AI Isn’t Optional: Marc Minor’s Call To Homebuilding Leaders

Homebuilding's muscle memory is fully engaged.

It's "back-to-basics" time. Heads down. Sweat the small stuff. Control what you can; prepare for what you can't. Cut, cut, cut, and, meanwhile, drive to move sales — whatever it takes.

At a moment when uncertainty defines the housing market — rates stubbornly high, affordability stretched, and volatility the rule rather than the exception — one of the clarion call messages from this week’s Focus on Excellence Leadership Summit in Denver rang clear.

It came from Marc Minor, co-founder and CEO of Higharc, and it wasn’t a plea for patience or a forecast of better days. It was a rallying cry.

In the middle of turbulence, he told homebuilding leaders, you can’t afford not to be experimenting with AI—right now.

The Hardest Problem in the Industry

Minor began by reminding the audience just how complex the homebuilding business really is.

Homebuilding is a unique market,” he said. “It has productized homes that are also continually changing. And the reality of continual change is what makes the problem of innovation—and of any technology—really, really hard.”

In his view, this difficulty has less to do with reluctance and more to do with structure. Builders operate in a fragmented ecosystem of PDFs, disconnected systems, and manual hand-offs.

What you ideally want,” Minor said, “is an integrated thread of data about the things you’re building — from the specification and design all the way through distribution. But we don’t have that. We have very disintegrated systems, and we don’t have data. We have PDFs that get passed around.”

This disconnection, he argued, makes innovation extraordinarily difficult.

Everybody’s like on the factory floor, on the assembly line,” he said. “How do you upgrade the line without stopping it? It’s really hard.”

Short-Term Pain, Long-Term Gain

That difficulty has bred a culture of hesitation around technology investment.

Our industry is not known for substantial outside investment in technology,” Minor said. “The available tools for homebuilders are probably old and weak.”

Even the tools that are most widespread — the ERPs most builders depend on — may lack the interoperability needed to integrate innovation.

Data quality is an enormous problem there,” he said. “It’s supposed to be this kind of core operational data of the business. But the data hygiene is pretty bad nearly everywhere we look. And almost nobody has an API.”

That absence of clean, normalized, interoperable data prevents software from communicating and makes genuine transformation nearly impossible. For Minor, the barrier isn’t money—it’s will and structure.

Short-term pain for long-term gain” is how he framed the trade-off.

Without new patterns of change management, he warned, the industry’s habit of delay will keep it lagging behind every other sector of the economy.

The Both-And Imperative

In Denver, Minor’s remarks resonated precisely because they captured the tension that every homebuilding CEO and division president now feels. The job is no longer to choose between lean operations and innovation. It’s to do both at once—to run tighter, faster, and smarter while simultaneously reinventing processes through AI and data integration.

In my opening to the conference, I described this as a “both-and” era.

Strategic leaders must keep focusing on the basics—cost control, construction efficiency, accountability, and quality—while also building the capacity to imagine and implement change.

Marc Minor made that abstraction concrete.

His message: you can’t wait until things stabilize to experiment with AI; it’s the instability that makes the experimentation essential.

The Call to Action

Minor didn’t just offer an abstract principle. He issued a practical assignment every builder could start on Monday morning. Every homebuilding firm, he said, should identify one or two high-aptitude young team members and give them explicit time each week to work with generative-AI tools—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other platform—on solving operational problems across the company’s workflow.

That means letting them explore how AI could help improve land-acquisition models, pre-construction planning, design iteration, construction scheduling, customer communication, and warranty triage—the full life cycle of the build. The goal isn’t a perfect tool; it’s learning, discovery, and organizational adaptation.

The builders who empower that kind of structured experimentation, Minor argued, will be the ones who survive the next decade of disruption. Those who don’t risk being left with outdated systems and exhausted teams running in circles around problems that AI could already be helping to solve.

Change Management as a Core Capability

The other thread running through both Minor’s remarks and our discussions in Denver was that change itself must become a core capability. Homebuilding has never been short on grit, good, honest know-how, or craftsmanship, but its next chapter depends on a different muscle: the ability to evolve continuously, not episodically.

As I said to the audience in my opening remarks,

We’re entering an age when the winners will be the firms that can pivot fast, align teams around transparent data, and make uncertainty their ally.”

That requires a culture that welcomes experimentation and tolerates short-term pain for long-term learning—precisely the point Minor underscored.

Why It Matters Now

The urgency behind Minor’s message comes from timing. With home prices high, financing tight, and consumer confidence uneven, most builders are tempted to retrench—to double down on execution and defer innovation. But that instinct, Minor suggested, could be fatal.

It’s very hard to stick it out with any kind of technology product,” he said. “Even something as fundamental as an ERP.” Yet without that endurance and investment, the industry’s inefficiencies will only deepen.

In other words, the volatility that makes innovation feel risky is the same volatility that makes it essential.

The Leadership Challenge Ahead

For homebuilding’s senior leaders, the takeaway from Denver was unmistakable: change management isn’t a project; it’s an operating system. The decision to assign a pair of sharp, curious minds to test AI applications inside the company isn’t symbolic—it’s strategic, and in fact, it's the new basics to get back to now. It’s how a firm starts building the reflexes of adaptation before disruption forces them.

Marc Minor’s manifesto at Focus on Excellence distilled that truth into one imperative: upgrade the line without stopping it. That is the paradox every builder now faces. The companies that figure out how to do it—balancing execution discipline with structured innovation—will define the next generation of homebuilding.

Because, as Minor reminded the room, the industry’s most significant constraint isn’t technology itself. It’s courage—the courage to act before certainty arrives.