Stuart Miller told me in so many words that homebuilding’s constitutional resistance to change and progress is a myth.

Innovation and applied brilliance happen everyday in residential construction and real estate,” the Lennar chairman and co-CEO said. “Fact is, a lot of the work is going on in little pockets, labs, r&d centers, testing grounds in every corner of the industry across the nation. Some of this innovation work is disruptive, it just hasn’t fully broken out yet and transformed how we work.”

Miller’s observation, circa mid-2015, is as true today as it was then.

True as well is that residential real estate, development, and building’s “

Image courtesy of Pearl Homes

With an app on the phone you can see your consumption. You can see how much you generated you can see what you took from the grid, you can see what you put back to the grid. It’s so exciting to see how much power you generate.

Owners feel that. There’s a feeling of pride of self generation, because we’re in a place where we have the ability to have clean energy. We’ve spent so much energy on the house itself on the performance of this house that has solar panels, with the battery, and having no utility, and having zero carbon footprint or a positive carbon footprint. But then you get the feeling and you actually see it on your phone.”

On the Future Of Housing Solutions

I want to make a difference in the world because I think that’s just a great thing for me to leave. I just want to do that. For younger people – millennials – they look at this as this needs to be done. To them, it’s ‘you should be doing this and every other home builder should be doing it. So that is who we brought in. We’ve taken the average age down 20 years from the beginning of the project. They get it. They get it faster than we would. They understand that it shouldn’t be a question. They love that we’re doing it. Some of them will post on their own social network success at the community, and on their own personal like, so that gives that shows they have pride to work with us. So that’s something great and that’s something I think, really again happened organically. We’ve come together as a group, much more of a team than historically have done in the past.”