Editor’s note: This installment of Built for This is part of HousingWire’s ongoing examination of homebuilding leaders and companies improving their businesses in a housing market that offers little outside help. View Homes CEO Natasha Gandhi will join Signature Homes chairman Dwight Sandlin and National HomeCorp executive chairman Wade Jurney on the CEO Power Panel at the HousingWire Homebuilder Summit, Oct. 19–21 in Dallas.
Homebuilders can’t choose the right moment to overhaul a business.
There is no pit stop to suspend sales, construction, land development and customer commitments while a new CEO replaces leaders, redraws accountabilities, standardizes operating practices, modernizes technology and decides which assets belong in the company’s future.
Natasha Gandhi knew much of that work would be necessary when she became View Homes’ CEO in March. Six months into the job, with new-home demand still soft and affordability constraining buyers across much of the country, Gandhi has reached a perhaps counterintuitive conclusion about timing.
She would rather do it now.
“I would have had to do this either way: good market, great market, bad market,” Gandhi told me. “I’d rather do it now, John, when the market is soft and the sales are slower than in a busier time, when we are missing out on opportunity.”
In other words, View Homes isn’t treating the downturn as a period to merely endure. Gandhi is using it as a window and a launching pad to remake the organization so that, when stronger demand eventually returns, the company can handle substantially more business than its current operating model was designed to support.
Gandhi’s conviction about timing syncs with a theme we’ve been exploring throughout this Built for This series: Homebuilders have limited control over mortgage rates, consumer confidence, material costs, land prices or the direction of the economy.
Where they do have agency is in the organization they intend to use to operate under those conditions, come what may. For Gandhi, that means working on the organization and its culture of capability and smart systems now.
From family enterprise to scalable builder
View Homes isn’t a turnaround in the conventional sense. The company has built homes for 35 years and was once ranked among the nation’s 35 largest builders. Hunt Companies acquired full ownership last October, and it aims to develop View into a larger regional homebuilding enterprise. Gandhi, whose career includes leadership roles at Pulte Homes/Del Webb, Century Communities, and Richmond American Homes, was recruited through a nationwide CEO search to lead the next stage.
What she inherited, however, was still, in important respects, structured as a loose confederation of entrepreneurial franchises, like the family-owned enterprise it had been.
“The company has been very successful over the 35 years,” Gandhi says. “There’s definitely a good foundation and bones to the organization. It’s just not set up to go to the next level.”
Her playbook starts with accountability and consistency. Different divisions had developed distinct ways of operating. Reporting was inadequate. Gandhi questioned the integrity of some data available to managers. Enterprise technology had not received the investment needed to support the scale the Hunt team and Gandhi envisioned.
Her description of View’s current stage is straightforward: stabilization. That has meant rebuilding corporate leadership and making changes among division leaders, middle managers, and field-level employees. It means establishing common processes where independent practices had accumulated over time. And it means defining more clearly who owns an outcome and how performance will be measured.
“It’s actually all levels,” Gandhi says of the leadership work. “I’ve put together a new corporate team in place.”
A company aspiring to grow across multiple markets doesn’t standardize for its own sake; it needs enough common operating discipline so that five divisions don’t effectively behave like five unrelated builders.
At the same time, Gandhi doesn’t want to remove the local judgment a regional builder needs. Her description is closer to setting boundaries around that judgment: establish the rules of the operating system, then allow people to move quickly within them.
That distinction is showing up in something as immediate as selling homes. Previously, Gandhi says, salespeople could receive a pool of incentives and exercise substantial discretion in how they used them, without sufficient visibility into the resulting margin impact. The transformational pivot is toward a more structured process in which the buyer situation, competitive context and proposed offer are understood before management approves a concession.
There are constraints inside the box, Gandhi says, but people can still be “flexible and nimble within it.” That’s what scalable operating discipline typically looks like in practice. The objective isn’t to eliminate decisions. It is to improve their quality and consistency.
Use the weak market
There is irony in trying to do all this now. Changing leaders, systems and expectations is difficult enough in a healthy market. View is doing it while builders are fighting harder for sales and managing margins more aggressively. Gandhi sees an advantage in precisely that.
A booming market would place a different kind of pressure on the organization. Every deficiency in the operating platform could become an opportunity cost as sales accelerated. The company could have more business than its systems and people were prepared to handle.
“I think this is the perfect time for us to rebuild this organization because of the market conditions and to be ready when the market is ready to come back,” Gandhi says. “If we were in a booming market, we would be losing significant market share across all our markets because we’re not positioned for that next level of success.”
