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 diversified 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.