As the old adage goes, you can’t make more land. For home builders, anything that helps facilitate land deals is huge. That’s where Steve Benson and his team come in—they provide land banking services for builders. Steve is the CEO of Essential Housing, and on this podcast he walks us through the nuances of land banking, a booming method to get deals done.

Episode 59: Steve Benson and (Land) Banking on the Future

Successful restaurants have great service, the right menu, and a long-term outlook. A good location also doesn’t hurt. Mark Wolf, CEO and founder of AHV Communities, has a similar mindset when executing successful build-to-rent (BTR) communities. Mark joins our podcast to discuss what it takes to execute a successful BTR community.

Episode 60: In It for the Long Run: Mark Wolf on Build-to-Rent Communities

Eric Finnigan of John Burns Real Estate Consulting is a thought leader in the remodeling space. Let Eric walk you through the basics, the nuances, the future, the economics, and even the demographics, of the remodeling world.

Episode 72: Is the Remodeling Boom about to Go Bust?

With those low mortgage rate golden handcuffs keeping a huge chunk of the existing home market in cryogenic stasis, the new home sector has thrived. There is even a case to be made for continued good times even if resale listings begin to rise and mortgage rates remain elevated.

There are certainly hurdles ahead, but our Director of Research and Managing Principal, Rick Palacios Jr., makes the case for continued new home resilience on the latest episode of the New Home Insights podcast.

Episode 82: How Long Will Home Builder Euphoria Last?

The pandemic taught many lessons. In housing, one was that disruptions in the things we build homes with can, unsurprisingly, bring the industry to its knees. As 2023 draws to a close, we ask: Are we finally past all of that—the rising prices, broken supply chains, and interminable waits for everything from a garage door to window latches that forced builders to wait weeks to sell a home that was otherwise ready to go? Can we finally stop using the phrase “post-pandemic” and just move on?

Matt Saunders, JBREC’s Senior Vice President of Building Products, lives, eats, and breathes this world. On the latest episode of the New Home Insights podcast, he joins me to walk us through the latest in building products and trends in remodeling and discuss the future of these spaces.

Episode 87: What's Next for Building Products and Home Remodeling?

“Lifestyle” is one of the hottest concepts in new home sales and marketing. At its core, it means designing homes that not only have a specific buyer in mind but a buyer who knows exactly what they want and where they want it. It relates to both community and home. Lifestyle is about offering the right rooms and features in a home and the right amenities—schools, retail, parks—in a community. It is your identity wrapped up in your home and your neighborhood.

Building on our sales and marketing focus from our previous episode of the New Home Insights podcast with Stephanie McCarty of Taylor Morrison Homes, we chat with Caroline Simmel, Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Empire Communities’ Georgia and Tennessee region. Caroline and her colleagues are all about lifestyle, but she also discusses trends and preferences, processes and methods with us.

Episode 90: Empire Communities' Marketing Insights: The Art of Selling Lifestyle

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.

Episode 92: Building Up: Walton Global's Strategic Land Insights

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.

Episode 93: Shifting Foundations: A Deep Dive into Demographics and Housing

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.

Episode 94: Hillwood Communities and the Art and Science of Placemaking

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.

Episode 95: Building Success: Doug Bauer and the Growth of Tri Pointe Homes

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.

Episode 96: Leading Through Innovation: How Fortune Brands is Shaping the Future of Home

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.

Episode 97: Market Trends in Kitchen and Bath: A Deep Dive with NKBA’s Bill Darcy

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.

Episode 98: Inside the Deal: M&A Insights with Rich Moriarty of Vestra Advisors

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.

Episode 99: Data-Driven Investment Strategies: Don Mullen on SFR, Tech, and Housing’s Future

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.

Housing at the Heart of Politics: A Deep Dive into Policies Shaping the Rental Market

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.

The 2024 Housing Market Unpacked: Challenges, Strategies, and Optimism for 2025

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.

Connecting Builders and Buyers: How Zillow is Redefining New Home Sales

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.

Building Trust: How Taylor Morrison Became America’s Most Trusted Homebuilder

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.

Sean Dobson on Rethinking Homeownership, SFR, and Housing Investment

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.

From Gas Stations to Gross Margins: Ryan Marshall Runs PulteGroup Like a Well-Oiled Team

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.


Why This Spring Selling Season Isn’t Feeling Quite Like Spring Yet

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.

Porches, Parks, and Placemaking: How DMB Turns Dirt Into Destinations

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.

