Today's conference will include forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve estimates and assumptions which may be affected by risks and uncertainties in the company's business, as well as other external factors which could cause future results to materially differ from those expressed in this presentation. For a more detailed discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties applicable to the company, we encourage you to see the company's most recent annual report on Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in addition to the forward-looking statements included in our press release related to our Q2 2021 results issued on August 3, 2021. Welcome to Green Brick Partners' Inaugural Investor Day. My name is Jim Brickman. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Green Brick Partners.
We are incredibly excited to be able to show you, our analysts and our shareholder community, a behind-the-scenes look at our wonderful company and introduce you to some of the managers in charge of producing our superior financial results. The focus of today's event will be to showcase our strategic advantages and demonstrate why Green Brick Partners offers a compelling investment today and tomorrow. While I don't like talking about myself, I do think it's important for investors to understand how my personal experiences have shaped our corporate culture at Green Brick and set the tone for how Green Brick Partners operates. First, let me share a little bit about my background. My twin sister and I were born in Chicago and raised in the suburbs in a well-off German and Norwegian family where bragging didn't take place and results mattered. My family was very competitive growing up.
I was a good student but a better athlete and still maintain a close relationship with my wrestling coach 50 years later. I went to Arizona State in 1970 and transferred to SMU in 1972. In 1976, I received my master's degree in business from SMU. After spending four years in Dallas and getting my master's degree, I really fell in love with the positive can-do attitude here in Dallas. So in 1976, I purchased a small condominium in Highland Park for $32,500. For those of you worried if interest rates might increase, my interest rate was 8.75%. After being rejected by a job by a large Dallas bank, I decided to become an entrepreneur. Months later, I was one of three equal partners in a tiny home building and remodeling company with two guys just a bit older than me.
In the first year, my income was far greater than it would have been at a bank, and I was learning the home building business from the bottom up as an on-site construction superintendent. I also learned how to sell and that everything starts with a sale. For the next seven years, my partners and I were involved in many aspects of real estate from home building, multifamily condominiums, and commercial office developments. We were fortunate to do fairly well. So well, in fact, that in 1984, I decided to buy out my two partners in the business. As it turned out, this was not one of my best decisions. In 1978, I got married to my wife, Susan. That was probably my best decision. We have raised four great kids together and have our 12th grandchild on the way.
For those of you on the call too young to remember, the 1985 to 1990 Texas real estate depression was much more severe for Texas home builders than the national recession in 2008 to 2010. I never thought most of my lenders would go broke before I did, but that happened. Every public bank and nearly every private bank and S&L in Dallas and Texas failed by 1986. Trust me, having the FDIC or the RTC as your new lender wasn't fun, but it was a great learning experience. Most of my debt was non-recourse, but some wasn't. Unlike nearly every other Texas developer, I avoided going broke or putting a single property or entity into bankruptcy. I lost a lot of my net worth and learned the hard way the dangers of leverage.
This experience with excessive debt explains why 30 years later, Green Brick Partners is one of the lower leveraged public builders. Going forward, we expect to continue to operate the business with no more than 35% debt to total capital and probably less. If you visit our website, you'll see that the lessons I learned in the '80s and earlier are the foundation for our values and culture, which is summarized in an acronym we call HOME. More specifically, we believe that if you are honest, objective, mature, and efficient, you will set the stage for your future success in any economic cycle and maintain the strong reputation needed to succeed coming out of any economic downturn. From 1990 to 2000, I focused on home building. During that period, I found I could make wonderful returns developing lots and building homes with almost no leverage.
Today, based on lessons learned in my past, Green Brick Partners makes even better returns with low leverage. Indeed, a well-run business does not want or need much debt to succeed. By 2000, I achieved my goal of semi-retiring before 50. I quit home building and was able to live comfortably but not extravagantly on my savings, apartments I built and owned, and distressed debt investing and some lending. Little did I know, my life would soon radically change by meeting a young hedge fund manager in New York. One of my distressed investments was senior notes in an NYSE company called Amresco. When Amresco filed for bankruptcy, as I expected in the summer of 2001, I talked the court into letting me serve on the creditors' committee with three large institutional investors.
Later, I was a trustee in charge of liquidating Amresco, one of the biggest SBA lenders in the country. In the summer of 2002, an investment manager told me that a young hedge fund manager was shorting stock in a public company called Allied Capital that owned a huge fraud SBA lender called Business Loan Express. In 2002, armed with my Amresco SBA experience, I introduced myself to David Einhorn over the internet. I'll let David tell you about how Green Brick started and later went public.
Thanks, Jim. Hi, I'm David Einhorn, president of Greenlight Capital and chairman of the board of Green Brick Partners. I won't get into all the background that resulted in Jim and I meeting and becoming partners, but the most direct answer about how an investment manager in New York City became partners with a builder developer from Dallas is because Jim is capable, honest, hardworking, and today surrounds himself with people that share these values. For those that love these details about the early stages of our relationship, I wrote about them in Fooling Some of the People All of the Time. I started working with Jim in 2002, mostly on stuff related to Allied Capital and its subsidiary Business Loan Express. At the time, Jim had plenty of time on his hands.
In 2008, when the national real estate market collapsed, Jim proposed that we start a distressed real estate equity fund and later a second fund that would lend money to builders. In 2009, JBGL Capital, which stood for Jim Brickman, Green Light, was formed and later JBGL Builder Finance, LLC. Jim and his family owned about 10% and Green Light entities owned about 90%. These funds had no debt. The original game plan was to buy distressed income properties cheaply, hold these investments for a few years, and sell at a huge gain, just like Jim saw so many smart investors do in the Texas real estate collapse and recovery in the late 1980s and '90s.
However, this time was different because the problem was national and not regional in scope, and interest rates were so low the banks were given a pass by the regulators and were not forced to sell at the bottom most of the non-performing assets on their books. The one asset class that the banks did not want to own was land, particularly land that needed additional capital to convert into finished lots, particularly when it was owned by financially weak builders. For obvious reasons, the banks also didn't want to make construction loans to low or no net worth builders. So with Jim's strong background in home building, land development, and lending, JBL was able to easily fill this gap and began actively buying land and lots and loans on land or lots that the banks didn't want.
Some experienced builders were in financial distress, so JBGL lent them money and took controlling ownership. By 2013, the market had turned up. We had a great lot position and owned controlling interests in now very profitable builders. However, the builders needed permanent capital. JBGL was not structured to be a permanent vehicle. In January of 2014, I suggested we sell JBGL to a public shell company I was previously involved with that had some tax losses, but this would require Jim to run a public company. Jim's response was an immediate yes, based on our long history together and a new challenge. My response was, "You might want to think about that for a few days. Running a public company has a lot more red tape and a lot more hassles than running a private fund." Thankfully, he didn't reconsider.
On October 27th, 2014, we rolled the two JBGL funds into a renamed public company called Green Brick Partners, Inc., in a reverse recapitalization with the stock opening at $7.49 a share. We were able to use the predecessor's $180 million of tax losses to grow Green Brick Partners without paying taxes for the first few years. Despite Jim's insistence on low leverage, our results since going public have been fantastic. Our revenue has more than tripled, and pre-tax earnings are up about six times in just over five years. This growth translates into a 28% compounded growth in revenue and a 44% compounded growth in pre-tax earnings since 2015. Over that same period, our stock price has increased about threefold.
As you can see, by the 60% year-over-year revenue growth and the 55% year-over growth in earnings per share we just announced for our second quarter of 2021, our growth rate is actually accelerating. Housing demand has shifted. Before the pandemic, demand for single-family housing was weak. Grown-up children were moving into their parents' basements. If they had to move out, they preferred to rent rather than to own. The pandemic has caused that trend to reverse. There is now a shortage of single-family detached housing that may take years to satisfy. Land development and getting permits takes time. There's no way to satisfy the new demand, which is even more acute in the growth markets where we do business. Green Brick Partners has achieved a critical mass.
If you look at our income statement, revenues and gross profits are rising rapidly, and we're able to grow and leverage SG&A so that the earnings grow faster than the revenues. When you hear from our team today how we have strategically positioned the company, I think you're likely to agree that the best may be yet to come. The takeaway I want you to leave you with today is that Jim is one of the most quietly persistent, capable people I've ever met, and we now have a culture of people that think like him. Our company's attention to detail, research capabilities, and broad knowledge of real estate is how we cautiously expanded into some of the very best markets in the nation as we grew and how we will continue to expand into new markets as we grow.
Our subsidiary builders all have decades-long relationships and in-depth knowledge in the markets where they build, which is why we have such a fantastic land and lot position. Our operating ability has now matured to where we operate and build homes like the best-run large-cap builders. We're particularly thrilled with the growth of our wholly owned entry-level and value proposition subsidiary Trophy Signature Homes, which we believe will produce scalable growth in the multiple markets over the next several years and really take us to the next level. Jed and Rick will discuss Trophy in detail later. Our company's persistent competitive nature and focus on getting the job done is why Green Brick has been such a wonderful investment and should be a winner going forward. Indeed, yesterday, we reported $1.02 in earnings per share, which is more than a 30% annualized return on equity.
And even better, Jim said he expects this to grow over the rest of the year. And of course, only operating in the best markets in the country, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, Florida, and Colorado is icing on the cake. Now I'll turn the conversation back to Jim to tell you more about Green Brick Partners.
Thanks, David. Since going public, we have continued to evolve and grow to a national presence of eight brands across four of the best markets in the country. Originally, we maintained a controlling interest in our builder subsidiaries where our local operators were allowed to participate in the profits of the subsidiary 50/50. However, this profit split was made after Green Brick captured its profit from the lots we sold to the subsidiary at a very high IRR and our intercompany interest charges made at equity rates of returns. Today, the Providence Group in Georgia is the only builder that very successfully operates under this structure. In addition to the Providence Group, we have two subsidiaries with much smaller side-by-side ownership with our operators: GHO Homes, where we own 80%, and Center Living Homes, where we own 90%.
In both of these subsidiaries, earnings are shared according to ownership, and we have a pathway to 100% ownership. But our goal is never to have to exercise that control. We believe that real estate is a local business, and we want local partners like Warren Jolley at the Providence Group and Bill Handler at GHO that have decades of experience buying land to be our local managers. Today, over two-thirds of our revenues come from fully consolidated 100% owned subsidiaries, CB Jenny Homes, Normandy Homes, Southgate Homes, and Trophy Signature Homes. And over 80% of our revenues come from entities where we own at least an 80% interest and could potentially own 100%. All of our subsidiary home builders operate through a standardized financial and integrated operating system.
I want to thank our board of directors for helping a CEO that had never worked for or ran a public company succeed. Nobody has been more supportive than our chairman, David Einhorn. I can remember, like yesterday, missing our 3Q 2015 internal projections and analysts' expectations, and David's response was basically, "Let's do better." And thanks to a lot of hard work by a lot of capable people, we did a lot better and should continue to be even better going forward. Over the next two and a half hours, we will illustrate to you our capital and operating strategy, the unique advantages each of our home builders brings to the Green Brick family, and share our pathway to accelerated growth primarily through the rapid expansion of our nationally scalable, wholly owned Trophy Signature Homes brand.
There will be a Q&A at the end of each section, so I will now open up the floor for questions from our audience to David and myself, and then I will pass the presentation off to our CLO, Jed Dolson, for a look at our operating strategy.
David, thanks again for coming. I'm looking at my iPad here, and this is a great opportunity to really address questions that we never have time to do in our ordinary investor calls. I have a number of them on my iPad that are showing up from everybody attending, so thank you for your attendance. Well, I think one of the first most interesting questions that we really haven't addressed in investor calls is talking about the existing management team. Let's see, the question is, "What type of successorship planning has Green Brick implemented, or do we plan to implement?"
Great question.
I think the most important takeaway I want to leave you with is we have been planning about succession and building our bench strength. We still plan on our very strong growth rate over the next 5 to 10 years, and we've made really great strides in bringing and attracting really key people to Green Brick. Recently, who you're going to meet later, we've hired a new national director of purchasing. That's been very accretive to our earnings, improving relationships with national account vendors. We're currently looking for, so if you know any out there, send them over here, a senior vice president of finance. Our company's grown a lot. We want to continue to improve our operational ability to really digest all the data that our IT department and Jed Dolson are going to talk about later.
And really, we've totally revamped our employee onboarding system to better tell the Green Brick stories to new people as they come on to our business. David, do you have any?
Well, yeah, I mean, the thing is succession planning is very important, but our current leadership is also very important. And the thing that I know is that you've already practiced retiring once. And since you already have had that experience, you'll be in no rush to do that again. So I think we're going to be set for a good amount of time with the current setup.
Great. Great answer, David.
Sure.
Okay. Let's see another question. Okay. If you had a silver bullet and could only take out one of your competitors, who would it be and why?
Well, since this is a public forum, you never want to take out a competitor, but I can tell you that the company that we really admire, and we don't try to copy ourselves against anybody, but we recognize is really the gorilla in the room is D.R. Horton. And it's particularly important for us to recognize this because we're in Dallas-Fort Worth. Many of you may not know that D.R. Horton started really in the Fort Worth, Dallas area. And not only are they the big gorilla in our industry, but they are the super gorilla in our market. So it was very interesting. Our strategy originally was we knew we couldn't compete against D.R. Horton.
And what we did as we grew our businesses, and you're going to meet these operators and leaders and partners later, is these guys all had strategic advantages that were niche builders in each one of their markets. So we knew we couldn't go after Horton. They were the dominant guy here. You had to have not only a very efficient operation, but you had to be very, very cost competitive. So until we had a title company, a mortgage company, and really a back office and support through purchasing, we knew we couldn't compete with Horton. The good news is we're there, and we're there with Trophy Signature Homes. We open up neighborhoods that are right down the street from Horton and do a great job. Do you want to add to that, David?
