A Wisconsin-based residential developer with three or so housing cycles under his belt says he's picking up a vibe he recognizes may be almost impalpable, come-and-go pre-signals of a shift.

He can't tell for sure whether it is or it isn't one. That's the nature of shifts, particularly shifts in housing cycles. So much on the surface of things looks like it's getting even more constructive, and the fundamentals--jobs, wage trends, household formations, corporate profitability--look rock solid and humming along. Still, there's an uneasy sense that somewhere, somehow, a line's been crossed, from firm ground to uncharted, risky territory.

As he processes this faint feeling of needing to get out ahead of a cyclical turn for the worse--take some chips off the table, get rid of some leverage, etc.--he realizes he's got an internal issue. It's generational.

"For those of us who've been around a bit, and know this business works in cycles, we get how it works. You start getting ready for it to get bad before it does," he says. "But we've got a bunch of younger folks working for us that started in the last five years, and they think growth and good times is all there is in this business. That's a challenge when it comes to messaging that we've got to be prepared for when things go south."

In this predicament, our friend is in very good company right now. Success and stability, especially when they're sustained over a protracted period of time, tend to breed complacency. Equally risky, success and stability can spark up a distorted sense of where success and stability came from in the first place, as in who had a hand in it.

"Our young marketing team members, God love them, start thinking our numbers and our growth are happening because they're doing such a great job," he says. "Yes, they're doing fine, but we're doing a lot of what we're doing because the market's been taking us there."

If complacency looms as a generational risk--which it does in many of our organizations, large and small--so, too, does cynicism, which is apt to afflict the elder, wiser set of associates. With complacency comes a false sense security, of expectation that good times and progress can continue endlessly. Cynicism is, in some respects, complacency's evil older sibling, fostering a profound sense that one's individual effort and commitment don't matter, don't make a difference.

Often enough, complacency and cynicism co-exist, and together they add up to a home building enterprise's biggest existential vulnerabilities. Being blind to the realities of the business cycle or blinding oneself to one's own accountability to evolve, to learn, and to adapt can become life-threatening rigidities, especially entering a period of cyclical shift.

And, speaking of shift, resources--time, money, real estate, access to construction productivity--by themselves won't cut it as a long-term business resilience plan. What has made home builders do well up to now won't make them succeed tomorrow. So, leaders find themselves having to leverage adaptability, nimbleness, and regeneration as core skill-sets that enable them to do more with less, and with an ongoing barrage of shifting headwinds. Being able, repeatedly, to channel flexibility is the new deep pockets.

If our Housing Leadership Summit, May 14-16, at the Ritz Carlton Laguna Niguel in Dana Point, Calif., does nothing else this year, it will be a strategic leader's field guide in how to stem the tides of both complacency and cynicism, and how to develop and draw on a culture of adaptability in our nation's preeminent home building enterprises.

Tariffs and new tax laws and their effect on materials costs and consumer sentiment just got added to a growing heap of, mostly, supply-side expense and capacity challenges facing home builders as they ply their trade and hope to make a good go of it. While the economy's showing strength and a newly-minted generation of adults truly starts to flex its muscle as a household-forming, family-forming cohort on an American Dream-bound mission, home builders and their partners face these 10 "hard" problems, and a way to get at fixing them: collaboration. 

  • Access to buildable lots
  • Elimination of time, money, quality-loss, material fails, and waste traps in construction
  • Lines of capital for development and operations
  • Assurance of fairly-priced, reliable, skilled, careful, and productive trade crews
  • Designs that excite buyers, and generate profit and pace
  • Integrated technologies to improve enclosure, systems, and consumer experience
  • Activation of precise data on home buyers’ journey
  • Enhancing your home buyers’ experience of value and delight
  • Engaging local officials and activists in supporting your community plan
  • Focus on your firm’s core skills, culture, and reach outside for others

As is normally the case in home building's expansive and still-relatively intensely localized landscape, best-of-breed practices emerge in each of these challenge areas. So, we decided to harvest a dozen or so of them to serve as case studies other builders can learn from, assimilate, and put into practice in their own businesses.

In each and every one of these cases, collaboration--both internally and with external partners--figures materially in why we can hold them up as best-of-breed. Our conversation kicks off with a lightning round of six fast-paced business cases for how, what, and why new approaches to collaboration can serve as powerful solutions to everyday constraints on lots, labor, lending, and materials pricing. 

