From brokerage to buying land and building houses (2001)

The selling came first; the thing to sell was made in-house afterwards

Vertical integration is hardly a novel idea in real estate. What is striking about this decision is the order. Where most developers hold the land and the building first and work out how to sell them afterwards, Open House built a brokerage network that caught customers on the street and then made in-house the product to push through it. If you can buy land with the buyer already in view, the fear of carrying inventory recedes. That order is what allowed the company to give up the commission business as early as four and a half years after its founding.

Integration is not all upside, of course. A fall in land prices or an unsold house lands on your own books, and you take the swings in construction labour and material costs directly. That Open House kept the structure anyway is presumably because it judged that unless it kept pricing and the handling of difficult sites in its own hands, it could not compete on the ground it had chosen — cramped urban plots. Even after the later decisions to buy supply capacity from outside, with Hawk One in 2018 and Sanei Architecture Planning in 2023, the recurring question of how to wire an acquired company into that integrated model is a measure of how much the 2001 choice still weighs.