The obvious is always there, although lots of us might ignore it. Case in point, it shouldn't take a Harvard Business Review article to bring home the idea that knowing something and doing it are two different things.

But there you go. In an HBR observation, leadership consultant Peter Bregman writes here:

While strategy development and communication are about knowing something, strategy execution is about doing something. And the gap between what you know and what you do is often huge. Add in the necessity of having everyone acting in alignment with each other, and it gets even huger.

The reason strategy execution is often glossed over by even the most astute strategy consultants is because primarily it’s not a strategy challenge. It’s a human behavior one.

This is why we hear, over and over among the smart ones in the business community of home building and development, home building is a people business.

Bregman boils down his whole point into your company's answer to a single burning question:

"How can we align everyone’s efforts and help them accomplish the organization’s most important work?"

With all the upfront investment of capital, time, political fortitude, community relations, trade partnering, etc., a new year in a home building company's cycle is a time for execution like there's no tomorrow.

Still, even as a unified focus and effort is essential for what's going on on the ground, strategists also need to keep an eye on what's next, anticipating how to be agile and get ready for how execution may need to course correct just beyond the near horizon.

So, in thinking about the 12, 18, 24, and 36 months-ahead time frames consider these four facts, forces, and drivers that individually and collectively add up to fundamentals you'd have to say support a constructive view for home building and development over the next two to five years.

Housing stock is old, and it's never been older. Average households in 2015 were living in homes with a median age of 39 years old. In the 40 years since 1975, the median age of homes more than doubled from 18 years to the current level, according to data from the U.S. Census' American Housing Survey. This has implications favorable to home builders on two levels. One, is simply that old houses need to be replaced. The other is that people who live in older houses may tend to be motivated by the thought of living in a new home, taking advantage of new building technologies that are going into your new homes. The Northeast U.S. has the oldest housing stock (56 years), while the South has the most recent vintage of home structures (31 years median).

Millennial motherhood is on the up and up. Pew Research tells us that in 2015, about 1.3 million Millennial-age women gave birth, accounting for 82% of all U.S. births in that year. Now, of particular interest among home builders and developers, it's important to note that Millennial women, ahem, lag other generations in their birth rates. Pew says that almost half of Generation X women were already mom's when they were in the 18-to-33 age-range that Millennials are in now. Among Millennial women, in that age rage (in 2015), just 42% of them have given birth. What that can mean of course is that the birthrates among Millennials whose ages are beyond 33, in the 34, 35, 36, etc-year-old range are going up! Here's the Pew commentary on that:

Among Millennials, six-in-ten (60%) said that being a parent is extremely important to their overall identity, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey. A similar share of Gen X parents said as much (58%), as did a slightly smaller share (51%) of Baby Boomers with children younger than 18.

Pew tells us that Millennials now make up 34% of the U.S. workforce, and, while expectations for more of them to become moms are on the rise, so too are motivations for them to go mobile, to move to where the jobs are growing more plentiful. Interestingly, the Bureau of Labor statistics suggests that the occupation expected to growth the fastest between now and 2024 is wind turbine technician, a projection that may or may not be subject to change depending on which direction policy winds blow during the next administration or two.

Still, the other interesting thing about occupational opportunity is that many of the faster-growing job types are ones traditionally done by women, not men. Here, New York Times columnist Clair Cain Miller explores why men don't gravitate to jobs they associate with as women's occupations, even as technology, automation, robotics, etc. are eliminating more traditionally male occupations.

Still, in 2017, what may matter most to home builders and developers is more an issue of where the jobs are growing more abundant on a near-term basis, because that's what will draw young, flexible households, especially ones currently paying high rents where they currently live, to move. WalletHub analyst Richie Bernardo looked at places and job prospects through three different filters--employment growth, "job opportunities," and median annual income growth--and came up, here, with predictions on where the best and worst markets in the U.S. will be for job seekers in 2017.

Not surprisingly, cities with the more robust job trajectories bear a strong correlation to domestic migration patterns. Brookings Institution fellow and University of Michigan professor/demographer William Frey is the master at understanding the whys and wherefores of domestic migration, and you'll see his analysis of the latest annual tallies from the Census Bureau on population growth and where in the United States that growth is happening. Frey observes that Sun Belt metros have emerged with renewed post-Recession vigor as growth magnets, at the expense of old-line, Rust Belt and Snow Belt towns that are experiencing "out-migration." Professor Frey writes:

Seven of the eight fastest growing states are located in the West: Utah, Nevada, Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Arizona. Each of these registered growth rates exceeding 1.6 percent in 2015- 2016, and Montana, which ranked 14th, grew by 1 percent. All of these western states (Colorado excepted) grew more rapidly in 2015-16 than in 2014-15.

Accounting for at least some of that migratory wave is the fact that massive numbers of Baby Boom generation households have reached a life-stage that beckons for a change--often to warmer, more hospitable climes, where lifestyle activities, opportunities for fun, further education, and new adventures are more abundant. Builders intent on specifically designing, developing, building, and marketing product types and communities that aim for the pre- and new retirement tsunami should be well familiar with the patterns, the preferences, the motivations, and the motivators of people on track to their "next adventure" in living, in 55+ communities.

From personal finance site, MoneySavingPro, here's a "10 Best States to Retire" line-up that filters for life expectancy, tax friendliness, (low) violent crime rates, (low) healthcare costs, and (low) cost of living index.

So, aging housing stock, more Millennial moms, concentrated job growth geographies, and a heat-map of retirement magnets are all "good news" on the what-you-know front. Now, it's a question of what you do, and how you execute. As HBR contributor Bregman notes:

The conundrum is how to get from the first graphic to the second one. Most organizations rely on communication plans to make that shift. Unfortunately, strategy communication, even if you do it daily, is not the same as — and is not enough to drive — strategy execution.