229 Advocating for Housing Affordability - David Belman Aug 7 2024

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello, everybody, and welcome to today's episode of The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And we are excited to have joining us on the show today, David Belman. David is the president at Belman Homes. Thanks for being with us today.

David Belman: Hey, thanks for having me on, guys. Appreciate it.

Greg Bray: Well, David, let's start off and just help people get to know a little bit about you. Give us that quick background overview about yourself.

David Belman: Sure. So, I'm a second-generation homebuilder, grew up in the business. And when I say I grew up in the business, it was literally in the basement of our [00:01:00] house. I would hear the conversations at the dinner table and literally grew up in the industry. One of my favorite stories was when I was nine years old, with my dad.

It was a Saturday morning and I just wanted to do something fun with him. And sitting at the kitchen table, reading his newspaper. And I walked in and said something to get his attention and it was not a nice word. Got his attention. And I found myself shortly thereafter at a job site with a broom and a shovel. He said, start at the top and work your way to the bottom. And he left me there at nine years old.

So, think about this day and age and how we are with our kids and how things were back then, a little different. But I cleaned out the house and I got paid to do it, and I learned some valuable lessons that day, but I liked that check. I thought the business was interesting and just stayed with it and continued to work for my dad and in the family business and did all the crappy jobs early on.

And then, when I went to graduate high school, I got my real estate license. And then, while I was in college, I was selling houses full-time while going to college. So, it was an interesting career path. But the one thing I'll say about it is I graduated college, [00:02:00] I had no debt and I was already building my house.

Kevin Weitzel: That's always good. And you know, only if the corporate ladder could mimic house sweeping pathway, start at the top and then, you know, work your way to the bottom, cause that would be so much easier than this whole start at the bottom, work your way to the top.

David Belman: Yeah. I wish it was that easy, but I definitely had to start from the bottom in the business and work my way all the way to the top, and that was the best thing ever because just taught me the hard work. It taught me the discipline. I learned a lot of the different functions in the company. It made me a better business owner at the end of the day.

Kevin Weitzel: Absolutely. I'm a firm believer in that. Okay. So, before we get into a little bit more of that deep dive, let's find out something personal about you that has nothing to do with work, the home building industry, anything else.

David Belman: All right. Something that maybe you don't know. I actually play a lot of pickup basketball. So, every Tuesday a group of us guys go and play. I'm the oldest guy there actually now. So, I'm playing with guys that are 15 years younger than me, and I still can hang with them, although it's getting harder. So, I enjoy that. That's my [00:03:00] exercise. That's my stress relief for the week. I'm all of 5'6, so that's always a challenge too.

Greg Bray: About a year ago, I went and played with a couple of my teenage sons and their friends and things. And it didn't go well for me, so.

David Belman: The COVID break where we didn't play for like, probably 13 months when you're older, that was really tough to come back from because when you don't do something for that long, and then you try and get back into it. I still don't feel like I'm a hundred percent back to where I was before that.

Kevin Weitzel: You know, Philip Seymour Hoffman, he's a world-famous actor. He's deceased now, but he was actually kind of made into the character after the way I played basketball in Along Came Polly. His whole role in that movie was based off of my basketball abilities.

David Belman: He was hilarious in that. Yeah, he's throwing the ball over his head and bouncing off the backboard. That was a good portrayal.

Greg Bray: Well, David, tell us a little bit more about Belman Homes. What areas do you guys serve? What type of buyer and product are you putting out there?

David Belman: Sure. So, we're a semi-custom home builder. [00:04:00] We also do land development and real estate. So, we like to say that we're an all-in-one company. We do focus more on kind of the upper mid to upper echelon of homes. We also do full custom homes as well. So, we just completed a really nice lake home that we won a statewide award for. So, we do do that. We've adapted to do more custom homes lately. Just the way the market has been.

But we also do a lot of our own home and lot packages in our own developments. We also have condos that we do. So, we're doing a lot more of like the single-family condos and the side-by-side. And that's, you know, obviously a lot of demand in our market. We have a lot of aging populace in the market that needs those homes that don't have the steps, less maintenance in them, those kinds of things.

