3 minute readLeft to right: Amit Haller, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer – Ami Avrahami, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer – Dafna Akiva, Co-Founder & Chief Revenue Officer, Veev
On the heels of unveiling plans to 3-D print 100 single-family detached Austin-area homes in 2022, Lennar yesterday put another pin in a strategic map that makes it increasingly clear there’s no going backwards on its adaptive course to transform how it’s matching people up with its “everything’s included” new homes and communities.
The News
Lennar – via its fast-emerging portfolio of investments in end-to-end building lifecycle and home solutions called Business guru Peter Drucker has said, “innovation is the work of knowing rather than doing,” and Lennar chairman Stuart Miller has said: Innovation means racing around the track at full-speed, and figuring out how to change the tires and swap out the engine without slowing down.” Teaming with ICON and with Veev, whose industrialized building lifecycle features the ability to manufactures walls that are framed with steel, waterproofed, and finished with advanced high performance materials; these walls include complete mechanical, electrical, and plumbing; and are built with a fully closed and cladded panel system, ready for assembly at arrival on-site. Veev’s innovative installation system enables just five team members to install one wall every 30 minutes Construction velocity – which in its true sense goes beyond mere durational speed to include quality, durability, efficiency, waste-reduction, and holistic stakeholder value generation – allows homebuilders to blur the bright line business model boundaries between building on spec and building to order. Evenflow speculative construction – which today represents the real estate and production model closest to optimized efficiency – has served as the classic antidote to variability and lost productivity. Built-to-order, on the other hand, promises homebuyers a more personalized realization of the home of their dreams. What Lennar sets out to do – in the Peter Drucker sense of using its adjacency business investments and its pilot programs with ICON and Veev to “know” rather than do – is learn how to crush the distance between the efficiencies and “productization” of spec and the mass customization and personalization benefits of built to order. That’s why Lennar and LenX’s laser-focus have zeroed in on the instant – via the omnichannel marketing and journey-mapping platforms – the company can engage with her, with him, with them, the consumer, and begin laddering up toward knowing how to be part of their life solutions. The error here, associated with Lennar’s ICON and Veev forays into prefabricated and innovative construction, would be to place disproportionate weight on the building technologies the company is researching and developing in the field. At the very least, these technologies both align significantly with Lennar’s EI product and community value proposition. Further, if they each scale and can port into other geographical markets in ways that justify big-time investment in prefabrication and robotics infrastructure, they could achieve some of the bill-of-materials sourcing, design, building information model engineering, fabrication, distribution, and assembly promise that Katerra failed to pull off in the real world. The real gold take-way, however, is in Lennar’s upending of a huge weight of its own structure and process – the decades-long success it had as a land and real estate speculator – in favor of investments in Drucker-like “knowing” what makes a consumer tick when it comes to matching up with a home, and building bridges off that knowledge into its future.Why it matters
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