New Home Insights Podcast

The housing sector always seems to be in “crisis” mode when it comes to pricing. But now more than ever, there is no denying that affordability is the biggest hurdle to homeownership. Getting a key to a new home into the hands of a first-time buyer is everything to LGI Homes. It is a singular focus that has provided LGI with direction since its founding in 2003, as it has expanded from its Texas b...

Wellness can mean different things to different people in different contexts. Is it a spa treatment with facial scrubs and sliced cucumbers? Is it someone in a rented lab coat on YouTube rapturing about cold plunges and cupping and the latest superfood? Is it rise-and-grind hustlers, holistic healers, biohackers, and keto carnivores? In housing, it is so much more, and Teri Slavik-Tsuyuki knows th...

Homebuilder mergers and acquisitions (M&A) seem to slide into the zeitgeist now and then, catching our attention and making us wonder what happens next. M&A is having a moment now. From the rush of big Japanese operators into America to American builders partnering with their brethren to make them stronger, M&A is in the headlines. But sometimes it’s useful to step back and see the big picture. Wh...

Has Housing’s Spring Forward Stalled this Year? by John Burns Research and Consulting

A note: this conversation was recorded on March 17, 2025, so any references to pending legislation reflect the state of the debate at that time. The debate over institutional ownership of single-family rental (SFR) homes has moved from industry trade publications to the floor of the U.S. Congress. A bill currently working its way through the legislative process would restrict large investors from...

Japanese firms have gone big on American housing. Sekisui House has been at the front of this line. The 65-year-old innovative Japanese builder has built a book of homebuilding brands that covers the country. Their most recent acquisition, Richmond American Homes, not only gave Sekisui a national footprint but also brought them David Viger, now the President and CEO of Sekisui House U.S. David Vig...

The housing market pendulum has swung back toward buyers, and understanding what consumers truly want—and will pay for—has never been more critical for builders. In this episode of the New Home Insights Podcast, JBREC's Dean Wehrli sits down with Jenni Nichols, Vice President of Design, to explore where builders can push, where they can pull back, and where they absolutely cannot compromise.

It seems that affordability has suddenly become the word of the day in politics, but it has been at the top of the agenda in housing for a very long time. There will always be market space at the high end—but there will also always be a need to solve for new home prices that fit into the fat part of the bell curve. That is where Smith Douglas Homes lives. Smith Douglas CEO Greg Bennett recently jo...

Back in the olden days (after those bikes with the one really big wheel and the one tiny wheel, but before TikTok), when we spoke about the rental market, we meant apartments. Sure, there were plenty of “mom and pop” rental homes, but no one thought about them, and no one was building new ones. But over the last decade-plus, build-to-rent (BTR) has emerged as an ever-growing part of our national h...

In the new home world, we often divide builders into public and private. The idea is that the publics are the capital-rich, large-scale firms with a multi-regional presence that are gradually gobbling up market share from the smaller local private builders scattered throughout the country. But this ignores the “big privates”—homebuilders privately owned but with the size and resources to act like...

If there are two things that fuel real estate development, they are land and money. Oh, and design. Three things that—wait, the type of housing is huge, too, so product is another fundamental. So there are four—okay, there are a whole bunch of critical elements to the successful development of real estate, but let’s stick with land and money. Having those two things is indispensable, and they are...

There is no housing market; there are housing markets. We all know that, but all too often forget. Now, as mortgage rates and increasing supply challenge the for-sale sector, rental supply has tapered from its peak, and that sector is firming. Moreover, dynamics vary, often markedly, depending on geography. The nation is dotted with dozens of rental markets that sum to a whole, but each has a diff...

If you’re going to be the “Something of Something,” it is not bad to be the Trader Joe’s of homebuilding. You are big but not too big. You’re known for high quality and attentive service, but instead of ringing a bell for someone who just bought a bottle of that delicious almond sparkling wine, you have a key ceremony for someone who just bought a brand-new house. Beazer Homes CEO Allan Merrill jo...