Well, sure. I'd love to. A number of years ago, we were in a board meeting, and the company was, in my judgment, not earning its cost of capital. And I said, "We really need to earn our cost of capital. Otherwise, we're not even worth book if we don't earn a reasonable return on equity." And Jim and the management team really have taken this to heart. And what's happened since then is, at each time, not only has our return on capital improved, we're constantly benchmarking how we're doing. So first, we started doing better than the other small-cap companies and then the mid-cap companies. And then the larger ones that Jim didn't think were operated so well. And now we're at the point where our performance metrics are now really right there equal with the top tier, despite the fact that we're still at a lower scale.
And it's a real credit. And watching how Jim views the competition and how the management views the competition has, I think, really inspired and motivated the company to perform.
Okay. Thanks, David. I'm going to let you really take the next question because this comes up in our board meetings frequently. Investors ask about it. And the question is, "Can you explain your thought process behind stock buybacks?"
Oh, sure. Look, it's really, really difficult to figure out when to buy back stock in this company and when not. The reason is that the unlevered returns on capital that the business is able to achieve are so attractive that we have to compare it to a stock buyback. If you have a company that's earning a low return on capital and it's trading at a low value, it makes a lot of sense to return the capital to the shareholders. Here we are with a relatively low amount of leverage and a fairly heavy land burden and earning a 30% return on equity that seems poised to grow. I think the preference of the company is because the returns on invested capital are so high to explore all of the opportunities that have high returns on capital.
And to the extent that there's still some capital that's left over that works out within our leverage targets, and we're very conservative in terms of the financial leverage that we're willing to take, and the stock is cheap, then it makes sense to buy some capital, some stock back in the market. But the goal really here is to grow the company, and the company has demonstrated that it is a good user of capital.
Okay. Great. Let me see what else we have coming up here that we can talk about that we don't address in conference calls. Here's one. Green Brick recently announced a 50/50 partnership with Heritage Homes on the purchase of 1,800 lots in Farmersville, Texas. Why split the opportunity with a competitor?
Good question. Hogs get fat, pigs get slaughtered is kind of the way I look at this. We have a great relationship with Heritage. They recognize our land buying and land development skills. And this was a large transaction that we wouldn't have taken on by ourselves because it really would have been too big for either us or Heritage to get through this many lots over a reasonable time period that would generate the returns on capital that we want to achieve in our business. So we split up that opportunity, and we really like doing that as long as we have a good partner that we know we can collaborate with because there's always overlapping responsibilities in the land development.
Let's see. David, you might want this. What macroeconomic drivers of our business do you think might impact our business, and what are your concerns as one of our biggest investors over the next few years?
Well, look, I think it's very interesting because for the first many years that we've been in business, the trick has been enough demand for the houses and how many can we sell and can we get reasonable margins and turn the inventory and get the asset turns. And what shifted in the last year or so is now the question is, how many houses can we manufacture and build over what time frame and at what cost? And so we've moved from basically being a company that's limited by demand to a company that's limited by our internal capabilities to execute. And there's lots of things that can go wrong or cause costs to go up, labor, supplies, materials, and whatnot. But I'm very confident that we're going to execute successfully in those areas.
So what ultimately is concerning has to concern is what happens if the macroeconomy turns in a major way such that we go back to having to find enough demand for what we're doing. And the most likely cause of that would be much higher interest rates or something like that. But I don't think a little bit higher interest rates are going to do it. It would really take a kind of a sea change, I think, to drive the demand low enough that we're back into that nature of our business.
Yeah. And yesterday, which I know you were listening to our investor call very closely, as probably many of the people that we're visiting with today were, but one of the things we're having a hard time really communicating effectively is why we are not selling houses intentionally. We see great demand. We see great macroeconomic conditions, and we are delaying sales because we want to harvest greater profits as we see the price of our houses going up over time. So that's a hard counterintuitive thing for people to understand we're doing it, and we think it's going to be really a win-win for Green Brick and its investors.
It's a very high-quality problem to have.
Yeah. And one of the few I've had. Okay. David, thank you so much for coming down here today, sharing your thoughts with us. I'm now going to pass the presentation over to Jed Dolson, our COO, who will be discussing our operating strategy.
Hello and welcome to our operating strategy segment. I'm Jed Dolson, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of Green Brick Partners. As Jim mentioned earlier, in this segment, we will be showcasing our strategic advantages and demonstrating why Green Brick Partners offers a compelling investment. I would like to go over four key operational areas and how we foresee them fitting in our vision for accelerated growth. First, I would like to give a brief overview of how we are planning our growth through our land pipeline. We believe our land and lot runway is the best of all public builders with a significant concentration in the high-growth markets of Dallas-Fort Worth and Atlanta. Our strong geographic footprint should provide meaningful downside protection in a recessionary economy and significant selling power in today's booming market.
We currently have in excess of 21,000 lots owned and controlled, with over 14,000 of those lots under development, with an additional 1,800 lots anticipated to be finished over the next six months and 4,600 lots to be completed in 2022. We feel our lot runway is primed for continued double-digit growth. Our lots are located in high-demand suburban areas where we can sell to third parties in excess of a 25% gross margin. Despite many requests to do so, that is not our plan. Our land and lot pipeline has grown over the last five and a half years at an annual rate of 32%, placing Green Brick in a position to continue growing closings at a double-digit pace for the next few years, independent of expansions into new markets.
Despite our move to more outlying markets, we have continued to maintain robust margins on land development, and due to strong pricing and execution, we are currently running well ahead of our minimum underwriting expectations. All of our new neighborhoods are underwritten at a 20% or greater unlevered rate of return and more than 20% gross margin without assuming any home price escalation, construction cost savings, or ancillary revenue from our financial services businesses. By working with other large public home builders and land developers through joint development and joint venture arrangements, we have been able to share costs and take advantage of larger deals that might otherwise have been too large for us alone. In outlying Texas suburban markets, we continue to capitalize on our reputation and decades-long relationships to participate in special tax districts such as public improvement districts and municipal utilities districts.
These districts are created to provide public improvements, infrastructure, and services such as water, sewer, and stormwater drainage in areas where city services are either not yet available or require improvement. The district is typically financed through revenue bonds, which are paid off through taxes levied on residences in a given district. For developers, this poses a significant strategic advantage as they are reimbursed for development costs once the neighborhood has created a taxable value. This next slide really puts our growth of land and lots in perspective of our public peers. With the demand for land and lots at its highest in decades, we successfully utilized our strong relationships in our markets to grow our lots owned and controlled by 133% over the past 12 months.
During this time, our land acquisitions team added a total of approximately 16,000 gross lots to our lots owned and controlled while maintaining the same underwriting standards that have led to Green Brick's success to date. One particularly compelling thing I would like to note is that our very high net income return on average equity in the second quarter of 30.2% was achieved despite the fact that our industry-leading investment in new land and lots will not produce revenue until 2022 and beyond. This rapid growth in our land pipeline is the strongest of any public builder and is a clear example of Green Brick's capacity to quickly and efficiently source land in our markets. We believe our core markets still have remarkable opportunities for growth, but we continue to evaluate expansion into new markets.
With nearly 57,000 single-family starts in DFW and 30,000 in Atlanta, our subsidiary builders have the markets to significantly expand and capitalize on this demand. As we announced last May, we are actively working with Challenger Homes to source land in the Denver area to fuel Trophy Signature Homes' expansion. We also remain optimistic that Trophy's value-oriented, scalable model would be successful in other Texas markets like Houston or San Antonio. Our biggest strategic advantage when it comes to land is that each of our building subsidiaries have local operators with decades of experience in their respective markets and are also supported by our corporate land team, one of the best in the industry. Additionally, our in-house engineers, corporate analysts, and underwriters provide significant support to our local home building operations. Next, I wanted to briefly touch on our purchasing.
Later in the program, there will be an opportunity to participate in a live Q&A with our directors of purchasing across our brands, as well as our national director of purchasing. But I would be remiss not to at least mention how integral our cohesive purchasing program has been to our growth. After achieving the required scale to get the attention of national vendors, Green Brick now has a successful national purchasing program. In addition to resulting in millions of dollars in cost savings, it has provided us with preferred supply and the security of price protection across our brands. In our year-to-date 2021 results, this program has resulted in roughly 70 bips improvement in home building gross margin. Our participation in these programs makes us a preferred customer and critically improves our purchasing power and leverage to manage current supply constraints.
Additionally, our corporate oversight and cross-training uses the lessons learned at various subsidiaries to make improvements quickly and efficiently across all our purchasing teams. These efforts accumulate in stronger bottom-line results that help us stand out from our peers. As many of you know from our prior quarterly calls, in addition to offering a large array of home types and price points, Green Brick Partners offers financial services to coordinate and enhance the home buying experience. This includes our two 49% owned mortgage joint ventures, Green Brick Mortgage and B Home Mortgage, as well as our wholly owned national title operations, Green Brick Title. In addition to providing ancillary income, these services create a one-stop-shop solution for our buyers and eliminate many of the stressors that come with purchasing a new home. This all-inclusive approach results in cross-channel revenue capture, including mortgage, title, home building, and residential management service operations.
Finally, an area where we continue to improve by leaps and bounds is our operating systems. We have a corporate team that maintains a rigid, standardized accounting construction, purchasing, and production platform used by all of our builders. This allows our local operators the best possible operating systems and enables our corporate office management and finance teams to consistently evaluate each of our subsidiaries to see what is working best. Additionally, we work continuously with our software developer behind our ERP system to augment the existing efficiencies and make ongoing investments into our software. For example, after completing the implementation of ExpressPay with one of our subsidiary builders, we realized an 80% improvement in efficiencies with our accounts payable team. Due to its success, we are currently in the process of replicating this to our other builders.
Another great example is a new master project our IT team is currently working on that will soon be rolled out at our Trophy Signature Homes brand. This will enable us to build and roll out new communities much more efficiently and forecast costs much faster than we have been able to do in the past. In closing, the most important takeaway I want to leave you with is that we have the land pipeline, operating systems, and people to grow our top-line and bottom-line result. There's been a lot of discussion in the marketplace about land and opportunities and prices of land. What opportunities is Green Brick seeing across our builders?
No, Jed, great question. Appreciate that. Just before I jump into the question, I would like to thank everybody for joining us today. It certainly means a lot to our team here that you're taking your time out of your day to join us and hopefully learn a little bit about our Green Brick operating team as well as addressing a few questions related to our land and operating strategy here on the front end. Just to kind of, Jed, to dive right into the question, I want to point out first, we look to acquire a creative land position for all our team builders. Trophy is our only single-family detached builder that serves our entry-level buyer, which, of course, is a very hot segment of the market currently today.
Long-term, Trophy is going to plan on primarily building homes ranging from the 200 to 500s, which will really give them the chance to offer product on a wide range of buyers. And that gives them the ability to underwrite deals that maybe some of our other team builders wouldn't consider. Now that Trophy's really started to achieve some scale in this marketplace, we're really starting to see that business produce outsized returns while they're minimizing incremental corporate overhead and adding communities as well as home deliveries. I think all of those are primary reasons why we're seeing a shift to the land allocation towards Trophy.
And so conversely, when we have a lot of land that we've entitled over the years in what we would call A locations, how hard is it to find new lot positions or even existing lot positions in those A locations?
It's getting extremely tight, right? But with Trophy kind of moving to the periphery, as we see those opportunities pop up on the infill kind of A location still, we are able to act quickly, make efficient decisions, and allocate those potentially to one of our other team builder partners.
Okay. Let's switch over to IT, Randall. The pandemic taught us all how to use our internet and iPads better than we had pre-pandemic.
Definitely.
Can you provide some context about what opportunities Green Brick found as a result of the pandemic?
Definitely, Jed. So just a little background. Our IT department contains our business applications team, which is made up of our residential experts for the applications and systems that our partner home builders use on a day-to-day basis. Going back to our acquisition of GHO Homes in 2018, that team developed a standard operating model, which we now use across all of our subsidiary partners. And we've continued to maintain that model diligently throughout the pandemic and Trophy's rapid growth. Thanks to all of these efforts, we've been able to quickly adapt to all of the constraints of the pandemic and even allowed us to recognize a 23% growth in revenue from 2019 to 2020, despite the 4%, I believe, decrease in headcount we experienced during that same time period.
And now, with the unprecedented first six months of 2020 that we've seen so far this year, we've had to rapidly scale our headcount beyond those 2019, 2020 numbers due to Trophy's growth. And thanks to all of the efforts we've made since 2018, we have and continue and believe that we will continue to recognize operational efficiencies as we continue to scale in size.
Thanks, Randall. Okay, Bobby, shifting back to land. This year and even more recently, it feels like we've been saying no to a lot of land deals with rising land prices. Luckily, we were fortunate to get out ahead of the curve. We have about 21,000 lots we own or control. Can you talk a little bit about what opportunities we're seeing and what the right inventory level for us is?
Yeah, Jed, I'll kind of answer that from a different perspective of really kind of how we manage our underwriting. Our goal is to deliver the best risk-adjusted returns in our industry. We're going to continue to underwrite deals to our strict underwriting standards, which is meeting a 20% unlevered return as well as exceeding a 20% gross margins. But we're recognizing now that really the market is getting tighter and deals are, quite frankly, they're just getting harder to pencil. As you just mentioned, we've built a great lot position up over the course of the last year and really have been able to source what I would consider a creative land to get us to our internal debt-to-capital ratios of a cap of 35%, which I know Jim had touched on earlier today.
But we are expecting that leverage to gradually work down for the remainder of this year.
Great. Randall, I know one question I get asked all the time from peers is, are you guys virtual or are you back in the office? So do you want to talk about what that looks like at Green Brick?
Yeah, definitely. So 2020 came with its challenges. And thanks to our unique decentralized structure, we really didn't have many challenges moving to a remote work-from-home environment at our various business units, departments, and even unique individual situations. Prior to the pandemic, our sales and construction teams, they were already working remote from their subdivisions, and it was not very challenging for us to extend those capabilities into our purchasing, accounting, and other back-office teams.
So another question I get asked often is, are you guys going to eventually go to virtual sales platform if there's another if and when there's another pandemic?
