New Home Insights Podcast

If you’re going to be the “Something of Something,” it is not bad to be the Trader Joe’s of homebuilding. You are big but not too big. You’re known for high quality and attentive service, but instead of ringing a bell for someone who just bought a bottle of that delicious almond sparkling wine, you have a key ceremony for someone who just bought a brand-new house. Beazer Homes CEO Allan Merrill joins us on the latest New Home Insights podcast to take a deep dive into Beazer’s strategy in our ever-changing and always-challenging housing market.

Tariffs, inflation, interest rates, jobs. All are factors that massively impact the housing market. As head of economic research and forecasting at Renaissance Macro Research, Neil Dutta tracks currents and trends across the globe. On Bloomberg TV or in Business Insider, Neil always tells it like it is. He recently joined the New Home Insights podcast to do the same. In this episode, Neil Dutta touches on not just economic trends but also lays out how he sees the US economy playing out—and how that will impact the housing market. Note: This episode was recorded on June 12, 2025.

Every great story has an “inciting incident,” something that propels the protagonist into action. For Ryan Stroker, Founder and CEO of Avenue One, that moment came when he realized there was a gaping disconnect between institutional capital and a vast array of comparatively smaller homebuilders that could thrive with better access to big money. But Ryan had also cut his teeth in the single-family rental world. Ryan’s background in the capital markets and his attention to detail and data made him and Avenue One a natural fit to connect capital to local builders and single-family operators.

Placemaking is the art hiding within the banalities of residential development. It is the color on canvas that transforms square footage and dwelling units per acre into homes, and homes into communities. DMB Development has been making great places since 1984, and the company’s President and CEO, Brent Herrington, has been helping them do that for almost 40 years. Brent provides his take on the key ingredients in the best recipes for great placemaking, highlights some of the best of those places, and, as a bonus, chats about DMB’s partnership with Disney and the new Storyliving communities that are beginning to take shape.

Spring is a critical time of year for the housing market. The weather warms, foot traffic surges, and builders can bank sales. It is historically the height of the market, particularly in cooler climes. At JBREC, we constantly interact with new homebuilders, resale brokers, land brokers, building products folks, and other actors in the housing space to keep thumb and forefinger on the carotid artery of the housing market. Survey leaders Dillan Krieg, Cara Lavender, and Jody Kahn walk us through sales, incentives, buyers, strategies and tactics, what’s working and what’s not, and what headwinds have been heaviest in these unsettled times. And, as a special treat, we spend a little time with the legendary Jody Kahn, who shares some lessons learned from a storied career spanning almost forty years and still counting.

PulteGroup CEO Ryan Marshall brings clarity, candor, and—since it is in the name of the show—insight into the latest episode of the New Home Insights podcast. You can tell he is not eager to talk about himself, but Ryan has a great story to tell. He shares his humble upbringing and early life lessons before dishing the inside scoop on running one of the biggest homebuilders in the country.

The best ideas are the ones that seem obvious—“Why didn’t I think of that?” Sean Dobson saw the pile-up coming before the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) crashed the housing market. Sean and his company, Amherst, built a model to assess the true value of every home in America and bet right on what followed the GFC. Sean then had another great idea. Families who were foreclosed on were pushed out of the for-sale market but still needed a suitable place to live. So Sean pivoted to single-family rental (SFR) in the early days when there was still plenty of doubt from investors and market watchers. Today, Amherst is a diverse financial services company for some of the largest investor entities in the world; think pension funds, major endowments, foundations, and sovereign wealth funds. SFR remains a key focus. Sean shares his insights on the SFR market, housing supply and NIMBYism, housing affordability, off-site construction, and more. Here are some highlights from the latest New Home Insights podcast episode.

Most of us, even the CEO of a major homebuilder, don’t have a master plan for our lives. Sometimes, fate takes us to a place we never thought we would be. Sheryl Palmer’s journey started as a young advertising expert at McDonald’s, wound through homebuilder Del Webb, and eventually put her at Morrison Homes when it merged with Taylor Woodrow. Thirty days after that marriage in 2007, new builder Taylor Morrison asked her to take the reins. She hasn’t checked her rearview mirror since. Sheryl Palmer, Chairman and CEO of the sixth-largest homebuilder in the country by volume, joins us for this episode of New Home Insights.

Zillow is the unquestioned king of the existing home space, but it is not just about matching buyers with a resale. Zillow is big in the new home world as well. The company is partnering with homebuilders to empower them to reach potential buyers better, joining the melee for a buyer segment that often doesn’t realize they have other options. Qadra Evans is the Director of Industry Relations and Sales for New Construction at Zillow. Qadra helms Zillow’s efforts to help homebuilders use Zillow to expand their reach and put them on the radar of homebuyers who are not always reachable. Plus, we have some bold predictions for the 2025 housing market! Let’s review some highlights from my chat with Qadra on the latest episode of the New Home Insights podcast.

In April, the New Home Insights podcast looked at how the spring selling season was shaping up with some of our resident market experts, and you loved it. It was one of our most listened-to episodes. So, in this episode, we are joined by the JBREC survey team—Jody Kahn, Cara Lavender, and Dillan Krieg—to review 2024 and look forward to how the housing market is shaping up. They dig into a wide range of results from our monthly surveys of new homebuilders nationwide and distill that into an array of trends and insights.

