Scott Cox on why homebuilders may be fighting for fewer buyers

[Editor’s note: HousingWire The Builder’s Daily contributing author Scott Cox has just published Less Wrong, More Right: Judgment, Risk, and the Questions That Actually Matter in Homebuilding and Land Development, a new book exploring how the decisions that shape homebuilding businesses, land investments, and careers often hinge less on having the right answers than on asking the right questions. This is the second of seven excerpts we’re pleased to share with TBD readers.] For essentially my entire forty-plus-year career this industry operated with a set of secular winds at its back so constant that we stopped experiencing them as conditions and started experiencing them as physics. Several stand out. Seventy-six million baby boomers moved through their household formation and move-up years, a demand wave that took half a century to fully pass through the market. The share of women in the paid workforce roughly doubled over the postwar decades, and the two-earner household went from exception to norm – a one-time income engine underneath house prices that ran for two generations. Mortgage rates fell, unevenly but relentlessly, from the high teens in the early 1980s to below three ...