Yeah, that's an interesting topic. To date, we really haven't invested too heavily in a virtual sales platform, at least on the IT side. We definitely have the capability to make virtual sales and have made some virtual sales so far this year. But our position, I mean, our buyers, a new home is their biggest purchase they're going to be making at that time in their lives. And it's our experience that they would rather walk our models and work with our experienced and skilled sales agents prior to signing on a contract of a home.
Okay. Thank you. Bobby, in Dallas, Fort Worth, if you read the paper, everybody says we have less than a year's supply of finished lots out there. Do you want to, and as we talked with our competitors, everybody's pacing sales and starts so they don't run out of lots. Everybody has geared up and there are more lots on the horizon. So do you want to kind of tell the investors what our deliverable pipeline of lots looks like in the next 12 to 24 months?
Sure. I think really I'll kind of take it even a tranche a little closer to that. Really, in the next six months, we're expecting about 1,800 lots to be delivered to our team builders. And over the course of 2022, I think that number jumps up to approximately 4,600 lots. So we're very well positioned to maintain the growth that we've been seeing thus far and looking forward to continuing on that path.
Okay, great. Another question we got recently today from the audience is, do we sell homes to investors and build-to-rent guys? I'll take that one. We don't discriminate against investors, but we don't actively seek out investors either. So it's not uncommon for, as we're selling homes, to see some for rent signs pop in our neighborhood, but it's not something that we actively pursue. Another question. Bobby and Randall, looks like we're out of time. Thank you for your time and insight. Next, we have Rick Costello, our CFO, who will be covering our capital planning and strategy. Thank you, guys.
Thank you. Thank you.
Hi, I'm Rick Costello, CFO for Green Brick Partners, and I will be leading our Investor Day segment related to our capital structure and strategy. I'd like to begin this segment by highlighting the tremendous growth Green Brick has accomplished over the past five and a half years. As Jim mentioned earlier, our 2020 revenues are over three times our 2015 revenues, while our pre-tax income attributable to Green Brick is up double that, showing six times higher from 2015 to 2020. Based on our results for the 12 months ended June 30th, 2021, our compounded annual growth rates in total revenues and pre-tax income sit at 28% and 44%, respectively, which is truly remarkable. Our outsized growth in pre-tax earnings was made possible through our efforts to scale our business efficiently.
At Green Brick, we encourage every employee to maintain a business owner mentality and take ownership of each dollar spent. In fact, our SG&A leverage reached an all-time low this quarter of 9.1% of total revenues. Our work to minimize overhead costs has resulted in a 28% decline in SG&A per home delivery over the past five years and has allowed our company to minimize overhead costs as we increase revenues, accelerating our pre-tax growth in excess of top-line results. The growth we have achieved to date was only possible thanks to the diligent underwriting and careful acquisition of our superior lot position. As Jed discussed earlier, the growth in our lot position is unrivaled in our industry, as demonstrated by our 32% compounded annual growth rate over the past five and a half years.
Our growth in lots owned and controlled is a leading indicator for future revenues, as each lot under development or contracted through an option agreement should convert to a potential home closing. With our total lots owned and controlled up 133% in the past 12 months alone, we believe Green Brick has a clear capability to continue our current growth trajectory. We believe our dramatic improvement in lot position can lead to sustained double-digit growth in units delivered for the next three years, assuming demand remains strong. To finance our tremendous growth, Green Brick uses a combination of short-term credit facility lines and long-term senior notes to finance land acquisition, land development, and the construction of our homes. As you can see from the table on your screen, we have some of the best lending names in the nation as our capital providers.
Our relationships with these providers, coupled with our low-risk profile and propensity to keep our debt-to-capital at or below 35%, enable us to maintain both short-term facilities and long-term debt at low rates compared to those of our peers. Of note, our most recent long-term private notes were issued at a low fixed rate of 3.25% because our participants underwrote Green Brick as investment grade. Next, I would like to briefly discuss our capital structure cycle and illustrate how we marry our unique capital position with home building. In this slide, we illustrate our capital structure and how it grants us the flexibility to be opportunistic to acquire new land and lots and grow our business. We begin with the expansion of our lot pipeline. Acquisition of land and lots are funded through short-term lines of credit. This results in growth of units under construction and subsequently increasing revenues.
Upon reaching $150-$175 million in credit facility utilization, we initiate a private placement of senior long-term notes at favorable low fixed rates. As you can see in the third step of our cycle, proceeds from these notes are then utilized for repayment of the short-term lines of credit. In the last step, the cash flow from our high-margin home closings, in turn, funds the replacement of our lot pipeline. This cycle provides us with the financial flexibility to remain opportunistic on land and lot acquisitions in our respective markets and continue to provide our home builders a stable opportunity for growth. Presently, we have additional capacity on our line of credit facilities of approximately $170 million, which provides us plenty of dry powder to move quickly on acquisitions of larger land deals, expand geographically into new markets, or complete an acquisition.
One of the most common questions we've received has been regarding Green Brick's future growth and how Trophy Signature Homes brand is changing our business. As you can see from this slide, we pride ourselves in having some of the best product diversification in the industry. We have done this through individually branded and locally managed subsidiary home builders, and we intend to continue supporting their growth. As Jim mentioned earlier in his segment, we are particularly thrilled with the growth of our Trophy Signature Homes brand in DFW, where they currently operate, as well as its potential for growth in other major markets. We believe this growth will significantly enhance a variety of our key metrics and fundamentally improve our business.
For example, Trophy is producing very high return on invested capital by building homes at high gross margins and high net operating margins with a shorter building cycle time than many of its competitors. Despite only being launched in 2018, the brand continues to innovate as it scales, using its world-class construction and purchasing teams to improve efficiencies at all stages of construction. For example, Trophy pioneered the use of pre-built wall panels and manufactured trusses amongst our builders, resulting in reduced material and labor cost, improved efficiency, and a speedier construction process that requires significantly less skilled labor. We believe Trophy's value to be truly unmatched and subsequently intend for it to grow to become a larger portion of our business.
Trophy's percentage of home closings has grown 14% from 20% of our full-year closings in fiscal year 2020 to reach 34% of our total closings for the sixth month ended June 30th, 2021. However, we believe Trophy is well set to continue this growth trajectory, as units started over the first six months of 2021 represent 41% of total starts for the company. Additionally, we have significantly grown Trophy's lot position over the last 12 months, increasing the subsidiary's total lots owned and controlled by roughly 10,800 lots. This substantial investment provides Trophy a total of 13,800 total lots owned and controlled as of June 30th, 2021, representing 65% of our total lots and a 460% increase in their lot position from a year ago. While our lot runway has increased significantly, this includes two 1,000-plus lot communities for Trophy that will have a much longer life cycle.
Excluding these two communities that represent about 5,000 home sites, Trophy's share of existing lots is 54%. Because of Trophy's ability to sell across a wider spectrum of home buyers with prices ranging from the high 200s to up to $830,000, Trophy has been one of our most dynamic builders in acquisition underwriting. With the majority of acquisition opportunities in suburban single-family markets, Trophy's ability to serve the entry-level buyer has been crucial to their growth success to date and continued opportunity for expansion. Our acquisition underwriting remains strict while targeting unlevered internal rates of return of greater than 20% at today's margins without assuming increasing prices to our customers. Many have noticed that Trophy's average community size is significantly larger than our historical average.
While Trophy has already significantly impacted the average size of our communities this year, we believe that Trophy's average community in fiscal year 2022 will reach an average of 160 lots, roughly double the average of our other brands. These larger communities have a much higher sales absorption rate, allowing us to reduce active selling communities while continuing to grow net new orders. In short, Trophy's communities produce twice as many sales and are appropriately twice as large, allowing us to reduce our active selling communities while continuing to increase total sales and reduce many of the fixed costs associated with the management of so many neighborhoods. These larger communities will allow us to grow sales and top-line results while minimizing the cost and time associated with community openings and closeouts, improving profitability.
We believe Trophy has a robust lot pipeline in the DFW market to allow for future growth while reducing costs. Additionally, Trophy's lots include several sizable communities that will be a consistent source of revenue for a much longer timeframe than a typical Trophy community. As the brand continues to become a more significant component of our business, Trophy's production of superior financial results has accelerated the growth in our bottom-line results. Trophy maintains slightly higher gross margins on average versus our other brands and has seen its Q2 2021 gross margins improve 490 basis points year- over- year, well above the 360 basis point year- over- year improvement seen in Green Brick's consolidated results. There are significant overhead costs needed to start and grow a home building brand to steady-state optimal operating performance.
Thanks to Trophy's larger community size and less frequent community turnover, Trophy has been able to maintain an SG&A leverage that is 90 points stronger than our other brands. We expect that trend to continue as we achieve additional scale in the back half of this year and in future years, which in turn will help Green Brick achieve additional overhead leverage. As those of you in attendance at our earnings call yesterday may have already heard, our Q2 2021 record results represent a new normal for our company and have set the bar for our Q3 and Q4 results later this year. We are incredibly excited and optimistic about the growth of our builders, especially Trophy Signature Homes, and expect to be in a stronger position going into 2022 than we have ever before.
I would now like to pivot to addressing some of the questions we have received from our audience.
Thanks, Rick, for that introduction. Now, let's jump right into some questions from our audience. First question is, do you believe your growth path over the next 5 to 10 years will be more focused on organic growth in your existing markets or expansion into other markets? Jim, do you want to take that?
Yeah, I'm going to hedge that and say both. And the reason I'm going to say both is because we don't know where the best opportunity is going to take place. But I can tell you that we are aggressively looking at expanding into the Denver market right now with Challenger Homes that operates in Colorado Springs. They've expanded in Denver. We own 49.9% of Challenger Homes.
Tom Hennessey, who runs Challenger, previously ran a public builder for 12 years in Denver. As everybody on this panel knows, land is where the risk is. It's also where the profit starts. And kind of we're looking for opportunities there. We're also looking at other markets, but we really don't share what those other markets are. And we probably wouldn't share Challenger other than Challenger already announced that to all their people. So it's pretty public knowledge that we're fishing around Denver.
Okay, great. Rick, what capacity does Green Brick have to continue sourcing low-cost private placements?
We have great capacity. Now that we have five very solid relationships with insurance companies and investors through the club deal that we closed in the first quarter for $125 million at a fixed rate of 3.25% over seven years.
When we underwrote that deal with the investors, we actually asked them what their indicated interest was, and that deal was more than two times subscribed. So I think it's really going to come down to allowing ourselves the time, the visibility, as I suggested before, on our line of credit. Once that gets to a sustainably high level of $150 to $175 million is when we move into doing our next deal. We're in constant communication with them, so it's really a very good set of circumstances for us.
Rick, explain, I think one of the things our viewers would be interested in, Flagstar Bank administers our bank facility. I think they've done a great job of increasing and growing our bank lines. And then tell us about the Prudential deal was wonderful and how that started, and then the club deal and who's involved in that.
Yeah, actually, all of the companies, including Security and Bearings, Voya, and Hartford, they follow what Prudential initially did, which was really active underwriting of us. When we first met Prudential and dealt with the local office here in Dallas, it was a long process for them to really do a deep dive on us. And at that time, and when we did the club deal, Prudential underwrote us as investment grade, and the whole group continues to do that from an internal standpoint. So it was a process that resulted with Prudential closing our first deal in 2018 for $75 million. Then we did a follow-up deal a year later in 2019 for $37.5 million for 3.35%. And after that, we started discussing, well, what do we do next? And that was getting a little heavy for them to go at themselves.
So they, through their Atlanta team, helped structure a club deal in which they brought four other investors that they commonly do deals with. And really, they only had to go out and speak to a very small number to raise the interest. So it became a deal in which Prudential structured the transaction. There's not a lead like Flagstar is the administrative agent, but they all followed and conformed to the same set of documents. So we know that every deal that we do into the future is going to contain the same terms and conditions, which is great. So we're proving ourselves with Prudential, and now we're proving ourselves with our new investors. One of the most important takeaways that I want our audience to really understand about Green Brick is that relationships do matter. They matter not only internally, but in external relationships with lenders like Prudential.
And we're just thrilled to have really solid relationships with some of the premier lenders in the country. Oh, very much so. And in fact, pretty much all of our banks and investors are on investor day watching us today. So that's very cool. Great. So can you give a little recap about what our long-term debt looks like and then what our line of credit looks like, Rick? Well, we've got 237.5 million of long-term debt that has staggered maturities that go out generally four to seven years. And then we've got a credit facility that is administered by Flagstar. Flagstar is a major participant in that. It has $265 million of total commitments. So then you add on our small secured facility with Inwood National Bank, which is a long-term relationship here for Jim. We've got $300 million total available commitments.
And so right now, as of the end of the second quarter, we've got $170 million of availability. We obviously utilized a good portion of that in Q2 when we spent $180 million in land and lot acquisitions. But we also think that as we go through the rest of the year, we'll probably taper down our debt to capital a little bit and really can sustain that with the amount of flexibility that we have right now. It's really a best practice to be able to borrow up and pay down, borrow up and pay down. So it's a great facility. Our current pay rate is under 2.7%, which is phenomenal. And we have an evergreen renewal in it where every December we get to go back to all of the participants in it, which is Huntington Bank along with Flagstar.
We now have Veritex in that facility as well as Citi and JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs. We will extend it this December such that as of December 15th, the new maturity date would be three years out from there. So we get plenty of advance notice as to any maturities, which is great.
Well, that leads into our next question we got from the audience, and that's, what is the right amount of debt for the company, Rick?
Well. How do you manage that? Our total debt as it sits right now gives us less than a 35% debt to capital, which is our own structured requirement.
But how we've always set it up is that our work in process on our homes under construction, the typical relationship that we see every quarter when we measure it, we have about twice as much cost in WIP as we do in outstanding debt. And that's really where we want to be. We want to have our most easily convertible asset to cash, which is our homes under construction, far exceed the amount of debt. So our interest coverage is fantastic. And really, we like that level of 30 to 35% debt to capital. If you look at our charts in our investor presentation from yesterday, we are one of the lowest leveraged of all the small and mid-cap builders. So we think where we're running is appropriate for the risk that we're taking.
