Colin Lenton

While Emile Haddad appreciates your congratulations and well wishes, he wants you to know one thing: He’s not retiring.

Following the announcement that Haddad would be stepping down as CEO of FivePoint Holdings, the company he started in 2009, many people assumed he was leaving the business. That’s not the case.

“A lot of people are taking it as if I’m retiring,” says Haddad, the former chief investment officer at Miami-based Lennar Corp. and last year’s Legends Award winner, which honors someone whose career has been dedicated to the development of first-class master-planned communities. “I’m not really retiring. I’m just transitioning to a new phase of my life, which is very exciting.”

While Haddad will remain on the board, Stuart Miller will become executive chairman of FivePoint in addition to serving in that same role for Lennar—the No. 2 home building firm on the latest Builder 100 list—and Lynn Jochim will ascend to the role of president while also retaining her position as chief operating officer.

Haddad took some time to speak with BUILDER about this next phase in his career and where he thinks the industry is heading.

BUILDER: Why was now the time for you to make this decision?

Haddad: The top four people in the company— myself, Lynn, our chief financial officer [Erik Higgins], and our chief legal officer [Michael Alvarado]—have been at the office every day since March 2020. Everybody else is working remotely, but the four of us have been in the same room every day from morning to evening.

During that period, because we were all together, we were able to streamline the organization and remove a lot of the natural barriers between departments. As I was watching it, I started feeling like, operationally, the company was ready for the transition. And for all practical purposes, Lynn is the chief operating officer. She and the three other senior managers have been running the day-to-day operations.

The issue was going to be who’s going to be the face? And who’s going to be interacting with the public markets? I did not want to put that burden on Lynn because she has a lot on her plate operationally. And speaking to the public markets and dealing with the public markets can dilute your focus.

I have a very strong relationship with Stuart Miller and with the Lennar executives, and Lennar is 39% owner of the company. Stuart Miller is on the board. I talked to Stuart, and we agreed that he would step into the executive chair and be the person who interacts with the public market.

BUILDER: What will your focus be?

Haddad: I will be working closely with the team. But I’m going to start thinking about what’s next. What can we do within our communities besides what we’ve already done? We’ve been focusing a lot on health care and life science and in entertainment. We have a big partnership with the City of Hope [National Medical Center], the largest cancer center on the West Coast. They’re building a $1 billion cancer center. Through that, we’ve been thinking about having our communities become hubs for health care providers, as well as life sciences. Nurturing and advancing those initiatives and bringing them to reality takes a lot of time. There are only 24 hours a day, and you can’t be the CEO of a public company and do justice to opportunities that could really add a lot of shareholder value.

BUILDER: What are you most proud of in your time running FivePoint?

Haddad: We have a team and a culture that has enabled us to do a lot of things with a small group. I look at what we’re doing at Great Park—we have 72 languages now spoken in our public school. And we have a community that is multicultural and multigenerational, where grandparents are living next to their grandchildren. We have people living in affordable housing next to people who are buying $1.5 million homes. And we have built the largest sports complex in the country to provide youth an opportunity to display potential. All of that is what excites me. It’s not the project. It’s the social fabric that gets created inside the project.

BUILDER: Do you have disappointments over things you weren’t able to accomplish or things that didn’t go the way you thought they might?

Haddad: Of course, there are disappointments. But, disappointments mean that you have to keep on working on them to try to fix them. The biggest challenge that we have in our industry is that in order for us to do what we need to do, we have to be in sync with the public sector. I can’t just build a community without a city or county or the state being on board. And the private sector sometimes moves at a different pace.

We’ve been talking about the housing shortage in California since I came to the state 36 years ago. Now at least we’re starting to hear people recognizing that we have a housing crisis, and they’re starting to work on that.

BUILDER: Outside of your work with FivePoint, what will you be doing in the future to contribute to the built environment?

Haddad: I still have very strong relationships with people on the public [sector] side—the federal government, state, and local. I will continue advocating and giving my opinion about how we solve issues that are housing-related and community-related. The state is very much in need of a public-private partnership so we can work together with the public side in order for us to deal with housing, public education, and a lot of these issues.

The other thing that I am very much involved in is education. I sit on boards. That is an area that I still will be involved in because I believe if we’re going to truly bridge the gap, we need to focus on education. Health care will [also] be an area that we all need to be thinking about.

BUILDER: What are your plans going forward?

Haddad: We have 40,000 residential home opportunities that we’re going to be building. And we have relationships with builders, at the top is obviously Lennar, who are going to be part of our communities. So the residential component is on track, and we have relationships with public education where we build out the schools. So those are things that are established.

But we also have 23 million square feet that is entitled for nonresidential. That’s an area that can provide a lot of value for the company. Ten years ago, if you would’ve asked me, I would have said, “We’re going to be building office and retail.” And that was the thinking at that time.

Today, I don’t think I’ll be thinking about building retail. And I don’t think I’ll be building a traditional office. I think I need to start building relationships with [industries] like health care. We have a partnership with Live Nation, where we have an amphitheater. I’m having a lot of discussions with them about where the entertainment world is going to go. I believe that, once the pandemic is in the rearview mirror, we are going to see the roaring ’20s again.

BUILDER: What is the biggest challenge in the coming decade for the building industry?

Haddad: We need to start thinking about building a home differently. Every industry has innovated the way it builds its products. We are still building products with the same nail and hammer that we’ve been doing for decades, if not centuries. We need to start thinking about innovating how we build the products. A lot of time gets lost in building a home because of how we build it.

The other area that will be a challenge [is land]. In the days of suburban sprawl, you could find land by driving 3 miles out of town. That’s not going to be the case over the coming decade. I think the elasticity to keep pushing outward and outward is going to become less and less [possible]. Therefore, the availability of land for mass production is not going to be the same.