Higher-for-longer is an indefinite new normal reality in homebuilding.

This week, a Bank of America memo was brief and to the point on higher-for-longer interest rates. It's message: Don't hold your breath for rate cuts.

Investing.com's Sam Boughedda quoted the BOA investment brief:

1Q inflation was too high, and a single print should not deliver much comfort, especially if it annualizes to a rate much higher than consistent with the Fed's target," adds BofA. "Furthermore, the economy is still solid, including services spending, the labor market remains tight, supply tailwinds could fade, and elections are approaching."

Then there's the reality of higher-for-longer land prices, higher-for-longer costs for skilled frontline workers and management talent, higher-for-longer prices for insurance, and access to more precious raw material commodities essential to technologies and new building materials.

For now, anyway, homebuilding leaders and their operational teams have little choice. They must either adapt decisively and continuously to new normative levels for these resources or become existentially fragile.

Even consumer households reckon with a similar moment of truth.

'The longer that we are at mortgage rates at these levels, the more people acclimate to them as normal, or just have life happen and they need to move anyway,' said Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com." – Wall Street Journal [gift link]

Homebuilding operational teams, their ecosystems of partners, and their strategic leaders are in a challenging position. However, by adapting to higher-for-longer, acclimating, and becoming more resilient, they can dial-up best practices performance among team members and sustain that performance higher-for-longer.

This is not a matter of short-term financial performance. It's a strategic, business, and generational pivot that will span three to five years. Seismic forces of change are roiling the short—and mid-term outlook, and it's crucial to be prepared for this.

This is the backdrop of our collaborative effort with The Builder's Daily partner Constellation HomeBuilder Systems and our co-located Build Smarter and Focus On Excellence events, Oct. 28-30, at the Hyatt Regency Lost Pines Resort in Austin.

We're also so proud and excited to note that, in addition to Constellation HomeBuilder Systems as our Elite sponsor, four partners – Builder Advisor Group, Boise Cascade Wood Products, New Home Star, and Westwood Insurance Agency – have committed to supporting us as Premier sponsors of our inaugural Focus On Excellence event.

Homebuilding operational team members and strategic executives can learn more about Build Smarter and Focus On Excellence by clicking here.

We're excited today to share two new "reveals," with more to come in the weeks ahead.

One, a keynote session with best-selling author and motivation guru Cara Brookins, who'll tailor her remarks to our audience of strategic and operational leaders across homebuilding's end-to-end value chain, from the headquarters offices to the field. Cara may be best known as ...

The mom who built her own house with her kids using YouTube tutorials. With her eager construction crew, which consisted of her four young children, Brookins laid the block, framed the walls, and even ran the plumbing and gas lines for her two-story house. She shared her story in her #1 best-selling memoir 'Rise: How a House Built a Family.'"

For our Build Smarter and Focus On Excellence audience, Cara's in-real-life homebuilding experience becomes a canvas to explore, learn from and illuminate a blueprint for pushing past fears, setting ambitious goals, and pursuing them with relentless grit and determination and, perhaps most importantly of all – for homebuilding organizations at this moment – teamwork and sustainable, adaptive, and resilient high-performance.

A big part of it is the idea of setting this massive goal and going all in without a Plan B, where you have to figure it out to survive as a business, and to accelerate yourself as a human being you have to figure it out," Brookins told us recently. "That spirit of going all-in, setting a tight deadline, committing all of the money and the resources, and determining to figure out how to put all that together. There's no Plan B there's no way out. You better figure it out."

This is a homebuilding business leader's dilemma. Figure out higher-for-longer performance, sustainable high performance to offset elevated costs and accelerated challenges, and, ultimately make more value for consumer households, who, as Realtor.com's Danielle Hale notes, are acclimating to higher-for-longer.

Building on Cara Brookins' motivational message, which speaks to the mettle and character of teams homebuilding strategists need to cultivate and empower to drive that higher-performance-for-longer goal, our Focus On Excellence experience will also tap into nationally known organizational advisor Higher Echelon to work in a roll-up-the-sleeves workshop format, emphasizing best practices and how to evolve them over the long haul.

This is not another business event, per se. Rather, it's a leadership immersion workshop on building and sustaining high-performance teams during an accelerated, seismic shift. Shoulder-to-shoulder with 60 or so of the industry's true leaders, participants will get to Focus On Excellence. Here's what that means:

• Focus on People: Building Resilient Adaptable Leaders 
  • Calm through Chaos
  • High-Performance Mindset
  • Resilience
• Focus on Your Company: Building High Performing-Teams 
  • Thriving amid Major Change
  • Characteristics of High Performing Teams (Organizations)
  • Building the Proper Culture

Many of these firms are very good and have an amazing culture around best practices," says Stephen Spaulding, VP of Business Solutions at Higher Echelon. "Our work will be to continue to help them to go from good to great and then to transfer that greatness to the next generation, and that is through building high-performing teams. This is the content from our experts that we plan to bring."