Award-winning luxury-home builder plans to shut the door.

• Position: Charlotte

This past summer, Charlotte-based Simoninl Builders Inc. received word that Professional Builder magazine, the bible of housing contractors, wanted to include the company in its hall of fame. That shouldn't have been much of a surprise: Simonini has received numerous national awards and was the magazine's builder of the year in 2006. But the company couldn't decide if it should accept. It still hadn't decided in September--when it announced it will fold by the end of the year.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Alan Simonini and Ray Killian Jr., who took over from Simonini's dad in 1994, won't say much about the causes. Simonini blames "catastrophic changes" in real estate. Industry insiders point fingers at a Charlotte economy--especially its housing market--that is sicker than civic cheerleaders let on. "If you look at the peak of the Charlotte market in 2006, the top 4% started at $850,000," says Chuck Graham, principal of Charlotte-based Newton Graham Consultants Inc. and a Simonini consultant. "In 2006, Charlotte closed 800 new homes over $850,000. In the last 12 months, the top 4% of our market started at $550,000, and only 200 homes sold. The higher you go in the market, the more change you see."

Simonini Builders also got caught in a trap partly of its own making. From the beginning, it staked its future on Charlotte's silk-stocking housing market and banking economy, which by some estimates has lost 3,000 jobs worth $1 billion a year in wages since 2008.

But perhaps the biggest blow was the tightening of loan...