Greg Bray: Well, David, one of the reasons we wanted to get you on today is because we have seen a lot of your content you've been putting out around affordability over the last little bit. And this is a topic that Kevin and I have touched on a little bit in some of our other episodes, but it felt like [00:05:00] now might be a really good time to kind of amplify that discussion. What has gotten you passionate about affordability and why are you trying to take your time away from your business day to day and spend time on this topic and outreach and being a warning sound, I guess, if nothing else?

David Belman: Yeah, I'm trying to bang the drum because it's just gotten out of hand. You know, I worry because I have a daughter, she's 17. She actually is working part-time for me a little bit here during the summer. And I worry about how is she going to be able to afford a home. How is she going to be able to do these kinds of things? I've been very active for a while as a member of the builders association, so the local state and now the national. And so, I'm seeing some of this stuff. I'm seeing some of the data.

The big kind of mind-blowing moment for me was when I started comparing income versus average housing costs. I was at the builders association and they had a library there and they were getting rid of it. They're moving. And there was this book on the shelf. And one of the people handed it to me and it said how to [00:06:00] build a brand new home for $9,700. And it was written in 1950. And I was like, I was laughing. I was like, this is ridiculous. How could you do this?

I read the book, and then I started doing this research. And I looked back in the 1950s. You had one person working, right? Think of Leave It to Beaver and that family. That encapsulated that era, right? One family, one person working made $4,700 and you could buy a new home for $9,400. So, twice your income, you could buy a brand new home.

Today it's somewhere between nine and 10 times your average income. It's a really unsustainable path. There's a lot of things wrong with that. There's obviously supply and demand issues and regulation and all sorts of different things. But the bottom line is housing has become very unaffordable. And as much as we want to pin the millennials on not wanting to own homes, I don't think that's true. I think they do want to own homes. I just don't think they can afford them.

Greg Bray: So, then when you step back and look at that and go, gosh, there's 20 different reasons why these prices [00:07:00] have gone up, is there one smoking gun that jumps out at you or is it just a whole bunch of small things that all add up together?

David Belman: Well, there is one big part of it. So, I've actually been working on a book or a manual on how to drive housing costs down, but one of the big costs is just regulation. I hate to make it sound like I'm trying to blame the government on it, but according to a recent study, the cost of local, state, and federal regulations on a brand new home, one home, is $93,870.

Put that in context. Go to a Chevy dealer right now and look up a brand-new Corvette. They're around 93,000 before they put their markup on it. So, every time you build a home, that's how much goes to the government is the cost of a Corvette.

Greg Bray: And that's probably very different from region to region, I'm guessing too. You know, you're kind of averaging a national average.

David Belman: Yeah, it's a national average. You know, in my state, that's probably pretty close. Now you go to California and that number is even worse. It's probably close to $600,000. So, [00:08:00] yeah, it's different in all different places, but that's still a quarter of the cost of a home. It's not sustainable.

Kevin Weitzel: David, just mathematics-wise, as the price of the home rises, so do those fees, because they're all commensurate with the cost of the home, correct?

David Belman: I would say many of them are. I don't have an exact breakdown on each one. I can tell you that about two-thirds of that cost goes on the land development side, so that's a big part of it. There are some things too that we get caught in as a builder and developer, and sometimes you have elected officials that will go, well, we're going to make this change, but it doesn't add any cost to your project.

But that's where they're wrong because you either have to go back and have it re-engineered or redesigned. There's a cost there. Then there's the delay from when you could have everything. They even said out of that $93,000, like $1,500 of that is just delays during design process and development process. So, everything costs money.

And when you add $1,000 to the cost of a home, here in Wisconsin takes out 4,300 people [00:09:00] from being able to afford that home. So, nationally, it's like 150,000 people. So, every $1,000 takes buyers out of the market. A lot of the stuff that we're trying to do now, it's just, you know, hey, we want to save energy want to be more energy efficient. That's great, but the payback is so much longer. The law of diminishing returns comes into this equation.

