Redbrickbear said:
This is 100% right on although those margins are absolutely gross margins (gross profit vs materials/labor). They exclude a bunch of fixed expenses. Industry standard on net is generally 8-10%. Over that and you are performing above par.
We've looked into doing land development in Waco as a vertical integration tool. We came to the same conclusions as this guy.
If you want to build something affordable for Gen Z (born 1997-2012), you have to get the lots small and dense to keep the land cost down. You have to use lower quality materials. You have to build them "down and dirty" as a homebuilder acquaintance who specializes in "value" builds refers to them. And you really need to build them in mass to get the economies of scale to make sense. We can ***** and moan about it all day but that's the cold, hard economic facts.
On the flip side, you could develop one estate lot in place of every 4-5 dense lots. The price of the lot goes up 4-5x accordingly but if you turn around and build a luxury 4000sf house on it, you can absorb that land cost. Selling time depends on the market but there are a lot of Baby Boomers (1945-1965), Gen X (1965-1980), and older Millennials (1980-1995) that were able to get into real estate right and ride the appreciation wave to significant equity, allowing them to put a bunch down and afford the upper 6/low 7 price tags. These folks are also in the prime earning bandwidth of their careers.