Let me chime in on one other thing that I think many investors are not aware because it's not easy to understand looking at peers' balance sheets and their liability side of their balance sheet is that Green Brick Partners doesn't do any land banking. And land banking can be a very effective way to reduce your appearance of leverage by downloading lots and other assets to land bankers. And we don't do that because we don't think we need to do it. First of all, there are some wonderful land bankers out there. I was with a big one last weekend or the weekend before last, but we don't do that. It's almost equity-type returns that we would be giving away. And that's another reason when we start talking about gross margins why our gross margins are so high. Absolutely.
Two things happen when you do a land bank situation. Number one, you're giving up the extra margin that we can achieve in our strong markets from land development. Our land development profits as a portion of our average selling price is 5% based on the percentage of frequency of doing self-developed lots. You give that up if you do off-balance sheet financing. And worse, what you're talking about. So it's balancing of risk, and we choose to take that in moderate proportions by not doing that. Correct. And we don't want to pay a double-digit internal rate of return for somebody doing an off-balance sheet. That's a high cost of capital. Great.
Thanks. So let's shift over to our earnings, which we just announced yesterday. We announced over a dollar for the first time in the company's history.
Can you talk a little bit about the three-year revenue growth it took to get to that point and then what the future holds?
Well, at the beginning of my remarks, I talked about our compounded annual growth rate, how the bottom line is growing faster than the top line. And the 27% and 37% growth in top line and bottom line are even stronger over the last two and a half years when you consider where we're at today. We're in excess of 40-plus percent, 44% compounded annual growth rate over the last two and a half years. We see, and that is directly a function of the lot inventory that you just talked about. And really, we have queued it up in advance. There's a very dynamic, strong correlation between our revenue growth and lots owned and controlled.
So on that basis, where we're at now and how many lots we've added, we have strong capability to sustain those double-digit-plus growth rates in both top line and bottom line. The bottom line operating leverage is really coming down, should continue to come down the remainder of the year. Our margins are strong. We expect them to continue to be not just sustained, but improve over the balance of this year. We have very measured increases in our staffing. So it really is a very nice storm when you combine it with what's going on in our industry and our particular markets.
Yeah. And let me add to that. When we were a much smaller business, being a public company is expensive. We had high fixed costs.
And one of the things I'm really excited about that's going to translate even better going forward is our SG&A was what, 9.2% in the second quarter? That's approaching the most efficient large companies. And we think that can continue to improve as we scale our business, particularly with Trophy.
Rick, can you talk a little bit about what the future holds with our backlog and what those margins look like?
The margins look great. Really, a lot of our backlog has grown over the last, for the fourth quarter last year, the first quarter of this year. And that was a timeframe in which we were increasing prices very heavily from 9 to 25 percent per builder brand. So it's looking very strong at this point. We think our backlog is a little larger than we want it to be right now, which is why we're metering sales.
We, especially with Trophy and CBGE as a townhome builder, we really want to have more spec inventory. Thank you, everyone, for your insightful questions. We hope this has given you a better understanding of our capital strategy. Now we'll be pivoting to our builder segment where we will showcase each of our subsidiary builders. First up, we have the Providence Group in Atlanta, Georgia.
Hi. I'm Warren Jolly, President of the Providence Group. At the Providence Group, our strategic advantage is the ability to define and entitle land opportunities in the most desirable locations in Atlanta and develop these properties into premier one-of-a-kind neighborhoods. Our accessibility to the best land in Atlanta is unrivaled, as most large private or public builders lack the ability or willingness to develop the innovative site plans and home designs required to maximize the potential of these sites.
For more than 40 years, I have been developing neighborhoods and building homes in and around Atlanta. I built my first house when I was just 16 years old and have always enjoyed the challenge and hard work needed to build something that lasts. When I established the Providence Group in 2001 with my father, we brought the same passion for home building and land development along with us. Our reputation for high-quality, low-maintenance neighborhoods continues to drive success and leads to new opportunities. For example, in 2013, the Day family, who owned and operated a highly successful Day's Inn hotel chain, decided to sell a portion of their family estate in Johns Creek. They came to us directly with a vested interest in long-term quality of the community, knowing that our intelligent craftsmanship and meticulous attention to detail were unmatched by our larger public peers.
Bilmore Park awarded the 2016 Community of the Year by Greater Atlanta Home Builders Association sets a high standard for what a master plan committee should be. When the city of Alpharetta began redeveloping its city center, the Providence Group worked with the city officials to plan and develop a signature main-on-main community right across from City Hall. Our east-on-main subdivision set the tone for the city's residential redevelopment and was later joined by our Chelsea Walk, Rose Downtown, Atley, and Maxwell communities. Each of these communities were met with incredible demand from our buyers and maintain the unique, one-of-a-kind feel that comes standard with our neighborhoods. Our strong product diversity and innovative designs allow us to maximize land potential in the area's best locations. For example, our unique stacked townhome concept at Pratt Stacks allows us to achieve density up to 27 units per acre.
Pratt Stacks is located in historic Grant Park, across from the landmark adapted reuse development, the Beacon Atlanta, featuring 110,000 square feet of retail, dining, and entertainment venues. The community is also immediately adjacent to the Beltlines Plan Southside Trail Extension. We were very excited and proud when Pratt Stacks was awarded the 2020 Community of the Year award by the Greater Atlanta Home Builders Association. We hope to continue successfully combining our premier land position and innovative home designs at Waterside, a gated master plan community with a half-mile frontage along the Chattahoochee River, located in Peachtree Corners in close proximity to Jonesbridge Park and Peachtree Corners Town Center. We expect Waterside to continue our legacy of excellence in the master plan community development in the Atlanta region.
Our ability to acquire the best land in Atlanta and create signature award-winning communities would not be possible without the network of land sellers, brokers, and subcontractors, and our relationship with local city and county government that we have built over the last four decades. With Green Brick's financial and operational support, we have been able to build upon this unique strategic advantage and combine our local expertise with the financial liquidity of a national public home builder. Thanks to the success of our relationship with Green Brick, we believe the Providence Group will continue to produce best-in-class neighborhoods that will build upon our hometown legacy for years to come.
Warren, thanks for coming. And we have some great questions that have come in about the Providence Group and Green Brick's relationship with the Providence Group.
I can say that Jett and I love going to Atlanta and seeing all the great stuff the Providence Group builds and develops. And I'd like to have you take us through the relationships the Providence Group has in Atlanta. I know you're a second-generation home builder with Pete that started it. So take us through that chronology. Yes. So fortunately, we've been in Atlanta, the same jurisdictions that we're currently building for a minimum of 20 years. And Atlanta is a bunch of local governments and cities. And so we have a great relationship with all of those jurisdictions. Normally, we don't have we haven't had the turnover the public builders get with division presidents and so forth. So they're always dealt with me or Mike Smith. So we always do what we say we're going to do. And so we've got great relationships.
But when the pandemic hit, we couldn't get the city of Atlanta even show up with inspectors. They wouldn't inspect our projects at all. In March, they basically wouldn't send anybody the job that we were able to get with the local HBA and the governor's staff. And by the end of March of last year, he drafted an executive order to allow third-party inspections by approved engineers to do inspections, which if we didn't have that relationship, we wouldn't have Pratt Stacks, one of our best communities. We wouldn't have had any closings in first and second quarter last year.
Again, we talked about in some of our other segues how relationships matter. And that's really a case study of trust, people knowing you, knowing your reputation, and working collaboratively for solutions in this kind of situation. So how have your company's grown?
Gosh, I don't know how many folds since we met first in 2009, but how have you handled that growth with the Providence Group, particularly doing so many different things?
Again, fortunately, we do have, like you said, one of the most diverse product offerings for a builder in Atlanta. The main thing is we got the same people that have been with us for 20-plus years. We've got some builders 15 years, some builders 25 years. So when you're building complicated product, you need that team. But also, we've got the same civil engineers, the same land planners, and architects that are all used to working together on complicated product, which we know in Atlanta, most of it's driven by topography. And it's not the best sites that are left. I mean, the most difficult sites at good locations. And Waterside is a case study in this, really. Yeah.
Yeah. And so Waterside, because of our relationship with the people that owned it, we were able to work a great deal, which we know is going to be a great community on the Chattahoochee River, 114 acres, almost 900 units that we were really excited about. And we wouldn't have that without those relationships.
Yeah. So kind of what are your plans this year to manage this growth? Everybody's interested in all those challenges.
Well, one thing that keeps coming up is lots. And luckily, we had enough stuff teed up in zonings before the pandemic. And again, because of relationships, we were able to keep those things in zoning. And then we were able to get those zoned. So now we have over 600 lots that we are developing right now that we wouldn't have if we would have dropped them like most public builders did.
I think one of these deals we worked on for five years. Right. We did get zoned a week ago. Yeah.
Which we hung in there and finally got it done. Okay, Warren, we're running out of time. So thank you very much for your time. Next, we're going to be joined by Steve Schimmerhorn and Trevor Brickman to learn a bit more about CBGE Homes, Normandie Homes, Southga te Homes, and Center Living Homes. So thanks again, Warren. Thank you.
Hi. I'm Steve Schimmerhorn, president of CBGE Homes, Normandie Homes, and Southgate Homes in Dallas, Texas. At CBGE Homes, our strategic advantage is seen in our dominant lot position and leading market share of the townhome market in Dallas-Fort Worth. With nearly 30% of townhome starts in DFW attributable to CBGE, we have established a strong reputation for quality construction within the cities where we operate.
This brand recognition, in addition to Green Brick's decades of experience developing land in our market, has made the process of sourcing and entitling land significantly more successful. At the same time, our economies of scale allow us to continue sourcing new land while driving down construction costs. Since 2009, CBGE Homes has proudly built new townhomes in premier DFW locations for lifestyle-conscious homebuyers. CBGE was founded to provide new home options for a large swath of homebuyers. We believe our moderately sized, low-maintenance homes have wide-ranging appeal across first-time, move-up, and move-down homebuyers, as well as empty nesters and single-parent families. At Normandie Homes, our strategic advantage is our unparalleled lot position in some of DFW's most desirable neighborhoods. This lot position was painstakingly and carefully established through Green Brick's deep relationships and years of experience working with landowners and developers in our market.
Since 2012, Normandie Homes has proudly built timeless new homes in premier DFW communities for discerning move-up buyers. Normandie Homes was created to provide new home offerings for those looking to buy elevated, boutique-quality homes with thoughtfully crafted architecture, interiors designed for how you live, and a hospitality level of service. At Southgate Homes, our strategic advantage is our recognition as one of the top luxury production home builders in Dallas-Fort Worth. Combined with a superior lot position established by Green Brick, our appeal to second-time move-up buyers in our market is outstanding. Our proven formula of setting high standards for each of the five key home building elements, desirable communities, unsurpassed architecture and design, desirable floor plans, stylish home features, and quality construction has made us a premier DFW luxury home builder. We are a hands-on company dedicated to the highest standards of creativity and attention to detail.
In every home we build, our design, finish-out, and construction process ensures a unique home that is stylish, functional, and modern. Because we believe quality construction is paramount, all of our homes are built with upgraded energy-efficient features. Our position as a subsidiary of Green Brick Partners allows us to access Green Brick's capital and nationwide centralized state-of-the-art operational support, IT systems, accounting, and national purchasing, enabling buyers to benefit from a builder with the resources of a national brand and the expertise of a homegrown builder. This unique position further allows us to maintain nimbleness with our designs while leveraging the financial strength and superior lot positions across the metroplex that come from a national, publicly traded parent company.
Hi. I'm Trevor Brickman, president and founder of Center Living Homes.
At Center Living Homes, our strategic advantage is our ability to find, entitle, and build out complex neighborhoods in high-density communities throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Center Living Homes developments boast award-winning world-class architecture, the latest in smart home technology, and rooftop decks with some of the most coveted views of Dallas's skyline. I am a second-generation home builder that has been passionate about home building my entire life. I have a master's degree in real estate and construction management and pride myself in having experienced everything from being a laborer, estimator, and construction manager. I was also a real estate lending coordinator with Green Brick Partners' predecessor company, JBGL Builder Finance, where I oversaw construction loans and draws for hundreds of homes. Then, in 2012, we launched Center Living Homes.
We first started building luxury townhomes in Dallas's Uptown and Oaklawn neighborhoods and grew the brand to include a wide array of award-winning single-family homes and townhomes. Our reputation for quality, design-driven homes has opened the doors for Center Living to expand from Dallas's urban core into some of DFW metroplex's most sought-after suburban markets, including Keith, Richardson, Frisco, and Waxahachie. This reputation for excellence led us to being selected as the only single-family home builder in the $1.5 billion city line development. The mixed-use development, anchored by the regional headquarters of State Farm Insurance, has resonated extremely well with homebuyers seeking the amenity-rich lifestyle with the spacious floor plans of a suburban neighborhood. Our residents at City Line Community went on to win awards for its design series and superior architecture.
I am also pleased to announce that we were just selected as the exclusive builder for the future development of 120 townhomes in the highly acclaimed exclusive Newman Village neighborhood in Frisco. Green Brick's highly experienced land team continues to source new land for our company, taking advantage of infill opportunities where other builders usually could not succeed. Thanks to our stellar team and Green Brick's strong operational and financial support, homebuyers can rest assured that they will receive an exemplary home from contract to close with Center Living Homes.
Steve, we've known you since 2009. I really think you're really one of the great success stories at Green Brick, watching your career. You're now running a really large business for us. CBGE is the largest townhouse builder in the largest townhouse in the largest home and house market in the country.
So take us through this tremendous growth, not only for you personally, but for your business and managing this business for us.
Yeah. I mean, going back to 2009, it really starts with it really started with land. Green Brick's and Jed and Bobby's team, their ability to source, entitle, and develop lots for us, and not just get us the lots, but get us the lots in premium locations. That's kind of the foundation of how we've been able to grow. And this was all through CBGE Townhouse originally. Yeah, absolutely. That's how it all started. And I think the other big component that has really helped us is we've got a team of just townhouse professionals. I mean, Aaron will be on one of the panels later today, but Aaron was the first person I hired when we started CBGENE. And so it's been. Aaron's just purchasing manager.
