Tips For 2025 | Innovate To A Vision

Through partnered research activities, we’re exploring and supporting two areas of strategic opportunity for 2025.

Wellness is the new why.

Through our collaboration with the America at Home Study to design and deliver the Picket Fence concept home, one of the lasting insights captured through Wave 3 of the study confirms wellness as a leading purchase motivator, and the key reason consumers make decisions about sustainability features, technologies, and community attributes. These insights were further reinforced during Pitchfest, our annual housing focused startup competition, where representatives from across the residential construction value chain selected Rainstick Shower as the audience favorite and Mimic Systems as the Judge’s Choice. It’s our belief that we’ll continue to experience a growing interest in wellness centric solutions and technologies. For housing providers, the biggest wins will come through partnerships to minimize the total cost of incorporating these solutions while streamlining consumer interaction with new products and technologies to achieve their desired lifestyle benefits.

Innovation is a growing focus with the largest builders.

Through our work with Ivory Innovations and ProBuilder, we identified that 25% of 2024 Housing Giants have a dedicated department to lead and coordinate innovation efforts. We learned the balance of innovation and risk is determined by practical, effective solutions that can be implemented while keeping business performance strong. A lasting approach to innovation adoption not only helps drive goals around quality, speed, and cost but fulfills a larger mission. As you develop your strategy for 2025, prioritize solutions with noticeable impact in context of the effort it takes to implement and reinforce the deeper strategic why. Small innovations work best when an operation is culturally willing to fail forward for the sake of applying those learnings to a greater purpose, such as playing ahead of energy and environmental regulations, addressing climate change, and appealing to consumer demand or preferences outside the norm.

Builders indicated they want to build faster, reduce costs, get ahead of code changes, and respond to the evolving consumer purchase motivators. According to interviews and survey feedback, most efforts for 2025 will focus on business software, digital sales and marketing tools, connected homes, and platforms for digital construction documentation and submittals. With the expectation that digital design tools, alternative materials, and offsite construction solutions take a more prominent role in 2026-2027.