The softer labor market has created another opening. Gandhi says View has been able to recruit experienced people who might have had many more alternatives during a stronger housing cycle.
Hunt’s ownership also changes the equation. View remains a private regional builder, but it operates within a much larger real estate enterprise whose investment horizon extends beyond the next quarter or the selling season. Gandhi describes Hunt’s capital as patient and View’s view of housing as long term.
“Their only guidance and recommendation is that when the market is back, you’d better be ready,” she says. Patient capital can buy time. It doesn’t pretend to be a substitute for using that time well. That is the assignment Gandhi has taken on.
Clean up yesterday while underwriting tomorrow
Remaking an organization doesn’t relieve View Homes of the economics already sitting on its balance sheet. Gandhi says the company has legacy assets that it knows are unlikely to generate attractive long-term returns. She directs the executive team to work through them apace, rather than protect an aspirational margin while finished homes incur carrying costs. That may mean accepting lower margins on some homes and losses on others.
“We’re not saying we want to give it away,” Gandhi says. “We’re not saying we want to do a fire sale, but there’s a fine, happy medium.” View doesn’t intend to replace yesterday’s questionable investments with tomorrow’s.
“We are being very selective and very strategic in the investments that we’re going to make,” Gandhi says. “We’re not just buying land to buy land to fill a pipeline because we don’t need to do that.”
New land has to perform as an investment even if market conditions deteriorate further. That separation between legacy assets and new investment discipline matters. One of the easiest mistakes in a downturn is allowing the need to solve an old problem to distort the next decision.
View is trying to clear what needs clearing while raising the standard for what comes next. The same review is occurring in product. Gandhi and her team reviewed View’s plan library to identify where the company generates revenue and where it doesn’t. First-time buyers will remain important in markets where that is the natural customer base, but View also sees opportunities to reach move-up and second-move-up buyers, particularly in Colorado. The company has been collaborating with architects on new product series for future communities.
The operating overhaul, land strategy and product strategy therefore converge around the same question: Who are you, as a company? What do you want to be? Specifically, what business does View want to be ready to scale?
Rebuilding the guts
Technology is another part of the answer, although Gandhi is deliberately resisting the urge to buy the latest solution and call it transformation. View is evaluating its entire technology environment, including CRM, financial systems, and the broader enterprise stack. Gandhi says the current technology does not adequately support the company’s expected growth.
Rather than rushing into a replacement, the company is conducting a diagnostic of what it has, what it needs, and how the pieces should fit together. Once the stack is finalized, Gandhi expects implementation to take 12 to 18 months.
“We are taking our time to do a full-on diagnostic of where we currently are, where we want to go,” she says..
If View begins a 12-to-18-month systems implementation in today’s weaker market, much of that work could be in place around the time Gandhi wants the company ready to accelerate. AI is part of the planning as well. Gandhi wants the enterprise systems View Homes selects today to accommodate AI capabilities as they mature. But AI isn’t the organizing principle of the overhaul.
Technology has to support clearer business accountability, better information and repeatable processes already being designed into the company. Otherwise, a builder can spend heavily to automate inconsistency.
Never leave the basics
Gandhi has spent more than two decades in homebuilding, and she pushes back on a phrase that resurfaces whenever the industry gets difficult. Back to basics.
“I don’t think we should ever leave the basics,” she says. “I don’t think we should deviate from the basics.”
Good markets make that easier to forget. Rising prices and abundant demand can cover process deficiencies, sloppy decisions and costs that would become painfully visible in a tougher environment.
“When the market is really good, human tendency is to deviate from the basics,” Gandhi says. “We start cutting corners.”
Her answer at View is that it is a results-based culture built around people who understand the business, accept accountability, and want to grow it.
There is a useful contrast here with fellow HousingWire Homebuilder Summit CEO panelist Dwight Sandlin. At Signature Homes, Sandlin can point to an operating system refined over decades: customer research, real-time information, construction velocity, cost controls, product discipline and accountability. Signature’s 100-day construction cycle, for example, is the accumulated result of repeatedly measuring and improving how the company builds.
Gandhi is starting from a different place. She is taking a successful 35-year-old entrepreneurial builder and deliberately installing more of the organizational infrastructure needed to make the next stage possible.
The Signature Homes case shows what long-developed operating discipline can produce. The View Homes example shows what it takes to build more of it while the company is still moving.
“Change in itself is hard,” she says, particularly in a difficult market. “It comes with a lot of uncertainty.”
But waiting for uncertainty to disappear would defeat the purpose.