So, like when you already have a 96 percent efficient furnace, the amount of money and effort it takes to get it to 97 percent really doesn't pay off the benefit, right? We've designed these things as efficiently as possible. So, instead of putting all the burden on a new home, let's start looking back at some of these older homes and just correcting some simple things on them, and you're going to save a lot more energy doing that than to try and put the whole burden on a new house.

Greg Bray: David, as a builder, and don't necessarily want to put you on the spot here, but are these regulations fair? I mean, it's expensive, but are we being unfair? Like, gosh, we're demanding things and we're trying to get the builders to pay for the infrastructure that really should be paid for by somebody else? Or [00:10:00] is it because we can't trust builders to do it if we don't regulate them, you know, and do it right?

David Belman: Yeah. I mean, fairness is in the eye of the beholder, right? But one of the things that I would say you can easily question for fairness is impact fees because those are a one-time fee that you pay when you build a home. Those are unfortunately all put on new homes. Those have skyrocketed in the past few years. So we're seeing places where it's almost $20,000 in impact fees. So, that's a one-time fee before you even put a shovel in the ground. You're paying for the fire department, police department, sewer and water, parks, libraries, all sorts of pet projects from the municipality.

The problem is new homes already pay for themselves for many years beyond even when they're built. And so, they're kind of putting the burden on a new home to fix the problems of the past. That's one of the big things. And a lot of municipalities aren't even managing the impact fees properly.

So, we've actually started to open up some lawsuits here in Wisconsin, where we found municipalities have not [00:11:00] used the money, or they put the money in a general account and then spending it when it's supposed to be in a segregated account. If they don't use it after seven years, they're supposed to return it. So, there's all sorts of problems with this, and that's just one of the small things.

So, if you talk about fairness, I think that's an area where you could have a very substantial conversation about fairness. Now, other things, when you start talking about climate and impacting other people, that's a gray area because everybody's gonna have a different opinion on that. But I think impact fees is one that new homes are unfairly targeted with those.

Greg Bray: So, from a builder's perspective, is part of this that we have created big ginormous homes, and made that kind of the societal standard? When you look at some other countries and things, people live in very different types of environments and home sizes from what, at least in my perspective, what the typical American dream home kind of looks like and kind of the expectation is. Is that just something as a [00:12:00] society that we've perpetuated and we've kind of brought this on ourselves?

David Belman: Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, we live in the land of the Big Mac, right? I mean, the Whopper and the Baconator, all these, you know, big foods, right? And we have big homes and big cars. We've perpetuated that, and where, especially with social media that hasn't helped at all. You know, everyone wants an Instagram-worthy kitchen. They want their thing to be featured on Pinterest. That certainly plays into it, but there are other factors as well.

Take, for example, most areas around the country, you have a minimum building size. So, your municipality is going to say, you know, the minimum size house you can build is say 1500 square feet, which I have around by me. Now you go down to Houston, Texas, and it's very different. Houston, Texas, they do maximum lot sizes. So they say, you know what? We're only going to give you three lot sizes. You get a 45-foot wide, a 55-foot wide, and a 65-foot wide lot, and you got to make it work. That has helped drive some of the costs down. And so, sometimes it's just simple things like that can definitely change things.

But, you know, we are glorified for creating a dream kitchen and putting all the fancy quartz and [00:13:00] granite in it and the expensive appliances and all those kinds of things. That younger buyer wants to be able to showcase their home on social media and show off to their friends. I think you get a lot more clicks if you got a show-stopping kitchen versus, you know, a little tiny house or something that you're trying to live in.

Greg Bray: When we start to look at the actual product, you mentioned that you're doing some higher-end custom homes, but also some more attached townhomes. Is that an effort specifically to provide for a different buyer demographic or what kind of drives that breadth of offering that you're doing?

David Belman: Yeah. So, the side-by-side townhomes and condos, it's really more for the aging demographic, a lot of the boomers that are retiring. Now they do have the financial wherewithal to afford a new home. So, it's smart for us to do that, so to speak. We are working on a new subdivision that we have. We have some land that we've targeted that we're going to be putting in higher-density homes and smaller houses, trying to leverage technology. They're definitely not going to look like the typical homes that I build.