With an election days away, politics is top of mind for almost everyone. So, now seemed like a good time for the podcast to delve into the politics and policies that impact housing. David Howard is the CEO of the National Rental Home Council (NRHC), which advocates mainly for the single-family rental (SFR) sector. David walks us through the ins and outs of national, state, and local housing policies. We had a wide-ranging conversation primarily focused on the rental market, but we also touched on the for-sale world.

To celebrate the 100th episode of the New Home Insights podcast, John Burns, founder and CEO of John Burns Research and Consulting, joins us. But it is not just John and me sipping a delicious IPA and commiserating. There is that, but this episode takes a 30,000-foot view of the long cycles of the housing market before delving into some current hot buttons—mortgage rates, affordability, public and private builders, and more.

Diverse, tech-savvy, innovative—all fair when describing Pretium, one of the biggest real estate investment firms you may have heard of. Pretium has helped change how we invest in real estate. Pretium is impacting single-family rental (SFR), build-to-rent (BTR), fix and flip, mortgage originations, and even homebuilding through a menu of investment choices. Pretium Founder and CEO Don Mullen has been the primary driver behind Pretium’s rapid growth. Don recently joined our CEO, John Burns, at our Rental Communities Summit, and our latest New Home Insights Podcast episode is the result.

Big builders seem to be getting bigger every year. Growth might have some drawbacks, but for the most part, it makes a builder strong. Think operational efficiency, expanding your pipeline, access to capital, depth of skills, and expertise. You can grow organically, but you can grow faster through a smart merger or acquisition. That’s where Rich Moriarty comes in. Rich has been in investment banking for 35 years, much of that at financial behemoth Citibank. He co-founded Vestra Advisors last year and hasn’t skipped a beat, quickly becoming a key player in the homebuilder public finance and mergers-and-acquisitions (M&A) space. Join us for the latest episode of the New Home Insights podcast, where Rich walks us through the nuts and bolts of M&A, the strategy, the market conditions, the outlook, and more.

What will your kitchen and bathroom look like a year from now, two years from now, five years from now? That’s what Bill Darcy, Global President and CEO of the National Kitchen and Bath Association (NKBA), thinks about every day. This perspective provides Bill with a look under the hood of this sector, and he shares what he sees on this episode of The New Home Insights podcast. Please note that we recorded this podcast prior to the recently released 2Q24 KBMI report, in which K&B industry pros were slightly less bullish on 2024 growth. In the second quarter, the KBMI Index shifted down to 54 as firms lowered their expectations for near-term revenue growth.

One of the hardest things for a successful company is to stop doing what made it successful and start doing something that will stretch its success into the future. It is a risk and a cost, but it can be an investment if done right. So when Fortune Brands Innovations shed an iconic cabinetry brand, CEO Nick Fink had some anxious moments. But that decision and the ensuing journey have allowed Fortune Brands to expand their product offerings, providing a more diversified imprint on our homes. They made a strategic decision to focus on what they did best and play in the parts of the home market that they believed had the best prospects. In this episode of The New Home Insights podcast, Nick joined me to talk about that evolution and his journey and share insights about Fortune Brands’ strategies, goals, values, and core commitment to technology and data.

To grow or not to grow is often the question for a homebuilder. For Doug Bauer, CEO and co-founder of Tri Pointe Homes, the answer has always been “grow.” In 2009, when Doug Bauer and his partners started Tri Pointe, growth was a huge risk. But they pulled it off, and now Tri Pointe Homes is one of the top public homebuilders in the nation with a footprint across the country. On this episode of the New Home Insights podcast, Doug Bauer shares some highlights of Tri Pointe’s growth over the years.

If you have anything to do with the housing market in Texas, you have heard of Hillwood Communities. If you are from elsewhere in the country and have not heard of Hillwood, here’s your chance. All across the great state of Texas, Hillwood is building some of the best-designed and most successful master-planned communities in the US. They have achieved this with expert placemaking, which Hillwood defines this way: "We create places where relationships with neighbors evolve into friendships and those friendships begin to feel like family."   On this episode of the New Home Insights podcast, our guest is Fred Balda, the president of Hillwood Communities. Fred has guided Hillwood Communities for over three decades and he shares his approach, outlook, and take on all things master plan. He and Hillwood have a track record that says you should listen.

Demographics impact housing in a few massive foundational ways and a thousand small ways. Price, product, place—demographics help define them. On this episode of the New Home Insights Podcast, our guests are Chris Porter and Eric Finnigan, two leaders at John Burns Research and Consulting who live and breathe demographics and what they mean for housing.

This episode of the New Home Insights Podcast delves into the intricacies of land banking, a crucial component of the real estate industry, with insights from Kate Kaminski, the COO of Walton Global. Kate shares her journey from the home building industry to her pivotal role at Walton, a company that has significantly influenced land banking in North America since its shift from Canada to the US in 2006. Walton Global, a family-owned enterprise for over 45 years, specializes in land asset and investment management, focusing on raising capital globally to invest in various land assets, primarily in the southern United States.