Company: LEN
Filing Date: 2025-07-01
Form Type: 10-Q
Source: 0001628280-25-033777
Chunk: 133

Company: LENNAR CORP /NEW/
Filing Date: 2025-07-01
Form: 10-Q
Item: Item 8
Chunk 133
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 Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q and our audited consolidated financial statements and accompanying notes included in our 2024 Form 10-K.

Outlook

In the second quarter of 2025, our company navigated through a challenging economic environment. Despite these challenges, we remained steadfast in our strategy to drive volume and growth, matching production and sales pace while using margin as the shock absorber to enable affordability and avoid the build-up of excess inventory. Our focus on volume and even-flow production enabled us to re-rationalize our cost structure in order to find a floor and rebuild margin even as the overall housing market continues to soften.

The macroeconomic landscape remains challenging, with higher mortgage interest rates and diminished consumer confidence being affected by a wide range of uncertainties, both domestic and global. At the same time, supply remains constrained by years of underproduction. New construction has slowed as builders have pulled back on production due to mixed demand signals, exacerbating the chronic supply shortage. Additionally, restrictive land permitting, along with higher impact fees, remain as constraints on supply, while labor and material costs, and costs of lumber, in particular, are generally increasing. Demand, however, is still high, as people want and need homes. Millennials are reaching the prime buying age and are realizing the benefit, and perhaps importance, of homeownership. But affordability and waning confidence are sending confusing signals. Actionable demand continues to cool. This is a difficult cycle, as low supply fuels high prices which lock out many of our homebuyers.

Our operational strategy is clear: we are building and delivering consistent volume by meeting the market at affordability and pushing efficiencies through our platform. We strongly believe this will produce greater efficiencies and drive down costs. Financially, we are focused on driving an efficient, land-light balance sheet to effectively have land banks and third parties hold and develop our land assets while we build cash flow. We have intentionally maintained volume rather than protecting our margin. In the past, we protected margin as market conditions slowed. However, we have learned that once we step backwards and lose momentum, it becomes difficult to restart and recapture volume. The recovery is difficult and expensive, and we end up coming back as the exact same company that we were before, with no significant changes for the future. We believe we are starting to see a bottom in the free fall in our margin that began with the spike in interest rates in 2022. Our construction costs have decreased over the past two and a half years, and we believe our margins will stabilize as we