KINGSTON, Jamaica. Ask most Jamaicans who builds the world’s homes and they will picture a bricklayer, a family pooling money for a second storey, perhaps a crew of masons on a hillside in St Andrew. The real answer is a handful of corporations whose output is measured not in houses but in cities. Outside China’s crisis hit developers, the largest of them by homes built and sold each year is a company from Arlington, Texas, which handed over the keys to roughly 230 new homes a day in its latest financial year.
D.R. Horton closed 84,202 homes in the twelve months to September 2026. Jamaica’s National Housing Trust, the country’s largest housing developer, completed 21,166 homes in the ten years from 2016 to the end of 2025, according to provisional figures the Prime Minister gave Parliament on 19 May 2026. One American company, in one year, finished about four times what Jamaica’s main public builder finished in a decade.
That comparison is not a verdict on the Trust. Texas has cheap flat land, deep mortgage markets and an army of subcontractors; Jamaica has hills, hurricanes and a construction workforce that keeps migrating. But it frames the question this investigation asks: who are the world’s great builders, how did they get so big, why did the biggest of them all collapse in China, and what would it take for Jamaica to build at the scale its own Government says it needs?
The Biggest Builder of New Homes for Sale Is a Texas Company
D.R. Horton calls itself America’s Builder, and the claim is literal: it has been the largest homebuilder by volume in the United States every year since 2002, and says it has closed more than 1.3 million homes in its 48 year history. In fiscal 2026 those 84,202 homes brought in US$30.6 billion of home sales revenue, out of US$33.0 billion in total, and about 43,500 of the buyers were first time buyers. In fiscal 2025 its own mortgage arm financed 81 per cent of its buyers.
Lennar, from Miami, is close behind. It delivered 82,583 homes in the year to November 2025, though at a cost: in the final quarter the average price of a home it handed over was US$386,000, down from US$430,000 a year earlier, as it leaned on incentives and price adjustments of about 14 per cent, and its fourth quarter gross margin on home sales slid to 17 per cent from 22.1 per cent. Between them the two firms closed roughly 167,000 homes in their latest financial years, equal to about one in eight of the 1.36 million housing units the US Census Bureau says were started across the country in 2025.
The secret of their scale is not bricks. It is land and money. About two thirds of the homes D.R. Horton closes are built on lots developed by its affiliate Forestar or by third parties, so the company does not tie up capital holding land for years. Lennar has gone further: after spinning off its land holdings into a separate company, Millrose, in February 2025, it says it owned just under 10,000 homesites and controlled about 496,000 more, mostly through options, so that its supply of owned land fell to 0.1 years. The modern mega builder is a manufacturer and a lender as much as a contractor.
The League Table
Ranked by homes handed over in their latest full year, a selection of the world’s large builders looks like this. The figures come from company reports and public housing agencies, and the years do not line up perfectly, so read the table as an order of magnitude rather than a photo finish.
| # | Builder | Country | Homes | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Country Garden | China | 170,000 | 2025, homes delivered (company); down from nearly 700,000 in 2022 |
| 2 | D.R. Horton | United States | 84,202 | Year to Sept 2026, homes closed |
| 3 | Lennar | United States | 82,583 | Year to Nov 2025, homes delivered |
| 4 | PulteGroup | United States | 29,572 | 2025, homes closed |
| 5 | NVR (Ryan Homes) | United States | 21,915 | 2025, settlements |
| 6 | Housing and Development Board | Singapore | 20,294 | Year to Mar 2025, units completed (public agency) |
| 7 | Barratt Redrow | United Kingdom | 17,667 | Year to June 2026, completions |
| 8 | Persimmon | United Kingdom | 11,905 | 2025, completions |
| 9 | National Housing Trust | Jamaica | About 2,100 | Average a year, 2016 to 2025 (21,166 over ten years) |
Missing from the list is Sekisui House of Osaka, which does not report closings the way American builders do but claims a record no rival matches: 2,706,837 homes built since 1960 as of January 2025, including 57,085 overseas. In 2024 it bought the American builder M.D.C. Holdings, owner of Richmond American Homes, for about US$4.9 billion. The Japanese approach, factory made panels assembled quickly on the buyer’s own land, is the opposite of the Texan land machine, and the company says it has produced the largest cumulative total of any homebuilder.
