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3 days ago | 
thebuildersdaily.com | John McManus |John Mcmanus
This week, as we announced that our Focus On Excellence registration site went live, we made a claim. This is not just a conference."What makes Focus On Excellence different? Our program "reveals" over the next couple of weeks will clarify this, and today, we start at the heart and soul of how and why it will be unlike any homebuilding leaders' gathering on the calendar. It’s not the speakers. It’s not the venue. It’s not even the content, though that will be excellent, high-level, and provocative.
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5 days ago | 
thebuildersdaily.com | John McManus |John Mcmanus
Too many homebuilding leaders still cling to the belief that the future of homebuilding is somewhere out there, around the next corner or maybe the next. That it will arrive after one more cycle. That it's something you can pilot next year or table until interest rates come down. But here's a thought, call it radical or not: The future of homebuilding is no longer in the future. It's now, living in real life.
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1 week ago | 
thebuildersdaily.com | John McManus |John Mcmanus
Spring is supposed to be homebuilding’s moment. But 2025’s selling season has been jammed in neutral. Consumer sticker shock, stubborn mortgage rates, and insurance and property tax drag have forced builders into a full-blown incentive war. Everything's on the table for mortgage buydowns, free upgrades, design credits, and rate locks. The result? Sales that trickle instead of surge. And margins that shrink by the day. "Strike price" has become the new holy grail — the price at which consumers say yes.
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1 week ago | 
thebuildersdaily.com | John McManus |John Mcmanus
In a spring 2025 season marked by softening traffic, heightened affordability headwinds, and corporate belt-tightening, homebuilders are looking for new ways to de-risk their land books without losing momentum on development. Many have responded by delaying lot takedowns, walking away from land positions, or slashing budgets to protect margins. But what if the problem isn’t land ownership but timing?
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1 week ago | 
thebuildersdaily.com | John McManus |John Mcmanus
Danny Signorelli doesn’t back off a problem. He hunts them. We look for opportunity where there’s challenge,” Signorelli says. "Sometimes, those surface-level problems turn a lot of folks away. But if you power through them, there’s success hiding in plain sight."That philosophy is the backbone of Austin Point, a 4,700-acre master-planned community rising from the farmland of Fort Bend County, Texas.
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1 week ago | 
thebuildersdaily.com | John McManus |John Mcmanus
As Spring Selling Season 2025 sputters, homebuilders face a familiar but more punishing challenge: how to make the math work. Mortgage rates remain stubbornly high. Prices, incentives, and sales velocity are not cooperating. Material and labor costs, meanwhile, continue to run hot. What’s left? Efficiency. While sales may rank among homebuilders right now as Priorities 1, 2 and 3, performance – higher performance that gains efficiency – becomes an equally binding business imperative.
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1 week ago | 
irishtimes.com | John McManus |John Mcmanus
The Central Bank’s investigation into the collapse of the Irish Nationwide Building Society (INBS) – which concluded with publication of a report last week – followed a depressingly familiar pattern. First there was anger. Lots of anger. The collapse of the building society in 2010 led to a €5.4 billion bailout. It was a disproportionately large part of the €45.7 billion bill for bailing out the banking sector during the financial crisis.
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1 week ago | 
thebuildersdaily.com | John McManus |John Mcmanus
In today’s accelerating homebuilding M&A cycle, a familiar inflection point is emerging — an operationally solid, regionally dominant builder, pressured by capital constraints and macro volatility, seeks a suitor with deeper pockets and staying power. United Homes Group (UHG), a public homebuilder with roots in South Carolina and reach across the Carolinas and Georgia, now stands firmly at that juncture.
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2 weeks ago | 
irishtimes.com | John McManus |John Mcmanus
The scene opens ... it is early summer in Connemara. Dusk is falling. A black Range Rover with 27 D plates approaches Roundstone from the east. The driver slows, dims the lights and pulls over. The woman in the passenger side turns around and speaks to her two children in the back seat. “Okay, kids, let’s go over it again in case we are stopped by the men ... ”“Where are we going?” she asks. The woman turns back to the man. “What if they don’t believe us?”“It’s cool. I have made an online booking.
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2 weeks ago | 
irishtimes.com | John McManus |John Mcmanus
The news that rents are climbing at their fastest rate in 20 years and have passed €2,000 a month nationally should, in theory, put the kibosh on any plans to lift the cap on rents that applies in pretty much every urban area of the State. The Government has been trailing the idea since the last election, based on the premise that it will kick-start development, particularly the sort of large apartment schemes considered crucial to making a dent in the housing shortage.
