Why more private homebuilders face a succession test now

A succession challenge homebuilding can no longer ignore

A second U.S. President in a row to serve past the age of 80 is in the Oval Office. Whether spoken or not, succession, or rather a sound strategic, operational and organizational cultural plan for it, is on the minds of many.

 It’s the same in homebuilding land. No fewer than a half dozen of America’s highest-profile homebuilding enterprises – including D.R. Horton, NVR, Toll Brothers, Sekisui House (U.S.A), KB Home, Meritage Homes, and more recently, Lennar – have either triggered CEO-level succession plans or put them into greater focus over the past five or six years.

Moreover, among the strategic challenges facing most private homebuilding companies today, succession rarely appears on quarterly business calls, land acquisition maps, sales dashboards, or construction schedules. Yet it ranks right up there with customer focus, capital resiliency, land position, and operational excellence as one of homebuilding’s truly burning – if not existential – strategic issues.

In fact, homebuilding leaders often take pride in having navigated housing downturns, labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, affordability crises, inflation, interest rate shocks, and shifting consumer expectations.

Yet many privately held builders face another challenge that receives far less attention: determining who will lead the enterprise when the founder, owner or longtime chief executive eventually steps aside.

The issue is neither theoretical nor distant.

As noted in a September-October 2025 Harvard Business Review article:

“More than half of all privately held businesses with employees in the United States have owners over age 55,” representing “2.9 million businesses, 32.1 million employees, $1.3 trillion in payroll, and $6.5 trillion in revenue.”

Homebuilding is hardly exempt. The succession question is central to merger and acquisition valuation analyses prevalent in a rapidly consolidating homebuilding firmament. In a land acquisition, development and construction capital context where terms, finance costs and covenants can make or break lot pipeline resilience in a net-margin-challenged backdrop, succession emerges as an equally compelling determinant for capital providers.

Across the industry, a generation of founders, entrepreneurs, second-generation operators, and long-tenured leaders is approaching the point where the question can no longer be deferred:

What happens next?

Partners in Building – the $410 million, Houston-based custom homebuilding company ranked No. 34 on our HousingWire Homebuilder Rankings and operating in Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Nashville – offers a revealing case study of what a deliberate and replicable answer can look like.

It starts with commitment and investment in succession as an operational and strategic priority.

The company recently announced that President and CEO Jim Lemming will transition to the role of chairman, while his son, Chris Lemming, will assume the presidency.

On its face, it appears to be a straightforward family-business transition. The reality – and the candid insider insight into that reality we gain through our exclusive conversations with both Jim and Chris Lemming – shows this milestone to be anything but.

Our conversations reveal a succession effort years in the making – one involving executive coaching, leadership development, role transitions, operational cross-training, and a highly intentional effort to ensure the company was preparing for leadership continuity rather than reacting to leadership change or, heaven forbid, a reflexive generational family handoff.

Building a plan before it is needed

One of the most striking aspects of Jim Lemming’s account is how deliberately the process was designed.

“We began about 18 months ago,” Jim said, describing a formalized succession-planning effort that involved the family’s leadership team and its executive-coaching partner, Higher Echelon. The process included not only determining future roles but also mapping a specific sequence of transitions, communication plans and operational responsibilities.

“It was a very intentional process,” Jim said.

The objective of the commitment and investment in the process was not simply to identify a successor. Rather, it was to ready the organization so that it would be fit for a future full of known and unknown challenges and opportunities.

Jim recalls wanting to avoid the uncertainty that often follows abrupt leadership changes. The company announced Chris’s future role well in advance, named Chris’s successor in Dallas, arranged months of shadowing and overlap, and provided employees with visibility into the timeline long before the transition became official.

That level of planning stands in notable contrast to the pattern described in recent Harvard Business Review research.

Authors Jeff Rosenthal and Molly Rosen argue that many organizations spend significant time discussing succession while investing far less effort in preparing successors. One executive interviewed for their research put it bluntly:

“It doesn’t mean jack s**t if I have a grid full of leaders who are rated. What are we doing about it?”

Partners in Building’s approach appears to have focused heavily on the latter.

A successor who grew up around the business

Chris Lemming’s path to the presidency was neither genetically pre-determined, immediate nor automatic.

His earliest memories of homebuilding stretch back to childhood weekends spent accompanying his father to model homes and community openings.

“I do remember going to model homes with him on weekends with my brothers,” Chris said. “We’d go to a model home grand opening, and watch my dad give a few words.”

Yet he did not initially pursue homebuilding as a profession.

After college, Chris attended law school and practiced in finance-related legal work involving infrastructure projects. The experience, he says, proved unexpectedly valuable.

“The critical thinking skill set that you learn in law school and practicing law, to me, it’s applicable to any industry,” he said. “What’s the problem? What do we know about it? Let’s analyze it. Let’s make a conclusion. Let’s execute.”

