How DRB uses customer intel to connect land, product, and sales

For Char Kurihara, homebuilding job titles might well be artifacts of a bygone era.That’s not about title inflation or ego. If anything, it’s the opposite.Since the housing and financial crisis, the walls separating homebuilding disciplines have steadily become more permeable. Land decisions have become product decisions, product decisions have become affordability decisions, customer insights have become investment decisions, and sales and marketing leaders increasingly need to understand the operating and financial consequences of each decision.As a result, many of the people occupying management, director, vice president, and division leadership roles today have become more like business owners within the businesses they serve. They may enter the conversation through a particular discipline, but accountability no longer ends neatly at the edge of a job description.Kurihara is a particularly good example of that evolution, which has reached a tipping point.As senior vice president of sales and marketing at DRB Group, she holds a title that accurately reflects an important part of her responsibilities at one of the nation’s largest privately operated homebuilding organizations. Th...