Dale and Rob Francescon made a big promise.

Each brother clutched the corner of a gleaming crystal award, standing together in the spotlight, in a moment to shine. That was last May, in Southern California, at our Builder 100 event, honoring the Francescons and their Century Communities team members for a second consecutive year as fastest-growing public home builder in our annual Builder 100 analysis.

"We'll be right back here with you again next year, we promise!" the co-CEOs of Century Communities vowed from the podium.

The Francescons and the 1,400 associates who make up the Century Communities team lived true to that promise. They built, marketed, sold, cared for customers, and executed their way to a three-peat in our fastest-growing public builder category. We'll salute the Century Communities team once again at our rescheduled Builder 100 event, Nov. 2-4, and you can register here now.

The three-peat achievement, an accomplishment in itself, doesn't express the half of it when you look at the fact that the prior two cycles, Century's multi-year acquisition binge--eight strategic buys between 2013 and 2018--fueled the rocket of growth for the most part.

2019's trajectory came all on organic growth, particularly owing to a masterful strategic adrenaline blast the firm got as it transformed its entry-level juggernaut, Wade Jurney Homes, into a fully-integrated multi-regional operating brand unit, Century Complete.

The brothers Francescon founded their Denver-based operation in 2002 around stalwart, time-tested, principles and values--the right time, the right place, the right product, and the right talent, matched up with superior customer focus. Those strategic pillars could not have played better than they have over the past 10 years, especially enabled by a galvanizing capital infusion from going public in 2014.

A canny knack for spotting imminent vibrant economic activity's force of nature on local market demand, and an uncanny ability to both time the placement of capital into work, and to attract an overachiever team of operators lit the way forward for Century's current 17-state, 28-market footprint, with annualized revenues of $2.6 billion, on 8,201 deliveries in 2019.

So, in five years, from 2015 to the present, the Century Communities team has almost quadrupled in volume and revenue, nearly tripled its owned and controlled lot pipeline, and more-than doubled shareholder equity, from $409 million in 2015 to 1.085 billion last year. A classic case study in pairing up shrewd strategic vision with a nose-to-the-grindstone ethic around operational excellence.

You could say that explosive growth has been part of the program. Despite Covid-19 and its accompanying super-shocks to the economy.

"Our entire team has never been more cohesive," says Dale Francescon. "Culminating with the work put in place in 2019, we leveraged a fully-realized integration and positioning that allowed our teams to work in the same direction on both the Century Communities platform and the entry-level Century Complete product line, which is 100% FHA eligible pricing in all its markets. About 80% of our business is balanced toward the FHA buyer, and we like that position."

As it happens, much of the Wade Jurney Homes-operational template--an online technology- and retail-centric selling and go-to-contract model (i.e. no model homes), a finite floor-plan library that could confirm to most local guidelines and climate conditions, and a simple start-to-completion workflow--leant itself ideally to a Covid-19-challenged market.

"As we looked at 2020, and felt the momentum lift as it started, we felt so excited about this year, because it was all coming together," Rob Francescon notes. "We're hopeful now, and excited that the worst of the disruption may be behind us, so that we can get back to the stability and growth that we've been all about. We couldn't be happier than we are with how the team has performed and perservered, and we promise another strong year."

When the Francescons make a promise, their track record makes it a pretty darned good bet they'll live up to it.