It’s yearend in homebuilding land. The business community’s leaders focus on a fluid continuum of three time zones.

One is the recent past. This is where they square up their team’s accountability. The second time zone is the present, often an intense push to a 2023 finish line, delivering operational results that equal or exceed projected goals, budgets, or other performance expectations.

The third time zone encompasses the near-, mid-, and longer-term future, and a fully realized plan to grow the business in performance, sustainability, and resiliency.

Financial metrics dominate all three time zones of focus.

Still, alongside generating financial value, factors that often play out unnoticed stand as bedrock priorities among some organizations, inseparable and indistinguishable from the laser focus on driving shareholder and stakeholder returns.

One factor like this is trust. Trust, says global communications firm Edelman, is:

The ultimate currency in the relationship that all institutions – business, governments, NGOs, and media – build with their stakeholders. Trust defines an organization’s license to operate, lead, and succeed. Trust is the foundation that allows an organization to take responsible risk, and, if it makes mistakes, to rebound from them. For a business, especially, lasting trust is the strongest insurance against competitive disruption, the antidote to consumer indifference, and the best path to continued growth. Without trust, credibility is lost and reputation can be threatened.”

For more than a decade now, strategy and research consultancy Lifestory Research has won dibs as an industry standard among homebuilding and building products business organizations as an authoritative benchmark of specifically how these businesses can earn a “license to operate, lead, and succeed.” In early January, Lifestory Research will announce its 13th year of results of a survey of upwards of 55,000 participants, revealing its 2024 “America’s Most Trusted Builder” honorees.

At least one homebuilding organization – Taylor Morrison – considers recognition as a trusted brand in homebuilding one of its bedrock priorities, woven into the fabric of its financial and operational goals. For eight consecutive years, Taylor Morrison, has won top honors among homebuilding firms.

The beauty of winning an award repeatedly, year after year, comes with a few challenges,” writes Taylor Morrison Chief Marketing Officer Stephanie McCarty, in a LinkedIn post. “How do you celebrate it? How do you continue to market it meaningfully? And ultimately, how do you keep winning it? … I’ve been reflecting on what a meaningful unit of measurement ‘trust’ is for a brand. It’s such a fragile feeling. Something so difficult to earn, yet so easy to lose. But our formula for earning something as elusive as trust is really quite simple: it’s how we treat people. How we show up authentically. How we market our brand honestly and responsibly. How we provide real transparency into the process (even if parts are not often pretty). How we own our mistakes.”

McCarty voices a perspective that has woven itself into the Taylor Morrison business culture, a view Taylor Morrison CEO and chair Sheryl Palmer holds up for the entire enterprise’s team members as a non-negotiable practice when they show up at work each day. Palmer and her strategic leadership also focus on aligning the organization’s entire ecosystem of partners to deliver on a promise to customers that each of their experiences ranks at the top of the operational priority pyramid.

It's important to have that tone from the top in how you treat customers,” says Michael Previty, VP of Finance at Maitland, FL-based Mortgage Funding Direct Ventures, Taylor Morrison’s strategically aligned mortgage lending arm. “We all follow the charge to love our internal and external customers. That's a critical piece of our culture. That builds a desire – no matter which department –that when we engage with each customer, we do things the right way.”

Particularly in a post-pandemic economic, social, and environmental cauldron that has added volatility, uncertainty, and complexity to everyday life, homebuilders and their partners have worked to simplify and remove doubt from their part in a homebuyer’s journey, adding reliability and peace of mind to the process. To succeed in gaining that confidence among customers, homebuilders, Previty says, need to seal the relationship with the “currency” of trust.

From an insurance perspective, being trusted means making sure that we offer our consumers the right amount of coverage,” Previty says. “Not over-coverage, not under-coverage, but the right amount. This goes for all we do for our customers, whether it’s the lending side or the insurance side. We want to make sure that we're going to hold your trust by trying to do things the right way from point A in the process, all the way to the end. That's our culture. Nobody succeeds at that all the time. But you build trust by having a consistent approach at every point that you interact with the customer. The same is true, whether we’re serving customers internally or externally.”

That “point A in the process, all the way to the end,” that Previty speaks of requires weaving together epic partnerships that give every customer touchpoint consistency and clarity. Tom Kriby, VP of Client Development and Partnerships at Westwood Insurance Agency, notes that what has been a long and trusting relationship between Taylor Morrison and its lending and insurance partners has evolved now into a fully seamless focus on a customer’s experience.

Taylor Morrison works with its in-house lender and Westwood to make the process easier for every potential homebuyer,” Kriby says. “For example, given how challenging it can be to insure older homes, if potential customers are going to be able to get out of their old home to buy a new one, they’ll want to have an insurance referral for their existing property. Together, we're thinking of removing as many barriers as possible to get customers onto their ecosystem.”

The push to remove friction finally penetrated the new-home purchase process at an accelerated, systemic level as a COVID-era pivot. However, it’s younger adult homebuyers – Millennial and GenZ – who suggest most homebuilders and their partners are on an early learning curve when it comes to truing up their processes with a strong, trusting homebuyer experience.

Taylor Morrison has been thinking about what the insurance market looks like five years from now, including what insurance products are going to be around and their pricing, because their biggest interest appears to be having sustainable products that protect consumers over the long run,” observes Westwood’s Tom Kriby. “Typically, builders don't give this a whole lot of focus. They simply want to sell the home.”