Drees Homes bets on operational leadership for next century

[Image (left to right): Scott Drees, Midwest Regional President, Barbara Drees Jones, VP Marketing, David Drees, Chairman, Alexa Drees Walker, Director of Midwest Design Centers. Drawing: Maggie Goldstone]

The resonant image of a German immigrant’s handiwork – a brick Cape Cod house built on a shoestring, very nearly a century ago in Wilder, Kentucky – might itself have cast an almost deterministic hereditary effect on family members for generations to come.

Prescott “Scott” Drees’ pathway into Drees Homes – our No. 25-ranked organization on the HousingWire Homebuilder Rankings – was not so predestined but rather of his own free will. Arguably, however, it may well have been meant to be.

It began with Legos, with company outings he attended by virtue of being his father’s son, … and with listening, osmosing, if you will, a livelihood and life purpose that come with a well-trusted name.

There was no family edict, he says. No heavy-handed expectation that the great-grandson of Theodore Drees, who founded the company in 1928, would one day enter the business.

Instead, the interest formed gradually. It was almost as if the calling seeped into his coming of age, his evolving true-north identity and steps forward, as he found himself among the people who had helped make Drees Homes what it had become over nearly 100 years.

“I feel blessed that there wasn’t that intense pressure or expectation you sometimes hear about with family businesses,” Drees says. “Our family did an excellent job of cultivating that interest naturally – starting with a steady flow of Legos early on. What likely had the biggest impact on me, though, were the community grand openings and other company events, which were staples of Drees family vacations.”

What stayed with him were not only the homes, new neighborhoods or the family name. It was the people.

“My interactions with our employees at those events were especially meaningful,” he says. “They would share stories about my grandfather and how proud they were to work at Drees. Being around that level of enthusiasm and pride, it felt only natural to want to be part of it myself.”

Generation-4 steps up

Drees Homes is entering another generational handoff moment, and Scott Drees’ own “origin story” for a livelihood choice has become part of that handoff milestone.

The Fort Mitchell, Ky.-based builder has appointed Scott Drees as Midwest Regional President, overseeing Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, Cleveland, Columbus, and Indianapolis. He succeeds Steve Tuckerman, who is retiring after nearly 39 years in homebuilding, including more than two decades at Drees and 11 years as Midwest Regional President.

The move adds a new chapter to an ongoing leadership transition. David Drees, Theodore’s grandson and Scott’s father, has spent the past quarter-century strengthening and transforming the company’s culture, expanding its footprint, and preparing the organization for its 100th anniversary in 2028. Tim Terrell, now president, has brought operating discipline and urgency to Drees’ Centennial Strategy. Randy Mickle, Southeast Regional President, has brought public-builder-scale experience to the company’s regional leadership ranks.

Now Scott Drees brings something different: a fourth-generation family member whose career within the company has been deliberately operational, and quite intentionally as a worker-among-workers.

He began as a Builder Trainee in 2015, then moved through land acquisition, sales leadership in Indianapolis, and, most recently, the presidency of the Townhome Division. Before Drees, he worked as a project engineer for national construction and development companies. His résumé is a job history, a sequence of rungs on a career ladder.

It is the record of someone learning the business from the field, from land, from sales, from process, and from customers.

Asked whether he feels more responsibility to protect the Drees legacy or to evolve the company, Scott doesn’t miss a beat.

“Our employees and our culture do a tremendous job every day of protecting that legacy,” he says. “I definitely see it as my job to evolve the company going forward, to give us the ability to do that every single day.”

First principles come first

At Drees, legacy is not for show. It is a working system, a first principle that places customer care and trust at the center of a Drees four-generation ecosystem. It lives or dies in daily decisions: how land is acquired, how homes are designed, how schedules are kept, how trade partners are treated, how customers are served, and how leaders develop into accountable roles.

CEO David Drees once told The Builder’s Daily that one of his proudest accomplishments was helping build a capable leadership team to carry the company forward. Scott’s own progression is that idea come to life.

“There was learning at every step of the way,” Scott says, “whether earlier on it was just providing excellent customer service and doing right by the customer, or what it takes to underwrite a good land deal. We’ve been very thoughtful in this development process, and it’s been exciting along the way to hit on different facets of the business.”

He is also candid about the burden that comes with the name.

“I was always conscious of that, more so than I would ever admit along the way,” he says. “My older sister, Alexa (Drees Homes director of Midwest Design Centers), showed me a pretty early example that with hard work and the ability to contribute, credibility will quickly follow. I was really blessed to have her be the trailblazer of my generation in the company.”

That ground-up, worker-among-workers credibility will matter in the Midwest for operational performance benchmarks rather than mere abstractions. Under its Centennial Strategy, Drees’ stated goal is to achieve roughly 300 closings per division annually. Scott’s region includes mature and growth divisions, as well as a new Columbus opportunity. He says each market will require a different operating emphasis.

“Each of these divisions can, should, and does have a different focus on how to achieve that,” he says. “Almost all of them involve excelling in land acquisitions and even developing the expertise in stealth land development in these markets.”