[00:14:00] Unfortunately, we're not really going to be launching that product for another, probably two years yet, but we're working towards that. I think that'll be a good test case for how to do development. But you gotta have a municipality that's willing to play ball with you on it.

I have one that I think wants the density part, but they don't get the regulation part. So, it's going to be challenging because they're going to be like, yeah, put these homes close together and build smaller homes. We love it. And then they're gonna be like, Oh yeah, and here's our 250-page manual on how to build a road. Have fun.

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. This is Greg from Blue Tangerine. And I just wanted to personally invite you to join Kevin and me at the upcoming Home Builder Digital Marketing Summit. It's going to be October 23rd and 24th in Raleigh, North Carolina. You do not want to miss this. We're going to have marketing education. We're going to have online sales counselor education. We're going to have networking, round table discussions, and of course, a whole lot of fun. So, make sure you get registered today and join us. You can get all the details at buildermarketingsummit.com. Can't wait to see you there.

[00:15:00] Well, David, there's some people I hear out there that are blaming interest rates for all the affordability problems. Is that a legit argument as well? I mean, obviously higher interest rates increase monthly payments and things for folks who are financing, but is it really fair to blame interest rates for affordability?

David Belman: Well, I mean, it's all part of the equation, right? Because they're very seldom are people that just can go out and pay full cash for a home, you're going to have to finance. I've seen a lot of posts and data, you know, I think it's like a $400,000 house. It was like $1,700 a month. And now, it's like, $2,900 a month, right? So, you have 1,100, 1,200 more a month going just to the cost of your living expense. That's going to hurt affordability.

The rise in the interest rates has not hampered the housing market like they thought it would. Average home sale prices have continued to climb like 10 percent per year and we're still selling similar numbers of homes. That hasn't [00:16:00] slowed it down because we don't have enough houses on the market. The big problem we have in the market is we're just not building enough of the smaller stuff in the lower price point. And quite frankly, a new home is almost a hundred thousand dollars more than an existing home, from day one. And so, it's really hard to fill that need in the market with new construction.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, change doesn't happen until pain usually occurs. As long as we have a shortfall of homes that are available and we have enough people that are able to make the purchases actually happen instead of just vaporizing into thin air, the home builders don't have a motivation to want to change or need to change. They don't need to make smaller footprint homes because as long as people can step up to the plate and pay for them, why would they need to make the change?

David Belman: Yeah, I mean, that's a fair point. We get caught in habits and, you know, as a builder, we're kind of risk-averse. Most builders are. So, for someone to be like, Hey, I'm going to start building houses half the size and make this product that's completely different in the market, that's a huge risk. And so, that's not for everybody. But it takes [00:17:00] two to tango. And a lot of times the challenge isn't necessarily are the builders willing to do it. I think you'd find a lot of builders that are willing to build smaller homes if you can show them like, Hey, you're still going to make a decent margin on this. You're going to sell them faster and get them done quicker.

There's a really good argument there to do that, but you need a municipality that's willing to help you along the way and make sure to approve the project and support it, and then also appease your NIMBY neighbors that, you know, are like, Hey, my house is, you 2500 square feet. Now you're putting 1700 square foot houses next to me. Um, I don't like that.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, speaking of regulations, isn't it crazy that the single-family home building world has to adhere to this set of rules that you have to have this amount of lot size, this type of home, this many elevations, this many colors combinations that you're allowed to put on these homes. Yet you can go build a 300-unit apartment complex that all of them are the same. They're all just craptastic. And yet they have completely different rules and regulations that apply to [00:18:00] them, and they usually don't have to put in the same kind of funds that a single-family home community would have to put up in impact fees to create schools and infrastructure

David Belman: Well, and again, it's part of it's the municipalities rewarded in that case, because they see that density and they're like, okay, yeah, you're putting a 50-unit apartment building on a couple acres and they're seeing like the tax dollars and going, Hey, we're going to get 400,000 a year in taxes on this. Where you build a couple of houses here. We get four grand a piece for. So, maybe they're not as motivated because there's not as much tax dollar there.

