Author: Will Keenan

[…] The combination of increasing returns at scale, with a secular tailwind of new household formation working with an aging housing stock, leads us to believe we have entered a new era of the supermajor in US homebuilding. Like the emergence of Exxon and Chevron as supermajors, first coined by Morgan Stanley analyst Doug Terreson in 1998, we believe that D.R. Horton and Lennar will be at the forefront of homebuilding consolidation in the United States – an industry which we believe today more closely resembles a manufacturing business, as opposed to a real estate business.

[…] Like the current era, the late nineteenth-century American investment landscape offered tantalizing new technologies – from mechanical typesetters to the light bulb – but lacked the safeguards and information networks today’s investors take for granted. Examining Mark Twain’s forays in investing highlights a fact of life that we often discuss at Smead Capital Management: excellence in one field does not necessarily translate into another. […]