Warren Buffett's heir just bought another big homebuilder. What's Berkshire Hathaway planning?

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Five weeks after Greg Abel—who became president and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway on January 1, 2026, succeeding Warren Buffett, who remains chairman of the board—made his first major deal by announcing that Berkshire Hathaway would be buying Taylor Morrison—a deal that will make the conglomerate Buffett built America's No. 4 homebuilder—Berkshire's home-building arm is on the move again. This time, the target is far smaller, but the pattern is the same: Berkshire keeps doubling down on site-built homebuilding, even as the industry grinds through a post-boom cooling cycle.

Last week, Mungo Homes—a unit within Berkshire Hathaway-owned Clayton Home Building Group—announced last week it has acquired McGuinn Homes, a South Carolina-based homebuilder with more than four decades in the Southeast. Financial terms were not publicly disclosed.

In 2025, McGuinn Homes completed 993 new-builds—up from 581 in 2024, 337 in 2023, and 309 in 2022.

Click here for an interactive of the map below

McGuinn Homes isn't just a for-sale homebuilder. Sources tell ResiClub that Build-to-Rent (BTR) has, at times, made up the bulk of McGuinn's business. This latest deal gives Berkshire even more exposure to the BTR sector—which appears to be just days away from receiving a federal blessing if the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act becomes law. In May, when Berkshire Hathaway announced it was buying Taylor Morrison, it also expanded its BTR exposure, given that Taylor Morrison operates a BTR business under the Yardly brand. A BTR-heavy builder like McGuinn gives Clayton/Mungo another lever to pull—and the potential to scale up in a later cycle when institutional and private capital swing up.

When Berkshire Hathaway bought Clayton Properties Group, Inc. in 2003 for $1.7 billion, Clayton was primarily focused on manufactured and modular housing. Clayton's push into the site-built market gained momentum in 2015 when it acquired with Atlanta-based Chafin Communities. It later expanded its site-built footprint through acquisitions like adding Mungo Homes, Goodall Homes, Summit Custom Homes, Oakwood Homes, Harris Doyle Homes, and Arbor Homes. And the shift happened fast: By 2025, Clayton Properties had become America's 12th-largest site-built homebuilder.

Adding McGuinn is Berkshire Hathaway once again doubling down on site-built homebuilding.

With Taylor Morrison's 12,997 closings, Clayton Properties' 9,953 closings, and McGuinn’s 993 closings combined that's roughly 23,943 closings in 2025—which, by ResiClub's back-of-the-envelope analysis, would make Berkshire Hathaway the No. 4 largest site-built homebuilder in the United States, leapfrogging multiple established players (including NVR) and trailing only D.R. Horton, Lennar, and PulteGroup. How exactly Berkshire Hathaway will combine/rollup Taylor Morrison and Clayton Homes’ site-built operations is unclear. That said, the company made it clear some type of rollup is coming.

Based on ResiClub's research, below is a roundup of Berkshire Hathaway's homebuilding operations. (Berkshire also owns other non-homebuilding real estate businesses—including HomeServices of America—that aren't shown below.)

McGuinn's territory is no accident, either. Several of its markets—Columbia, Greenville, Hilton Head, and Savannah—overlap directly with where Mungo Homes already has a deep presence. With this deal, Berkshire Hathaway is consolidating share in a region where it's already strong, folding a respected local builder's community pipeline, land positions, and—notably—its Build-to-Rent relationships directly into an existing platform.

Taken together, the Taylor Morrison deal and the McGuinn add-on point to the same conclusion: Berkshire Hathaway is leaning further into site-built homebuilding at a moment when some in the industry have pulled back amid softer conditions in core homebuilding markets in the Sun Belt. Builders nationally have spent the past several quarters compressing margins—leaning on rate buydowns, incentives, and price cuts—to keep sales volumes from falling further as the market adjust in the post-boom window. Berkshire, with its famously patient capital and lack of pressure from Wall Street's quarterly clock, is betting that scale and staying power matter more in this environment, not less. It's also part of a broader wave of homebuilder consolidation running through 2026—from Japanese conglomerates snapping up Tri Pointe Homes, United Homes Group, JK Monarch, and Wright Homes this spring, to Dream Finders Homes' running pursuit of Beazer Homes. Berkshire's version of that consolidation looks less like a single dramatic swing and more like what it's always been: buy good builders, let them keep their local teams, and quietly assemble scale one market at a time. McGuinn Homes—41 years old, deeply rooted in the Carolinas and Georgia, and with a BTR business capital partners already trust—is a textbook fit for that approach.

Among the 100 major metros tracked by ICE Mortgage Technology, these 6 have the highest share of underwater mortgages

ResiClub members can read our latest “underwater” report here.