But the problem is for housing to work, you have to have housing at all levels. That means smaller homes, bigger homes, and homes for every phase of people's lives. You know, unfortunately, we're just kind of building a lot of the same stuff. You know, I've had to adapt, like I mentioned earlier, right? I'm building some higher-end custom homes because if I didn't do those, I wouldn't be building much of anything. And so, as a business owner, we have to do what we need to do to sustain and grow or maintain our business, and we'll go after whatever the market is bearing.

And right now I'm dealing with a lot of cash people because a [00:19:00] lot of the other people have the golden handcuffs of the 3 percent mortgage and they don't want to go to the 7 percent rate. We're just going where the market goes. But the government can dictate a bit which directions the market flow and they can nudge some things. And so, I always argue that they have a lot of influence on that. If they wanted more people in that arena, they could nudge them that way.

Greg Bray: David, one of the things that I respect so much about builders is how far out they have to plan. You're always looking far ahead of where do I want to be, which areas, which type of product do I want. Is that part of the problem here is that it takes so long to get some of these products and projects through the pipeline where we're dealing with stuff that was planned several years ago or more right now, and so, to make a difference, it's going to take another five to 10 years before we could really see something. Is there some way to make that change happen faster?

David Belman: Yeah, that's a great point. You're right. It takes a long time to get projects. I mean, typically when we start something, we're looking at like two years from concept [00:20:00] to building homes in a community, two years to get it going. The market's going to change three or four times between then and now. And so, it's kind of like gambling, you know, where you're throwing the ball on the roulette wheel or something and hoping it lands on, you know, a favorable spot that you picked. It's pretty dangerous. And so, you have to kind of plan out and you have to look to the future a little bit and figure it out.

But yes, if we could get speedier approvals, if we could get faster approvals if we could get more guaranteed timeframes from our municipalities on projects and get them across the board faster, that would not only lower the cost, but it would create a lot more certainty for the developer. And that also means if you have a project that is much more certain to go ahead, you don't have to necessarily mark it up as much because you know you're going to move through it faster.

But, you know, when you spend a million bucks on a piece of land, and then you've got to spend another million to get it developed, and then you've got to borrow on that for two years, that's a lot of capital cost. That's a lot of used-up resources. And [00:21:00] so, speeding that process up will dramatically reduce the price and help the developers out because they're going to at least have a little more certainty on what kind of market this product is going to land in.

Kevin Weitzel: Loaded question. It could be rhetorical, but the NAHB actually put out some data that the top 20 builders build roughly 80 percent of the homes in the United States. The top 20 builders. Do we have too much power and revenue driven to just these top 20 builders?

David Belman: That's interesting. I don't doubt that stat. I mean, anything that NAHB puts out is heavily researched and I concur with their assessments. I live in Wisconsin. We don't have a large national builder presence. In fact, we have one that came into the Madison market and they're already kind of leaving because it's too competitive. So, in my market, in the Western Milwaukee market, we have 220 some builders. Most of the builders in the market build less than five homes.

But you go down south and you go to Arizona and Florida [00:22:00] and the Carolinas and Texas, and it's dominated by these large corporations. I call them locust builders, right? They just buy a tract of land and they just, you know, fly in and build all these houses and they kind of disappear. That's just kind of interesting how the country works. But, yeah, I mean, when you have that much building going on by these large corporations, they do hold a lot of power and they can influence, you know, a lot of things. And I think we're always better when there's more competition.

Greg Bray: Well, David, I think from a size of builder, I could also feel like if I'm the guy that's building 5 to 10 homes a year, it feels like just a tiny drop in the bucket. Do the homes I do really make a difference in this type of an issue, right, around affordability? and if I were to cut my size by X percent in order to get the price down and everything else, and now there's 10 homes that are a little bit less expensive, right? Is that really going to matter? How many builders does it take to kind of make a difference?

