Whether or not market-rate new housing development and construction can regain a solid footing, and when that may be is uncertain.

Whether or not those players will resume producing and booking sales and lease-ups for new homes to get back in pace with the Millennial cohort juggernaut doesn’t change the business community’s three underlying mega-challenges to strategic investment and cultural commitment.

  • Attainability – which puts building profitably and household payment power into the same two cupped hands.
  • Construction capability – which pairs technology-enabled people with more, better, faster throughput
  • Resiliency – which pairs homes’ and communities’ operational performance, protectiveness, and comfort with their ability to net-positively impact the environment

These business challenges pre-date the pandemic and the geopolitical disruption and their convulsive ripple effects. They’re there. Good times or bad, they challenge the broad business community of stakeholder builders, architects, investors, manufacturers, developers, and materials distributors to solve them, come what may.

Setting aside whether solving for those challenges will positively impact the world or society, they’re business challenges. Seeking the solution for them – whether it’s driven by necessity of staying ahead of the curve on legislation or addressing increasingly activist investor groups’ interests, or hewing to a simple profit-motive principle that customers needs and demands are evolving – is a business best practice.

For homebuilding’s players with the biggest geographical footprints and the deepest, most patient capital resource structures, the moment they reckon it’s time to shift their heft into position to capture greater market share, local scale, and control of their markets is when other, smaller, more constrained competitors are back on their heels.

Of course, land control is a big national builder’s go-to strategy to box out, dominate, and improve their local scalability in their operational arenas. This comes clear in statements like the following, where D.R. Horton president and ceo David Auld speaks to Wedbush Securities equity research analyst Jay McCanless during

Image source: Medium

As consumer households – especially the ones D.R. Horton wants to attract with its dominant entry-level Express brand models – get whipsawed in the throes of cost-of-living increases and mortgage rate hikes, Horton’s pilot JV with a player like Boxabl stands as an investment commitment in both the near-term speedbumps, and at least two of homebuilding’s longer term chronic challenges – attainability and construction capability.

No better time than now to get a lot of learning and operational value in such investments.

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