Carl Worsley, general contractor

He arrived on the Outer Banks in 1979, where he worked for a Rocky Mount- based concern.

Outer Banks icons such as the Yachtsman, Bodie Island Beach Club, Hawks Nest and Seagate North were projects where “Pogie” cut his contractor teeth.

In 1987 Carl Worsley Co. Inc. was formed. The annual numbers of houses and condo units he has completed since 1990 is like a biological tree-ring history of the ups and downs of the local economy. Excluding commercial projects and renovations, here is what that history looks like:

› 1990-94, 129 houses/condo units

› 1995-1999, 203

› 2000-2004, 182

› 2005-2009, 68

Year to date, Worsley has about eight completed or underway, which indicates he may reach his first significant uptick since 2006 by year end. As one can see, for a builder who has completed over 570 homes (including 32 condo units), plus 20 renovations and three significant commercial structures, the period since 2005 has been worse than any since Worsley opened his company for business.

While he has built everything from the famous “Pogie” box, a beach-box style pictured here, to large oceanfront homes, his bread and butter has always been smaller west -side permanent residences and more modest rental homes between the highways on the north beaches and on interior lots on Hatteras Island.

General contractors as a rule employ very few, as most of their work is sourced to subcontractors. Yet, in his heyday, the company employed six full-time workers, including three foremen and one office manager. Today, staffing is down to three full-timers.

Worsley did not delve deeply into the speculative market, which is one reason why he has managed to survive the ups and downs of the local economy. Instead, his focus has been on turnkey jobs for specific clients, some of whom have returned two, even three times to Worsley as they have built new homes or “traded up.”

He is a fanatic about cost control, and one is hard-pressed to find this builder far removed from a notebook that contains almost daily updates of every job in progress — comparing actual expenses to the allocated budget for each step of the project.

He has once more adapted to the current reality, pointing out he is working on locating lots and offering turnkey homes priced between $199,000 and $299,000 — a price point considered the current “sweet spot” in the local market.

The Voice would like to thank Worsley for the considerable time and effort he expended in going over the subject house’s invoices, work orders and other documents to help us build this narrative.