uncovers a dozen new billionaire builders whose fortunes have jumped on the homebuilding industry’s high prices and high interest rates.
By Richard J. Chang, Staff
Surveying a row of three-to five-bedroom starter homes going up along the recently asphalted Addison Drive, Tom Bradbury spots an issue. Poking his brown brogue leather shoes into the red Georgia clay, he makes a beeline for a construction crew manning an excavator, telling them exactly where they need to dig.
“Everything has to be done right the first time and on time,” Bradbury says. “Like when a car comes off the assembly line, it has to be ready to go.”
Bradbury is an expert at churning out neighborhoods like this one—“Duncan Farm,” in Cartersville, a suburb of Atlanta—with Ford-like efficiency. Since 2008, his Smith Douglas Homes has built 304 communities in five states. Sales hit $765 million in 2023. Shares of Smith Douglas, which Bradbury took public on the New York Stock Exchange in January, are up 56% since then. The 80-year-old Bradbury, who still owns 88% of the stock, is now a billionaire.
Aaron Kotowski for
It’s a terrible time to be a homebuyer. In 2023, mortgage rates spiked to levels not seen since 2008 and, despite coming down in recent months, remain higher than they’ve been in more than two decades. Home prices have also skyrocketed, up 30% nationally on average over the past four years while real median household income has stagnated.
Yet, given a nationwide shortage of at least four million housing units, according to the National Association of Realtors, it’s a great time to be a homebuilder. There simply aren’t enough homes. The S&P index of builders is up 57% over the past 12 months. Shares of the country’s largest, D.R. Horton, are up even more over that period, 70%, while luxury builder Toll Brothers’ stock has soared by 96%.
This building boom has led to a billionaire boom. In all, has found at least 12 new billionaires or billionaire families in the homebuilding industry. That includes Bradbury, plus Perry Homes’ Kathy Britton, GL Homes’ Itzhak Ezratti and three members of Lennar Corp.’s Miller family.
It doesn’t look like it will slow down any time soon, especially with both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump calling for a major increase in new home production. Plus, builders have a few advantages in this market: cash-strapped buyers not only don’t need to put additional money into remodeling a brand new home, but they can often borrow money at competitive rates from the builders’ affiliate lenders or secure other sales incentives to ease the costs.
“You put all that together and you have an environment that is solid and performing better than I think most economists would have expected,” says Robert Dietz, chief economist at the National Association of Home Builders. Adds Alan Ratner, an analyst at housing research firm Zelman & Associates: “These companies are in the best shape they’ve ever been.”
And some of them have been in the business a very long time.
Bradbury, whose father was an architect who designed government office buildings and who once worked as a flight instructor, sold his first house to a police officer and a municipal clerical worker for $35,000 in 1975. “I was sitting at that closing and that woman cried,” says Bradbury. “She looked me in the eye and said, ‘I thought I would never be able to own a house.’” That was the start of Colony Homes, which built entry-level residences in Georgia and North Carolina before Bradbury sold it to KB Home for $67 million in 2003. Five years later, when KB Home pulled out of Atlanta, Bradbury, frustrated they’d abandoned the market, started Smith Douglas Homes.
Since then he’s built 15,000, mostly for lower-to-middle class buyers like auto workers, teachers and first responders, mainly in growth markets in the South, such as Nashville, Charlotte and Raleigh. He’s been able to keep the homes relatively affordable because he’s gotten the process down to a science, thanks in large part to a scheduling software, called the SMART build system, that updates trade partners and material suppliers in real time, starting from when a home buyer has put in the order. After one part of the construction process is completed, the next step can begin the following morning. The faster it gets the framers or painters in and out, the faster—and cheaper—it can move onto the next buyer’s new house. The SMART system has decreased Smith Douglas Homes’ build time to an average of just 59 days from start to finish, about 20% faster than most of the other public builders.
“Our goal is to be as efficient as we possibly can to try to reach as many folks as we can,” Bradbury says. “Ever since I’ve been in business, I’ve had big, hairy, audacious goals—and I always come close or beat them.”
Patrick Zalupski
Patrick Zalupski got a later start than Bradbury but has already gotten richer. A former auditor for FedEx in Tennessee, he made his way to Florida and built his first 27 homes in Jacksonville in 2009, right after the financial crisis. Since then his Dream Finders Homes, which he took public in 2021, has closed on 31,000 homes through 2023 in eight states, primarily in the Southeast. Like Bradbury, he focuses largely on first timers or move-up buyers looking to upgrade, but his strategy has largely been to cut out some higher-end features like quartz countertops or wood floors in recent years and make them optional upgrades. That has helped power the company to record sales of $3.7 billion in 2023, up 12% from the prior year, and landed him on ’ billionaires list, worth an estimated $2.3 billion thanks to his 84% stake.
