Ethan Eckstrom | 6 Boston Developers to Watch in 2024

NAME: Ethan Eckstrom

COMPANY: Eckstrom Home Designs

I know you’re just 23! But what’s the earliest point you trace your career in development back to?

I've got photos of me, at just a few years old, holding a drill around the house. My dad was kind of in the industry but not necessarily doing what I'm doing now, but we were always renovating the house, so there were tools around and I would get into those. When I was seven, he repainted the whole exterior of our house and before school in the morning, I would be cutting siding with him. I have a picture of that, which is pretty cool to see. I loved LEGOs. Just building things. The LEGO architecture series was always a great Christmas present.

But playing with SketchUp is probably the real point. My mom was looking at a job relocation, and I started looking at houses in the new area that we were going to move to. And seeing all the houses for some reason made me want to draw them. My parents noticed my interest and for my 12th birthday, bought me the software that I still use today to draw homes. This was back when they sold physical software in stores. They noticed it in the checkout line at Home Depot and just thought, “This might be a good fit for Ethan.” It’s called Chief Architect.

You don’t have kids – but after how your parents fostered that interest you had, what would you say to parents of young kids who want to cultivate those interests their kids have, and see where they lead?

I'm really grateful that nothing was pushed. I think just paying attention to what your child might be interested in and then giving them the tools to be able to explore it. I often think that when I do have kids, I don't want to push my own interests on them either because it would be kind of artificial in that sense. I think a lot of kids might experience burnout when a parent tries to push their interests on the child. 

Was there a steep learning curve with Chief Architect? You’re 12 at this point, using professional software…

So there was definitely a huge learning curve, but I used it every day, just practicing modeling houses that I saw and wanted to redraw. And it is funny looking back, because I've got photos of some in my camera roll from back then and it's just obviously crazy to see the progression over time. I definitely didn't know how it worked at the start, but they have a huge online forum with a lot of user help videos and tutorials. I never really played Xbox or anything, so this was sort of my version of video games.

When you say you were “drawing houses,” do you mean the exterior at this point?

Yeah. So a lot of it was exterior-driven just because I would see those houses and try to model them, but then I moved into the interior layout, and learned more of that on my own. That kind of gets into the next step on where this turned into something more, which was I was drawing a little bit of the interiors and then I wanted to know about the building code. So I looked up the town of Easton’s building code, and I stumbled across the town's website that actually had online permitting for building.

And this was rare, I couldn't find this for any other town, but what it was was a public database of all the permits, but in addition to that, it had all the documents associated with every permit so I could go on for free and download PDFs of plans that people were submitting. And so I would basically study those and be like, "All right, what does it take to draw a full set of plan?," and kind of just learn, "All right, this looks like it's happening on every job. It's probably code or a standard in the industry or whatever." So that's kind of how I got into going past just the exterior design of it, but into a little bit of the layout and the functionality and still modeling it all and getting better with each one.

I feel like if I saw the blueprints for an interesting house in my town, I’d want to go see it.

Yeah, exactly. That's a great point. In houses that I would see going through permitting online, I would make my parents drive me by there. So I'd grab pictures and then try to draw it up until I got my drivers license. So what it kind of naturally turned into was I started offering my design service in the form of renderings for real estate agents. Because I would see that this house went through permitting, it's being built and the agent is essentially taking a screenshot of this black and white plan, the front of the house and using that as the marketing. And I'm thinking, I draw these, I model them all day every day. I can do this quick enough and I feel like for a few hundred bucks for a rendering, this provides a lot of value. And then that kind of started the entrepreneurial side of the design and the architectural drawing for me.

Before we even jump into you selling these early renders to realtors, let me ask – did doing this stuff set you apart from your peers? Or was there just always this awareness that you were entrepreneurial?

Yeah, no, that's a good question. Generally I've always been kind of introverted anyways, so kind of sticking to myself, it didn't really have any effect on me either way, if people were either into this stuff or not. I kind of just saw it as a cool hobby and I was cool rolling with that. 

But I was definitely always entrepreneurial. It started with landscaping and cutting grass. I started cutting grass at six or seven – I was doing my own house and a few of my neighbors’. Another example of my parents seeing an interest and fostering it: I made flyers and went around the neighborhood and got a few houses, using a push mower. Then I kind of proved that concept and expressed to my dad that I wanted to get a ride-on lawnmower. And so when I was eight, he took me to the John Deere store and co-signed to finance it, but I ended up getting more accounts with that and paid it off in the first spring of having it. It was like, $1400, which for an 8-year-old, was a ton of money.

So as I got older, I can’t say I have any memories of what exactly the consensus was, but I think the feeling around me was that I was like the “dad” of the group, since I was into the business and entrepreneur thing. I never really partied, just always worked, knew what I liked to do. My friends thought it was cool, but it really wasn’t a big deal.

Got it. So back to selling renders and getting into selling plans – how did that come about?

Freshman year of high school, I remember a builder, just as a fluke thing, uploaded the invoice from his architect into the permitting system. So I was like, "Oh, no way. This guy paid 1500 bucks for this set of plans. The next level of my software costs 2,500 bucks, that's a no brainer. I can draw two plans and it's paid for." 

