The Iran conflict, elevated gas prices, and renewed inflation concerns are among the factors shaping buyer psyche and confidence in 2026. For builders, these factors have contributed to a more challenging market than many anticipated. Buyers continue to engage in the sales process, but converting interest into contracts is requiring more focused effort.
Buyers are increasingly payment-sensistive, taking longer to make decisions while placing a greater emphasis on affordability and value. Financing incentives remain part of the equation for builders, but they are not the whole story. Today’s buyers are well-researched, understanding communities, floor plans, and pricing from particular builders before they ever visit a model home.
Against this backdrop, builders are doubling down on the variables they can control. They cannot dictate mortgage rates, consumer confidence, or geopolitics. They can control how efficiently they build and sell and how strategically they manage their inventory and starts.
“Our focus has been on the areas we can control,” says Fischer Homes CEO Tim McMahon. “We have worked to improve conversion, sharpen the customer experience, and make sure our teams are highly effective with every lead and appointment.”
Char Kurihara, senior vice president of sales and marketing for DRB Group, says the company is focusing on its on-site sales efforts, offering monthly trainings, bootcamps, and individual training videos to sales team members. Part of the builder’s focus is supporting customers through the ‘worry and concern’ that buying a new home today may be a mistake.
Managing Cycle Times
For many builders, including Lennar, PulteGroup, and Stylecraft Builders, lowering cycle times is a manner of controlling costs and inventories in an uncertain market.
“[We are] staying disciplined in the sales process while tightening operational execution around job costs, starts, and build times,” Stylecraft Builders CEO Doug French says. “We have spent the past 18 months reinforcing those fundamentals, and the team has responded well. One result we are especially proud of is that we have reduced our average build time by 30 days this year.”
Lennar has lowered its cycle time to a record low of 121 days, directly helping the company improve inventory turn compared to the same time period in 2025. In some markets, PulteGroup has lowered its cycle time by 100 days or fewer, helping manage starts cadence and spec inventory as it shifts strategic goals.
CBH Homes is leaning into a focus on product and speed to help deliver an experience and product that solves affordability concerns for prospective buyers.
“We cannot control interest rates, but we control how efficiently we build, how clearly we communicate, and how much friction we place in front of a buyer,” says Ronda Conger, vice president of CBH Homes. “We have shortened the average build cycle to approximately 61 days and maintain more than 500 move-in-ready homes. Buyers increasingly want certainty and the ability to move within weeks, not nine months from now.”
Conger says transparency and efficiency are two ways builders can deliver certainty to buyers in today’s market.
“The clearest lesson is that speed matters at every level of the business. We are focused on faster build times, greater move-in-ready inventory, simpler processes, and quicker organizational decision-making,” she says. “Buyers are no longer comparing a home builder with another home builder. They compare every experience with the fastest, simplest, and most transparent companies they interact with.”
Managing Starts and Refining Strategy
Public builders are applying the same discipline to strategy that many brought to construction operations. Companies are refining starts cadence, balancing built-to-order and spec inventory, and managing inventory exposure based on factors they can control rather than attempting to predict the market.
Construction costs have become a variable moving in builders’ favor. Lennar, KB Home, and Century Communities all highlighted lower direct construction costs during recent earnings calls, providing an opportunity to protect margins while absorbing the impact of financing incentives that may be required to achieve sales.
“We’ve done a good job holding the line on direct cost of construction and, in a lot of cases, getting direct cost of construction down,” Century Communities chief financial officer Scott Dixon told investors during the builder’s earnings call.
For Lennar, the company’s focus has remained on maintaining affordability while preserving operational efficiency. CEO and president Stuart Miller said the company’s standardized “Everything’s Included” platform continues to create purchasing efficiencies that are offsetting cost pressures while simplifying the buyer experience.
“By standardizing features at scale and offering more for less, we capture purchasing efficiencies, offset cost pressures, protect margin, and deliver more meaningful value to buyers,” Miller said during the company’s earnings call.
Other builders are emphasizing different levers. For KB Home, the current market is reinforcing the value of its built-to-order strategy, which the company says provides greater visibility into costs, pricing, and margins before construction begins.
“Our built-to-order approach is a structural repositioning of our company that we believe will enable stronger, more sustainable performance over time and across market cycles,” president and CEO Rob McGibney said.
Since homes are sold before construction begins, KB Home enters the build process knowing the buyer, sales price, construction cost, and expected close date. This visibility helps reduce exposure to changing market conditions while supporting a consistent starts cadence with trade partners.
However, there is no single formula for today’s market. The approach of builders such as CBH Homes and Meritage Homes, favoring move-in-ready inventory to satisfy desires for faster move-in timelines, is also yielding positive results in the current environment.
M/I Homes has adjusted its strategy by selectively increasing its exposure to move-up communities where demand has remained resilient. CEO and president Robert Schottenstein said the company began shifting toward these opportunities after finding that higher-end land opportunities were underwriting more favorable in select markets.
For luxury builders like Toll Brothers, there remains a benefit to serving a more affluent customer base in a market defined by broader affordability concerns.
“We are quite simply a more efficient and less cyclical home builder,” executive chairman of the board Douglas Yearley said during the company’s most recent earnings call. “Overall, our buyers are less sensitive to affordability pressures.”
