“What’s cool about what we’ve set this up is that you can learn something every day,” says Doug Bauer, TRI Pointe chief executive officer. Bauer, chief operating officer Tom Mitchell, and chief financial officer Mike Grubbs started TRI Pointe on legal pads, a white board, and an Excel pro forma six years ago. In mid-2009, going-concern viability as a fee builder was as grandiose as Bauer, Mitchell, and Grubbs could afford to be as they road-mapped their vision to be a “next generation” home builder—free of legacy land issues, intimate with home buyers’ needs, and an operational outperformer. In mid-2015, Fortune 1000 sustainable profitability is more like it, based on mapping national, but acting, eating, sleeping, and breathing local. The leaders of TRI Pointe’s confederation “look at their world from a retail perspective,” Bauer says. “What the consumer wants has begun to shift much faster and more dramatically than at other times in home building cycles, so what we learn from each of those leaders every day allows us to change our thought processes and focus on what the consumer’s going to want. With our structure, everybody gets immediate on-the-ground updates and can address and mine that.”

TRI Pointe’s “sharing economy” business model materially impacts its odds at triumph—a house plan product that works effectively in multiple markets; a best practice that can port from one division to another; a marketing or demand-generation technique that flares up and takes hold in a single submarket; a land underwriting process that can scale across the enterprise; a validated safety procedure for jobsites. High-level and in-the-trenches collaboration is something that has become standard operating procedure at the freshly formed top-20 home building enterprise.

The Winchester Homes Woodley ranch speaks to two truths that might seem buried in the sizzle, thunder, and smoke of TRI Pointe’s rocket-blast zero-to-3,100-plus home trajectory in its toddlerhood. One is that, having paid about $100,000 per home site for the WRECO empire of 27,000 lots in five U.S. regions, the Woodley ranch means that TRI Pointe also acquired the human nimbleness and heart to pivot off some challenging deal terms and build a profitable turn for each and every one of its $100,000 lots. Perhaps even more important, it also acquired a brain trust and executional SWAT team of five operating chiefs with 70-plus years of battle testing who represent the promise to replenish the lot pipeline—when the moment is right to do so—for less than $100,000 per lot the next time around.

“When it comes to product design, we’re obsessive when it comes to learning what we should be building based on the local knowledge, the data, and the competition,” Grubbs says. “It may be a manufacturing-based process, but it’s a consumer-centric company.”

A rocket-thrust takeoff gave TRI Pointe a storybook start. From its first incarnation as an Irvine Co. fee-builder in spring 2009, to its initial public offering in January 2013, to its dramatic $2.8 billion coup to acquire the five WRECO home building companies, it has been a hell of a ride, even for a precocious six-year-old.

“This is absolutely the company that we envisioned when we were first talking about what it could be,” says Mitchell, the COO. “The magnitude may be different, but the heartbeat, the passionate culture, the customer focus, and our core thought that we could be different from every company that had come before us was part of the genesis of the idea.”

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As we glance, momentarily, back at TRI Pointe’s 2014 triumphs, we see a who-are-these-guys fearless upstart that delivered 144 homes in 2012, and 459 in 2013, emerging victorious from a seven-month high-stakes scrum for the huge WRECO land and talent prize in late 2013. We see a story that’s as much about trust’s role in big-time outcomes as it is the magic of smart money, and it’s also the story of how scale may play differently in home building than many people think it does. For TRI Pointe, being profitable on a per-lot basis at $100,000 a unit goes back to its model and processes for scale—being a great brand locally, and supporting that nationally. Being able to do it all again, iterating the formula, is about trust, which is something money never buys.

“I felt a cultural alignment 10 minutes into listening to Doug, Tom, and Mike,” says Shapiro, whose words and sentiments echo in nearly identical terms those of Trendmaker president Will Holder, Quadrant Homes president Ken Krivanec, and Maracay Homes president Andy Warren, who came, along with Shapiro, into the TRI Pointe family of regional presidents at

the time of the WRECO deal. “I could have marched [the TRI Pointe executive trio] into any one of my group management meetings, and they’d be talking the same language, and Doug, Tom, and Mike introduced this notion that we can build this ‘next generation’ home building organization around being local and national, acting small and leveraging big, and it feels as if we’re on to something special, like building Apple in a garage.”

Meeting of the Minds

The cultural alignment Shapiro refers to may sound to some like consultant-speak. What it means is this: Shapiro and his fellow chiefs at Maracay, Pardee, Quadrant, and Trendmaker had carved out ways to achieve relative operational excellence as regional players, but for years it was clear to them and everybody else that Weyerhaeuser was “all about the trees,” the timber-related products that were the mainstay of its future business as it grappled with capital demands and investment strategies across diversified stakes in related verticals. Its home building companies—while well-run and overachieving—were a pimple on the ocean, compared with the forest products focus.

Shapiro, Trendmaker’s Holder and a few other WRECO presidents got their first whiff of cultural alignment on Sept. 4, 2013, at the Morgan Stanley offices at the corner of Constellation Boulevard and Avenue of the Stars in Los Angeles. They were invited into the process of screening potential suitors for the WRECO companies, a journey that had begun in mid-June and already had been culled down to five companies for the final bidding: Beazer, Brookfield Residential, Meritage, NVR, and TRI Pointe.

When Shapiro, Holder, and the others met and listened to each of the five bidders in a daylong presentation, two positives leapt out at them. Specifically, the Beazer, Meritage, NVR, and TRI Pointe pitches sounded like music to their ears simply because each was a pure-play home builder—they didn’t make money doing anything else, and they were in it for the long haul. The WRECO operators no longer would be a footnote on the Weyerhaeuser balance sheet, but rather they would have an opportunity to make a strategic difference in the outcome and destiny of their respective companies.