Yeah, our director of purchasing. And having a team that has been with us for over 10 years, has grown with us, has learned through the ups and downs and challenges that the market provides, that's really been a big component of our growth and what's really helped us. And go ahead, Jed.
So let's talk about things that have changed a little. We started Trophy a little over three years ago. We saw some really good success stories there. Tell us how you changed your philosophy and what CBGENEX is. Yeah. So one of the things that we learned from Trophy when they started was the efficiency of the kind of pre-packaged, no design center experience where you're eliminating the customer's need to make all these decisions, which I think in a lot of cases, they get buyer fatigue.
And so what we've done, we kind of basically copied that, created CBGENEX, professionally selected pre-packaged selections that we build. They still get a choice because they can choose one of those packages, but it allows us to create a better experience for the buyer, and it's more efficient. So it was, and really, we've transitioned. We've had a lot of success with it. It's really helped us, certainly with the current status of the market. I'm glad we did that. It's allowed us to continue to grow, and we've really transitioned almost all the CBGENE brand into that kind of X pre-packaged process. So that's a little different. And this is really interesting to me, particularly because Trevor and I obviously share the same last name. But Trevor's business is quite a bit different from yours. You are much more of a manufacturing, very process-driven.
I think all of our builders are process-driven. But Trevor, kind of take me through the strategic advantage of Center Living Homes versus Steve's much more manufacturing process-driven business.
Yeah. So we've been able to be a little bit more nimble in some of the selections and the design process. A lot of that was due to our history building in high-density urban infill areas where zoning districts would change from block to block, and it really forced us to be able to adapt quickly. And so when we have some new communities that we're really excited about and some of the land sellers, like for example, we have a new community in Frisco that's 121 lots, and that was a fifth-generation Texan.
And it was very important for him to have a builder that could adapt to a unique townhouse lot size and have product that we had to collaborate with the land seller on. And a lot of home builders really didn't want to go through that difficult process of collaboration and developing new product for one community and one lot size that isn't easily repeatable. Yeah. Jed, do you have any?
So Steve, in addition to running CBGENEX and CBGENE, which are really production-oriented companies, you also run Normandie and Southgate for us. So can you tell us kind of some of the parallels and then some of the differences between those three brands? Yeah. I mean, I think the core of it is the people. Our leadership team between all three brands is the same, kind of what I spoke to earlier. That's where it starts.
We don't lose our process and discipline. I mean, building a house requires a process, and we have to stick to the discipline, whether we're building an entry-level townhouse with standard selections or we're building a house that's upwards of higher than 800,000, and it's almost a full custom house. We still have to have a discipline process with good people. And I think the other component with the Southgate brand, and to a certain extent Normandie, is a lot of builders are getting away from design center experiences. And so having Southgate be a builder that does offer that choice allows us to get a premium over our competition that might not be doing that to provide them with the quality experience and, of course, the architecture and floor plans that just live right is really something that we're excited about.
And tell us about your new Southgate community and over Winsong and how that's kind of expanding Southgate's brand up there because we're really excited about that. Yeah. I mean, Winsong and Prosper, we've got two different product lines there that we've developed, and we've got upwards.
I mean, there's a couple hundred lots in front of us. I don't know that. And it's really the last phase. Jed helped put this together for Steve. So Jed, I think it'd be a good time for you to chime in how that happened.
Oh, yeah. Well, Southgate's been buying option lots. In Winsong, we have a great relationship with the master developer out there. It was the first community to have a Crystal Lagoon in North Texas. So it was a great community, really attracted very high-end buyers.
And we were lucky enough to purchase the last paper pods from the developer. So we have 425 lots that we're going to build with Trophy, Normandie, and Southgate. So that's a good segue to the next question we have, Steve. Here is how do you does having three brands help you entitle land? And then how do you kind of fit all three brands in the same city and sometimes even the same property? I know.
Yeah. I mean, I think the first benefit that we get with the three brands is scalability with the development team, with Bobby's group, right? So instead of I'm able to go find bigger pieces if I can get the entitlements for all three brands, which makes Bobby's team more efficient. We can develop a 500-lot deal at once versus doing a 100-lot deal here, 100-lot deal here for each different builder.
So that's a big efficiency that we gain there. And then certainly being local and being able to meet with these cities and have three specific brands in my back pocket to say, "Hey, guys, here's what we're going to do. We're going to offer three distinct brands, products that fit different buyers." And so we can almost create our own little master plan within one company, which provides us with a lot of flexibility to, A, react to market changes when things change, and B, just gather a bigger swath of buyers. So in Frisco, Texas Frisco, Texas is one of the most sought-after neighborhoods in the whole country. If you read any realtor magazines or best places to live publications, you're one of the biggest builders in Frisco, Texas. When you add in all three builders, maybe the biggest. What does the horizon look like?
Frisco's the end is kind of approaching. Where do high-end buyers buy and build next? Yeah. I mean, I think Frisco's got a little runway, but it's not a long runway. And so I think the natural progression as North Dallas, the area itself, as we continue to see job growth and transplants or migration in, the needs for housing will continue to move north, I think. I think Prosper is not that big geographically, but certainly with Winsong, we think that the buyer is going to migrate there. And then certainly Allen, McKinney, even Salina. I think Salina is the next Frisco. I think it's going to have a lot of that growth that Frisco's seen over the past decade. And Trevor, we just mentioned it's kind of finishing a high-end townhouse neighborhood in Newman Village, which we're excited about, but we're really excited about Painted Tree.
I don't know what you could share with our audience about Painted Tree. That was really a coup for us to be involved in that. And tell us about CBGENE and Normandie's involvement up there. Yeah. So we've worked with Tom Oliver and his team. We're buying well, we started with two pods. We were going to buy two pods for Normandie to get in there and really what we think are the premium pods. And part of that, kind of to the point of having the multiple brands, that wasn't a townhouse. There wasn't a townhouse component when we started those conversations.
And then over time, as we continued those conversations, we found that, hey, we can change the land plan a little bit and end up with some town homes here too, which I think is going to it really shows what we can do, and it shows how we can work with partners and landowners.
Yeah. One of the advantages and another takeaway I want to leave our audience with is that a lot developer, when they get zoning, they show renderings to a city. And as we have a real advantage over really decades of our builders working with these cities, we can actually show them what's going to be built. And we have, I don't know how many neighborhoods we've done in Frisco where they've actually seen us execute this with our other builders.
And that's just a huge advantage versus trying to get entitlements and overcoming neighborhood objections, showing pretty pictures. Absolutely. Yes. So on the other end of the spectrum, Trevor, you've typically been an infill builder. And you want to tell the audience kind of what you're looking like the next few years? Yes. So in the past, we built mostly high-density urban infill. And what we've seen, especially in the post-COVID era, is a lot of the millennials are moving out of the city centers into the suburbs or the suburban city centers. And so we've been very excited about growing outside of the urban core of Dallas into some really exciting neighborhoods. So we have a new neighborhood in Heath, 27 single-family houses. We have a new neighborhood on the edge of City Line, which is the regional headquarters of State Farm. That'll be 58 town homes.
We touched base a little bit about the Newman Village, which is close to the PGA headquarters in Frisco. And then in Waxahachie, we have some new communities opening up too. Great. So with the pandemic kind of easing, are you seeing more traffic in your infill locations? Yes. Our infill locations are doing great. We're still excited about our urban infill. We're just diversifying and growing with suburban infill locations as well. So it's basically people like you that look like you that used to be urban, that are kind of moving to the suburbs now. Yes. Yeah. And some of your demographic that are moved-down buyers as well. Okay. Well, thank you. And do you think that's because people your age are having kids and wanting to get into better school districts? What's driving infill locations? Yeah. It's not just the pandemic and COVID.
It's also the demographics of the millennials getting older and starting families and wanting a little bit more elbow room and some values in the suburbs. Great. So in summary, I think, Steve, really big things ahead for you guys. I think when you add your three brands up, you're right around 1,000 closings a year, headed toward 1,200. We have the land pipeline to do that. We're running out of time too. Yeah. Sorry, Jed. I think I got to cut you off. We got to keep the show moving forward. Thanks for coming on. Next, we're going to have Brian Barr, who started Challenger Homes in Colorado Springs. And he's going to be our next guest. And I look forward to introducing Brian. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Thanks for having us.
Hello. I'm Brian Barr, the founder of Challenger Homes.
As I began my career in Colorado Springs, I had the opportunity to experience nearly every aspect of the real estate industry, including property management, real estate sales, commercial development, and home building. This diverse background and market knowledge proved invaluable when my wife, Heather, and I decided to start Challenger Homes for Margarage in May of 2000. Driven by our mission for making life better and by strong core values, I am proud to say that over the last 21 years, Challenger Homes has become one of Colorado's most trusted new home builders. At Challenger Homes, one of our strategic advantages has always been our ability to deliver exceptional value to first-time move-up and military home buyers. As a child, my father was in the United States Air Force. I've seen and know the sacrifices many military families make to protect the freedoms we enjoy.
As such, since starting Challenger Homes, we have honored our servicemen and women with one of the largest military incentives of any new home builder in the area. Several of Challenger's communities are conveniently located close to major military employers such as Peterson Air Force Base, NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain Air Station, Fort Carson's Army Mountain Post, and the Air Force Academy. With great lot positions near military employment centers, Challenger Homes has proudly become one of the largest new home providers in the area for our men and women in uniform. Because of Challenger's strong track record and our deep roots within the community, Challenger Homes receives the first look at many land and lot positions. Having a first shot at great communities and lots provides Challenger Homes with a significant competitive advantage over other public builders. A few years ago, I was introduced to Jim Brickman and Greenbrick Partners.
I was impressed by Jim's vision for the future, Greenbrick's great culture, and the tremendously talented people Greenbrick Partners had attracted to their team. We decided to work together. Since Greenbrick's strategic investment in Challenger Homes in 2017, we have continued to grow Challenger Homes by combining the strength of our local relationships with Greenbrick's operational excellence. During that four years, Challenger Homes has grown significantly within Colorado Springs and has also expanded into Denver and other northern Colorado communities. Recently, Greenbrick Partners and Challenger Homes reached an agreement to jointly find and develop additional communities within the Denver market. This expanded level of collaboration will provide significant growth opportunities for both Challenger Homes and Greenbrick's Trophy Signature Homes.
With the support and expertise of Greenbrick Partners, the team at Challenger Homes is not only excited about the successes of the past but also optimistic for the possibilities of the future. With our strong track record of building quality homes in Colorado Springs and our future partnership with Trophy Signature Homes, Challenger Homes can expect to continue developing incredible communities, building quality homes, and delivering great value to our customers for years to come. That is the intention, the pursuit, the very purpose of Challenger Homes: making life better, one home at a time.
Brian, thanks for coming down here. I can say very honestly, we own 49.9% of Challenger Homes. I was very cautious about that when we did that a little over four years ago. It's been just a fantastic experience.
And we've talked about Greenbrick and our team builders, but I can say unequivocally that we have learned so much about culture, people, and really the human side of running a business from Challenger Homes. And kind of take us through what your plans are for Greenbrick/Challenger Homes and growing with you in the future. Great. Thank you for having me down, Jim. It's been a pleasure to be your partner for over four years now. And since our partnership was formed, we've grown the company from under 400 closings a year to more than 500 in Colorado Springs. And last summer, we hired a division president for northern Colorado. And this year, we will close 50 homes in Denver and Fort Collins with goals of closing more than 200 homes next year.
So it's been a great partnership, and I love being part of the Greenbrick culture and just being partnered with great people like you. Thank you. Thank you so much. And I really do mean that. For people that want to see a really great group of people that can really row the boat together, Colorado Springs I mean, your operation in Colorado Springs is great. And we don't announce returns on capital by builders, but I can tell you that one of the exciting things is treating people well really can translate to the bottom line, which you may want to address. We have always been very good to our employees. We believe that making life better is our mission. And so we try to make life better for our customers and our employees and our trade partners. And it's come out with great results. We're very thrilled.
And how many employees do you have? I mean, you took them all on a cruise. Yeah. When we celebrated our 20-year anniversary, we took all of our employees and many of our trade partners on a Disney cruise just to say thank you for everything that they've done for us. Yeah. That's just great. Tell me about your kind of strategic advantage. You've been in Colorado Springs a long time. You develop a lot of lots there. And kind of take us through that lot supply because that's kind of the starting point for your success like it is for other businesses. Well, just as you've mentioned, real estate's a local business, and it comes down to relationships and understanding your market.
And we've been fortunate to develop relationships in the 21 years that Challenger Homes has been in business and for years prior to that that give us a first look at land. And so whereas other builders may be paying market rate or even getting hometowned at times when they come into Colorado Springs, we are able to get a first look and to see the land and to buy it right. And we estimate 7% to our bottom line margin. Before we run out of time, I want to give a shout-out to Tom Hennessy, who's your CEO, because really, right after we went into business, it was a little bit shocking because you wanted to change management. And that was a little over four years ago. And I can't say what a great success he's been to helping our business grow together. Tom's tremendous.
He came from a public builder. He was in Denver, so he knew that market. And you and I had discussed that Denver was twice the size of Colorado Springs and a big growth opportunity. So this was a natural transition, and he's done tremendous work. Well, thanks for your time, Brian. Thanks for coming out to seeing us again. We love our partnership with Challenger Homes. For the next segment, we're going to be taking a closer examination of GH Homes in Vero Beach, Florida area with Bill Handler, our president and operator there. Thanks again. Thank you.
Hi. I'm Bill Handler, president of GHO Homes. At GHO Homes, our strategic advantage is the combination of decades of experience acquiring and developing land in Florida's Treasure Coast, the area north of Palm Beach County and south of Daytona, with the capacity to customize homes through our tailor-made program.
