yesterday to get a feel for what our single-family counterparts were facing. Rather than focus too much more on another set of predictions/guesses for the future, I wanted to call out some observations that were made in a couple sessions that are relevant to multifamily housing.1. Conservative Journalist Tucker Carlson pointed out the 2 key issues that he thought would prevent Republicans from advancing in this year's elections: the continued rise of immigration and the rates of single, childless women. Both rates are the highest we have ever seen and have obvious ramifications for the housing markets that we need to note. After doing some cursory research on the latter topic it was interesting to find that fertility rates are still rising because women who are having children are having more.
2. One of the nation's largest homebuilders cited a stat that I found very interesting. Based on his own follow-up surveys, his firm was not following up with more than 40% of the folks who filled out registration cards at open houses. High quality leads. Sales training is a huge issue with homebuilders the same way it is with multifamily housing executives and service providers. When times are good no one focuses on training (order taking) and when times are bad the troubles are magnified and we have less time and resources to address them.
3. The need to understand workforce housing is "more important than Green." - Jeff Mezger, CEO of KB Home
4. Jeff also spoke a lot about the concept and implementation of sustainability. He doesn't spend much time pushing Green Marketing but does look intensively at the low hanging fruit where costs can be saved, from products to land plans. We have an entire magazine dedicated to this concept called Developer. So I was happy to hear that this topic is moving up the agenda for production builders.
These are just a few of many takeaways from this event. Stay tuned for the wrap up from our friends at Builder.
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