What 18 Housing CEOs Have to Say About the Current Market

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Economic uncertainty and consumer hesitancy translated to a more muted spring selling season for public home builders. In the recently concluded earnings period, public builders highlighted how consumer confidence and slower-than-typical traffic impacted results in the first several months of 2025.

D.R. Horton kicked off the earnings period with soft year-over-year performance in orders and closings, setting the stage for its other peers as the largest home builder in the U.S. While some builders still reported positive growth on a year-over-year basis, executives noted that 2025 would likely be a choppy and difficult year for volume growth.

While not having a tangible impact on costs or build times yet, executives noted that the stop-start nature of tariff announcements played a role in greater economic uncertainty. The more immediate impact of tariffs is likely weighing down consumer confidence. In the long run, though, public builders expressed confidence that costs would not increase significantly due to tariffs on foreign imports. Companies either pointed to the large percentage of goods sourced domestically or the scale of their operations as evidence that tariffs will not have a major impact on cost structures in 2025.

Beyond the reporting of financial results, the first quarter also demonstrated that wider trends of market consolidation could begin to impact the public home building landscape. Landsea Homes, the No. 33 company on the 2025 Builder 100, announced its sale to private equity-backed, privately-held New Home Co., less than five years after the launch of its IPO. A week later, United Homes Group announced a restructuring of its leadership group and the appointment of a special committee to review strategic alternatives, including a sale of the company among other options.

What They’re Saying: On Market Conditions, Tariffs, and Outlook
“Where necessary, we have increased sales incentives to drive traffic and incremental sales. Our cancellation rate remains at the low end of our historical range, indicating that buyers in today’s market are able to qualify financially and are committed to their home purchase despite the volatility and elevated uncertainty of the current economic environment. We expect our incentive levels to remain elevated and increase further, the extent to which will depend on market conditions and changes in mortgage interest rates.” — Paul Romanowski, president and CEO, D.R. Horton

“We are confident that our focus on volume and even flow will position us very well for resilience, durability, and growth in the future. The macro economy remains challenging as mortgage interest rates have remained higher for longer, which has left the overall housing market weaker for longer. Across the housing landscape, actionable demand has slowed materially. On a bad-news-is-good-news basis, all of this led to the long awaited environment where the costs of both homes, new and existing, and apartments have started to come down.” — Stuart Miller, executive chairman and co-CEO, Lennar

“I strongly believe people still aspire to homeownership, and if you can provide the right value equation, they are excited to get into a new home. We saw this as the first quarter progressed, and demonstrated a typical seasonal pattern with traffic, gross orders, and net new orders trending higher as we moved through the quarter… Consistent with the relative strength we’ve seen among move-up and active adult buyers over the past few quarters, we saw the average spend on options, and lot premiums per home climb to $110,000 in Q1. The financial strength of move-up and active adult buyers is why we have purposely aligned 60% of our portfolio to serve these key buyer groups.” — Ryan Marshall, CEO, PulteGroup

“There continues to be healthy traffic at our communities despite affordability being stretched and a deterioration of consumer confidence due to challenging macro conditions. This quarter, we successfully balanced both pace and price as we were focused on optimizing returns. Our business strategy was designed around a sales pace of four net sales per month. So, as needed, we utilized more incentives and/or increased external commissions to achieve that target. Given the current macro volatility, this daily discipline ensures that we are not overreacting to short-term market swings and that we preserve the long-term value of our land book.” — Phillippe Lord, CEO, Meritage Homes

“While longer-term housing market conditions remain favorable, driven by demographics and an undersupply of homes, demand at the start of the spring selling season has been more muted than we have seen over the past few years… We took action in mid-February, evaluating our base pricing in every community relative to local market conditions, then repositioning our communities with a focus on offering the most compelling value. We were encouraged by buyers’ responses to these actions and saw a meaningful improvement in our net orders in the last two weeks of the quarter, which has continued into the first three weeks of our second quarter.” — Jeffrey Mezger, president and CEO, KB Home

“Even in the face of rising incentives across our industry, our diversified portfolio is relatively insulated from broader net pricing pressure due to the strength of our buyer and appeal of our quality locations in desirable communities and product offerings… As we look ahead, there are more macro-related uncertainties facing the business that I can recall at almost any point in my career outside of the early days of the COVID pandemic. Consumer confidence is the most critical factor in the long-term, as it will be key in determining if our sales and pricing holds up for the remainder of the spring selling season.” — Sheryl Palmer, chairman and CEO, Taylor Morrison

“Given our lot pipeline in community count, we have the ability to grow our deliveries by approximately 10% annually over the next several years. That said, we are not focused on growth for the sake of growth alone and will look to balance pace and price at the community level to optimize our returns. We continue to target our sales efforts and incentives on monetizing and completing homes, while matching our start pace with our current and anticipated sales pace to maintain an appropriate level of spec inventory within our communities.” — Dale Francescon, executive chairman, Century Communities

