You hear often these days of home builders as kind of poster kids for a business sector that a global manufacturing productivity revolution has bypassed.
The costs of labor, particularly among the skilled and semi-skilled subcontractors–25 or 30 trades–who each perform a discrete role in the assembly of every new home, keep going up. Scarcity due to a depletion of the pool of those workers causes uncertainty in construction schedules and risk to budgets, not to mention ongoing liability on warranty issues thanks to work quality-related failures that occur in the months and years following the home purchase.
But home building–contrary to what some would have us believe–doesn’t have a corner on productivity challenges. Few businesses and virtually no business sectors operate free of pain points around the need to bring technological solutions to bear to bring down input costs and improve the productivity of each human associate in the process.
At BUILDER and Hanley Wood’s partners on the data side–Metrostudy–and on the market activation side–Hanley Wood Marketing–our business succeeds or fails based on the quality and purpose of partnerships we forge with people who meet this productivity challenge head-on.
If we improve productivity, sons and daughters, and grandsons and granddaughters of people working in America will speak of us, their forbears, as building a better world for them, a world with housing options they can afford, raise families in, and build new generations of community.
Each year, BUILDER reaches out for a partner who commits a significant amount of capital, talent, labor, time, and strategic focus on bringing new insight into how other builders–large and small–can learn new ways, new tactics, new processes, new materials, and new engineering systems, to improve their productivity in developing and building new homes.
We’re so proud, this year, to be working with the corporate, Florida regional, and Orlando divisional teams at Meritage Homes on a project whose goal is no less than groundbreaking when it comes to new engineering, design, and construction processes, the reNEWable Living Home. We’ll team up with Meritage, with BSB Design and our other partners.
Some of the secret sauce of this project will be kept under wraps until we unveil the project in Orlando in January. What’s not a secret is the strategic commitment Meritage ceo Steve Hilton has made to using the reNEWable Living Home as a pivot point for how his organization will develop and produce homes that perform better, that live healthier, that adjust and adapt over time, and that delight and satisfy their owners more in the years ahead.
This week, we reach one of our milestones in the project, the frame walk. Over the next couple of days, we’ll explore some of the brand new processes the Meritage team is putting into place that will profoundly change how it builds, engineers, and positions its homes and communities for today’s and tomorrow’s home buyer.
Many of the features and funtionalities that will make the most difference and mean the most to those home buyers go on in the way the envelope comes together and how it performs, literally inside the walls.
During the frame walk days, we’ll highlight a few of the ways a big builder is working to transform itself around giving more meaning and value to each consumer, and at the same time improving its associates’ productivity in the delivery of each home.
For home builders and home building, the productivity challenge is a secular challenge. It speaks to individualized home sites, separate companies’ business models and operational disciplines, discrete investors’ resources, etc., but it also confronts all of its vested and invested players on a level playing field.
To bring more homes within reach of more people in America, home building needs to improve the productivity of its workers, and the talent of its workers, and the resilience of its talent to transform as technology and data make exponential gains.
That’s what the reNEWable Living Home is all about.