So I remember saying that to my dad and he's like... I admire that he's not frugal, but he's very financially conscious. And he was like, "I'm not about spending money for no reason, but if you know that you can get a return on this, then absolutely, go for it."

So kind of took the lawn mowing money, parlayed that into upgrading my software so that I could draw these full sets of plans and be able to charge $1500 or whatever. That was heading into my freshman year. I was still studying the plans and was doing more renderings for clients. I was starting to deal with people and was working toward, in my junior or senior year, to the point where I was producing a full set of plans to be built.

Got it. How were you doing outreach for the renders? How did you put yourself out there?

I remember doing some cold outreach via email. I don't know if I did any calling, but I also attended open houses too because I wanted to just see what the product was like and I always bumped into the agent there obviously and then pitched it. And I remember listening to a Gary V video or a podcast or something and he was like, "Reverse engineer what's been working and then do more of that." And I was like, every time I go to an open house I get a client. So I'm like, "I'm just going to do more of that." So I went to more open houses and got more rendering clients and it wasn't like a ton what guys are doing now, but it was, I don't even know the frequency, I don't know a few at first, but then some of them I would get in and approach the builder to draw the full set of plans. So it was kind of like that gateway into the next step.

So toward the end of high school, you start actually selling building plans. Did you feel like you needed more on the ground experience?

Yeah. I had to first learn how to produce a set of plans that was able to be built by studying the other plans that I had seen. But even when I landed a client in order to draw those plans, it was still like they were probably way under-detailed, probably needed a lot of work compared to what I do now, obviously. 

Around the same time I expressed an interest to my parents of interning for a builder. And I don't even know where that came from, just had kind of been like, "I want to see what it's like in real life." And so the next year, around 16 years old, they hooked me up with an internship.

And then I kind did an internship every summer from there and they grew, maybe not so much in complexity but maybe in complexity of the projects that each company was doing. So the first one was with a family friend and he does awesome stuff, but then the next one was in a different market, so I was learning maybe bigger houses or nicer houses. Then the next one was with a developer that did more big subdivisions and road work and stuff like that. So I think my interest kind of grew over time of like, well, I don't just want to see this part about building modestly sized houses, but I want to see how the neighborhood goes in, the big houses. And then again, try to bring that all back to what I was drawing.

How confident were you that the plans you were producing were legitimate enough to give to someone to turn into a real project?

I'm still not a licensed architect. Just to clarify too, I'm an architectural designer, so I'd have to go to school and do exams to get that accreditation. I think at the time I was doing smaller stuff, so I think the stuff that I was doing didn't necessarily need that stamp of approval from a structural engineer. By the time that I was getting enough business that I was drawing new houses, that was always my goal. I don't want to just draw a deck plan or a rendering. I want to draw new houses. And I think by the time that I got one of those, I had gotten in contact by means of a builder client of mine that I did a deck plan for or something. He said, "Oh, there's this structural engineer that I know and he could probably review and stamp your plans."

So I ended up reaching out to him, met him, and then it was around that time that I started drawing new plans. And then at that point he was reviewing my stuff and then he would review it with his license and say, "This checks out. I'm calculating all the beams and the loads and everything in this. It's all cool or maybe change this and that." And always giving tips too that I would carry into the next one. So by the time that I was drawing stuff that was really going to be produced in the form of a new house, I had that contact to review it all, make sure it was legit, and then was able to produce more plans at that scale.

You’re 17, 18 at this point, doing your first plans for actual new homes. Did you go to college? What was your thinking as you weighed how that could help you?

My plan was to go to college. I think I had decided late in high school, I didn't want to play sports in college. Not to say that I could have, I mean I think I was pretty good in sports, but I was like, "I don't want to really do that. I want to work or go to a school in which I can devote my time to learning my craft instead of also trying to focus on and play sports."

So that kind of ended my sports career, but I applied to two schools, Boston Architectural College and Wentworth, and I was unsure if I was going to go the construction management path and learn to be a builder and run projects. And oftentimes when you do that, you get into commercial construction and I wasn't sure that that's what I wanted to do. The other path was going to Boston Architectural College and learning how to develop this into an actual profession and really learn it formally. I ultimately decided not to go. I wanted to take a year and develop my business and see how it went. So that's what I did. And like you said, I was drawing more and more new plans. I had proven the concept by now and was kind of focusing on that.

What sort of direction were you getting from people who you were drawing plans for?

Some of it was taking feedback and then assimilating what I think they want and then working through a revision process. Some of it was a builder saying, "Hey, I found this plan online. I want to flip it. I want to change this." So it was kind of using a different plan as inspiration while making it our own completely. And in other times it was maybe they had a different plan from the past and they said, "I want to redraw this, but change a few things." And then working through a revision process still.

And maybe not so much in the early days, but certainly now, I've got a certain style that I've kind of just grown into. And somebody might come to me now and say, "These are the parameters. I have bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, how it sits on the lot, whatever. I want you to come up with how it looks." And that's kind of a different skillset because it's more design. And I think in the early days it was more drafting where people brought me the ideas and there was a little bit of guessing, but I kind of had some guidelines to go with, if that makes sense.

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