A word with Thomas Coleman — KB Home Idaho division president 

After starting and running area home builder business Coleman Homes from 2008 to 2017 — when it was sold to Toll Brothers — Thomas Coleman has recently been hired for his new leadership role with KB Home, where he will continue to be influential in the Treasure Valley home builder sector. 

This Q & A has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s coming to Treasure Valley that you are ready to announce?

Our first community is Graycliff, which is in South Meridian, near Victory Road. That will be opening this spring, early summer. And then we are also working on a new community in Caldwell — although that won’t open until next year — as well as two communities in Nampa. The one in Meridian obviously is finished lots and the rest of them we’re either working on building lots or working with cities on the entitlements.

Any talks about state wide (expanding) yet? Or are you committed to Treasure Valley for the foreseeable future?

Getting outside of the valley, the markets get significantly different, so currently we’re committed to growing KB in Treasure Valley and hopefully being a top-three builder within the next few years. It’s going to take a lot of heavy lifting to get there, but that’s what we’re focused on.

Why Idaho and why now?

It doesn’t seem like you can throw a shoe without hitting a story about Boise and what a great place it is I think that as Boise has continued to grow, and been a popular place for people to move, it has really added to the economic stability that Boise has always experienced. I also think it’s gotten more and more attractive as a place for a large home builder to be in business, because that demand just continues to increase. And demographics wise, Boise has continued to ascend that list because it’s a great place to live, especially for first-time homebuyers, because it’s achievable to buy your first home here without waiting an extreme amount of time to do that. And we’ve seen an influx of people from out of town; that’s added to what’s always been a pretty strong amount of demand here locally for people wanting to continue to grow their family here. It’s why I moved here and I think that’s why people continue to do that today. There’s so many people who are moving to places like Boise where they can afford a home, or maybe a little larger property. And then obviously the work from home thing is a big thing. People move to Idaho and they still work in companies in California, but they’re working from home. It gives that unique opportunity to move to a place where it means a little bit less congestion or so forth.

Is it becoming more challenging to identify where you can potentially build?

This is just part of the dynamic in doing business in the area and why we try and be the best at our jobs. It is competitive out there and there’s a lot of activity in the residential real estate space right now. So that’s something that we work hard at every day, to find the best locations for new communities. It certainly is not easy, but that’s a challenge across the country in most places.

In Treasure Valley, we’ve heard the phrase ‘infill’ frequently, because of that shrinking availability of large parcels of land to do traditional single-family homes. Are you looking at doing any of that infill?

In some ways, yes, and in some ways, no. We certainly are open to infill opportunities, but we are committed to sticking with what we know, which is single-family detached homes. That’s where we feel like we can really deliver the most value to our customers. As you get into different types of homes, like townhouses or condominiums, things tend to get a lot more expensive and it’s just harder for us to achieve those same benefits that we’re trying to offer to our homebuyers.

From a national perspective, we do have some of that. We build specifically in the Bay Area, in L.A. County, and even in Vegas, where there’s a lot of infill parcels that we get, and then Seattle as well. The majority of our sites are traditional, but we do have experience across the country with building attached infill communities.

Do you want to talk about affordability?

I do think that’s one of the most appealing things about what KB Home offers; but what also gets overlooked in that is what we’re able to do is decrease the cost of homeownership. Many times, people are focused on the price of the house they’re paying for, but especially with somebody buying their first home, I think there’s a lot of surprises with how much it actually costs to be a homeowner. And so, with the innovation that KB Home has, we’re able to reduce energy bills and across the board reduce the cost of owning that home. We even show potential homebuyers how much it’s going to cost per month in every home.

What are some of the partnerships that have helped lead to your success?

We pride ourselves as being built on relationships. We are there with our buyer from the sale point all the way through the build. So, we want to have all these different touch points, at the studio and with escrow…we just want buyers to know they have a partner throughout; that they’re not on their own. On top of that, going back to energy efficiency, we were named one of Forbes’ best mid-size companies; we’re on Newsweek’s list of most responsible companies, Wall Street Journal’s best managed companies, and not only that, we’re the only builder to receive EPA awards for like the last 11 consecutive years for sustainability on both water and energy savings. So those types of partnerships and national accolades have really steered our company, and we value that, and I think our buyers value that too.

Any business partnerships you want to highlight in the Idaho area?

It probably would be an injustice for us to highlight anybody, and I think we’re focused on growing those relationships right now. We value every relationship, whether it’s our title or escrow company or our plumber or roofer…it’d be hard to focus on one particular relationship that we value more than another.

What are some changes that have affected your industry that you’re excited to tackle?

Obviously, there’s been dramatic changes. It’s been about 17 years since I moved here. So I’ve lived here more than any other place, which is nice. Some of the things that specifically speak to our industry is we’ve seen some growth in our trade partner base. So, there’s a lot more available in skilled trades out there right now. And I think that for the cities, it’s a tough job to keep up with the growth that they’ve experienced, like in a place like Meridian or Kuna or Star that has had exponential growth. They have done a lot of good things to improve their transportation systems and the school systems, etc. So, although it always seems like somebody is playing catch up when you’re in a rapidly growing environment, there have been a lot of really positive changes. It’s pretty amazing to see the improvements that could be put into place as our valley continues to grow.

Any challenges you’re not looking forward to facing but are preparing to?

I think that in the homebuilding industry in general, there’s always something that’s your greatest challenge. When I started my first company here in 2008, it was very inexpensive to buy land and to build houses, but nobody wanted to buy any of them. So it was great from the building perspective, but sales were really hard. And now, we’re kind of on the opposite end of that spectrum, where demand is really strong and people are really actively looking to buy homes, but it’s a lot more expensive and more difficult to get houses built. And so that’s probably the greatest challenge our industry faces right now, is escalating costs and a shortage of people to build homes, but none of those things are something to be feared or dreaded. It’s just the reason that we keep doing our best work, and hopefully that sets us apart, because we can be better than our competition.

Any other ways that you are looking at tackling those problems?

We have these great established, national relationships; there’s a laundry list of different national contracts that help a builder like us tie in rates and tie in pricing across the country. So that’s another value that we bring to the table as far as controlling costs. I think we’ve seen that as we’ve been working with trade partners and going through our plans and getting their input and working on what resources are available. One of the issues that we face right now is sometimes things just aren’t available, because we’ve got shortages of different materials, and so those national contracts definitely help, if one of our trade partners hasn’t been able to get something, but we have a national contract to supply that; all sudden that opens an opportunity for them they wouldn’t have had otherwise. We’ve seen this in every division across the country;

it goes back to our relationship with our customers. We have to be up front from the beginning. We’re in a challenging time, and if you start that conversation in the beginning and you establish that relationship, it’s something we pride ourselves on and just try to set expectations.