  • Evolve the builder-developer value equation as buyers’ needs and preferences change: The Newland Communities’ Briar Chapel-Garman Homes-Fresh Paint story. Speakers will be Alaina Money, co-owner, Garman Homes, Teri Slavik-Tsyuki, principal, tst ink., and Paige Shipp, regional director, Dallas Ft. Worth, Metrostudy.
  • Create a new entry-level business and operations model: Inside the Ashton Woods Starlight strategic pivot into starter homes. Speakers: Carrie Schonberg, chief marketing officer, Ashton Woods, and Eugene James, director, Metrostudy.
  • Crack the affordable infill code: Surge Homes’ secret to leveraging data and partnership to balance what people can pay for and what local policymakers will permit. Speakers willl be Benoit Lemieux, chairman, Surge Homes, Louis Conrad, president, Surge Homes, and Lawrence Dean, regional director, Metrostudy.
  • Lean in on 55+. Revelations into Dan Ryan Builders’ new Elevate brand position, and how fresh, bold approaches to architect-builder collaboration unlock opportunity. Speakers will be Char Kurihara, vice president sales and marketing, Dan Ryan Builders , Deryl Patterson, president, Housing Design Matters, and Amanda Hoyle, regional director, Raleigh/Triad, Metrostudy.
  • Capitalize on Collaborating: Brothers Matt and Samuel Blank team up with partner Darryl Berger to build a fast-growing “intentional single-family for-rent” business model in the Phoenix market, creating a housing choice and asset class with staying power. Speakers will be Matt Blank, principal, BB Living and Jennifer Gooch, regional director, Metrostudy.
  • Fast-track permit approvals by aligning with influencers. Essentials in how The Olson company leverages community leaders to become allies in projects like the San Gabriel Wham-O and Huy Fong Foods industrial plant conversion into an 88-townhome neighborhood. Speakers: Scott Laurie, CEO, Olson Homes, The Olson Co., Jason Pu, former Mayor of San Gabriel, Southern California, John Mulville, regional director, Southern California, Metrostudy.

We'll also have an exclusive, evidence-based exploration of supply and demand drivers, what’s influencing and motivating their impact on housing, and what single-family for-sale operators can do to prepare for what’s ahead hosted by Ivy Zelman, CEO, Zelman & Associates and Alan Ratner, Zelman managing director, equity research, as well as Bert Selva, CEO at Shea Homes.

CohnReznick director Steve Friedman will lead a workshop session that will call out “everything you need to know” about how to take advantage of corporate tax policy changes, new laws impacting deductibility, and how to both leverage and protect your firm from negative fall-out in high-cost states, and new caps on mortgage interest deductions. A clinic on how to address accounting challenges and investment opportunity.

We're especially excited to host a conversation whose time in home building, residential development and investment is long overdue. Builders have been slow to diversify, both in their enterprise leadership and their boards of directors. This session challenges home building organizations to take action and lead their firms toward decisive steps that make progress in leadership diversification as a cultural and business performance non-negotiable. Moderator Margaret Whelan, founder and CEO, Whelan Advisory, will explore the data, the issues, and the challenges with Cathey Lowe, Board member, The New Home Company, David Chun, CEO, founder of Equilar, and Mary Federau, executive vice president, Mattamy Corp.

Curious to know how Amazon might be looking at how to enter the home building business? We've got a sense that the approaches and business model Aaron Holm and his team at Blokable are adopting might serve as a pretty strong indicator. Blokable's tech driven, modular, high-efficiency, highly adaptable model aims squarely at bringing workforce and affordable communities to over-regulated, expensive urban areas much in need of new housing.

Our home builder executives will get a feel for the capital outlook from the perspective of one of their own--the full stack of options and alternatives, ranging from debt to equity, from project financing, to mezzanine lending, to entity level deals, and of course, mergers and acquisitions--as Cory Boydston, CFO at Ashton Woods curates the exploration with five very smart, very active capital advisors: Tony Avila, CEO, Builder Advisor Group, Elena Bennett, senior vice president, Wells Fargo, Robert Crowley, managing director, Moelis & Company, Daniel Green, principal, Wheelock Street Capital, and Theodore Karatz, senior director, GTIS Partners.

We'll also delve into the nitty-gritty of how today's home building leaders can commit to, invest in, and derive both performance and entity-level value from collaboration. This session will explore urgencies, strategies, and practical tactics in identifying collaboration opportunity areas that may alter your organization’s future capacity to thrive. Clark Ellis, ceo and co-founder of Continuum Advisory Group, and Fletcher L. Groves, III, vp at SAI Consulting will lead a highly-interactive workshop session whose goals include: Why set priorities around a more inclusive core collaborative network? How to recognize and plan measurable, operational collaboration initiative goals, and what tactics and processes best ensure success for new trust-based partnerships?