Our relationships with landowners and developers in Vero Beach and Port St. Lucie, Florida, allow us to be optimistic and select properties to provide the lot positions that support a wide range of product and price points while growing our well-recognized brand. Our tailor-made program starts by providing a wide collection of interactive floor plans with pre-designed options, including gourmet and expanded kitchens, extended bedrooms, sitting rooms, alternate spa-like master bathrooms, larger covered patios, and more. Our state-of-the-art design center is unequaled in the market and offers over 3,500 square feet of kitchens, baths, countertops, appliances, and flooring choices for our buyers. They work directly and privately with our on-site design team to personalize their home. This is one of the critical elements of our market position to allow us to secure much larger customer deposits than our peers and maintain a much lower cancellation rate.
My father, Dan, started GHO Homes in 1983 after several years in commercial development. I was fortunate to grow up with craftsmanship, human nature, and building as a daily conversation around the dinner table. And I've used my practical hands-on knowledge, my educational background, and standing as a licensed contractor and business acumen to guide the company. In 2000, after graduating from law school and being constantly involved in the company, I took over as president of GHO Homes. And I've spent the last two decades growing our business. I have been fortunate to work with our lead managers for decades, and we have grown a team based on a sense of family and supporting each other through different markets and challenges.
In April of 2018, Greenbrick Partners acquired a majority ownership in GHO, which provides us with the access to new capital and operational best practices while maintaining the family-focused team that has been responsible for our incredible success. At GHO Homes, we believe your new home should be uniquely yours. It is this philosophy that gives GHO a strategic advantage and separates our business from our competition. When you combine our strength and reputation in the market and diverse offerings of floor plans and price points with our tailor-made program and ability to customize our homes, we're able to meet the needs of a large group of buyers while managing the balance between quality and value. Our single-story homes capture a significant share of the market in our price range from high 200s to well over a million dollars.
We have several luxury beachside communities staged for future homeowners, including The Strand, a gated community currently selling with sale prices exceeding a million dollars. Just a few miles north on Vero's Barrier Island, our Seaglass community began active development in July and will be part of our top-tier price series. With Vero's beachside island communities already substantially built out, our ability to acquire these highly sought-after neighborhoods speaks to our unique strategic advantage in our market. Further inland, we are developing Lakaya Point, also in Vero Beach, and Belterra in the master plan community tradition in St. Lucie County to address the demands of our buyers at a lower price point of affordable luxury in different markets. Our attention to detail and desire to provide each buyer a personalized home starts with our in-house land design and development team.
Our access to new capital and robust operational systems through Greenbrick, combined with our unparalleled culture and family-focused team, have made GHO an unmatched leader in the Treasure Coast home building. Well, thanks for joining us. For our viewers, we've been in business together three, four, five years. Gosh, I can't remember. It's been a couple. It's been a long time. I can tell everyone that it was one of the smoothest handshake transactions we've done. We shook hands, ended up being 80, 20 owners, and it's been a great experience for Greenbrick and our staff. Tell our audience really what GHO does. When we met, you were almost exclusively selling to retired buyers from the Northeast. But share of GHO's advantages and strategy for your business and who you sell to. Generally, we do still sell to mainly retirees. We're in a smaller market, Vero Beach. It's very quiet.
It's where people who have earned the right to come retire and live the lifestyle that they've always dreamed of come to. And we try to supply that market. Now, it's changed with more people working from home, and they're using this as a place to sort of unwind and come to. So we're seeing buyers from all over the state, which is a very surprising trend, and from all over the country really showing up at our doorstep. But the core is still going to be retirees only because it's not a job market, but it's based upon a place where people can live the lifestyle that they've really wanted to, and everything's not too far. Bill's a very conservative guy. They've prospered in Florida, which is notorious for big building cycles.
And one of the really unusual things about our business is we really have no debt at the subsidiary level, and we still make really great returns at GHO. Take us through some of the options and what you provide customers. Well, we try to be the premium brand locally. So if we're dealing with retirees, all the nationals want to do the same thing. Our goal is to be a step above. So from structural options to, I call them, one-off options, a music room, something that that guy has just got to have because he's always dreamed of it, to our design studio, which there's nothing quite like it in the marketplace. We have the full gamut to provide our customers what they're looking for. Now, we're built structurally not structurally, procedurally to build these homes for people with minor modifications. Yeah.
I remember when we were doing our underwriting and visiting you, we were visiting a very large builder's competitor's community. And he actually told me he sent you customers because they wouldn't make any changes. Right. Yeah. It's a marketplace that we're still dominant in, and we just continue to grow it. Now, we're doing it by price points, so we're getting up into million-dollar homes in markets locally that the big nationals won't touch. Tell me some of your newer neighborhoods that we're doing together that you probably wouldn't have done because they're larger and big investments that we made with GHO. That's a big part of the partnership why I enjoy it so much. But yes, we do have a bigger window. Seaglass, which is on the island in Vero Beach, is probably the last beautiful piece of property that we're developing now. It's going to be amazing.
And we have an opportunity. That's with 72 home sites and the million-dollar kind of project? They'll probably be right about a million. And we'll have two different product types and open up probably next year, but it's very exciting. And there's really nothing to compete with it. So we can find great opportunities like that. The Strand is another project where we're going to do over $1 million homes. And then things like Bent Pine Off, near a golf course, which are 6, 7, 8 hundred thousand dollars. So we're varying a price point and letting buyers choose what they want. Yeah. Well, it's been a great experience. One of the fun things was your head construction guy actually has worked for you and brought you to your college dorm, I believe. It's another example of people matter and they perform. It's all about the people.
I have the best team. A couple have been together for almost 25 years. We used to be young. But it's easy to work with those people, and you continue to grow. Chad, do you have any? Do you want to tell the investors kind of what how your closings this year look and how you've obviously bought a lot of land this past year? Where are you trying to grow GHO, and at what price points are you trying to? We're really set up. And the way the market's changing, we're set up so well for the next couple of years. It's great. Yes, it's hard to build right out. Yes, closings are going to be constrained. But we've got the best land stuff that you can't reproduce, and we can set our price points as we go forward.
So the pacing is really going to work well to our favor. And we've got five projects opening up between now and like six months from now, all going to be different price points within the same geographic area. Yeah. We're really excited to see you build on those. Yeah. And you have really one of the great design centers in your whole market. There's nothing quite like it. We love that. That's a big differentiator. Okay. Well, thanks for coming. Unfortunately, that's about all the time we have for this segment. I'd like to pivot to one of the most anticipated segments that we get lots of questions on, and that's purchasing, bottlenecks, supply chain. This is going to be led by Jack Wilkins, our national purchasing director.
Hi. I'm Jack Wilkins, national director of purchasing at Greenbrick Partners.
I recently joined Greenbrick from a top 15 home builder, and I'm excited to add my knowledge and expertise to the company's rapid growth trajectory. Today, I'll be moderating a panel with some of the best purchasing professionals in the industry from several of our subsidiary home builders. Before jumping into our first question, I'd like to stress that our purchasing teams across all our subsidiary builders have adapted like never before to mitigate today's unprecedented supply chain issues.
Thanks to Greenbrick's strong back office support, industry-leading information systems, and superior relationships with our suppliers, we've been able to successfully meet these challenges head-on. A significant part of Greenbrick's success is due to our local and national relationships with our suppliers.
Due to the high density and scale of our core markets in Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth, we've been able to utilize these relationships to obtain preferred customer status and prioritize order fulfillment above our peers. This program has added millions through volume rebates to our bottom-line results and significantly improved our overall company returns. Lastly, our best-in-class purchasing team has been critical in navigating the current supply issues, and I'm thrilled you'll get a chance to hear from them today. Without further ado, I'll let our panelists introduce themselves, and then we'll move on to the first question. Erin, would you like to begin?
Hi. I'm Erin Martin, Director of Purchasing for CB JENI Homes, the largest townhome builder in Dallas-Fort Worth, and Normandy Homes, a move-up single-family builder in DFW .
I'm Troy Caldwell, the COO of the Providence Group in Georgia.
Group is a move-up and townhome brand in Atlanta.
I'm Todd Stern, vice president of purchasing for Trophy Signature Homes here in Dallas-Fort Worth. Trophy is Green Brick's scalable, value-oriented, move-up and entry-level single-family home brand. And I'm Roger Holingworth. I'm the director of purchasing for Center Living Homes here in Dallas-Fort Worth. We specialize in urban and suburban infill and also specialize in cutting-edge architecture and design. All right. With that, we'll get started with our first question. First question, what type of changes have you made in your homes to avoid supply chain delays and mitigate increased cycle times driven by today's economic climate? Erin, do you want to take that one? Absolutely. So what we've done at CB JENI is to limit our upgrade and selection requests. Because CB JENI is a townhome builder, we're moving more to an inventory model.
We've also collaborated with our trade partners to aid in prioritizing our job schedules, similar to a centralized scheduling to mitigate some of the delays we're seeing. Troy, do you have something you want to add? Yeah. At the Providence Group, we source multiple manufacturers and building methods where possible to ensure material availability. For example, our floor systems are designed to be built with either iJoist or OpenWeb. We prefer to use iJoist, but in the event that iJoist are not available, we can easily switch over to OpenWeb to make sure we can continue with our framing crews and keep production going. Further, with appliances, if Whirlpool were to be backward on a refrigerator, we can easily switch over to an equally specced product from Frigidaire or GE. Yeah. Like Troy said, some of the things we do are the same.
We allow for substitutions to be used for materials to keep homes moving. We've also expanded our subcontractor base. We've gone to using wall panels and trusses to help reduce cycle times. That really helps us. All right, so next question. With the cost of lumber trending down, how quickly do you expect to see reduced costs reflected in your future home closings? Todd, we'll let you take that one. Sure. We've seen lumber prices decline 35%-40% from their peak. We're not really going to speculate on what they're going to do for the rest of the year. We've also seen some price increases in flooring, and labor has increased. But those price increases have mostly been offset by the decreases in lumber. Yeah. We're seeing the same thing. It's in our living rooms. All right, so next question.
Are you seeing suppliers increase production capacity to meet current demand? I'll answer this one. I just left a national purchasing meeting with probably 25 or 30 manufacturers involved. And yes, they're all striving to increase production capacity, but there are a lot of constraints from labor to raw materials that the manufacturers and it's not something that happens overnight. So yeah, the manufacturers are working to increase production capacity, but it takes time, so. Next question. What kind of benefits have you seen from having a wide range of national purchasing contracts with your larger suppliers? We'll let Troy take this one. Yeah. With over 20 national accounts, we're able to have material specifically set aside for our building partners. While some smaller private guys may have to find new manufacturers if the material is not available.
In the event that a specced material is unavailable, our relationships allow us to get free upgrades that come at no cost to us or, more importantly, to our homeowners. On top of that, our relationships with these contractors allow us to get price protection that can it gives us visibility to what our cost will be for up to a year in some cases. All right. Next question. How do you select product supply companies? We're going to let Roger take this one. Yep. So I believe this question came from a supply company. So it was kind of a two-part question. It also included a labor component as well. But it's pretty simple.
So with Jack at the helm working out these national agreements for us, he gets to give us the he basically pre-screens those vendors to determine if they have adequate capacity and they can service our accounts. Then we can, as a team, get together and find the ones that make the most sense and use those supply companies for us. The labor component of it labor is really driven by which market you're in. And it's hard to address that in a more broader perspective. So I can tell you the labor in the Dallas-DFW market is relatively strong. And so I can speak to that market and. No, I agree. You're right. There we go. All right. So any other comments, guys? All right. So we'll go on to the next one.
Can you provide examples of how sharing best practices and working with other Greenbrick builders has improved operational efficiencies? I think Erin's got some good examples of these. So we were inspired by Trophy Signature Homes. Their simplified living business model to quickly launch our own CB Jenny X business model. CB Jenny X is a package-driven business model where buyers are limited to a curated list of design selections. So that has greatly helped our business. With Greenbrick's growth, we were afforded the opportunity as a group, as a purchasing group, to collaborate and adapt to the market conditions. Locally in Dallas, Trophy and Center and myself share some of the same vendors. So it makes a bigger impact on our buying power as well as our service over the competition.
And we thought in the Atlanta market, we would have a lot of pushback with going to packages with a different buyer profile that we have out there. But we've rolled it out successfully in a lot of our townhome packages. And buyers, they're accepting it. It takes a lot of anxiety out of the buying portion of the home. That's what it says. And the collaborations have been really helpful. We all buy from the same people. We share our lumber prices, which helps us out immensely. That's right. Sharing from the whole group and having this amount of expertise and products that we can all play on is truly exceptional in the industry. It really is. All right. So we'll move on. What are we doing to ensure that our vendors prefer working with us? We're going to let Todd answer that one. Yeah.
We really do try to cultivate a positive relationship with our vendors and trades here at Greenbrick. Some of the things we try to do, we make sure we do weekly payments for the vendors, which ensures them the money to keep going. We try to make sure our job sites are safe, clean, and ready to go. We really try to practice good scheduling, which means they can get in, get out, move on to the next job, maximize their profits. And I think that we really try to make a good effort to just have a reputation of being a good partner, a good business partner for all of our people. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Be somebody they want to work for. Yes. Is that the easy pay system Jed referenced earlier? Yeah. Yeah. We do. We remember that. That's the easy pay system we're talking about. Yes. Okay.
All right. So now we've got some submitted questions. This is a three-parter. Can you discuss the trade base in Atlanta? How are you doing supplying subs? And are you short any? And can you discuss material shortages in other markets? I'm going to let Troy take over the Atlanta stuff because that's his backyard, so. The trade base in Atlanta, as it is across the country, is strained. But as Warren alluded to earlier in his piece about the Providence Group, we have, over the last couple of decades, built strong relationships with a lot of vendors in the Atlanta market. And frankly, they're dedicated to us and willing to do whatever they have to do, whether it be cut loose some of their smaller private guys that are taking up some of their workloads so that they can focus on the Providence Group.
And I'll address the material shortages. So the material shortages are widespread across all markets. They vary by market. We're affected just like everyone else. The positive aspect is we do have a lot of national relationships, and we kind of use those national relationships to help leverage that we get maybe first dibs on products in some cases. And it also helps that we get a little bit of a we get some feedback from some of the manufacturers so we're aware of some issues may be coming that maybe some of the other smaller builders may not. And I think that's been beneficial. You guys got any comments around? No, I think Troy nailed it with just having those long-term established relationships with those trade partners over many years and us treating them well over those many years.