Eventually, however, he found himself drawn toward the operating side of business.

“I always found myself wishing I was on the client side,” he said. “The one building the thing, or selling the product.”

That shift ultimately brought him to Partners in Building, where he spent the past decade advancing through operational leadership roles before leading the company’s expansion into Dallas-Fort Worth.

What gets passed down

Succession stories often focus on titles. More revealing are the leadership habits and cultural principles that get transferred from one generation to the next. Asked what he learned most from his father, Chris immediately pointed to curiosity.

“He is a voracious learner,” Chris said. “He’s constantly learning stuff, reading things, he’s really curious.”

That curiosity, Chris believes, extends well beyond homebuilding itself.

“He uses his interest in a lot of other varied subjects” and applies those perspectives to product strategy, marketing, pricing, and customer experience.

But the lesson Chris returned to repeatedly involved people.

“He cares a lot about people,” Chris said. “He is a really, really good people developer.”

That observation closely aligns with Jim’s own description of the culture he hopes will survive beyond his tenure.

“We’re a very people-centric company,” Jim said. “The team is very well valued. The team is well trained.”

Over the years, that commitment has evolved into a structured investment in leadership development through executive coaching and internal training programs. Rather than treating leadership development as an HR function, Partners in Building appears to view it as a competitive strategy.

Chris noted that the company invests heavily in developing managers, construction personnel, and future leaders, describing an organizational commitment to “creating a culture of leadership and resiliency.”

Beyond family: Building a leadership bench

Perhaps the least surprising aspect of the Partners in Building story is that the succession plan extends well beyond family members.

Jim repeatedly emphasized the importance of developing entrepreneurial leaders throughout the company.

Reflecting on his years in public homebuilding, he contrasted what he sees as increasingly managerial structures with the entrepreneurial environments that shaped earlier generations of operators. He described a desire to develop leaders capable of thinking and acting like business builders rather than simply administrators.

Chris echoes that philosophy. He described a culture built around teaching people the business, giving them meaningful responsibility, and then trusting them to perform.

“We hire great people, we put them in our culture, teach them as much as we can, and then you’ve got to let them do their thing,” he said.

That idea may prove especially relevant as homebuilding faces a broader generational transition amid a flurry of challenges, ranging from structural household formation and composition changes to AI-powered business economics shifts to seismic new patterns in where developers can build and why.

Succession planning is not merely about replacing a founder. It is about building enough leadership depth that an organization can continue evolving after its founder steps aside.

The next era

Neither Jim nor Chris frames the transition as preserving the company in amber.

Both talk about continuity and evolution.

Jim sees opportunity in technology’s ability to improve estimating, purchasing, design, and construction operations while creating greater value for customers.

Chris similarly points toward enterprise software modernization, data capabilities, and AI-assisted financial analytics while emphasizing that technology should enhance—not replace—the company’s commitment to human relationships and customer experience.

That balance may ultimately define whether succession efforts succeed.

The challenge is not simply preserving culture. It is enabling a new generation to inherit it, reinterpret it, and adapt it to a different operating environment.

Two takeaways for many organizations on the cusp

The deeper takeaway from Partners in Building’s transition is not that a father handed leadership to a son.

It is that succession became a strategic initiative long before it became an event.

The company invested in coaching. It built leadership-development programs. It created overlap periods. It communicated transparently. It developed successors to successors. It spent years preparing people before changing titles.

Those choices required time, money, patience, and organizational discipline.

They also stand as a reminder that succession planning is not fundamentally about retirement.

It is about stewardship.

As the Harvard Business Review observes in The Founder’s Final Act, the strongest outcomes emerge from “a structured, intentional approach.”

At a moment when thousands of privately held businesses are confronting the realities of generational transition, that may be the most important lesson this story offers.

How it should work

Succession planning has been called “the last act of a great CEO.” For founders, owners, and entrepreneurial builders, it may be even more significant: the ultimate test of stewardship. The irony is that when succession is executed exceptionally well, it often seems almost ordinary.

Years ago, after handing the chief executive role at Toll Brothers to Doug Yearley, co-founder Bob Toll greeted questions about the transition with a shrug and a Yiddish phrase: “Vus meer plan?” — what is all the fuss about?

Perhaps that is the highest compliment any succession plan can earn [ … and Doug Yearley more and vindicated Bob’s choice and nonchalance in discussing it.]

Not that it generated attention. Not that it created drama. Not that it became a case study.

But those years of intentional preparation, leadership development, trust-building, coaching, communication, and disciplined execution allowed a company to move confidently from one generation of leadership to the next, with employees focused on serving customers, managers focused on building teams, and the business focused on its future.

If that is the outcome Jim and Chris Lemming have helped create at Partners in Building, then the real story is not that a succession occurred.

It is that such a succession was prepared for. And that may be precisely why, in the years ahead, observers may look back on it and ask the same question Bob Toll did:

What was all the fuss about?