That phrase – stealth land development – captures one of Drees’ enviable, secret-sauce strengths. The company is not trying to outbid every national public or even other private builders on every obvious parcel. Its edge often lies in harder-to-solve sites, smaller tracts, local knowledge, strong relationships and a product that can justify a more thoughtful, concierge-like land strategy.

“Our model allows us sometimes to get in those tracts of land with those builders to serve on the higher level of those communities,” Scott says. “Quite often, we’ll be going after smaller, maybe more difficult tracts of land that will complement our upper-end product. You might not be able to get density, but you can get really quality lots that higher-end buyers will pay for.”

He adds, “Maybe there’s not 300 acres. It’s 30 acres, and those can be pretty special developments.”

The learning curve

The Townhome Division gave Scott another important lens into Drees’ future. In recent years, Drees has been expanding its product range, not abandoning its move-up and custom strengths but broadening them. Townhomes, Pure Style, smartly sized products, and other forms of attainable design are becoming more central as affordability pressures reshape demand.

“The townhomes experience was a phenomenal experience for me,” Scott says. “It really taught me the value of a disciplined process, and that’s something that’s in operations, in sales, in production, and in how they all match up together.”

Without rigor, a fretting-the-details focus and execution, Drees’ brand promise – custom homes made easy – can become operationally complex if not managed carefully.

“Sometimes it’s easy for a certain level of customization to allow you to lose discipline in some operational aspects,” he says.

Scott’s second big lesson was in the nuance and balances around product.

“Our buyers of townhomes and in our lower price point segments, such as our Pure Style line, they really value the same intentional architecture, design, thoughtfully designed spaces and overall style,” Scott says. “You have to be so intentional, so disciplined to be able to meet those desires at the price point that they’re at. If you can do that, and we can, there is room for us in that market.”

Those nuanced understandings – and smart, precise execution of them – may be among the most important in the company’s next phase. Drees’ future growth is not only about more units. It is about whether the company can bring its reputation for design, personalization, customer care and local trust into more product types without breaking the operating model that makes those attributes possible.

Customer focus sets all the priorities

The non-negotiable, Scott says, remains customer focus.

“It’s our customer focus and always doing the right thing,” he says. “Obviously they go hand in hand.”

Today’s realities, moreover, take a conventional understanding of “who” a customer is and expand radially outward to an array of customer-like stakeholders.

“The customers that we talk about aren’t just the homeowners, but our internal customers as well,” he says. “Our frontline builders and sales representatives are the clearest example of that. In the office, we’re always thinking, how can we help those people with their jobs, make their jobs easier, so they can perform better for that home buyer?”

That is the Drees culture David Drees has talked about for years: human capability as a business advantage. Not culture as a slogan. Culture as an accountability chain, an operating system.

Scott also understands that culture alone will not be enough. The homebuilding business is becoming more data-driven, more professionalized, more competitive and more capital-intensive. Drees is bringing in outside talent, sharpening its systems, and increasing its use of data.

“Fresh thinking can occur in many ways,” Scott says. “It can be cultivated in many ways. That does not just include outside hiring, but we’ve certainly accomplished that in recent years.”

The key, he says, is hiring first for character.

“We’ve been able to preserve our culture, and the reason we’ve been able to do that is through hiring through character and making sure that’s a box that’s checked before you bring those external candidates along,” he says.

The other kind of adaptability and agility requirement is speed of learning.

“Data-driven decisions and models that our employees at all levels can use to get instant feedback from that data – it’s been an absolute game changer for this organization,” Scott says. “It’s going to be a driving force behind so many incremental improvements over the next 10 years.”

Local intel, local trust

Compared with larger public builders, Drees will almost never have the lowest cost of capital or the broadest national scale. There’s just no pretending otherwise, and Scott Drees knows that. But he believes homebuilding remains local enough for a company like Drees to win by knowing its markets better.

“At its core, I believe homebuilding is a hyper-local business,” he says. “Our divisions know their home buyers so well, and Drees Homes gives them the ability to deliver those home types, those design options, and those community styles that allow them to be successful in their particular city.”

Its private structure helps, too.

“Everyone’s got David Drees’ phone number. Everyone has my phone number,” Scott says. “We’re able to be really nimble in process change, which allows us to move the needle in this ever-changing landscape.”

For almost 100 years, Drees Homes has endured by doing two things at once: staying recognizably true to itself and evolving.

Scott Drees now steps into a role and dons a mantle where both will be required.

“Drees has been providing an exceptional home-buying experience for about 100 years now,” he says. “Yet, at no other point in history have we had the operational prowess as we do today, nor the amount of instant information at our fingertips. That’s going to allow us to execute at a level we haven’t before.”

As the company approaches its centennial, Scott hopes the court-of-public-opinion verdict will be simple.

“I’d like people to say that Drees truly provides an exceptional experience, both in home buying, but also working for them and with them,” he says. “That it’s not too different than how Theodore Drees did it back in 1928.”

Then he adds the forward-looking part.

“I hope they say of this team that’s taking them into the second century, that we’re poised to allow more families to experience that Drees difference than ever before.”