“We used to customize a lot more,” says Zalupski, who paid nearly $8 million earlier this year to buy an 18,000-square-foot Jacksonville mansion on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places. “All of that comes with a tremendous amount of inefficiency and cost. Now it’s just about trying to deliver a more affordable house at the end of the day.”
Meanwhile Lennar, America’s second-largest builder, has started making 660-square-foot houses as wide as a driveway for as little as $137,000. In San Antonio, the company sold nearly every lot in its first-ever tiny homes community this year. “Demand remains robust if it can be supplied at an attainable price point,” said Lennar’s CEO and executive chairman Stuart Miller (estimated net worth: $1.8 billion) on a July earnings call. Miller, whose father Leonard Miller (d. 2002) became a co-owner of Lennar’s predecessor in 1956 and took the company public in 1971, has helped run it for 35 years. The business has never been worth so much, reaching a recent $52 billion market capitalization, enough to Stuart and his two siblings, Jeffrey Miller and Leslie Miller Saiontz, all individual billionaires.
Even Toll Brothers, known as the largest luxury builder in the country, has been moving down market. In 2016, the company began offering smaller townhouses and homes on smaller lots at the $450,000 price point. Around 2019, these cheaper residences made up only around 10% of Toll Brothers’ business. Now, “40% of Toll Brother homes are being sold at this lower price range,“ says Doug Yearley, the firm’s chairman and CEO. “In a high interest environment, we’re doing well.”
Especially Bruce Toll, who cofounded the company in 1967 with his brother Bob (d. 2022) and retired as vice chairman of the board in 2016. Toll, 81, who has been diversifying out of his Toll Brothers stock and into commercial real estate but still owns 1% of the company’s shares, is now worth an estimated $2 billion.
But for many buyers, it’s less about affordability than the prospect of getting a good deal. In Texas, Kathy Britton’s approach runs somewhat counter to the national trend. Houston-based Perry Homes, which Britton inherited from her father Bob Perry (d. 2013), has been riding a wave of new residents and businesses relocating to the Dallas and Houston metro areas in search of lower taxes, is targeting high-end homebuyers with an in-house design team to give them more choices on home floor plans, tech and materials. Under Britton, who spent her high school summers helping Perry Homes’ sales associates, it has hired extra architects to offer even more plans and greater customization. “Our product is superior quality,” Britton, 55, says in an interview from her office in Houston. “I think we build the best house in the industry, and we’re very selective about the communities where we build.”
Kathy Britton
In many ways, the market slowdown since the pandemic-era frenzy has actually made building more attractive for buyers. Existing home prices in much of the country have not fallen, even as mortgage rates spiked enough to push the average buyer’s monthly payment up by more than $1,000 since 2021. And with six out of ten American homeowners locked into rates of less than 4%, they’re unwilling—or unable—to list their house and take on a higher rate on their next purchase, drying up the market even more.
“We looked at quite a few older houses, and I wasn’t interested in trying to overpay for something that you’re just going to need to put more work into,” says James Wallace, a controls engineer in Detroit who bought his first home from a local builder with his wife in April. “We decided, “Let’s go for something new that’s a lot less headache for us to worry about.’”
Many of the larger builders have another advantage, too: They can cut deals that others can’t. No bank in America is advertising a mortgage rate of less than 5.5% on an existing house, yet Ashton Woods Homes will lend to their new buyers at 5% in Durham N.C. That’s because many homebuilders have affiliate lenders that can offer better rates or subsidize some of a buyer’s closing costs using a small portion of the builder’s profits. These days many are offering mortgage rate buydowns, where a buyer pays upfront for a lower interest rate at closing, giving the larger firms that have in-house mortgage arms—an advantage against smaller builders and existing home sellers, according to John Lovallo, an analyst at UBS.
“If a home builder can give you a mortgage rate that’s 150 to 200 basis points less, the premium between new and existing homes collapses. The new home price is less than the median existing home price,” says Brian Bernard, director of industrials equity research at Morningstar. “People are realizing that, ‘Hey, I can get a pretty good deal on home prices. Obviously it’s not as affordable as if I would’ve bought it years ago, but I can manage it.’”