David Belman: Well, I mean, it starts with one and that's why I'm trying to be the one voice of reason and try to make a difference here. If I gotta be the guy to [00:23:00] take some shots and take some bullets and put myself out there, I'm willing to do that. I mean, I don't build a ton of houses. I build 20 to maybe 30 homes a year. I'm not clearly going to make a huge dent in it with what I do, but I can lend my voice and my expertise, and lend my time to help with that. And that's what I've been doing.

Builders are kind of copycats though, in a lot of ways. And I don't mean to say that in a mean way, but you know if someone else is doing something and it's working all of a sudden, everyone else starts building it. I've noticed when I've done parade homes and I do a certain style of home, all of the sudden, I see the other builders doing it. It's like, yeah, I know where you got that idea from.

We tend to copy because it's like, Hey, if that worked for them like we could make it work, right? And so, you know, we just have to start emulating, Hey, here's some models where we're building, you know, some more affordable product and how it's working and how do we emulate that and how do we duplicate that effort in other parts of the country?

Kevin Weitzel: Since you mentioned the, you know, the custom builders and that higher-end product, is affordability even important to them to a certain degree? Because the haves are still going to be the haves. The haves are still going to be able to come in and pay cash for their homes. The haves are still [00:24:00] going to be able to come in and get, you know, conventional loans. They're not having to be beholden to any MIP or anything along those lines. So, when it comes down to affordability, are those upper-tier builders, even part of the equation of lowering the affordability costs?

David Belman: They're probably not. But there's always a kind of a distinction that gets mixed up and there's housing affordability and affordable housing and they're two different things.

Kevin Weitzel: They are.

David Belman: I'm really talking about housing affordability in general. I'm really not going to be able to build affordable housing. But if we can make all the housing more affordable, that helps everyone. That's what I'm really trying to pound is housing affordability because these regulations, they apply to homes of all sizes and types.

And so, when you make a certain regulation change, like for example, when we had to do a wall bracing requirements a few years ago, that affected not only a tiny small home, but a giant home and obviously to different levels. So, I'm really more [00:25:00] concerned with let's lower the cost of all housing.

You know, we have other challenges to it besides just regulation. We have a whole labor shortage thing. We've never replaced the workforce we lost from the last big housing recession in 2007 to 2012 or whenever they decided that actually ended, but we lost half our workforce. We've never really gotten it back. That's a huge problem.

You know, we took shop classes out for nearly a decade. We didn't expose kids to the trades. That's a huge problem. We encourage kids to play on their phones all day, right? You know, go on your phone, do this. They don't want to work with their hands. You get more rewarded for posting a stupid picture and getting a bunch of likes than you do for building that bird feeder that you built in middle school. We got to restore the pride in I made this, I built this, I did this because we've lost that. It's a big societal problem.

Greg Bray: I love that thought, David, that idea of breaking a sweat and working with your hands and seeing the result of it is something that feels like it is diminishing a bit in our society. [00:26:00] I completely support you on that one.

David Belman: Yeah, I mean, just be able to drive by and be like, I built that house. See that cool house over there? I built that. Hey, I built that one too. It's like, there's something to be said for that, you know, but we sit there and reward a dumb video that you posted online and it got some likes on or whatever. We're kind of losing sight of what's important here.

Greg Bray: Sure. And the idea of supporting the trades and growing the workforce also has a direct impact on costs, right? Because if you're all having to fight for the same subs, at some point, you win that fight by paying more to get them to come.

David Belman: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we're paying exorbitantly more money for labor and, you know, I look sometimes and I think my trades are making more money than I am. And you know, I'm the one taking a lot of the risk, right? But they're getting it cause they can, right? It was only so many plumbers and so many electricians and so many people that are willing to do carpentry work. Some of those jobs are young man's game. You know, that's one of the problems we've had too is. The average age of a construction worker is almost 40 years old. That should be an industry that's dominated by the 20 [00:27:00] somethings, you know?