For those who want a better grip on what's coming--economically and in housing--around the next corner and why, we have the 2020 Look Ahead: Heads or Tailwinds? Two of housing’s most respected economists discuss and debate supply and demand through a host of filters set to affect new home sales through 2020 and beyond. Mark Boud, chief economist at Metrostudy and Svenja Gudell, chief economist at Zillow sound off on insights, precision data points, and assertions that will help builders future-proof themselves for business conditions and consumer trends around the next corner.

Baselines around what builders these days need to include to make new homes live smarter, more connected, and more consciously using personalized technologies and embedded systems are a hot topic. Where does collaboration play a role in your ability to integrate what’s smart today with what proves to generate lasting value? Workshop Leader Paul Cardis, CEO, Avid Ratings, will tap into two of home building's leading high-performance and smart homes innovators, CR Herro, vice president of environmental affairs, Meritage Homes and Jacob Atalla, vice president, sustainability, KB Home.

Speaking of technology and innovation, there's hardly a hotter topic in construction these days than the productivity-boosting promise that off-site and modular factory assembly of homes offers as an increasingly realistic alternative to site-build business and operations models.

You've already heard now of a number of investments in factory capability in geographies around the nation. The question on many builders' minds is, "how do I make that happen?" What it takes to integrate offsite into your business and operations workflows, procurement, cost and revenue modeling, and construction start-to-completion cycles will be the focus of a workshop session that will include: Michele Knapp, development and construction consultant, building material innovator and entrepreneur will curate the conversaiton with Trevor Schick, president, Katerra Materials, Scott Hedges, North America sales and market development, Randek AB and Gerard McCaughey, chief executive officer, Entekra.

Access to thought leadership and business culture development insights from home building's chief executives in HLS's up close and intimate setting is a critical, exclusive value of our program. This year, we're honored to have ceo leaders who can shed light on mergers and acquisitions at the highest level, international investment in home building operations, and market and customer segment expansion opportunities and challenges. This year's ceo roster of speakers includes: 

  • Ken Balogh, president & ceo, Ashton Woods
  • James Brickman, ceo, Green Brick Partners
  • Peter Gilgan, founder and CEO, Mattamy Homes
  • Jim Leiferman, US president, Mattamy Homes
  • Tom McKay, senior VP & chief development officer, North American Sekisui House
  • Stuart Miller, chairman and ceo, Lennar
  • Dan Ryan, president & ceo, Dan Ryan Builders
  • Joel Shine, president and CEO, Woodside Homes

Of course, many of the best practices in how legacy organizations can, do, and must collaborate and create interoperable solutions by expanding a network of partners to include Silicon Valley tech leaders come from hidden-in-plain sight manufacture partners.

Whirlpool's 25,000 US workers, 15,000 manufacturing jobs, 9 production plants, and $1.1 billion of global research and development investment annually is testament to how real and how impactful a commitment to collaboration can be. A piece in the Harvard Business Review, from MIT and Harvard educators and researchers, Mercedes Delgado and Karen Mills reminds us:

We need to invest in skilled labor. The supply chain has the majority of STEM workers, of which America has a shortage. And while many companies are having difficulty finding skilled workers, service suppliers are most at-risk since their innovations are highly dependent on access to and retention of talent. Immigration policies that give greater access to this labor pool are helpful.

Second, we should support regional industry clusters. Suppliers produce inputs for businesses, and therefore, they particularly benefit from being co-located with their buyers in industry clusters. Catalyzing and strengthening organizations that support regional clusters is one way to promote buyer-supplier collaboration.

And finally, we must ensure that suppliers have access to capital. STEM-intensive service suppliers often produce innovations that cannot be patented, making it difficult to raise outside funding. Having pro-active government policy – through loan guarantees or credit support for suppliers – can help ensure stable and efficient access to capital for these suppliers to start and grow.

Whirlpool's support allows us to explore collaboration far and wide in all its incarnations, manifestations, allowing both for early detection and fast implementation of others' best practices in partnership.

We're so pleased to have Whirlpool as a partner on this Collaborate to Accelerate program, and we look forward to seeing all of home building's leaders at our Housing Leadership Summit, May 14-16, 2018, at the Ritz Carlton, Laguna Niguel in Dana Point, Calif. Click here to register.