A Thank-You To All The People Who Make New Homes A Reality

Roughly 600,000 households across America will celebrate Thanksgiving tomorrow for the first time in a new home in a new neighborhood in a new place on earth and in their lives.

Think of all the obstacles, the doom and gloom, the volatility, and the uncertainty that lay in their way a year ago.

It's hard to fathom how meaningful that reality is and it's hard to overstate how unreservedly thankful we are to those in your organizations whose individual and team capabilities make this statistic true.

For economists and financial experts, a house is, well, a house. It’s an asset with specific physical characteristics that is most often inhabited by a group of related individuals. However, that narrow description misses the enduring emotional power of a family home." – Miles S. Nadal, founder and Executive Chairman, Peerage Capital, Fortune

You could only begin to appreciate the nature and size of impact you've had, and that you continue to have in countless human life futures, by experiencing directly the feeling of sanctuary, warmth, peace-of-mind, and well-being in those homes among those people in them during these holidays.

Among these tens of thousands of households celebrating their first Thanksgiving in a new home, some are ones your team members worked with personally for weeks and months, through details and detours, through fleeting hopes and high anxieties, through a fits and starts journey across the finish line.

A litany of challenges, vaunted or nuanced, stood in the way of so many of these families, these individuals, these households. For some, the challenges were the moving-target math of high prices and spooling interest rates. Time and again, you and your teams found ways to price those folks into this very moment, this specific time in their own new home, where Thanksgiving 2023 is the first day of the rest of their lives. And for others, with greater wherewithal and perhaps more discretionary power to say what they want and where they want to be, you and your teams bridged the psychological gap, the tendency to hesitate and wait for perhaps a better time for that home they're dreaming of. And time and again, you and your teams created ways to add to the value and make the decision to act now simpler, faster, and, ultimately, smarter.

Exactly a year ago, we observed:

One thing we're most thankful about, having met, spent time with, listened to, learned from, felt for, and seen in action for more than 20 years – the people whose livelihoods spring from making homes and neighborhoods for others – is this:

• Homebuilding transformation happens today, now, always. It goes on in infinitesimal ways 24/7 among countless people relating to people, working together, working for one another and for others. The transformation we've seen begin in residential real estate, construction, and their ecosystem in the last several years is one with both the future of home and work at the heart of it, toward expanded belonging.
• The pulse of that transformation – be it in building technologies that will one-day industrialize homebuilding, in capital investment and lending, or in the sphere of local and non-local policy – is cultural and its future stands on the shoulders and backs of past giants and present everyday people.

For past giants and present everyday people in homebuilding and residential development, one thing is always and forever true. There's always more to learn than the sum total of all we know from experience.

In 2023 alone, there are 600,000 families and households, give or take, who have you and your teams to thank for their first Thanksgiving in a new home that will be one and the same with their deepest joys, their sharpest memories, and their greatest lessons in living.

Our friend and trusted homebuilding industry advisor Al Trellis writes to a wide network of owners and principal stakeholders of homebuilding operators:

Turmoil, both globally and domestically, is the order of the day and it seems that the news is a constant drumbeat of problems, conflict and pain. Against such a backdrop, it is more than appropriate to stop and give thanks for all that we have. Everything is not bleak, everyone is not evil and the sky isn’t falling, even if some days it seems pretty dark and ominous."

What gratifies us mostly is the adaptiveness homebuilders and their many, many invaluable partners in housing's value chain have shown, as always, when "the facts" – mortgage rates, input costs, regulatory costs, supply chain disruptions, frontline worker capacity constraints, and household-, income-, and family-formation – are in constant fluid change.

Collaborative Fund author Morgan Housel, as is so often the case, has a punch line about having always to learn more than we'll ever know:

Anything that evolves – markets, technology, careers, etc – has to be approached with the mindset that once-great ideas can expire, and when they expire you’re better off walking away rather than attempting to repair them."

The team at The Builder's Daily – and 600,000 families who'll wake up tomorrow on the first Thanksgiving morning anyone's ever spent in that new home – can't thank you enough for doing what you do so well.

And we wish you and your loved ones a happy Thanksgiving 2023.