Reaching the top when business hits bottom.

• Author: Nelson, Luann
• Position: Career of the National Association of Home Builders president Mark Tipton

Raleigh developer Mark Tipton is 41 - fairly young for a successful businessman. But in the rollercoaster world of real estate, it's old enough to make him a grizzled veteran.

And for Tipton, it's old enough to have attained the presidency of the 155,000-member National Association of Home Builders - a heady position for a Greenville boy who got his start cleaning up building lots for his dad.

Still, he's a bit wistful for the good old days of a decade ago, when he left the family business to go to Raleigh and set up shop for himself. "I'm very humble about being allowed to do this," he says. For him, being president of NAHB is "like a fairy tale. I wish economic times weren't so bad so I could enjoy it more."

North Carolina builders haven't suffered as much as those in the oil states and other severely depressed areas, but housing starts have stalled, decreasing 4.1 percent from October 1989 to October 1990 when nationwide they declined 12.1 percent, according to NAHB. TO make matters worse, builders have suffered from the shock wave of the thrift industry's implosion and bankers' fear of real-estate lending. A flurry of fees from cash-strapped municipalities have increased builders' costs at a time when affordability has become a major issue and home ownership nationally has declined, from 65.6 percent in '80 to 64 percent last year.

This is the mess Mark Tipton has stepped into - and it's something he's trying hard to clean up, both in his role as NAHB president and as owner and chairman of Whistler Corp., a Raleigh land-development and home-building business he founded in 1980.

Tipton's cousin and partner, Michael Murad, is president of Whistler and has been running it for the past few years. Tipton is on the road much of the time. "You wouldn't believe my schedule," he says. Recent trips have taken him to Poland and the Soviet Union, where he has been involved in U.S.-government-sponsored efforts to help Eastern European nations set up capitalist economies. He has also traveled to Israel and Kuwait, representing the housing industry.

He crisscrossed the country in his successful bid to lead the Washington-based NAHB. He was actually elected in 1988 by the organization's 1,700-member board of directors. NAHB's policy is that a winning candidate serves a year as vice president and secretary, a second as vice president and treasurer, a third as first vice president, and in the fourth year, he becomes president. "It's basically a full-time...