From Wall Street to Main Street: How Avenue One Connects Local Pros with Institutional Capital

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.

Resiliency Under Pressure: Can Housing Weather Choppy Economic Seas?

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.

The Trader Joe's of Homebuilding

There is no housing market; there are housing markets. We all know that, but all too often forget. Now, as mortgage rates and increasing supply challenge the for-sale sector, rental supply has tapered from its peak, and that sector is firming. Moreover, dynamics vary, often markedly, depending on geography. The nation is dotted with dozens of rental markets that sum to a whole, but each has a different story.

On this podcast, Chris Nebenzahl and Zak Nyberg join Dean Wehrli to weave us through the rental market maze. Chris is JBREC’s Vice President of Rental Research, who keeps an eye on national trends. Zak is a Vice President of our consulting practice who has conducted rental feasibility work throughout the Sun Belt markets and up the Atlantic Seaboard. We cover supply and demand, rental trends, regional variations, amenities, the capital markets, and more in this episode. 

The Rental Rebound: Supply, Demand, and Demographic Shifts Driving Recovery

If there are two things that fuel real estate development, they are land and money. Oh, and design. Three things that—wait, the type of housing is huge, too, so product is another fundamental. So there are four—okay, there are a whole bunch of critical elements to the successful development of real estate, but let’s stick with land and money. Having those two things is indispensable, and they are also what Rodney Montag of Bedrock Land Finance is best at.

Rodney understands the American real estate land market as well as anyone, and, through Bedrock, can provide builders and developers with the capital to realize their dreams. So we sat down with Rodney on the latest episode of the New Home Insights podcast and talked about exactly those things.


The New Land Financing Playbook: Flexible Capital Meets Cautious Builders

In the new home world, we often divide builders into public and private. The idea is that the publics are the capital-rich, large-scale firms with a multi-regional presence that are gradually gobbling up market share from the smaller local private builders scattered throughout the country. But this ignores the “big privates”—homebuilders privately owned but with the size and resources to act like a “national.”


David Weekley Homes is definitely a big private. The builder has spread from its Texas roots throughout the swath of the smile states (minus California, which hurts my feelings) and into the upper Midwest. On this episode of New Home Insights, Jay Brown, CEO, and Chris Weekley, President and Vice Chairman, walk us through David Weekley’s philosophy and strategy, expand on their expansion plans, and provide insight into how they view the market now and in the future.

How David Weekley Homes Balances Private-Company Culture with Public-Company Scale

Back in the olden days (after those bikes with the one really big wheel and the one tiny wheel, but before TikTok), when we spoke about the rental market, we meant apartments. Sure, there were plenty of “mom and pop” rental homes, but no one thought about them, and no one was building new ones. 

But over the last decade-plus, build-to-rent (BTR) has emerged as an ever-growing part of our national housing solutions. As BTR has grown and evolved, NexMetro Communities has played a key role in these changes. On this episode of the New Home Insights podcast, CEO Josh Hartmann joins me to talk about NexMetro, its philosophy, what drives it, his view of the market, and his take on BTR and its competition.

The Avilla Advantage: NexMetro’s Josh Hartmann on Brand, Data, and BTR Strategy

It seems that affordability has suddenly become the word of the day in politics, but it has been at the top of the agenda in housing for a very long time. There will always be market space at the high end—but there will also always be a need to solve for new home prices that fit into the fat part of the bell curve. 

That is where Smith Douglas Homes lives. Smith Douglas CEO Greg Bennett recently joined us at the New Home Trends Summit for a live podcast. Greg offers his insights on building affordably by design, with an eye on the workforce families that form the backbone of American communities.


Smith Douglas Homes and Building Affordably by Design

Issues, interviews, and insights into the U.S. housing market. Monthly takes on what’s happening in the housing market today, and what might be happening tomorrow.  From the John Burns Research and Consulting (JBREC) team.

The podcast is hosted by Dean Wehrli, Principal at JBREC. Dean manages residential and commercial real estate consulting assignments across the country and has deep knowledge of California’s Bay Area, Sacramento, and Central Valley markets as well as Northern Nevada. 

John Burns Research and Consulting is an independent research provider and consulting firm focused on the housing industry. The company’s research subscribers receive the most accurate analysis possible to inform their macro investment decisions, and the company’s consulting clients receive specific property and portfolio investment advice designed to maximize profits. The team takes great pride in enabling the profitable development of the best places to live in the world.

New Home Insights Podcast

Popular tracks