Tariffs, inflation, interest rates, jobs. All are factors that massively impact the housing market. As head of economic research and forecasting at Renaissance Macro Research, Neil Dutta tracks currents and trends across the globe. On Bloomberg TV or in Business Insider, Neil always tells it like it is. He recently joined the New Home Insights podcast to do the same. In this episode, Neil Dutta to...

Every great story has an “inciting incident,” something that propels the protagonist into action. For Ryan Stroker, Founder and CEO of Avenue One, that moment came when he realized there was a gaping disconnect between institutional capital and a vast array of comparatively smaller homebuilders that could thrive with better access to big money. But Ryan had also cut his teeth in the single-family...

Placemaking is the art hiding within the banalities of residential development. It is the color on canvas that transforms square footage and dwelling units per acre into homes, and homes into communities. DMB Development has been making great places since 1984, and the company’s President and CEO, Brent Herrington, has been helping them do that for almost 40 years. Brent provides his take on the k...

Spring is a critical time of year for the housing market. The weather warms, foot traffic surges, and builders can bank sales. It is historically the height of the market, particularly in cooler climes. At JBREC, we constantly interact with new homebuilders, resale brokers, land brokers, building products folks, and other actors in the housing space to keep thumb and forefinger on the carotid arte...

PulteGroup CEO Ryan Marshall brings clarity, candor, and—since it is in the name of the show—insight into the latest episode of the New Home Insights podcast. You can tell he is not eager to talk about himself, but Ryan has a great story to tell. He shares his humble upbringing and early life lessons before dishing the inside scoop on running one of the biggest homebuilders in the country.

The best ideas are the ones that seem obvious—“Why didn’t I think of that?” Sean Dobson saw the pile-up coming before the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) crashed the housing market. Sean and his company, Amherst, built a model to assess the true value of every home in America and bet right on what followed the GFC. Sean then had another great idea. Families who were foreclosed on were pushed out of t...

Most of us, even the CEO of a major homebuilder, don’t have a master plan for our lives. Sometimes, fate takes us to a place we never thought we would be. Sheryl Palmer’s journey started as a young advertising expert at McDonald’s, wound through homebuilder Del Webb, and eventually put her at Morrison Homes when it merged with Taylor Woodrow. Thirty days after that marriage in 2007, new builder Ta...

Zillow is the unquestioned king of the existing home space, but it is not just about matching buyers with a resale. Zillow is big in the new home world as well. The company is partnering with homebuilders to empower them to reach potential buyers better, joining the melee for a buyer segment that often doesn’t realize they have other options. Qadra Evans is the Director of Industry Relations and S...

In April, the New Home Insights podcast looked at how the spring selling season was shaping up with some of our resident market experts, and you loved it. It was one of our most listened-to episodes. So, in this episode, we are joined by the JBREC survey team—Jody Kahn, Cara Lavender, and Dillan Krieg—to review 2024 and look forward to how the housing market is shaping up. They dig into a wide ran...

With an election days away, politics is top of mind for almost everyone. So, now seemed like a good time for the podcast to delve into the politics and policies that impact housing. David Howard is the CEO of the National Rental Home Council (NRHC), which advocates mainly for the single-family rental (SFR) sector. David walks us through the ins and outs of national, state, and local housing polici...

To celebrate the 100th episode of the New Home Insights podcast, John Burns, founder and CEO of John Burns Research and Consulting, joins us. But it is not just John and me sipping a delicious IPA and commiserating. There is that, but this episode takes a 30,000-foot view of the long cycles of the housing market before delving into some current hot buttons—mortgage rates, affordability, public and...

Diverse, tech-savvy, innovative—all fair when describing Pretium, one of the biggest real estate investment firms you may have heard of. Pretium has helped change how we invest in real estate. Pretium is impacting single-family rental (SFR), build-to-rent (BTR), fix and flip, mortgage originations, and even homebuilding through a menu of investment choices. Pretium Founder and CEO Don Mullen has b...