Left: Joel Shine, Woodside Homes
Right: Roger Gannon, Woodside Homes

Joel Shine, who in the depths of The Great Recession's housing and financial meltdown stepped in as a work-out consultant to serve thousands of creditors in the bankruptcy of Woodside Homes, and led the firm's recovery, recapitalization, growth, and eventual sale to Osaka, Japan-based Sekisui House Ltd, will depart Woodside, effective Feb. 11, 2022.

Woodside team members learned of plans for Shine's exit in the past several days, as Sekisui House executives related the company will consolidate parts of its U.S. executive team oversight as it moves forward in a 2025 plan whose goal is for its U.S. group to supply 10,000 homes annually to the market by the end of the five-year timeframe.

Stepping up into the newly created role as chief operating officer, Roger Gannon, who has been serving as Arizona division president, and chair of Woodside's Fast-Cycle Time Committee. Gannon joined Woodside in 2014 from PulteGroup, and has been part of long-term succession planning for years, according to Joel Shine. Gannon will assume day-to-day executive leadership of Woodside with Shine's imminent departure.

Roger's performance and range of talent speak for themselves, and I've been impressed with his accomplishments from the start," Shine told The Builder's Daily during a brief conversation this past weekend. "We congratulate Roger and look forward to his leadership in this new role.  Roger has been in the homebuilding industry for over 35 years and has experience leading turn-around operations, multi-division operations, large divisions and has served in various corporate leadership roles."

I'm grateful to the entire Woodside Homes organization of team members for showing what we could accomplish."

Shine's exit comes shortly on the heels of Sekisui House's acquisition of Portland, OR-based Holt Homes, which together with Woodside's operating footprint in the four western states of Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California now completes a contiguous Western swath of six states that now include the Pacific Northwest's hot Oregon and Washington markets.

A statement at the time of the acquisition announcement earlier this month highlights a pan-cyclical strategy Sekisui House says it's pursuing in its 2025 roadmap:

Sekisui House technologies will be shared with Holt in order to facilitate a shift from price-based sales to value-based sales and to improve the construction process, thereby providing high added value to customers and enhancing corporate value."

Our TBD report on the Holt acquisition took note of Sekisui House's most recent performance reporting on Woodside, this past December:

Sekisui House reported 3rd quarter earnings in December, noting that its Woodside Homes operation – in Utah, California, Arizona, and Nevada – was on pace for a strong 2021, with expected full-year deliveries of 2,700 homes, roughly a 12% gain in closings over the prior full year.

Under Shine's strategic and operational leadership, Woodside worked through bankruptcy in 2008 through 2010, and got the operation back up on its feet unlike more than a dozen top 50 homebuilding companies that were casualties of the last housing downturn, and hundreds of other firms that crashed and burned, never to return. Prior to his role in the Woodside homes financial and operational restructuring, Shine formerly headed up a private homebuilding firm and two investment groups with interests in residential development.

Through two extensive recapitalizations – consolidating and re-terming debt and establishing a new slate of equity and credit holders – Shine guided Woodside’s reincarnation to the brink of a public offering in 2014, which only derailed as a Wall Street financial hiccup stalled the IPO market.

In February 2017, five years ago almost to the day, Sekisui House announced it had acquired Woodside Homes outright for what then was an estimated $468 million.

When I arrived at Woodside Homes in 2008, the Company was in the middle of bankruptcy and looking for its path forward," Shine shared with TBD. "During my time, we have taken the company out of bankruptcy, got it recapitalized and growing again, helped it become part of the SHL family of companies, and continued to improve it since the acquisition by SHL."

In 2019, Shine tapped national vp of operations Joel Abney and Las Vegas division president Kent Lay to team up on the transformational Chōwa Concept Home, bringing together an international design, development, and construction team from Japan-based Sekisui House's Shawood group at Las Vegas' Summerlin masterplan. Currently six more new Shawood branded homes are under construction in Summerlin, according to Hiroaki Takahama, ceo of Sekisui House U.S Holdings from an earlier interview.

Under Joel Shine's leadership and operations focus, an organization that had been largely decimated and demoralized after the real estate crash of 15 years ago, got another chapter to shine.

Woodside Homes is now one of the strongest builders in the country with a bright future of growth and opportunity," Shine says. "We have accomplished a lot together."

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