Really, they stick by the ones that have taken care of them, and that's helped us out tremendously here. And absolutely with what you said, Jack, that was spot on. Yeah. Having the protection on the national accounts has been huge help. Yes. So the next one I've got is probably for everybody, and we'll just kind of work our way down the table, starting with Roger. So what type of eco-friendly or energy-efficient products are used in your homes? And are you seeing that buyers are willing to pay a premium for more environmentally friendly homes? So we'll start with Roger on this one. Yeah. I believe the buyers really do see a value in it. I mean, I'll just be very, very frank. I own a center-living home, and I'm in it, and it is extremely efficient.
My utility bills are low, and I believe in the product that we put on the ground. There's so many different things that you can do as you get more energy-efficient using technology behind it. I mean, just an example is we use smart thermostats so that I can control my thermostat from the office and make sure that the temperature is right. And one of the things that we're actually piggybacking off of what Trophy has been doing is foam insulation in our homes. And that's just a couple of examples that I could say. Todd? Yeah. I mean, at Trophy, we really don't have options. So everything we do in our homes is included. But we do do a lot of energy efficiency and smart home features. We have a smart home package that comes in every home.
We do tankless water heaters, which means you're going to have an endless supply of hot water, foam insulation. And for us, that means your attic's going to be much more comfortable. And in Texas, that's a big deal. We do smart thermostats, smart garage door openers. And as the market's changing, we're trying to be forward-thinking, and we're transitioning some of our standard features to where we're going to be including electric car chargers very soon. So we do LED disc lights. That's a home automation energy savings as well. Again, a lot of the same. We're putting in the LED disc lights in all of our homes. We're offering the video doorbells for enhanced security with the alarm system, wireless garage door openers, wireless locks at the front door. The amount of options that are out there today are really endless.
And we're able to provide those to all of our buyers. We just recently got into a community that has a smart home package standard in our homes with a video doorbell, several of the other Wi-Fi capable, but it becomes a connected home for the home buyer. So new technology. Yeah. Especially in this climate where a lot of people are working from home, it's a big deal. Absolutely. Yeah. And I would say one thing that Trophy's doing that the homeowner doesn't see but that's unique to Trophy is Trophy's doing panels. So panelization where the walls are already pre-assembled at a factory, so there's less waste. There's less waste on the job site. So Trophy's rolled that out, and that's been going pretty well. You rolled that out what, about four or five months ago? Yeah. It's been very successful.
We've rolled it out to a substantial amount of communities with our core product. It's cut down on build time. It's cut down on theft. It's cut down on just shortages. It's been a big game changer for us. All right. So we're going to move on to the next question. Do your teams work remotely today, and what other impacts has COVID had on managing your purchasing department? So we'll start with Erin real quick. It's been a challenge, obviously, going from an office setting to remote. We had to figure out things really, really quickly during COVID of Zoom meetings and making sure everybody's doing their work from home. But our team is doing great. Most of all of us have a hybrid work schedule where our employees come into the office or they're remote as well. But it's been challenging, but pretty good. High efficiency. Yeah.
I think we all know that COVID is being addressed differently in different parts of the market. So while CB Jenny has been working remotely for some time now, the Atlanta office has been in the office, frankly, the entire time. So I don't know how Trophy and Center Living are handling theirs, but. Well, go ahead. You're going to go. For Center Living Homes, we have a very small office. And so it was important for us to just protect the company, making sure that we had management-level decision-makers that weren't, especially in the beginning when we didn't know what it was going to really turn into, how sick people were really becoming. And then it became obvious that this was a really, really big deal and people were getting very sick.
And we made a conscious effort to separate in purchasing specifically in other places, but separate purchasing management and always be separate from each other. And so we had that redundancy built into the organization, just making sure that we were going to be able to function properly, really. All right. So I've got a new one here. Can you talk about the lumber savings you're seeing today and in more detail? Roger? Oh, lumber. Man, what a thing to talk about. Yeah. The lumber savings is here. It's been trending down. But I mean, Todd alluded to it. We don't have a crystal ball, and it's difficult for us to tell you what it's going to do next month, the month after, and what it's going to do by the end of the year because lumber kind of does what lumber does.
I could tell you right now it's down. And it's down exactly what Todd was saying earlier, so. So I'll say this. Lumber went up dramatically last year. And I don't look at it market by market. I look at it as a wholesale country. I'm looking at it a little differently. And I can say this. The lumber wholesale pricing is back down to approximately where it was this time last year, which is pretty much averaged to where it's been in late summer year over year. Now, where it's going to go from here, you really don't know. And if I could do that, if I could project that, I probably wouldn't be working here. The decreases have been significant. I mean, I think, Todd, you've seen some of the bigger numbers. What have you seen since May as far as decreases? Yeah.
I mean, like I said, alluded to earlier, about 35%- 40%. With lumber at its peak, it was really expensive, which was causing a lot of theft, which was the reason we moved to wall panels because it radically cut down on any theft. But yeah, it hits about 35, 40 percent of the wall panels and the stick. Erin, you got anything to add ?
I'm glad that it's coming down. It's making it a lot easier for us to build homes with those prices, so. Okay. So I think I've got maybe time for one more question really quickly. Let me look here. In your earnings call, you mentioned moving to larger communities. Do larger communities make purchasing teams' job easier or harder? Erin, we'll start with you on that one. Absolutely. They make it easier. The larger they are, it spans over a time.
If you think about it, you're setting up one community that's going to last a lot longer than setting up multiple smaller communities. So it definitely makes our job a lot easier if it's a large community.
I think on the purchasing side of being able to negotiate contracts, absolutely it does. But sometimes, for a master plan community in Atlanta, it's not just all single-family homes. It's not just all townhomes. It's single-family. It's townhomes. It's condos. It's a rec center. It could include apartments. I mean, it can get pretty dramatic the bigger the community gets. So I think we're ready to wrap things up here. And I'd like to thank our panel for taking time out of their day to be here. Thank the shareholders for joining us. Thank you. And we'll be going back to Jim with Trophy Signature Homes in just a couple of seconds.
Hi. I'm Stuart Parker, president of Trophy Signature Homes. At Trophy Signature Homes, our strategic advantage is our ability to construct value-oriented homes with a streamlined sales and construction process. The options and upgrades you see in Trophy's models come standard to each of our thoughtfully curated design packages. This simplified process removes choice fatigue from the home buying process and allows each of our homes to be constructed entirely off purchase orders. This process is a win-win for both our company and our home buyers, as it allows Trophy to efficiently manage our construction cycle times and consistently deliver quality homes to our buyers in the shortest time possible. I have supervised the construction of homes for more than 35 years, working for private builders as well as one of the largest builders in the nation.
I have never been more engaged or excited about the future than I am today. I joined Greenbrick after serving as regional president of a national public builder. I love my new role because Greenbrick is a systems-oriented builder that at the same time understands that bureaucracy is the silent killer of superior financial results. I am not an owner, but my compensation is tied to both short and long-term results, not the flavor-of-the-day performance metrics used by most public builders. Launched in early 2018, Trophy Signature Homes has rapidly expanded across the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. We plan to start an excess of 1,500 homes in 2021 and accelerate that growth into 2022 and beyond. Our growth has been fueled by Greenbrick's unrivaled capacity to source land and lots in our market.
While our initial growth was possible through highly sought-after lot positions in the North Dallas suburbs, our communities today span from the suburbs of Northeast Dallas to West Fort Worth. Regardless of location, Trophy offers a unique blend of functionality, design, and value for home buyers across the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. We distinguish ourselves with not just our contemporary design, but our commitment to representative models in all our communities across every price point. This means that the typical upgrades from other home builders are always included in the price of a Trophy Signature Home. This transparency has resonated extremely well with buyers and has helped establish trust in the Trophy brand. Our Lake Point community in Northeast Dallas is an excellent example of our soft, contemporary design that provides our suburban buyers with a modern home at value-oriented pricing.
Lake Point is nestled between Lake Lavon and Lake Ray Hubbard and demonstrates how Greenbrick's experienced land acquisition team and our unique design quality combine to create an undeniable appeal to buyers in our market. Our ability to execute these modern designs and upgrade rich floor plans would not be possible without our best-in-class purchasing and construction teams. When Greenbrick hired me to build out Trophy Signature Homes, I knew it was not something I could accomplish alone. Luckily for me, I was able to rely on a strong network of industry professionals that I had built over my 35-year career. Thanks to these individuals, Trophy has successfully implemented an array of products and features in each of our homes, which encapsulates our philosophy of simplified living.
These premium energy-efficient upgrades include double-pane insulated windows, spray foam insulation, tankless water heaters, and home automation technology, all of which come standard in our homes and provide a significant cost savings to our buyers. Our superior lot position and value-oriented contemporary homes are made possible for the combined efforts of Greenbrick's superb land acquisition efforts in Dallas-Fort Worth and the amazing team of people I have the privilege to work with every day. As we continue to expand in Dallas-Fort Worth, we are exceptionally optimistic about the future of our company. We believe our one-of-a-kind value-engineered floor plans and modern lifestyle brand are inherently scalable and will easily translate to success across multiple markets outside of Dallas-Fort Worth. Jim and his Greenbrick team are conservative about giving guidance for growth.
That said, I want to share that Greenbrick plans to provide over $200 million above what is currently invested in our business to grow Trophy Signature Homes in 2022. Today, we are investing in staff and systems so we can effectively manage that future growth. We expect significant SG&A leverage and benefits when each of our investments become realized revenue. Please visit us to learn more about Trophy and why it is one of the fastest-growing builders in the country.
On behalf of everyone at Trophy Signature Homes, I would like to thank you for joining us on our virtual tour of our newest model home, the Morrison, at Lake Point in Lavon, Texas. We offer two product lines at Lake Point, but today we will focus on the Morrison model, which is part of our Musician series of homes.
Floor plans in this series range in size from 2,800 square feet to 4,300 square feet and feature five and six bedrooms with oversized and three-car garages. These desirable family-friendly features are hard to find, especially in the context of a $400,000 to $600,000 price point. At 4,300 square feet, the Morrison features five bedrooms with two of those bedrooms down, a media and game room, plus a study. This feature-rich home sets the standard for value in the market. Our right-now contemporary design and a representative model create a compelling argument for the buying decision. This commitment to a representative model across all price points has helped us distinguish the Trophy brand and set us into a league of our own. Some upgrades standard in our model include designer light packages, contemporary 60-inch electric fireplaces, vaulted ceilings, as well as upgraded quartz countertops.
These luxury upgrades are seldom seen as standard features and leave our buyers with a feeling of overwhelming value in the Trophy Signature Homes brand. The value of a Trophy home extends beyond what can be seen in the final product and comes with luxury upgrades that are standard behind the walls as well. For example, each of our homes comes with standard spray foam insulation on exterior walls and attic ceiling, an energy-efficient upgrade that would typically cost a buyer in excess of $4,000. Our homes also come equipped with tankless water heaters, an upgrade that would typically cost buyers $3,500. Once everything is said and done, our buyers can expect to find over $100,000 of luxury upgrades included in their home at no additional cost. For a home buyer looking for their forever home, this value is truly unmatched.
Trophy's commitment to a representative model presented by a best-in-class sales team creates an unparalleled value proposition for our home buyers. There's nothing else out there that offers our unique blend of contemporary elevations, thoughtfully designed plans, and right-now design that buyers are looking for. This combination creates a scalable business model that allows us to offer unmatched value to our buyers while performing better than builders reliant on selling options. Our representative model creates a consistent product that we can build quickly with the same premium materials and suppliers, protecting our margins over the long term. A big part of what makes the representative model system work is our designer-curated packages. At Lake Point, our Musician series offers buyers five interior design packages to choose from within the existing available inventory.
When we started Trophy Signature Homes, we knew that how we presented our homes should be driven by more than just the emotional appeal. We also researched consumer trends to determine what drives consumer decisions. We researched the neuroscience of choice, which led us to a phenomenon known as choice fatigue, the idea that one's capacity to make wise decisions becomes increasingly depleted as the brain becomes fatigued with choice. In the context of home buying, we found that traditional buyers were often overwhelmed and had a difficult time making decisions because there were actually too many options and upgrades. This understanding is why we pared down our selections, striking a balance of choice while eliminating the stressors that come with having to make endless design center selections.
We found that people will pay a premium to avoid choice fatigue and be part of a one-stop-shop solution that remains value-oriented but offers all the upgrades and options they wanted. They are willing to pay a premium to feel like they got the best of everything. The feeling they're left with, the feeling that they're getting a great all-inclusive deal in a prime location, leaves them feeling empowered in their decision and, most importantly, leaves them trusting us in guiding them to close on the most significant purchase of their life. We know buyers want to feel like they got the best of everything. If there's only one best way to do everything, why offer anything but the best? And that is the Trophy Signature Homes difference.
Thank you so much for joining me in today's virtual tour and taking the time to explore what makes our model homes truly unique. We're really excited to share the Trophy success story with our investors and audience. And in the CEO's chair, let me just tell you that the way I view the success really is because of the guy on my left, Jed Dolson, the land development team, is providing you an unbelievable lot position and really just unbelievable job you have built internally, building an organization that didn't exist much more than three years ago that's now doing 1,600 starts in Dallas, that's one of the biggest builders and the biggest housing market in the country. And Jed's going to have a number of questions that have been submitted that I know he's going to talk to you about.
But I think the most telling thing about Stuart and his team, if you ever get an email from them, is on the bottom of it in the boilerplate, it says, "What? Find a way or make it?" Find a way or make one. Find a way or make one. And really, I've never seen a team been able to do that like your team is. You've made it, and you've just really had the greatest organic growth story I've ever witnessed as either a real estate developer or certainly as a person that's kind of at the top of the pyramid running this organization. So Jed, why don't you kind of field the questions that have come in about our leading brand that Stuart's created? Okay. Great. Thanks, Jim. Stuart, we met you a little over three years ago.