In January, the biggest U.S. homebuilder, D.R. Horton, said it plans to offer more long-term mortgage rate buydowns through its in-house lender, DHI Mortgage, to maintain its advantage over other builders. Dream Finders Homes, the Florida-based builder run by billionaire Patrick Zalupski, recently brought their preferred mortgage lender in-house to buy mortgages in bulk and offer lower rates to buyers, striking a deal to purchase the 40% it didn’t own of Jet HomeLoans in July for $9.3 million. “Today, buying down the rate is the most impactful benefit to the consumer,” Zalupski says. More than 90% of Dream Finders’ new home buyers with mortgages are taking advantage of the incentive.
The homebuilder boom is likely to stay for the foreseeable future, too, even if the economy goes through a rocky period. The National Association of Realtors predicts that there will still be a shortage for at least the next five years, even if building activity outpaces population growth. New housing starts peaked at more than 2 million in 2005 and cratered to just 500,000 by 2009, following the subprime mortgage crisis. By 2012, 54% of new homebuilders folded after overbuying land in the runup to the crash, and an undersupply of both materials and labor have held new construction too well below demand for more than a decade. If rates continue to fall, builders could see a massive influx of buyers, spurred by easier access to mortgages and an easing of the mortgage lock-in effect that has kept many homeowners from giving up their low rate.
“Home builder outlook for the next five years is still good just because we have a sizable housing shortage.” says the National Association of Realtors’ chief economist, Lawrence Yun. “I think builders will ramp up production but there will not be an oversupply.” The U.S. Congressional Budget Office projects the post-pandemic drive for larger living spaces and an influx of immigration will spur 1.6 million housing starts annually over the next ten years. Goldman Sachs predicts new home sales will increase to 723,000 by the end of the year and 771,000 in 2025, up from 666,000 in 2023. Meanwhile, Fannie Mae expects 2024 to be the lowest-selling year for existing homes since 1995. That’s music to the ears of America’s billionaire builders, and the investors who have bid up their public share prices even in the face of sky-high home values and crushing interest rates.
“The sad part of it is that there are a lot of people that could afford a house but now they can’t,” says Bradbury of Smith Douglas Homes. “It would sure be a blessing if the rates went back down and people who are renting and would love to own a house can buy one.”
Builder Billionaires
These dozen new construction billionaires have ridden America’s housing shortage to the three-comma club.
Horton family
Ryan Horton: $3 bil
Reagan Horton: $3 bil
Marty Horton: $1.5 bil
Marty’s late husband Donald Horton founded D.R. Horton in 1978 and by 2002 had grown it into America’s largest home builder by volume. She and her two sons, none of whom work at the business, inherited the family fortune after Donald died in May. The stock is up 70% over the past year.
Miller family
Stuart Miller: $1.8 bil
Jeffrey Miller: $1.4 bil
Leslie Miller Saiontz: $1.4 bil
Stuart Miller joined Lennar Corp. in 1982 and took over as president and CEO from his father Leonard Miller in 1997. The company, whose shares are up 56% over the past year, builds detached homes and townhouses across 26 states.
Kathy Britton:
$2.6 bil
Britton worked in Texas-based Perry Homes’ sales and land acquisition departments before succeeding her father Bob Perry (d. 2013), the company’s founder, after he passed away. She’s now the executive chair of the privately held firm, which did $2.4 billion in 2023 sales.
Bruce Toll
$2 bil
Toll and his sibling Bob, who died in 2022, founded Toll Brothers in 1967. Bruce retired as vice chairman in 2016 and runs commercial real estate firm BET Investors, but still owns about 1% of Toll Brothers’ shares, which are up 96% over the past year.
Itzhak Ezratti & family
$1.9 bil
Ezratti cofounded GL Homes in 1976 and gained momentum in 1992, rebuilding houses after Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida. His son Misha now runs privately owned, $1.9 billion (2023 revenues) GL Homes as president.
Thomas Bradbury
$1.7 bil
Bradbury sold his first home builder Colony Homes to KB Home in 2003 for $67 million. He founded Smith Douglas Homes in 2008 after KB Home pulled out of Atlanta. Now executive chairman, he took Smith Douglas public in January; shares are up 56% since.
Elly Reisman
$1.4 bil
Reisman cofounded Toronto-based Great Gulf Homes in 1975 and in 2013 became a director of privately held, $3.6 billion (2023 sales) Ashton Woods Homes, of which he owns an estimated 34% stake.
David Weekley
$1.1 bil
He launched David Weekley Homes with his brother Dick in 1976 at just 23 years old. The company generated $3 billion in revenue in 2023 and builds in 19 markets across the South, Midwest and Mountain states.
