Purchasing Agent

Character Companies, Inc. | Alexandria, VA | $80,000 to $105,000 base plus profit share

Who We Are

Character Companies builds custom and spec homes from $1M to $3M on infill lots in Alexandria, Arlington, and Fairfax County, the kind of neighborhoods where the house going up next door has been there for eighty years and everybody on the street is watching. We run three defined product lines, Classic, Signature, and Legacy, so pricing and specs are settled before we break ground instead of getting negotiated at the client's expense halfway through framing. Every house is built to a written standard covering all nine phases. Our promise to a client is on time and on budget, and we mean both words.

Here is the honest part. Most of the schedule we lose, we lose before a single truck shows up on site. Bids get requested late. A trade gets awarded with a piece of scope sitting in nobody's column. Trim shows up ready to work and half the material is still on a truck somewhere. That is the problem this seat exists to solve, and we are not asking you to solve it with hustle. We are asking you to solve it with a system.

The Seat

You own buyout. Every trade, every house, bought out complete and on time, at a cost we can defend.

That means the bidding runs concurrent with permitting rather than after it, awards are tied to a plan approval milestone instead of to whenever somebody remembers, and the day a job is ready to start, every trade is awarded, every scope is covered, and every long lead item has a confirmed date. You report to our General Manager and work shoulder to shoulder with preconstruction, estimating, and the field.

Day to Day

You work off the pipeline, not off whoever is yelling loudest. Every active and upcoming job has a buyout status you know cold: what is bid, what is awarded, what is still open, and how many days you have left before it becomes a problem.

You write the bid package before you send it, which means you read the plan set and the spec, you know what is in scope and what is not, and you write the invitation so three vendors bid the same house. When the proposals come back you build the line item comparison in JobTread, one grid per trade, vendors across, scope down, and you normalize the bundles so you are comparing the same work and not the same number. You classify each trade as price comparable, spec driven, or sole source, and when you award something that is not the low bid you write down why.

You run the turnkey versus split math honestly. Labor only paired with a material supplier sometimes beats a turnkey bid on paper and loses once you count the hours our people spend ordering, chasing, and receiving material. You are the person who counts that.

You chase long lead items on a calendar instead of on a hunch. Trusses, windows, cabinets, appliances, specialty millwork. You know the approval date each one depends on, and you are pushing the person who owns that approval two weeks before it is late.

You make sure material is on site before the trade is, in the quantity the plan actually calls for, and when a sub burns through material because of waste or a change nobody authorized, you document it so it gets backcharged.

You close the week with a buyout report by job: awarded versus open, buyout to budget, what is at risk, and what you are doing about it.

What You Will Be Measured On

You get your scorecard on day one and we review it weekly. No mystery and no moving goalposts.

1. Buyout complete before the job is ready to start. Measured by percent of trades awarded by the plan approval milestone, and days from approval to full buyout. Bidding runs alongside permitting, not after it. A job that sits waiting on proposals is burning carry cost every day it waits, and that money is gone before we ever pour a footing.

2. Awards that are scope complete, with no gaps between trades. Measured by scope gap change orders per job and dollars of scope discovered after award. If the soffit is in nobody's contract, we find that out now, at the document level, and not when a framer is standing in the driveway asking who is doing it.

3. A line item comparison on every trade, documented in JobTread. Measured by trades with three qualified bids, percent of awards backed by a written comparison, and award versus budget variance. Three real bids on the same scope is how we know the number is right. One bid is a guess with a decimal point in it.

4. Long lead items and material on site ahead of the trade. Measured by trade start delays caused by material and days of float on every long lead item. Trim has a window. Flooring has a window. Material that lands a week late does not cost us a week, it costs us the crew, the sequence, and everything stacked behind it.

5. Buyout savings, rebate capture, and rework you prevented. Measured by buyout to budget by job, CBUSA rebates captured, and material waste backcharged. Every dollar you save at buyout is a dollar that funds the next lot. This seat pays for itself or it does not.

How We Decide If This Seat Is Right For You

We use GWC. Before we hire anyone, we ask whether they Get it, Want it, and have the Capacity to do it. All three have to be a yes, and we would rather find out now than six months in.

Get it. You can read a plan set and a spec and know what is missing, not just what is there. You understand that scope gaps and scope overlaps both cost money, and you can spot either one before it is awarded. You know the difference between a cheap bid and a good one.

Want it. You like the detail. Normalizing a messy set of proposals into a clean comparison is satisfying to you, not tedious. You want to own a number and be held to it.

Capacity. You can run buyout on several houses at once without dropping a trade, you document as you go instead of at the end, and you can hold a vendor to a price and a date without burning a relationship we need on the next twelve houses.

What We Believe

Three values run this company. They are not wall art. We hire against them, we review against them, and when someone does not fit them we deal with it.

Fail Forward. This business was not built on a handful of wins. It was built on a mountain of failures we learned from. When the framing is off you do not tear down the house, you adjust, course correct, and keep building. Bring us a scope gap you found in your own award and we will fix it together. Bury it and we will find it at framing, which is a much more expensive conversation. Nobody here gets punished for a problem they surfaced early. People do get held to what they did next.

Fuel the Vibe. Culture is not built in meetings. It is built in how you show up on a Tuesday morning when the job is behind and it is raining. Your attitude works like a level: if you are true and steady, the whole team builds straight, and if you are off, the whole project leans. We solve and we own. We do not complain, blame, or sit in the delay.

Figure It Out. Nobody handed us a playbook. Most people here walked into a seat with no system and built one. Our controller built our job costing system from close to nothing in two weeks. If a trade has one bidder in this market, we expect you to go find the second and the third rather than telling us there is only one. Figure It Out applies to obstacles, not to standards. The quality bar is written down and it does not move.

What Is In It For You

Pay. $80,000 to $105,000 base depending on experience, paid biweekly.

Profit share. You share in what the company earns. Buyout is one of the few seats where the connection between your work and the company's margin is direct and visible, and you will feel it.

Retirement. 401(k).

Insurance. Medical, dental, vision, and life, eligible the first of the month after 60 days.

Time off. 120 hours of PTO, which is 15 days, front loaded January 1 and available after 90 days. Plus 9 paid holidays, 3 floating holidays, 6 sick days, and bereavement and parental leave.

Equipment. Phone and laptop.

The part most builders will not give you. Three defined product lines, which means the specs repeat and your work compounds instead of starting over every house. JobTread as a real system of record rather than a folder of emails. A written quality standard for all nine phases, so scope is defined and not improvised. And leadership that backs you when you hold a vendor to what they signed.

Career Growth

We are growing, which means new seats open up regularly and we fill them from the inside whenever we can. You get monthly coaching, Quarterly Conversations, and honest feedback fast enough to actually act on it, because nobody should find out at their annual review that something has been off for six months. This seat sits at the center of preconstruction, and the person who masters it understands our cost structure better than almost anyone in the building. Where that goes next, whether estimating, preconstruction leadership, or purchasing manager over a larger volume, is a real conversation and not a someday.

This Is Probably Not For You If

You treat buyout as paperwork that follows a decision somebody else made.

You send bid invitations without reading the plan set.

You take the low number without checking whether it covers the same work.

You wait for the field to tell you material is missing.

You need someone to tell you what to do about a problem. We expect problems to arrive with a recommendation attached.

How to Apply

Tell us about a trade you bought out where the bids were not comparable. What was different between them, how did you figure that out, and what did you do before you awarded it?

We read every one of these.

Character Companies, Inc. is an equal opportunity employer.