How Resilient Are We?

Resilience is a hot topic these days, with a focus on building homes that are better prepared to withstand the elements, keep occupants safe in a storm, and reduce repair and replacement costs. But resilience can be an operational strategy for your business as well. That is, fortifying your entire operation to ride out market-driven risk factors that can flatten or flood a home building company.  

To be sure, those risks (like their natural counterparts) are becoming more severe, frequent, and costly, affecting everything you do, which begs the question: “How resilient is the housing industry?” 

If my experience reporting on the multiple (and historically predicable) boom-and-bust cycles of the residential construction industry since 1987 is any indication, most home builders appear to be quite resilient—or perhaps simply stubbornly resistant—to the ebbs and uncertainty of market conditions.  

But that’s just an observation, so I asked a few industry friends to weigh in: 

“While the home building industry is facing near-term policy uncertainty, the economic fundamentals favor growth for the residential construction sector over the coming years,” says Jim Tobin, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders. 

“Housing remains a cyclical industry, but the peaks and valleys have been flattened, with many years of undersupply contributing to consistent industry demand for the foreseeable future,” offers Margaret Whelan, founder and CEO of Whelan Advisory Capital Markets, a firm focused on studying and analyzing builder operations. 

Adds industry purchasing and leadership guru (and Pro Builder contributing editor) Tony Callahan, “We have been through banking crashes, real estate bubbles, recessions, natural disasters, wars, and a whole host of other geopolitical events that have shaped us and our industry. We have learned from our mistakes and improved our operations, and we will adapt and overcome current challenges as we have other challenges in the past.” 

“How people’s lives change over time provides us with endless opportunities to meet their needs as homebuyers,” says Alaina Money-Garman, founder of Garman Homes and our 2024 Woman of the Year. “That’s not to say we’re immune to the whims and whimpers of our economy, but the degree to which we stay rooted to those moments in life when buyers need us most will determine our resilience.” 

Dennis Steigerwalt, president of the Housing Innovation Alliance, offers, "The industry's resilience is evident in its ability to adapt and innovate. Forward-thinking builders are leveraging strategic capital partnerships, alternative materials and methods, and integrated business models, creating paths for differentiation and stability. These investments are not just survival tactics; they'll reshape the competitive landscape. The question is not if the housing sector will overcome its challenges, but who will emerge as the leaders of tomorrow."

Home building industry sage George Casey offers this somewhat sobering take: “The element of community obligation by small, local builders, lenders, and policymakers has fallen by the wayside as the demands of pure profit, return on assets, and the whims of investors [have dominated] ... and with it [we’ve seen] a decline in the resiliency of the housing industry.” 

And lastly, from Brock Corder, CEO of The Builders Group, in Tuscaloosa, Ala., who offered this comment in our 2025 Top 200 survey: “We are telling our people ‘short-term pain, long-term gain’,” he wrote. “Lack of consumer confidence [combined with] pricing pressure will affect margins, but the investments we are making into systems and processes will pay off.” 

That sounds like a company built for resilience. Is yours? 

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