Before we dive into the questions, why don't you tell us kind of what the—you had a very strong vision for what you wanted Trophy to be. Can you share with the audience what that vision was? Yeah. Sure. Sure, Jed. First, I think we need to—we need to recognize the relationship that we do have with Greenbrick. And the last three years have just been enormously satisfying and a great experience, both for our team but also for me personally. And I thank you for all the kind words. What you're seeing out there, Jed, right now is really the result of the creative effort of our leadership team and our sales team. But also, it's a vision of small incremental experiences and personal experiences that we've had and what we've all experienced over the last years of home building.
One, I think, is important to relate to a little bit is I think we all can relate to the idea of having way too many choices, right? And a good example of this—and we just get burned out, frankly. A good example of this would be back when we were first thinking about Trophy and coming up with the business platform for Trophy and thinking about the brand. My wife had been out of town, and she called me up and said, "Hey, you need to go buy some hangers." Well, I never bought hangers. These are clothes hangers? Clothes hangers. Not airplane hangers. She didn't want to hang your hair. Clothes hangers, right? Anyway, so I never bought that before in my life. And I got on Amazon like most people would do, I think.
And there are over 2,000 combinations and permutations of hangers being sold on Amazon right now. What started out as just a simple search and acquire mission quickly degenerated into something a lot more problematic and difficult. And what this experience really got me to think about was to start really thinking about how that might apply, that experience might apply to how people buy homes, right? And the fact that we are inundated with options, we're inundated with choices. And if you really study some of the science that's out there on choice fatigue and the economics of choice, why people choose A over B, and really even the biology of how people process data and information, I think you realize that most people, given a choice between having multiple options but having the right option, are going to choose what they consider to be the right option.
So how do you come about narrowing the scope and helping choose the right options and limiting the selection process? Sure. And that's a great question. And that really comes back to what we mentioned earlier about our leadership team and our sales team. We really are a bottom-up information stream. And we rely heavily on the people at the point of attack out in the community to tell us what people are looking for. And we also integrate them into the decision-making process and take ownership in the final product because it affects them, right? We want to give people control over their destiny as much as possible.
So when the information that we get from people with 20 years of experience, maybe selling homes, or the leadership team that's, in some cases, been working with me for well over 20 years, we're able to create and really determine what the market is looking for. We don't look and say, "Well, this works for us." We ask, "What works for the buyers?" So what we've done is we've taken that data from the salespeople, and we've created packages that we think are what the buyer wants. And so the buyer simply chooses a package. They're priced the exact same. And it's really a Trophy's an all-inclusive model with very limited upgrades. Isn't that right? Exactly.
And we have a representative model so that when someone comes into our model and they look around, it takes them a while to get their head around the fact that everything that they're seeing is standard that comes with the home. There are no upgrades or options that they have to layer in on top of it. But also, it's beautiful. I mean, we have curated color packages that we supply for them so they don't have to make those choices. I think we've all made choices in the past that we regret. It's a lot easier when someone that does this for a living makes those decisions for us. One question we've gotten from some investors is, "Trophy's your entry-level buyer. Why are you guys—or builder, why are you guys building houses $850,000?" Because we can. So I think I'll answer that. We started Trophy three years ago.
And at the time, every builder across the country was diving into entry-level because that's where the demographics were pointing most buyers to go. That segment was producing the highest return on capital. So what we've seen, we were unable to find any finished lots that were pure entry-level lots. So what we were able to find were some bigger price reset lots at a higher, more expensive second-time move-up. And I think what was, for me personally, so exciting to see about Trophy was when we nailed the second-time move-up market, I knew it was going to work at the entry level while we developed those lots. So for investors out there that are wondering why we are long-term, that's not our plan to build $850,000 lots at Trophy. We want to stick in that 300 to 500 range. But that was the opportunity at the time.
And we're just kind of winding through that. But it's been a very profitable business. And sadly, we'll kind of miss it. But as we grow Trophy from 1,000 closings a year to over 2,000 in the DFW market, we really need to be more streamlined. Stuart, I got to say that three years ago, there was a large private builder that had come into town with some really hip elevations that worked really well in the Northeast, Northwest. And you decided to do modern elevations. And I was more than a little bit nervous. But we said, "Okay. We're going to go for that." So tell me how this modern-looking home that wasn't a brown house with brown brick with a 412 ridge roof pitch, how you did that. And I guess it's a compliment because some of the big builders are now copying your elevations.
But tell me how you got into that. Yeah. Time to change. Yeah. Well, that's a great question, Jim. I think that our unique selling proposition, we knew that when we first started Trophy, we needed to be different. We couldn't look like everybody else. If we look like everybody else and we're homogenous, then it really becomes all about a fight over incentives, right? Who has the best incentives? And then ultimately, that's a race to the bottom, right? So we originally thought, "Well, maybe 5% of the market will really, really like us." And that was okay because 5% of our market is huge, right? So we actually did look at that builder. And we realized that their elevations were great. We loved that look. It was very contemporary. And they were seeing a lot of traffic and getting a lot of interest in it.
And it worked well for them until it didn't. The problem was that they really didn't have the efficiency and the value engineering. And for us, we look at an item and we say, "Look, we want, let's say, $5,000 worth of perceived value. It costs us maybe $2,000 to build. We sell it for $3,000." So that's a win-win for everybody. That's a hard balancing act to find that item. But we've been very successful with it using our business model and listening to our sales and leadership team. So how do you stay ahead of the guys now that's going, "Gosh, Trophy really did some cool stuff. And I'm driving around going, 'That looks like a Trophy house in a neighborhood now'"? Yeah. Well, time to change, right? So we are very nimble.
A lot of the simplicity of our business model allows us to really allows us to be very nimble and to make these changes relatively quickly. And that's what we're looking at right now. We are going to look at the next gen of Trophy and really try to move that needle out a little bit further. One thing that we discovered was that the modern elevations, people love the modern elevations, right? And the light, bright interiors. The light, the light airiness, the volume in the home. And they obviously love our business model with the representative model and no changes and really no options. It's working great for us. And you brought up an interesting point. We've been able to sell houses using this business model from $300,000- $850,000 with one carpet, two colors. It's just the right carpet, right?
Let me share with our audience something we really don't discuss that much internally about capital allocation between builders. But Stuart knows this. Jed worked with me on this with our finance team. And that is what our retained earnings are, which we don't foretell what we expect our earnings to be this year. But they're going to be a lot. And we are going to basically use all of our retained earnings to grow Trophy Signature Homes organically in Dallas and hopefully into other markets. And that's going to be a big investment for us. He's got the team that we're already planning for executing to deploy this capital. And we think we can really—we took people through the model of shorter business cycle, nice margins, higher return on capital.
And we're really excited about investing most of our retained earnings and debt that attaches to that retained earnings in the future in Trophy and your team. I like to hear that, Jim.
Thank you very much. Stuart, the demand's huge out there today. We just had our earnings call with analysts yesterday. And a big question that came out of that call, not just for us but our peers as well, is how are—and I think they'd love to hear firsthand from the guy that's kind of controlling the spigot—how are you metering sales? Why are you metering sales? And can you talk about the strength of the demand you're seeing? Obviously, you've been building and selling homes for a long time. I have. But I think that's a really good question. But the answer is really fairly simple.
We know that our market, that the demand for new homes in Dallas is going to be consistently high and greater than the supply for the foreseeable future. The value of the home to the buyer is going to increase and continue to increase dramatically. So the good news, bad news, we have tremendous demand. But that also puts pressures on the efficiency of the organization. So if we're able to manage that and to eliminate some of these stressors that volume has and to go ahead and allocate them over a longer period of time, we can increase margins and become more efficient. Great. Thank you, Stuart. Thank you, Jim. Appreciate your time. Thank you for your time and insight, Stuart. We could not be more excited about Trophy's outlook for growth.
Our record results over the past years are the culmination of years of diligent planning and hard work by our subsidiary builders and corporate team. We believe that outstanding results achieved this quarter are just the first step in Greenbrick's remarkable growth story as the company is on track to materially exceed $1 billion in revenues this year. As such, we are confident our shareholders should continue to see the benefits of the synergistic integration of our culture and operating scale in some of the best housing markets in the country for years to come. As we wrap up our event, we want to take the last 15 minutes to answer some of the questions that have been coming in.
Joining me for our last Q&A of the event are Jed Dolson, our COO and executive vice president, and Rick Costello, our CFO, and David Einhorn, president of Greenlight Capital and chairman of the board of Greenbrick Partners. Our final questions here. First, can you provide or quantify the improvement in operational and financial efficiency of the larger communities? And how do you balance that with the concentration of lots in a given area? Jed, COO, this is your turf. Sure. We really look at it. We run a financial model on every prospective project we do. And we look at what the absorption rate is. So if we think a community can sell 50 homes a year, we're probably going to want to buy a two to three-year supply. We have some much bigger projects. But we feel like we have bought those at very low, low-cost basis.
And it doesn't cost us very much carry to hold on to those. We think those assets will remarkably appreciate over time. And you probably also have the lack of needing to remobilize because we get to use our model rows consistently over time. And any sales momentum, we just continue on. I think that brings a big SG&A efficiency as well. Yeah. Absolutely. We love it when we find a three-phase project and we can sell out of that with one model. Well, specifically, talk about we've got a question here on the two large land parcels for Trophy, where they are and when the communities might be coming out. So without getting into too much specifics, we'll just say they're located in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, one's north, one's south. And we are very excited. We've been in these markets for a long time now.
So this is not a new case study for us. We know what our proven track record is. And we think in these two communities, we can sell well in excess of 100 units a year. Yeah. That's a really good point you made. And one of the things I want to highlight for investors, some of them are concerned about diversification or concentration in Dallas. Well, Dallas is one of the most diversified economies in the country to start with. Secondly, what do we have? 56 neighborhoods now in Dallas? Something in that number. The lawyers are probably panicking. I'm throwing the wrong number out. But I think that's very close. So we have unbelievable market real-time feedback on many price points, many products. I think we're the fourth largest builder in units in the largest housing market, maybe the second largest in revenue.
So we have an unbelievable data point and feedback loop that allows us to underwrite all these price points very quickly. And Rick and his finance team and Jed and his operational team really do a great job on that. Yeah. It's actually gotten easier to underwrite projects and to run our business as we've gotten larger. Yeah. We've mentioned Horton as a dynamic competitor. Like others in the space, they're rapidly shifting to a land-light model. What's your view on that shift in the broader industry? And are we considering doing the same? We are not considering doing the same. And that's probably not that popular on Wall Street. But we talked earlier in the segment that to go land-light, you're going to pay private equity returns on capital to somebody. They're not going to do that for free. And these land bankers are really smart people.
So they're going to take—if they're going to take that risk, somebody's paying for it. And it comes out of margin. That's one of the reasons our margins are so high. The second reason is that when you start relying on lot developers, there are really not a lot of developers in business anymore that they don't need land bankers. And we can control our own destiny and know that we can control our own destiny. It's one less third party to rely on. So no, that's not really part of our strategy. I knew that answer would be coming straight out. And everybody wants our lots, by the way, Rick. Yeah. When I say everybody, most public builders call all the time, "Jed, can you give me some lots?" Yep. What is your sense in terms of the rapid price increases we've seen this past year?
Are local buyers being priced out by the out-of-state buyers coming in from California and elsewhere? Well, interest rates are still low. We've done sensitivity analysis with our mortgage joint ventures over what people can afford. Sticker shock is much more of an issue than affordability right now in terms of people buying homes. But there's a huge amount of buyers that can pay higher interest rates and buy more house than they're buying right now, even though prices have rapidly escalated. Yeah. And we've talked on quite a few of our calls about what kind of really seminal event we've gone through here with the fact that the market has been underserved for the past dozen years in terms of the millennials being late in terms of their homeownership rate. So we have a dozen years of undersupply.
We have very little existing supply of the existing stock of inventory out there. We have rates that really should remain low because we still have negative rates internationally between Europe and Japan. And we've got the millennials now just coming into their most active home-buying years. So the impact of that—and David, what do you see from an inflation standpoint and an affordability standpoint? Kind of on the more macro side only. Yeah. Look, I mean, the way that I look at it was we had a housing bubble that went from about 2004 to 2008. And the country overbuilt maybe 2 million houses. And then for the last 13 years, we've underinvested in housing. And cumulatively, maybe it's 2 million underinvested. And so now we're catching up. And we're just at average. We're not even rebuilding the excess demand.
It could easily take a half a decade or longer to make up for the underinvestment that's happened in housing. And in markets like where we are, it just seems—it almost feels like it's limitless. And so it's a question for the company here, how well can we execute, how much land can we buy, and how fast can we get it entitled, and how effective can we get in the construction? And that process is slowed down, which makes it tougher. That just gives us a ton of visibility for a multi-year period of growth that might look an awful lot like the last five years. Hey, Jim, in terms of that execution, do you see our execution as being different from those of our peers in terms of what we've been able to do? Without sounding egotistical, I wouldn't say different.
I would say we want to be better than peers. That's our goal every day. That's Stewart's goal. That's every one of our builders that have talked. So we're all building houses. We just have to figure a way to do it better and more efficiently all the time. And if you're not moving forward, you're moving backward and just don't know it. And we just got to keep pushing to move forward. Well, very good. We are pretty much at the end of our list here. Jed, have we discussed today sufficiently the—are we transitioning into a point where land is getting more expensive and tougher to find out there? Yeah. Yeah, we have. But I'm happy to answer that again. We've said no to a lot of deals this year. We're going to continue to say no.
We were just shown a deal yesterday where our cost basis right next door is 39,000 a lot. A paper lot? No. Finished lot. Finished lot. And we were pitched a deal at 68,000. So we're going to continue to say no until we get further through our lot supply. So we're going to be very opportunistic. I think we are going to execute better than our peers. I think, as we mentioned before, we think our land book is superior to every one of our peers. So we look forward to the results that are going to come in the near future. Well, I think time's about up. We're going to wind down the presentation. We appreciate our viewing audience. We particularly appreciate David coming down and visiting with us. And we look forward to producing really great results for everybody this year.