by Michele Gillis
Staff Writer
Barbara Moore knows a lot about the homebuilding industry. But she doesn’t know everything – nor does she want to.
The Lennar Homes division president of sales and marketing and Northeast Florida Builders Association first vice president does know the importance of surrounding herself with experts in other industry areas that will help Lennar move forward in today’s market.
“One of the things I find is that my job is to have people who understand what it takes to move forward,” she said. “If I try to be the person who understands everything, we will be held back. One person just can’t do it, so the key is to find the people who understand what needs to happen because it’s all about your people.
“Any one person who thinks they can do everything and know everything is way behind the times. You just can’t do everything.”
“Some people are afraid to have people around them that know more than they do, but I look for people who know more than me.”
It’s just one of the many lessons she’s learned in a real estate career.
Moore was born and raised in Jacksonville and entered the real estate market right out of college. She earned a bachelor’s in business management and a master’s in urban and regional planning from Florida State University before beginning in real estate in 1982. She first worked for Watson Realty as Realtor and then relocation director before joining Stokes and Co. as a site agent and then sales manager.
When Stokes and Co. sold part of the company to Ryland Homes, she was on the move to South Carolina as a Ryland division president.
Moore then took a job with Pulte Homes, which sent her to North Carolina and then back to South Carolina before moving to Texas for a position with Ashton Woods Homes.
Her real estate career finally came full circle when she returned to Jacksonville in 2003.
Moore worked as Beazer Homes’ division president from 2003-07 before joining Lennar in 2007 – after the housing bubble began to deflate.
“In 2007, we were in the middle of a housing crisis,” said Moore. “I knew that prices were plummeting and the whole business was in a crisis. I didn’t know where it was going to end. Lennar was a company that I knew would survive the crisis. Some would, some wouldn’t, but I knew Lennar would.”
Moore said Lennar has extremely creative management and strong financing that’s helped it survive many downturns.
“My confidence was that Lennar was the place to be,” she said. “It allowed the local divisions to respond to the local market creatively to do what it took to thrive in the local market. A lot of big companies have a ‘one size fits all’ philosophy where if it works in Denver, it will work in Florida and New York. Lennar is different. It looks at each market as a separate business and allows each market to do what it takes in the local market to work with the products and features to fit each market.”
Moore has particular skill for coming into a company when it purchased smaller companies to bring them together. In 2004, Lennar purchased two private building companies, Admiral Homes and Classic American Homes, and combined them in 2007.
“They were making Lennar standards and Lennar divisions from two different companies,” said Moore. “I had done that twice before.”
Typically, when a national builder buys a private one, they end up running the company as the private company did for several years before completing a transition.
Lennar was ready to do the transition locally to create a single company. Moore was at the ready.
“It was at the same time the market was in the crisis and we were all downsizing,” she said. “So, we had to combine them and rethink our business completely. What worked in 2005 didn’t work in 2007.”
Moore said they had an annual retooling to keep up with the market that continued to be in flux – but it did pay off.
Under Moore’s leadership, Lennar has succeeded as evidenced by its many Laurel Awards over the last several years.
Moore said they redesigned products to fit buyers who were in the market. They also ramped up their marketing when other builders were pulling back.
“We retooled our ‘Everything’s Included’ business model, which has been very successful in this market,” she said. “We decided that marketing was a very important part of what our success what going to be. A lot of builders are afraid to spend money on marketing and we’re not. Across the country, we are not afraid to market heavily, spend money on marketing, reach out to people and redefine what we were doing. For us it was more important than other Lennar divisions because we were new here.”
And as for surrounding herself with knowledgeable people, Moore will continue to do so outside the company on a grander scale as the next NEFBA president. It’s not the first time she’s taken a leadership position in the area, as she has also served as president of the Northeast Florida Association of Realtors and has been heavily involved in NEFBA’s Sales and Marketing Council.
Both NEFBA and NEFAR, she said, are vital to the industry.
“I think the organizations are very important to the industry in general to keep them thriving,” she said. “I think it is important for people to get involved in them because they make our lives and business easier and better legislatively and politically. I think it is important to give back and step up. I feel so strongly that what NEFBA does is so important that I wanted to be involved. We are in such interesting times that I’m hoping in 2012 we will be on our way out and looking forward.”