Assuming it does and will matter, what sets one home building firm apart from peers in the hearts and minds of consumers?

As unknowns--health, economic, and societal--ebb and flow with ever-intensifying, ever more potentially menacing force in those hearts and minds, points of difference and distinction may actually be existentially important.

This question, along with an equally-intense query, as to whether a new-home builder--merely by virtue of offering a new versus used home--is difference enough.

These two questions beg an overarching challenge for home building enterprises of all sizes as people, society, the economy, and our nation face transformative times, now and ahead.

Is home building--as a secular business class--fit to meet the "unmet need" universe of working people in the US, or just a fraction of that universe of people who qualify financially as "new-construction" capable?

Questions like these--and smart, innovative, and energizing answers to them--will be at the core of our re-scheduled Builder 100 event. Register, risk-free here, for Builder 100, Nov. 2-4, at the Ritz Carlton Laguna Niguel, Dana Point, Calif.

Like as not--given the structural challenges to the demand side of the economy in the months and years ahead--the consumer universe of demand for homes is headed for a big disruption.

It's not happening yet. "Pull-forward" forces may have merged with some pause-related pent-up demand and, together, gotten supercharged with the fuel of irresistibly low mortgage rates. Voila, a few banner months that make up for dislocation in Spring Selling, and set comparable records versus shaky year-earlier benchmarks.

Anyone seriously "in market" for a new home without serious anxieties about near- or longer-term wherewithal would have to believe now is the moment to act. The answer to this bigger, macro challenge to new home building players may never before have been so important as it is now.

For builders--who normally believe the biggest threat to their business models is the potential of deflation in land values that could turn their capital lending agreements upside down and inside out--assessing risk at a moment where demand momentum is surprisingly strong may be especially challenging.

So, this question of "how different do I need to be in the hearts and minds of consumers?' is important. Critically so. Seeding your business with a clear answer to this question, by design, is what our Builder 100 event this year will focus on.

Some part of the answer may lie in peeling back the layers of our Builder 100 data. In 2019--before the pandemic and its array of accompanying mind-boggling shocks--things were already getting tougher on home builders.

What with growing risks around confident access to skilled construction crews, land entitlement risk, local fees and permitting risks, materials risks--not to mention the uneasy sense that asset bubbles had begun to crop up in the space--challenges aplenty plagued builders and their partners.

Every home builder, big, medium, and little, needs now--if they haven't done it 10-times over in the past 90 days--to gut check not just "who they are" but "what they do," that's supposed to stand out to a consumer who's going to be harder and harder to find out there as America wrestles with getting back on its feet.

Take a page, for instance, from the leadership team at Webb City, Mo.-based Schuber Mitchell, a $63 million a year firm whose place, time, mission, and purpose have aligned like rocket-fuel for sustainable growth, even amid today's challenges.

"It was hard to know at the onset of Covid-19 how we'd proceed," says Schuber Mitchell ceo Joe Harris. "We've had to modify everything about the way we sell, and a good deal of practice around worker safety on our sites, but we haven't experienced serious negative impact to our business, and this past month, we've had lots of demand."

That sentiment echoes what we've heard from home builder executives in many markets. However, for Harris and the Schuber Mitchell team, it's what underlies the message that matters. You see, the company, whose unit-volume in 2017 and 2018 would not have even qualified it to rank among Builder's top 200 volume builders, shot into the 123rd position last year for several strategic reasons.

  • Geography
  • Mission and culture
  • Product positioning

Of course, Harris and the Schuber Mitchell founding principals would put "mission and culture" at the top of pyramid of reasons for success.

"Having clarity about our vision and mission grounds everybody on the team around what we're trying to accomplish," says Harris. "First and foremost, the vision driving our organization is to honor God-given resources in service of enriching the lives of others," he says, citing a faith-based strategic impetus that over-arches the organization's business model.

Second in the pecking order of what Schuber Mitchell prioritizes as a core characteristic, not just of "who it is" but "what it does" applies to positioning.

"A big hairy goal that we consider essential to what we do is to make homeownership attainable to everybody," says Harris. "We've focused on what we call the 'affordable luxury' market. This, after all, is the biggest underserved part of the buyer market, and it has the highest barriers to entry, because it's difficult to serve the affordable market successfully, so we can stand apart from others there."

Harris notes that, by design and execution, Schuber Mitchell can exert powerful appeal, not just to buyers explicitly in the hunt for new homes, but two other parts of the housing pipeline, current renters, and shoppers for existing homes.

"We've got a 'monthly payment' value proposition that many people find to be competitive with their monthly rental payments," says Harris. "We've also gotten a lot of traction among buyers who may have considered themselves in the market for 'used' homes. Once you get somebody in the door to give us a fair shake, it becomes easier to sell them a new home at the same price point they'd be paying for an existing home."

A fourth factor Harris and the Schuber Mitchell team regard as essential to their sales, product offerings, and cultural DNA is community. "We don't just build houses, we build neighborhoods," says Harris. "It's so important to us that we create communities that people love to come home to."

While many of these hallmarks of success--culture, product, positioning, pricing, etc.--show up among Schuber Mitchell peers up and down the Builder 100 rankings, a fifth really drives a wedge of difference between this Southwest Missouri/Northwest Arkansas builder and most of the builders thriving in the top-most and second-tier home building markets throughout the US.

"We're the only top 200 builder--or one of the only ones--who can go into markets that support only a hundred or so new homes a year, like Joplin, Webb City, Carl Junction, Carthage, Neosho, Oronogo, in Missouri, and Bentonville, Centerdon, Gentry, and Gravette, in Arksansas, and, by doing, say, another 50 homes or so, we're able to keep growing and stay clear of the competitive fray," says Harris. "Most home builders won't find this sized market attractive to them, but for us, this is where we live, and where we thrive."

That's a difference that impacts operations, land strategy, scale, land-related regulatory fees, and other areas of the balance sheet to the positive for a builder like Schuber Mitchell.

The difference--you'll note--is not just in who and what Schuber Mitchell is. It's in what it does, essentially outside the bubbles of lot, labor, and lending factors that plague builders who cluster competively in more active, higher profile, higher volume new home markets.

A strategy that could make a builder like Schuber Mitchell fit for a tough future.