Buzzwords tend to put us off.

Some we ignore at our peril.

There are two that homebuilding strategists can ill-afford to dismiss as meaningless mumbo-jumbo. In a turbulent, split-personality housing environment – complete with its own one of a kind supply-and-demand hot mess — they are:

  • Agility
  • Resilience

If the two buzzy business-school terms blur in your mind as meaning roughly the same abstract thing, (a) you’re like me, and (b) you’d do well to think again.

Here’s a line of reasoning that you can participate in developing. Scan the following areas of critical homebuilding business priority focus and eliminate any of them that are not subject to changes – constant and meaningful ones – at any given moment.

  • home pricing and mortgage tools to maintain orders pace
  • business and construction input costs
  • internal and operational resource and capability levels
  • access to skilled, high-quality subcontractor crews
  • mortgage interest rates and borrowing costs
  • community absorptions-per-month rates
  • construction start-to-completion cycles
  • land acquisition and development costs
  • value engineering and new product development
  • local municipal levies, approval-and-inspection-cycles, hook-up costs

There, without so much as missing a beat, 10 bedrock operational areas essential to a priority list. And you can easily add to the list of “spinning plates.” Are any of them ones you can cross of the real-time flux list?

So, when the important business variables seem each to be channeling their inner

Source: The Builder’s Daily

Only by leveraging fresh, real-time, scrubbed, operational data that matters, and only by widening the company’s capability in anticipation of moving parts that don’t move according to plan – i.e. resilience – can your team expect to thrive.

The Baldrige Program’s Harry Hertz draws from research by Brookings Institution Tech Stream fellows Eleftherios Iakovou and Chelsea White III, to spotlight the kind of actionable data homebuilders can – and must – be able to carry through their end-to-end build cycle in times of high volatility and flux.

To be resilient we need supply networks that are robust and that can recover quickly to the pre-disruption state or, even, a more desirable state. To achieve this resilience requires: (1) rapid detection, response, and recovery from disruptive conditions; (2) end-to-end, data-driven supply network effectiveness. This means being able to trace a successful pathway from raw materials to finished product, from your suppliers’ suppliers to the end customer; and (3) redundancies, including emergency stockpiles and diversified sourcing of supplies, including localized sources.”