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KB Home—a giant homebuilder ranked No. 526 on the Fortune 1000—announced on Thursday that it will expand into the Atlanta market, closing its first land deal (110 homesites) and setting the stage for a growing presence in one of the country's most active homebuilding markets.
KB Home’s Atlanta expansion comes at a moment of change for KB Home. Earlier this year, the giant homebuilder announced it will relocate its corporate headquarters from Los Angeles to Tempe, Arizona. The headquarters move also coincides with a CEO transition. In March 2026, Robert McGibney took over as KB Home's CEO, and Jeffrey Mezger, who had been CEO since 2006, transitioned into Executive Chairman of the board.
Click here to view an interactive version of the scatter plot below
Why Atlanta?
When a homebuilder is making a long-term market presence bet, it isn’t as focused on finding the tightest housing markets at the moment where home prices or rent growth are strongest. Instead, when a homebuilder makes a long-term market presence bet they’re trying to predict future population growth. Homebuilding, at its core, follows people. Builders deploy capital where the population base is rising, where land is available to entitle and develop, and where the regulatory and cost environment makes it feasible to build homes at prices the market can absorb.
U.S. single-family homebuilding activity is heavily concentrated in high-population-growth pockets in Arizona, Texas, Florida, the Carolinas, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia—markets where land is available to entitle and build on, regulatory environments are more permissive, and population growth continues to generate underlying need for more housing stock.
Atlanta checks all of those boxes. While the Atlanta metro has been one of the softer housing markets (with home prices down -2.3% year-over-year) amid the post-Pandemic Housing Boom cyclical cooling window, the Atlanta metro has still been one of the most consistent long-term population growth markets in the country. The region has drawn residents from across the country for decades, fueled by a diverse economy, a relatively lower cost of living compared to coastal peers, and strong in-migration from both domestic movers and international newcomers. That population growth creates a durable floor of housing demand—new households forming, new workers arriving, new buyers entering the market—that gives builders confidence in underwriting land deals and planning communities years in advance. Beyond demand, Atlanta offers something many of the country's large coastal metros cannot: room to build. The metro's exurban and suburban counties—including Gwinnett, where KB Home's first community is located—have land available for large-scale residential development.
While many large homebuilders have made the decision to anchor down in growth markets and resist the urge to chase currently tighter Midwestern and Northeast pockets like Buffalo and Youngstown, that doesn’t mean they will maintain high spec levels in Sun Belt markets that are passing through home price corrections. Indeed, over the past 12 to 18 months, many large homebuilders have temporarily reduced their volumes in the weakest housing markets.
As for the Midwest, when a giant homebuilders push in, they aren’t simply chasing the currently tightest markets like Peoria, IL or Youngstown, OH. Instead, when they do expand there, it’s through selective moves—into metros like Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Columbus. They’re looking for places with durable, multi-year population growth prospects. Homebuilding is a 2- to 6-year pipeline business. By the time a new community delivers, today’s conditions may have shifted. Long-term outlooks matter. In fact, on their Wednesday earnings call, Toll Brothers was asked on Wednesday about which housing markets they could eventually target for M&A/entry. Toll Brothers leadership suggested a growth market like Indy.
“To your question about the remaining spots on the map, you know, there are parts of the Midwest where we don't have a footprint today. Indianapolis, Minneapolis are two spots that come to mind… I think we'll continue to do this type of acquisition, like you saw with Buffington and Northwest Arkansas. We've now done 16 acquisitions over the last 32 years.”
Over the past week, ResiClub PRO members got these 3 additional housing research articles:
