[Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of The Builder’s Daily analyses leading up to the HousingWire Homebuilder Summit, Oct. 19–21 in Dallas. Each installment will look closely at homebuilding leaders, companies and operating models finding ways to keep moving forward through a market that continues to test margins, affordability, capital discipline and execution. The series will explore the playbooks, decisions and leadership approaches that make a homebuilding business tough enough for what comes next – and bring many of those same operators and ideas into the conversation at the Summit.]
Michael Bergman sounded almost out of breath one afternoon just before Labor Day, but it wasn’t because he’d just run up nine flights of stairs.
Listen for a few moments to the youngish first-year CEO of a homebuilding startup that Michael helped co-found almost five years ago this week, and you’ll then clearly recognize why he’s breathless.
He’s giddy with purpose, with all-in, sweating-the-details passion, with grit and the ineffable gratification that goes with it.
One can safely say, in housing’s topsy-turvy, gravity-bending, pell-mell world of September 2026, Michael Bergman is having a blast.
The good news for the American economy, and for its chronic undersupply of homes and neighborhoods for people to live in, is that Michael Bergman and his team at National Home Corp. are the private homebuilding version of Everyman.
New-home demand is there, but it is on indefinite hold. Affordability remains punishing. Incentives are taking a sledgehammer to margins. Finished inventory, carrying costs and land exposure are forcing builders, large and small, to make increasingly difficult choices about pace, price and capital.
National Home Corp., from Day One the contrarian outlier, is pushing harder.
The Jurney map
The entry-level homebuilder co-founded by Wade Jurney, Bergman and Gregg Erickson in October 2021 is pacing to close more than 800 homes this year, up from 550 in 2025. Bergman wants to exit the year with roughly 1,200 homes under construction, creating production capacity and what he calls “actives” subdivisions for 1,500 to 1,800 closings in 2027 if market conditions and NHC’s own operational capacity cooperate.
“We’re still exceeding and growing at the same time,” Bergman told me in a one-to-one conversation last week.
Five years in, National Home Corp. still feels like a startup to Bergman. After moving into the CEO and president role in late 2025, as Jurney shifted to executive chairman, Bergman spends three or four days each week on the road. Another reason he sounds out of breath. He’s running like hell.
He has immersed himself in land, finance, purchasing, construction, sales, and marketing. For now, the leadership model resembles the family businesses Bergman grew up around in North Carolina: If the trash needs taking out, you take it out. If you’re the last one there, you turn off the lights.
And through all of it, Bergman keeps coming back to two words.
“The playbook.”
It is the operating model Jurney developed over decades of building homes for entry-level buyers, including through Wade Jurney Homes, the company he built through and beyond the Global Financial Crisis and ultimately sold to Century Communities.
It starts with an idea much of conventional homebuilding has gradually come to regard as somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible: Figure out what a working household can afford to pay for a new home, and build a durable business backward from there.
Finished lots. Standardized plans. Spec construction. Few choices. Relentless purchasing discipline. Low overhead. Fast inventory turns. Capital exposed for as little time as possible. Pace over margin, provided the pace still produces an acceptable return.
The logic echoes one of management thinker Peter Drucker’s most enduring principles: The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.
For Jurney and now Bergman, the household comes first in the equation. The home, lot, construction process, capital model, and organization have to bend all cost curves toward a price the customer can actually pay.
Why is National Home Corp.’s five-year mark worth paying attention to now?
The playbook isn’t being tested with a housing-cycle tailwind. Just like the first Wade Jurney start-up, it’s being tested against the headwinds of languor and uncertainty.
A five-year scorecard
Bergman’s numbers tell a story with enough fits and starts to make the trajectory more meaningful.
National Home Corp. closed 25 homes in 2022, its first full year of operation. Closings jumped to 304 the following year and then 747. In 2025, amid deteriorating market conditions, the company went backward, closing 550.
This year, Bergman expects to get back above 800.
More important to him right now is what is entering the production machine.
Bergman stepped deeply into operations in mid-2025 and formally took the CEO role at the beginning of this year. He described the initial phase under his leadership in two words: “stability and immersion.”
By the end of the first quarter, NHC had started 23 more homes than planned, generated 100 net sales above plan and finished slightly ahead of its closing target. During the second quarter, the company put another 107 starts above plan into production and finished the first half with 23 more closings than its business plan.
Now Bergman is focused intently on getting approximately 1,200 homes into active construction by year-end.
At a conservative 1.5 inventory turn, that would theoretically support 1,800 closings in 2027. Bergman quickly acknowledges that the market and the operational demands of scaling the organization could bring the actual number closer to 1,500.
Either outcome would represent another sharp step up.
“Going from 550 to this year 800, then 800 to 1,500, that is quite a substantial jump,” Bergman said. “You have to break through different barriers of operation with your leadership and your management team.”
The operative word there may be operation. Because nothing Bergman describes about National Home Corp.’s current trajectory sounds much like growth for growth’s sake.
What the playbook actually does
Homebuilding sometimes leans toward making an operating model sound more complicated as the organization grows. Bergman goes the other direction.
“We’re just disciplined on the blocking and tackling,” he said.
National Home Corp. buys finished lots. It builds the same floor plans repeatedly. It purchases the same concrete, windows, doors and roofing materials. Its homes are 100% spec. Buyers don’t navigate long menus of upgrades and options. Exterior colors and elevations vary, as do some community-specific architectural requirements, but the production system is deliberately repetitive.
“We’re doing everything just fundamentally disciplined over and over and over again,” Bergman said.
The operative term, repetition, is where the capital model and affordability model meet, and it’s where the “flywheel” of learning, constant improvement and the ability to focus more fully on customers starts to gain momentum.
Every unnecessary day a home remains in production costs money. Every added SKU introduces complexity. Every option creates another decision, purchasing variable or opportunity for error. Every dollar of land carried longer than necessary requires capital. Every layer of overhead ultimately has to be paid for by somebody.
At National Home Corp., that somebody eventually becomes the homebuyer.
So the work of keeping a home within reach begins long before a salesperson meets a customer.
That philosophy also explains why NHC’s preference for pace over margin shouldn’t be confused with indifference to margin.
Bergman says the company aligned with the pace-over-margin approach that Lennar emphasized earlier this year. But the ability to accept a lower gross margin depends on everything that happens before the sale.
“If you are disciplined in your purchasing and your cost and your business model that we have, you can still harvest an acceptable margin, a business plan margin,” he said.
In July, Bergman said NHC generated an approximately 18% gross margin while maintaining business-plan overhead and producing what he characterized as a business-plan pretax net margin.
The company closed 70 homes that month, exactly on plan.
It started 93, against a plan of 86.
Here we are in a market where builders have increasingly been forced to choose among protecting margins, maintaining pace and managing inventory risk. NHC’s bet is that rigorous control of the cost basis, limited land exposure and velocity give it room to keep pushing product through the system without surrendering the economics that allow the business to keep doing so.
Start with the customer
To understand Jurney’s playbook, set the business model, its processes, and its requirements aside and focus on the first principle. Start at the opposite end of the income statement.
Start with the customer.
Drucker’s formulation that the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer can sound almost self-evident until the economics of an industry make that increasingly difficult to do.
Homebuilding has reached precisely that point.
Land prices, development costs, materials, labor, regulation, financing costs, and mortgage rates have progressively raised the threshold at which a household can afford to buy a newly built home. Builders can offset some of those costs through incentives and mortgage-rate buydowns. They can shrink homes and value-engineer specifications.
Eventually, however, the question becomes more fundamental.
Can the entire business be designed around producing a house at a price a working household can actually afford?
Jurney’s answer has been yes. But Wade’s answer is not everybody’s answer. It will only pencil out if affordability governs decisions from this point forward.
That philosophy reaches back to Wade Jurney Homes, the business Jurney launched into one of the most punishing housing environments in modern housing history, and ultimately sold to Century Communities. The lesson he carried forward wasn’t that inexpensive homes require inexpensive thinking.
Quite the opposite.
They require discipline everywhere.
Jurney made that point again earlier this year during a HousingWire discussion on housing affordability. Small decisions compound. Square footage matters. Ceiling heights matter. Windows matter. Product standardization matters. Construction time matters. Lot cost matters.
For a household near the edge of mortgage qualification, costs that appear immaterial inside a homebuilder’s broader financial statement can determine whether that household becomes a customer at all.
That is what gives NHC’s “playbook” a purpose beyond operating efficiency.
It is designed to keep that customer not only in the game, but at the very center of it.
The people who row the boat
Bergman’s job now is figuring out how to scale a model whose simplicity requires exacting execution. That has taken him deeper into the organization, a domain he’s both well familiar with and revels in.
“I come from a family business out of North Carolina where, you know, you take the trash out if you have to, and you close the lights down at nighttime when you leave,” he said. “And what happened that day is what you made happen.”
Since stepping into the top operating role, Bergman has immersed himself in what he calls every “nook and cranny” of the company – land, accounting and finance, purchasing, sales and marketing – partly to understand what leadership structure NHC will eventually require at a much larger scale.
His goal, he said, is to “backward engineer the right leaders to put into place to run it at a scalable level.”
For now, however, the organizational preference is unmistakable. NHC wants more rowers.
“We’re really leaning on scaling out to people who are able to do the work more so than people who manage or sit there as an executive and not be in the boat rowing with the team,” Bergman said.
Chief Operating Officer John Hayes, who previously worked with Jurney, is deeply involved in purchasing and operations as the company works to keep costs aligned with a declining market. Bergman remains deeply involved in the details with him.
It isn’t an organizational model Bergman believes can remain this hands-on indefinitely. At some point, 1,200 active homes and potentially 1,500 or more annual closings will require additional management capacity, systems and delegation.
But Bergman sees value in building those capabilities now, when mistakes get exposed quickly.
“We’re using this tough market to understand why is it tough and how do we put processes and how do we do things better to safeguard against times like this,” he said. “If we can succeed in these tough times … we’re going to be really strong when we come out the backside and catch a tailwind.”
Don’t fix what isn’t broken
That same thinking offers an interesting counterpoint to the homebuilding industry’s current rush toward artificial intelligence and more sophisticated data systems.
National Home Corp. isn’t rushing.
Bergman sees many places where AI could eventually reduce the granular work his team currently performs. The company has audited its financials, implemented closed-loop purchase-order systems, and adopted Constellation HomeBuilder Systems software, and recently brought in a team member to start turning its data into more useful Microsoft Power BI reports.
But implementing technology for its own sake isn’t currently the priority.
“We’ve been so busy trying to process what we’ve stuffed in the front end of this production machine that we haven’t had time to explore these creative things,” Bergman said.
His shorthand for the moment: “Right now, it’s not broke. Don’t fix it.”
First, get the 1,200 homes into production. Then ensure the organization can process what it has started. Finally, introduce tools that improve analysis and give people time back. For a company built around stripping complexity out of homebuilding, that restraint is entirely consistent with the playbook.
Tough enough
There’s a danger in reading too much into the success of any one builder at any one moment in the housing cycle.
National Home Corp.’s model isn’t a one-size-fits-all prescription for every homebuilding company. Its entry-level customer, finished-lot strategy, standardized product, geographic footprint and capital structure create their own opportunities and risks.
Nor is its 2027 growth target guaranteed. Bergman himself repeatedly qualifies it by market conditions and the considerable organizational work required to scale.
The homebuilding businesses worth watching through the next phase of this cycle aren’t necessarily the ones with a formula everybody else can copy. They’re the ones that know precisely who they are and who they want to be.
Across the country, privately held homebuilders have developed different versions of that knowledge. Their advantages may come from land relationships built over generations, trade partnerships, local market knowledge, purchasing power, construction velocity, customer trust, capital relationships, or the ability to see opportunities in submarkets that larger competitors overlook.
The playbooks differ, as do the capital underpinnings, access to off-market lots, strong relationships with high-quality trades, the ins with local municipal officials, and the myriad intangible competitive advantages that come with the turf. What’s the same, though, is the underlying discipline.
What’s also the same across this patchwork quilt of amazing private homebuilding operators in urban, suburban and rural America is something harder to capture in a spreadsheet: the peculiar fire that drives homebuilding entrepreneurs to keep finding another lot, another cost reduction, another buyer and another way forward in markets that periodically give them every reason to stop.
Bergman doesn’t sound like one who’s grinding through that part of the job.
“You know what? I’m having a blast,” he told me near the end of our conversation. “I love this. I’m very grateful that I was able to learn all that I have from Wade. This playbook is fantastic that we’re doing.”
Then he went further.
“We want to be a household name for the entry-level product across the country. I’m obsessed with this. I’m in it. I’m immersed in it.”
People running homebuilding businesses still seem to get a rush from figuring out how to make the next affordable home work. They love hard problems. And they love what happens in the homes and neighborhoods they help bring to life. They’re homebuilding’s Everyman.
