Weather permitting, we'll see many of you in Orlando next week, as the National Association of Home Builders' flagship event, the International Builders Show offers a week of immersion in learning, discovery, networking, and relationship-building to kick-start another year of challenge and opportunity.

Amid a broad context of global economic recovery and demand, an historic tax overhaul, ongoing national political drama, the de-fanging--at least temporarily--of a number of regulatory impediments, and a steadily surfacing surge of demand for attainably-priced housing options, builders and their partners are all ears about what's in store for them and how they can be smarter to meet the challenges of carrying on their trade profitably as costs keep going up.

Clearly, nobody has all the answers, but in more than 140 education sessions, economics outlooks, trends panels, strategic programs, data insights, tech innovations, and countless one-to-one consultations the NAHB is hosting, a builder's opportunity to absorb at least a few helpful ideas and tactics to navigate safely and thrive in the next frame of the recovery will be a rich one.

The entirety of this stubborn, patience-testing housing recovery, attention deservedly has focused most on capacity inhibitors--access to finance, access to buildable lots, and access to labor crews. This focus has been largely defensive, with strategies to mitigate these capacity constraints defining who wins and who loses.

But in few and far between instances, home builders have figured out how to get past being reactive. They're working on setting a bar of ambition for themselves at a new level--their focus is on changing, elevating, home buyers' standards of what to expect from builders.

And this is where we see the challenge facing the home building teams who'll be around not only this time next year, but in five years from now, 2023, and 10 years from now, 2028.

If we put ourselves--imaginatively, perhaps--on that horizon, and look back at the ways we would have needed to evolve, to transform, to engineer ourselves to arrive there, I don't think playing defense really cuts it.

Now, we know that technology and data applications will play a starring role in what takes us from 2018 to 2023, and yet we know equally that human skills, care, ideas, persistence, and talent will co-star in the scenario. Housing, in all its forms, doesn't happen simply as a result of money, real estate, materials, and a set of completed tasks. Housing in the sense of homes happens because people make it their work to make it happen, and technology and data's function as enablers to doing that better is just that, a function.

Consider two of the six "laws of technology" as spelled out by Melvin Kranzberg, a professor of the history of technology at Georgia Institute of Technology more than 30 years ago:

  • Invention is the mother of necessity.
  • Technology is a very human activity.
  • (p.s. the other four are equally compelling).

At IBS this year, we'll be listening to you, and want to hear from you about what you most care about, what worries you, what you need most to do what it is you do, because that is so important to us as a society, a people, a time in human history, that you get to do your work.

But we'll also challenge you to get beyond reacting to adverse, challenging circumstances around getting access to labor, lots, and lending. We'll challenge you to tell us--amid transformational technological and data-fueled resources available at your fingertips--who and what you are at your core today, and what it is you want to be at your core tomorrow as home builders.

In very real ways, we believe the answers to those questions are both timeless and full of dynamism and change. We believe homes and communities, the building blocks of our family life, and our societies, and our culture, are timelessly about being able to be safe and being able to prosper--in other words, well-being.

Everything else--the models, the economics, the process, the talent mix, and the ground itself--is in flux. Exciting times, eh?

See you in Orlando! Safe travels.