The other thing that's scary is the average age of a builder is like 59 years old. So, I mean, I'm kind of a unicorn where I'm at age-wise, but there just isn't a lot of younger builders because It's not an easy business to get into and it's a very cash-intensive business. You have to put a lot of money out and have a lot of money tied up, you know, to be a builder. And so, there's a huge entry barrier to just getting in the industry.

Greg Bray: Well, David, this has been a great conversation and you've raised some really interesting points. If somebody is listening though, and they're going, you know what? I want to join David's fight here. What are some of the ways that people could actually get involved and kind of help speak out and make a difference in your mind?

David Belman: Obviously, that's the first thing is use your voice and share information online. I use LinkedIn a lot. I get a lot of traction there. But if you want to help, there's a lot of different things you can do. First off, in the building industry, get involved with at least your local builders association, or you can also get involved with the state builders association, eventually work your way to the national builders association. And give your time. That's a huge help right there.

If you're not in [00:28:00] the industry, you could still help by being on a local board. If we can get more reasonable people on these local boards be a voice of reason, be a voice of, Hey, you know, new projects brings revenue to our municipality. Why are we putting barriers up? Let's take barriers down. We want growth. Growth equals income for the municipality. We need people to be a part of that. Those are some ways right off the bat.

And then, the other is to contact your elected officials. Believe it or not, they do see some of those emails, or staff sees those. Making a call, all those kinds of things. If everybody does a little bit of it and we start changing the dialogue and start shifting the dialogue more to housing, especially with our elected officials, and getting that on their radar, I think we can make a big difference.

Greg Bray: Well, David, do you have any last thoughts or words of advice that you wanted to get out there that we didn't touch on yet?

David Belman: I wrote a book a couple of years ago. It's called Leadership Growth Hacks. And one of the pieces of advice that I have in the book is it's for younger people that are, you know, trying to figure things out, right, and becoming a better [00:29:00] leader. Two pieces of advice on that was the first one is to think about your legacy at the end of the day. Where do you want to be? What do you want people to say about you someday when you're gone? And so, use that as your framework for how you think about things. And then, always be growing. So, always put a time and effort behind learning and growing, whether it's reading or watching something, try and grow yourself every day. That's how you can make a big progress in your life and become a better leader, become a more effective person.

Kevin Weitzel: My guess is an hour on TikTok a day is not that growth observation that you're talking about.

David Belman: Depends on what you're watching, I guess, right? I don't go on TikTok, but I'm imagining if you're just watching dance videos, probably not.

Kevin Weitzel: It's garbage. It really is.

Greg Bray: Well, David, we appreciate your thoughts here. I feel like in some ways, this is such a large. challenge that it could be a little overwhelming. And so, I really just want to give you some kudos for taking it on and at least trying to say, Hey, we need to have a conversation. I'll be honest, you got my attention. So there, you [00:30:00] know, at least one person heard something.

David Belman: Well, I appreciate the platform. And you know, just sometimes people hearing these things, You know, I've been giving a lot of talks lately and people have been seeing the posts and, you know, I'm getting opportunities to share. That turns into changing minds and then changing minds and you get other people talking to influential people and pretty soon there's a groundswell. So, that's where I hope it gets. And we're going to keep fighting and being in the pulpit and trying to make a difference here.

But you're right, what Kevin said earlier, you know, sometimes we need pain before we're willing to change. And when we've got people not even able to buy a house anymore, or the cost gets so out of line at some point, people are going to be like, Hey, we absolutely have to do something about this now. It's unfortunately not a top-five issue with an election coming up. I think it should be, but we're going to keep fighting and getting it to be one of those top-five issues.

Greg Bray: Well, David, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to reach out and connect?

David Belman: I think the best way is through LinkedIn. So, just look up David Belman on LinkedIn. Send me a connection request and we can start a conversation there. You can [00:31:00] kind of follow along with some of the things I'm doing. I post there a couple of times a week. Otherwise, you can also listen to my podcast. So, it's the Home Building Hero. We do an episode a week and we're always talking about stuff like this and many other things related to housing. So, I'd love to have you join the conversation.

Greg Bray: Well, thank you, David, and thank you everybody for listening today to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you. [00:32:00]