Building Big

The 2024 Oakland County Real Producers Summer Soiree.

Sapphire Luxury Homes is the road home

By Paul Natinsky

Sometimes the road less traveled leads to unexpected places. In Randy Najjar’s case, that place was architecture and design. He was so sure of his life’s direction that out of high school he applied only to Lawrence Technological University’s architecture program.

But as he rounded the corner toward his degree, Najjar felt a pull toward home construction and sales. As a young boy he began working for his uncle, who ran a handyman business. Both of Najjar’s parents worked in real estate sales, where Najjar also gained experience.

He finished the degree from Lawrence Tech in which he had so much invested, filed it away, and began a career in home construction and sales. Najjar launched Sapphire Luxury Homes in 2012. Having worked for homebuilders, he thought he could do what they did, but better.

Najjar describes business practices in the homebuilding business as similar to a “used car salesman approach”—promise one thing and deliver another. “Everything was done on a handshake, nothing was documented,” he said. “It was always a messy, disorganized process and I figured that I could clean that up and do a better job myself.”

But Najjar, who is now 35, rediscovered his love for architecture and began to focus on designing luxury homes about five years ago. The road curved toward its origin point. But the going didn’t get easier. The luxury homes market is tough to break into. You have to have name recognition and a strong reputation to build and sell houses; but you have to build and sell houses to create those attributes.

And those houses aren’t cheap to build. They are typically around 5,000 square feet and priced at $2 million or more.

The challenge of breaking in coupled with the industry’s less-than-stellar reputation created hurdles that pushed Najjar to the edge. In 2019 he considered giving up on Sapphire.

“I got to a point…I remember specifically calling my mom in September 2019 and telling her that I wasn’t sure I wanted to do this anymore,” Najjar recalls. “All that hard work, and risk and everything that was happening. The fruits weren’t bearing from a financial perspective. I was barely making ends meet. We were redlining the bank account month after month just trying to pay the bills, and there was nothing left for profit at all.”

He was starting to feel like he’d be better off getting a job and bringing home a paycheck. “I said to my mom, ‘I could just go and get a regular job and make more money than this.’”

But Najjar’s mother reminded him of a fable from his childhood in which a man stops a months-long dig for gold when he’s only three feet away from treasure.

Najjar persevered. He designed and built the Sophia, a 6,315-square-foot, $3.5-million luxury home on Maple Road in Bloomfield Hills. He built the home with his own money—no customer to direct and bankroll the project. Pouring everything he had into the house—named after his mother—Najjar took advantage of its high-street-traffic location and showcase features to build interest in himself and Sapphire. He estimates upwards of 10,000 pairs of feet have walked the floors of his passion project.

The road curved yet again. Armed with the reputation and demand for business he aspired to for so long, Najjar no longer had to sell houses for bargain rates. He was able to build more “spec” houses—including one named for his son, Cameron—and finally begin to enjoy the success that would allow him to provide for his growing family.

From the very start, Najjar named his houses—with the exception of the Cameron—for women, typically for the wife in the customer couple. This grand tradition foreshadowed the next turn in Najjar’s road—a passionate focus on design, customers, and his own legacy.

Unlike many businesspeople, Najjar is not looking to scale up his company strictly to increase profits. He got into the industry, in part, to do things better, to focus on keeping promises and delivering high-quality houses. He wants to focus on building legendary houses like his idol Frank Lloyd Wright; houses that will be around and talked about 100 years from now.

Najjar tells me that Wright designed his houses down to the smallest detail, the toothbrush holders. Sapphire has that capacity. In addition to architecture, design and building, Sapphire provides landscaping, interior design and furniture acquisition services, allowing Najjar to imprint his stamp on all aspects of a project.

Outside of Sapphire, Najjar’s focus is on Amanda, his wife, and their two young children. The family lives in a 5,000-square-foot home in Rochester Hills that Najjar designed—plenty of room for the family to grow.

And so the road less traveled comes full circle with Randy Najjar coming back to a talent and passion for architecture first revealed in a 6th grade aptitude test and rediscovered two decades later.