area where they settled and lived in a home built by his father, Ron Mitchell. Ron Mitchell was the first "Mitchell Custom Homes" that built in and around the Canyon Lake area. His specialty was the "home on stilts" as Travis described it at a young age. These lake houses were designed to be built on steep hillsides with sprawling decks and many windows to take advantage of the spectacular view of the relatively new Canyon Lake. Ron took his young son Travis with him to jobsites where he picked up blocks of wood for an allowance and learned what it meant to work hard. This work ethic was instilled in Travis by his father at an early age and continued on though various years of summer work at his dad's jobsites.
After completion of high school, Travis moved with his family to Las Vegas in 1989, where he got his first job at the age of 18 working on the high rise Rio Hotel and Casino. From ground breaking to opening day of the twenty two floor first tower and casino, Travis was a union carpenter's apprentice learning all aspects of commercial construction. Travis attended the University of Nevada Las Vegas but also stayed in the carpenters union and worked on the Santa Fe Hotel and Casino and two new North Las Vegas schools. After three years of commercial construction and part time school, Travis realized building was his niche and continued on with a family tradition.
In October of 1993, Travis decided to return to his home in Texas. Travis' uncle, Martin Mitchell, was the head of the installed sales program at Builders Square in San Antonio. With his help Travis became an installer for not only Builders Square but Home Depot as well. With over 400 installs per year for the next three years Travis gained experience in scheduling his own jobs and more customer interaction and relations than he could ever imagine.
In 1995 Travis began to pursue his passion of working on new homes and started interviewing local home builders. In January of 1996 Travis was hired as an assistant construction manager with a local San Antonio home builder. After six short months Travis moved up to lead construction manager of the fastest growing production builder in the nation at the time.
With much experience in fast pace multiple closings of production homes Travis wanted to gain experience in a more custom environment. 1998 is when Travis made the move to another locally owned San Antonio home builder. This time things were done on a bit slower pace with fewer homes built per year that were more semi-custom. This company's policy and attitude was much more geared to quality building and customer satisfaction.
With many thoughts of going on his own in January of 2002 Travis felt like he had the experience, knowledge and the drive to start his own company. The only missing ingredient in the master plan was financial backing. Travis had a great business plan for a community to build in, ideas for a model home, and the security of a building in a location that was hot on the market with intense advertisement, marketing, and building longevity.
Travis found his financial backer and began Millennium Homes, as an equal partnership, building the first model home right behind the land sales office in Mystic Shores. Over the next five and a half years Travis had participated in over ten builders fairs as Millennium Homes built over 35 houses just in Mystic Shores alone. Millennium Homes built many other homes in and around the Canyon Lake, Bulverde, and Spring Branch area.
Based out of Mystic Shores, Travis had grown Millennium Homes to require a sales and construction staff to help him operate the company and eventually grew the need for a much larger second model home that was completed in December of 2004. In January of 2005, Travis became Vice President of Millennium Custom Homes, LLC as his partner assumed the role of President and continued his duties as an office administrator.
Even though Millennium Homes, a company Travis had started with from ground zero, had become very successful in its own right and gained a reputation as being a quality builder, Travis began to feel like the newly re-structured company had taken a direction away from what he originally set out to do. Over the history of Millennium Homes, Travis had learned a great deal about business and how to run it. Travis developed systems of internal management and quality control to better the company. After five and a half years Travis realized that with his financial backer, and once equal partner, now having majority ownership of the company, that he had once again hit the glass ceiling with what he could accomplish in the home building business.
In early June of 2007 Travis Mitchell stepped down as Vice President of Millennium Custom Homes, LLC, took a step back, regrouped his thoughts and desires for building, and began his own new company as a sole proprietorship. Mitchell Custom Homes was up and running in less than a month.
Travis Mitchell has gone back to his roots of when he first started and is now stronger than ever with his revitalized building philosophy. Aside from being more price competitive, Travis has realized that a big part of a person's decision in selecting a builder comes from having a very strong and personal builder/client relationship during the entire planning and building process.
Travis Mitchell limits himself to only taking on four to five houses at a time, twice a year, so that he can personally manage the building process of each individual custom home. Travis has surrounded himself with only the strongest contractor and vendor base in the Texas Hill Country area. Many of his people have been with him for over ten years and have gained mutual respect for each other and responsibility for the work they do.
Travis Mitchell has already begun construction of new homes under his new company name at Mystic Shores and will soon begin construction on an entirely new model home in Vintage Oaks, a brand new Blue Green neighborhood, right outside New Braunfels, TX.
With the help of his residential plan designer, Peggy Sampson, of P.S. Designs Inc, Travis Mitchell builds custom homes ranging in size from 2400 to over 5000 square feet. With a nine year working relationship with Peggy Sampson, Travis and Peggy have become one of the most recognizable builder/designer teams in Mystic Shores. Together, they design and build homes with Old World Tuscany flair, to waterfront Mediterranean Villas to Texas Hill Country style homes.
Mitchell Custom Homes may not be the builder for every client but for those looking for someone to guide them along though the entire process from developing house plans, to staying in a budget, to personally overseeing the entire construction process, to move in, Travis Mitchell of Mitchell Custom Homes is the right choice.