Let me ask. Which pressure point has you vibrating the most, now? What’s “keeping you up,” especially as a mixed-signals-first-three-quarters of 2020 flops over to a moment-of-truth-fourth-quarter for the multi-trillion-dollar residential real estate and construction community for business, consumers, and the workforce?

Call October 2021, a pressure-cooker moment for real estate investment, construction operations, and for the ultimate end-users of building’s business community, consumers and workers.

Pick your poison from a half-dozen walls of worry.

  • Rumblings of
    Source: NAHB Eye On Housing

    Don’t believe me on this. Here’s smarter and better spoken perspective from Humantiy Works co-founders Debbie Cohen and Kate Roeske-Zummer, from a Harvard Business Review insight piece that so well applies to what we’d call a Q4 pressure-cooker crisis for homebuilding organizations and their partners.

    Cohen and Roesk-Zummer write:

    The best way to stabilize your business is to stem the tsunami of attrition and increase your retention. In the frantic need to hire more people, the group we often forget to attend to are the folks who stay — those showing up day-in and day-out shouldering the work that needs to get done. Think about what these people — the ones who are here, working for and with you — need now. The short answer is they need to be seen for who they are and what they are contributing. It’s your job as the leader to make sure they’re getting the recognition they deserve.”

    Land, capital, materials, and people are the finite resources with which real estate, construction, manufacturing, distribution, architecture, and engineering firms ply their magical powers.

    People often get the shortest shrift when it comes to crisis; that’s because cycles always – up to now – have made people a cheaper resource in the early wake of a downturn, allowing for a quicker, stronger rebound later.

    However, in the last leg of 2021, people – as in your team members – are counting on a trust factor and a return on their beyond-the-call-of-duty efforts to bring new homes across the line this year. That’s why the perspective of people like Debbie Cohen and Kate Roeske-Zummer stands as a brightline for housing leadership right now.

    People are part of what leaders can control. And they’re the key to staying fit to flourish come what may on all of the other exogenous challenges of the day and the decade.

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