Lennar Corporation

Lennar Corporation is one of the largest homebuilders in the United States by deliveries, revenue and net earnings, selling homes under an "Everything's Included" product model and financing a large share of its buyers through its own mortgage and title operations. It collected $34.2 billion of revenue in fiscal 2025 and earned $2.08 billion, a set of numbers that, read next to the prior year's $3.93 billion, tells you almost everything about where this company sits in the cycle.

This is a story about a scale builder deliberately trading margin for volume while it works off a land basis underwritten in a better market. Stuart Miller, the executive chairman and chief executive, is unusually explicit about the choice: the company is "compromising margin in order to maintain volume," and the entire gross-margin gap from three years ago is, in his account, land — homesites committed to in different conditions that the company can only deliver through, not reengineer. The land-light model, sharpened by the February 2025 spin-off of Millrose Properties, is the mechanism meant to retire that basis a home at a time without wrecking the balance sheet.

The file turns on a single question: whether volume discipline and a near-clean asset-light balance sheet are enough to carry Lennar through an affordability squeeze that has pushed its gross margin from 23.3% in fiscal 2023 to 17.7% in fiscal 2025 and 15.5% over the first nine months of fiscal 2026, without the land basis turning into write-downs first. The bull answer is that the land problem is finite, visible and self-liquidating; the bear answer is that the company is not the only seller who knows it.