How DRB uses customer intel to connect land, product, and sales

Kurihara’s responsibilities span strategic research, brand, operational marketing, the customer’s digital journey, online and onsite sales and DRB’s realty operations. Her work also intersects deeply with land intelligence, product development, architecture, purchasing and the design studio.

In other words, her accountability begins well ahead of predevelopment and extends end-to-end through DRB’s operational lifecycle.

When we recently discussed what she might bring to her conversation at the HousingWire Homebuilder Summit in Dallas next month, Kurihara laughed a little at the mismatch between the title and the reality.

“I actually run four departments,” she said, then described a strategic research team that includes data analysts and a data scientist working to translate market information into actionable land insights.

A few minutes later, after explaining her involvement in product development, purchasing RFPs, architecture, design, and the customer journey, she settled on a better description of how DRB operates.

“I think it’s a company culture of interwovenness.”

Call it interwovenness or, as other organizations have awakened to, a system, it all comes down now to pre-data homebuilding strategy and operations vs. post-data enterprises, an inflection point reached somewhere between the end of the GFC and the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic era.

BD (before data) and AD (after data), if you will.

Kurihara has not accumulated an assortment of unrelated responsibilities. Her role reflects what has happened to the homebuilding business, as strategy and operations have become more tightly connected and the cost of a decision made within one functional silo increasingly shows up elsewhere.

The business of making profitable customers is hard right now.

Demand is harder to capture. Affordability limits what customers can buy. Land and capital decisions leave less room for error. Marketing dollars have to work harder. Product must align more closely with what households value and can afford.

Few, if any, builders can afford to have one part of the organization learn something important while another part keeps operating as if nothing happened. The job may still have a department or a discrete workflow attached to it. The outcome belongs to the business and relies on what Char calls interwoven workflows.

When the title stops describing the job

Kurihara came from the sales-and-marketing side of homebuilding, a discipline that can still be acknowledged quaintly as the part of the organization responsible for advertising, model merchandising, lead generation and “making it pretty.”

She bristles at that characterization, not because she wants credit for doing more. She wants the work itself understood differently.

“People see sales and marketing, and they think the rah-rah girl, or, you know, the make-it-pretty person,” she said. “I’m incredibly strategic.”

What she actually does during the day makes the point.

Customer intelligence can determine which land deserves further attention, which product belongs there, how architecture should respond to changing household preferences, which specifications purchasing should standardize, how to position the product, and how online and onsite teams convert interest into sales.

Kurihara participates in purchasing RFPs. She works with product development on DRB’s active-adult lineup. Her strategic research team develops land insights. She oversees the customer journey from the moment someone finds DRB online to the point when they cross the threshold into an onsite sales environment.

That is less of a marketing funnel than an operating system built around a common source of information: the customer.

And it illustrates why the definition of a high-value homebuilding leader keeps expanding. Functional expertise still matters enormously, but so does understanding how decisions in your part of the business affect the rest of the business.

Build people who can cross the boundaries

Kurihara has carried that idea into how she develops her team. She describes people whose expertise begins in one discipline but no longer ends there.

“I have an operations marketing professional who now also leads a sales training boot camp,” she said.

Her vice president of digital experience could do the same. Her onsite sales director, responsible for sales training, could also train the marketing organization. The objective isn’t to erase specialties. It is to build enough fluency across functions so people can understand the business problem from more than one position in the system. That capability becomes more valuable as an organization grows.

DRB operates across 20 divisions. At that scale, specialization is necessary, but it can also cause information to stall at organizational boundaries. A land team can optimize land. Purchasing can optimize cost. Marketing can optimize lead volume. Sales can optimize conversion.

However, the business has to optimize the whole. That requires people who can recognize when success in one function creates friction, costs, or lost value elsewhere. It also requires information to be portable, to take wing across the organization, and to be specialty-agnostic, all to enable interoperability.

Customer intelligence has to change something

Kurihara’s organizing principle for much of that work centers on the customer.

“Connecting with the customer” is how she describes the overarching mission. But her version of customer centricity has little to do with slogans. The information has to change a decision.

If research helps a land team better understand who is likely to buy in a given location, it has value. If customer knowledge changes the product offered on that land, it has value. If product and pricing better reflect what households value and can afford, marketing has a clearer job. If digital behavior reaches an onsite salesperson with useful context rather than disappearing at the handoff, conversion should improve.

Kurihara points to DRB’s marketing efficiency as one indication that the connections matter.

“I can do more with less because my people on site connect better with the customer,” she said. “Because our process is customer focused.”

Doing more with less is an increasingly valuable operating skill, but so too is how an organization keeps learning what “more” should be.

Different businesses, increasingly connected decisions

That same widening of accountability has shown up throughout our Built for This series, though in businesses of dramatically different sizes and with very different operating models.

At National Home Corp., CEO Michael Bergman described a tightly disciplined production system built backward from the price its entry-level customer can afford. Finished lots, standardized plans, spec construction, purchasing discipline, low overhead, and fast inventory turns work because the decisions reinforce one another. Change one part of the equation, and someone needs to understand what happens to the rest.

