KB Home CEO Jeffrey Mezger is certainly no housing newbie. He has seen just about everything in his 17 years as the homebuilder's top executive, including the "housing bubble" and subsequent crash in 2008. However, even with all that tenure, he'd never witnessed the housing market turn on a dime like it has so many times since spring 2020.
"It has been an incredible pendulum swinging back and forth ever since the pandemic hit," Mezger tells Fortune. "If you go back to 2019 and leading into the pandemic in January 2020, our business was very good, and then it stopped [during the lockdowns], and you navigate that and then buyers came back with vengeance that summer... and then the Fed decides [in 2022] they're going to stop housing and jacks up [interest] rates, and it [housing] stops again. Those were really dramatic shifts in a really short period of time. Normally it is a slower shift in trend that takes months, and in this case it was days."
