There’s a conversation happening quietly but more frequently on calls and in corridors, away from official meetings and reports, right across the housebuilding industry at the moment. And it goes something like this: when the market turns, will we have the people to move quickly?
It’s the right question. And the honest answer, for most businesses, is not automatically.
The last major upturn in housebuilding, to which we refer as the sustained delivery period from roughly 2013 to 2019, was built on a workforce that had been shaped by the cycles before it. For example, we had senior land directors who’d navigated the post-2008 correction and commercial leads who’d learned cost control when margins were genuinely thin. Technical managers who’d spent years problem-solving on constrained sites before anyone expected them to manage volume – you get the drift! That experience doesn’t replicate itself easily, and what we’re seeing is that a lot of people with those skills are now exiting the industry, largely due to retirement.
Admittedly, some of that generation has already gone. Retired early during the slowdown, moved into consultancy, stepped sideways into local authority or housing association roles, which they find less stressful. The ones who remain are, in many cases, being stretched across more than they should be, covering gaps that organisations haven’t formally acknowledged.
What’s filling that void is a cohort of professionals who are talented, motivated, and in many cases not quite far enough along the curve yet. Not through any fault of their own. More simply, the reality is that they came into the industry at a difficult time, without the volume of activity that builds certain kinds of experience quickly, and they’re doing well given the conditions. But “doing well given the conditions” isn’t the same as “ready to lead a complex land-led programme through a high-growth period.”
This isn’t a crisis (yet) but it is a lag. And lags, by their nature, are easy to ignore until the moment they aren’t.
The businesses managing this well are doing a few things deliberately. They’re mapping their senior bench honestly; not just who’s in post, but who could step up, and over what timeline. They’re creating the conditions for that cohort of emerging talent to take on real responsibility now, while the pace allows for it, rather than waiting until the market demands it and the learning curve becomes a liability. And they’re having frank conversations about the genuine experience gaps in their teams, rather than letting job descriptions do the optimistic work of pretending those gaps don’t exist.
Our read is that while the talent will be there for the next cycle, they won’t arrive fully formed. The industry will need to grow the next generation of senior leaders in roughly the same window that it needs to deliver at scale.
The businesses that start thinking about that now are the ones that will have options. The ones that don’t will be competing loudly for the same small pool of experienced people, at exactly the moment everyone else wants them.
We have been placing housebuilding professionals across land, commercial, technical, and sales since 2009. If you’re thinking about your senior pipeline — or your own next move — we’re happy to have that conversation.