StyleCraft Builders CEO Doug French approached the same problem from an execution standpoint. His team has spent the past hard market getting back to fundamentals: build on time, control variances, tighten purchase orders, spend incentive dollars where customers actually value them, and make the 900th house better than the 899th.

For French, the leadership challenge is getting an entire organization to pull in the same direction on standards that sound simple until hundreds of people have to execute them repeatedly.

At Park Street Homes, Kevan and Ayesha Shelton are testing a different kind of interconnectedness. They are bringing production homebuilding practices to historically Black urban neighborhoods, where land acquisition, product, architecture, municipal relationships, affordability, and community trust must work as one system.

Their challenge as they contemplate expanding into more markets is determining what can be standardized and scaled while preserving the local knowledge and relationships that make the model work in the first place.

Now consider those three businesses from Kurihara’s vantage point within DRB Group. The companies are hardly comparable in scale. Still, the operating lesson common to all four stories is strikingly similar.

A homebuilding company improves when fewer important decisions are made in isolation.

Land has to know the customer. Product has to know land and affordability. Purchasing has to understand product and customer value. Marketing has to know which demand matters. Sales has to understand more than how to close an order. Finance needs visibility into the operating assumptions underneath the plan.

Leadership has to make sure information moves among all of them fast enough to change a decision before the cost of getting it wrong is locked in. That is where Kurihara adds something important to the Built for This conversation. Her experience puts a human face on what an increasingly integrated operating model requires from its people.

Capital helps. Operators still have to operate

DRB also adds an important wrinkle to a series about homebuilding businesses moving forward without waiting for outside help. DRB has had significant outside help.

Japan-based Sumitomo Forestry acquired a controlling stake in the company in 2017, and its capital support has played an important role in DRB’s growth. The company has expanded both organically and through acquisitions and now operates at a scale far beyond what it was a decade ago. Kurihara doesn’t minimize that edge.

“We’re number 16 because we had the capital support,” she said. The capital may support the strategy. It doesn’t originate the ambition, make the operating decisions or integrate the businesses. “Sumitomo is not saying, ‘Go buy this,’” Kurihara said. “We’re saying, ‘We want to do this. Can you support it?’ And we get support for it.”

That distinction fits the Built for This thesis better than pretending all homebuilders operate with the same resources. Outside resources can amplify, but won’t manufacture, an operating advantage. Capital does not decide which parcel deserves investment. It does not determine which household belongs there, which product will create value for that customer, or how purchasing, architecture, marketing and sales should align around it. It does not make an acquired company function better after the deal closes.

People have to do that. And the more a company grows, the harder it can be to connect those decisions.

Scale increases the need to learn

That may be one of the less visible challenges underneath DRB’s growth. Every new division, market, product line, acquisition and management layer adds knowledge to the enterprise. It also creates another place where knowledge can get trapped. Kurihara’s “interwovenness” is one response to that problem.

A learning organization needs mechanisms to make what it discovers in one place useful elsewhere. Sometimes that mechanism is data. Sometimes it is a meeting, a process, a shared metric, or a person with enough cross-functional understanding to recognize that an insight belongs elsewhere, not in the department that generated it.

Kurihara herself plays that role. So do the people she is trying to develop, which makes cross-training more than a talent-development exercise. It becomes part of the company’s operating infrastructure.

The goal is an organization that learns by doing. It means discovering constraints and friction, removing them, and giving the next person in the process better information than the person before had.

Likewise, Bergman’s playbook at National Home Corp. depends on decisions staying tightly connected. French’s continuous improvement at StyleCraft depends on teams learning from execution rather than repeating the same errors. The Sheltons’ expansion of Park Street depends on transferring what is repeatable without losing the local intelligence that creates value.

Kurihara’s work at DRB elevates the organizational question underneath all three: How does what one part of a homebuilding company learns become something another part of the company can use?

Accountability travels across the business

That is also why Kurihara’s session at the HousingWire Homebuilder Summit in Dallas on Oct. 21 should matter to people who have never worked in sales or marketing.

“I want to add real value,” she told me, “not just pontificate.” The value is in connecting those disciplines. A land executive does not need to become a marketer. A marketing executive does not need to become a purchasing expert. A division president cannot personally perform every function under their purview.

Each, however, needs sufficient fluency in the value-creation system to understand what information another function has, why it matters, and what should change because of it. That increasingly looks like the next evolution of homebuilding leadership. People will still have specialties. They will still have titles, reporting lines, budgets and functional responsibilities.

Leaders who create the most value will act more like stakeholders in the whole business than as custodians of a piece of it. A common operating mandate is emerging. Understand the customer. Know where the business creates value. Connect decisions that depend on one another. Learn from what happens. Remove friction. Give people enough visibility into the whole system to understand the consequences of their role.

And keep getting better at the things the business itself controls.