“While the near-term outlook for the housing market remains cloudy due to the well-known affordability pressures and the volatile macro environment, we continue to believe the long-term outlook for the new home market remains positive, particularly for our luxury niche… The financial strength of our customer base is highlighted by our industry low cancellation rate, high percentage of all cash buyers, and low loan-to-value ratios for those who take a mortgage.” — Douglas Yearley, chairman and CEO, Toll Brothers

“As we began 2025, it was clear to us that rate buydowns remain necessary for us to drive traffic and promote sales and that such rate buydowns would continue throughout the spring selling season unless and until it became clear that consistent and solid demand had returned. Clearly, that has not happened. Instead, what we have seen is the continuation of choppy and challenging conditions. While there has been some uptick in demand during the first quarter, the spring selling season has been just okay.” — Robert Schottenstein, president and CEO, M/I Homes

“Adding to the productive quarter, we closed the Liberty Communities and Cherry Creek Mortgage acquisitions during the quarter, and Alliant National Title and Green River Builders subsequent to quarter end, for a total of ten acquisitions in six years. We decided more is better when it comes to the Atlanta market and we announced the closing of Green River Builders. This strategic acquisition will help bolster and accelerate our growth in the Atlanta market. We are confident all of these transactions will provide significant growth opportunities in our home building and financial services segments.” — Patrick Zalupski, president and CEO, Dream Finders Homes

“While the longer-term outlook for housing remains favorable, with a continuing shortage of homes and strong demographics, it’s clear that elevated uncertainty about the economy is weighing on consumer sentiment. International trade tensions and the new tariffs have emerged as unpredictable variables in the current environment. The headline news of tariffs and their potential inflationary effects has dampened buyer confidence. However, we do not believe tariffs will have a material impact on our cost structure in Q2 2025.” — Doug Bauer, CEO, Tri Pointe Homes

“Even though the spring selling season has not played out the way everyone had hoped, our focus on pace over price resulted in an above-average number of contracts per community compared to our peers… Given the persistently high mortgage rate environment, we assume buydowns will remain at similar levels going forward. In order to meet home buyers’ decisions to use cost-effective mortgage rate buydowns, we’re intentionally operating at an elevated level of quick move-in homes (QMIs) so that we can offer affordable mortgage rate buydowns in the near term to give more certainty in an uncertain market.” — Ara Hovnanian, chairman of the board, president, and CEO, Hovnanian Enterprises

“Despite recent headwinds, we’re confident in the long-term outlook for the housing market. The persistent shortage of entry-level homes across the country represents a societal challenge and underscores the importance of affordable, new residential construction. Underlying demographic fundamentals will only increase this need, setting the stage for a long runway of sustained demand for homeownership. These structural dynamics provide us with clarity and conviction as we continue to invest in our future growth.” — Eric Lipar, CEO, LGI Homes

“We’re shifting the target date to exceed 200 communities to the end of fiscal 2027. This will allow us to temper the rate of land spending to accommodate meaningful share repurchases without sacrificing our pro growth posture. Based on investments we’ve already made, we’re positioned to have meaningful growth in community count next year and into 2027.” — Allan Merrill, president and CEO, Beazer Homes

“While the shifting macroeconomic landscape presents headwinds for the entire industry, we believe the core strengths that have driven Green Brick’s success over the past decade will enable us to navigate any challenges with greater confidence and flexibility. The essence of our business has been and always will be land, which is a starting point of every builder’s profitability. We understand that land has risks, and we mitigate those risks by having decades of experience in our markets, using conservative underwriting, having an investment-grade low leverage balance sheet.” — Jim Brickman, CEO and co-founder, Green Brick Partners

“Sales conversions were negatively impacted by affordability concerns and macro uncertainty. Similar to past quarters, we used financing incentives to overcome these obstacles and solve for monthly payments that would fit our buyers’ needs. While there are many factors that affect our business that are out of our control, there are many things we can do to optimize our performance in any demand environment. The first is controlling land through option agreements rather than owning it outright. This land light strategy gives us some degree of flexibility with respect to our lot takedown timing, if needed, and limits our downside risk should market conditions soften.” — Greg Bennett, president and CEO, Smith Douglas Homes

“We are encouraged by the demand elasticity we saw during the quarter as buyers responded to declines in mortgage rates and high incentives. Order activity started off slowly to begin the year, then picked up as the quarter progressed. Affordability remains an important issue for most buyers, so financing incentives were a key driver of sales during the quarter. We continue to balance pace versus price at each of our communities with a slight lean toward pace, all things being equal. We also made the strategic decision to sell through some of our spec inventory in an effort to return to a more balanced approach between spec sales and build-to-order homes with 67% of our first quarter deliveries also sold in the same quarter.” — John Ho, CEO, Landsea Homes

“The first quarter of 2025 was a tale of two halves for our company, the second being materially better than the first. January started slowly due to normal seasonality and some abnormal snowfall, which impacted our sales efforts. We saw a bounce back in February and that momentum carried into March. Our profitability also followed a similar trajectory with gross margins improving 400 basis points from the beginning of the quarter through the end. Affordability continues to be an issue for buyers, which has necessitated the use of financing incentives to get people to their desired monthly payment.” — Jack Micenko, CEO, United Homes Group