How China Built, and Broke, the Largest Machine of All
For a decade the true giants were Chinese. In 2021 Country Garden recorded contracted sales attributable to shareholders of about 558 billion yuan, roughly US$88 billion, the largest of any developer on earth. China’s National Bureau of Statistics puts total new commercial property sales that year at around 17 trillion yuan in revised data. The model was simple: sell flats off plan, use buyers’ deposits to buy more land, borrow against the land, repeat.
When Beijing tightened credit in 2020 and 2021 the cycle reversed. China Evergrande defaulted in 2021 on liabilities of more than US$300 billion, by a United States Congressional Research Service estimate about 2 per cent of China’s GDP. A Hong Kong court ordered it liquidated in January 2024 and its shares were delisted on 25 August 2025. Its liquidators reported creditor claims of about US$45 billion against the Hong Kong parent and by October 2026 had recovered about US$436 million, including US$28.8 million from selling, at a loss, 96 of the 107 artworks found at its Hong Kong headquarters.
Country Garden survived by restructuring US$17.7 billion of offshore debt, effective 30 December 2025. Its attributable sales in 2025 were about 33 billion yuan, a fall of roughly 94 per cent from 2021, and it delivered about 170,000 homes, most of them sold years earlier to families still waiting for keys. The bank Nomura estimated in 2023 that some 20 million presold homes across China remained unfinished. In 2025 sales of newly built commercial property, most of it housing, fell another 12.6 per cent to 8.39 trillion yuan, half the peak, and new construction starts, measured by floor area, fell 20.4 per cent, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
The lesson for small markets is uncomfortable. Scale bought with presales and debt can vanish faster than it was built, and the people left holding the risk are not bondholders but buyers. The developers now topping China’s sales rankings, such as Poly Developments and China Overseas Land, are state controlled and have the cheapest access to credit.
Singapore’s State Builder, the Caribbean’s Closest Cousin
The most instructive name in the league table for Jamaica is not a company at all. Singapore’s Housing and Development Board completed 20,294 dwellings in the year to March 2025, had 91,941 more under construction and has finished 1,277,918 homes since 1960. About 76 per cent of Singapore’s resident population lives in its flats. Like NHT borrowers, its buyers pay largely from compulsory savings, held in the Central Provident Fund. Unlike the NHT, it acts as master planner, landowner and developer at once, and it sells new flats at subsidised prices, with the Government covering the deficit.
Singapore has roughly 4.2 million residents to Jamaica’s about 2.8 million. Its public builder completed nearly ten times the NHT’s average annual output of the past decade. That gap is the clearest measure of what institutional design, rather than national size, can do.
Why There Is No Honest Global Ranking
No one keeps a reliable world list of homebuilders, for three reasons. Companies count different things: American builders report homes closed, British ones completions, Chinese developers contracted sales by value and deliveries of homes sold years before. Financial years end in different months. And in much of the world, including Jamaica, most homes are not built by companies at all but by owners who add a room when money allows.
Jamaica’s own statistics show the problem. The Planning Institute of Jamaica publishes housing starts and completions, but its data cover only developments led by the NHT and the Housing Agency of Jamaica, or facilitated by them. As the Institute itself notes, developments financed and built strictly by private developers are not counted. Nobody can say with confidence how many homes Jamaica builds in a year.
The Caribbean: Lots, Keys and Promises
Across the region, governments promise scale and measure it in different currencies. Guyana’s Government says it allocated more than 50,000 house lots between 2020 and 2025, exceeding its manifesto target, after spending about G$250 billion opening up land; President Irfaan Ali has set a goal of 30,000 new homes over five years. A lot is not a house, but an allocated, serviced lot is the step Jamaica’s schemes often find slowest.
Trinidad and Tobago shows the opposite risk. Its Housing Development Corporation was created in 2005 with a stated aim of 10,000 homes a year; it has delivered more than 50,000 units in two decades, closer to 2,500 a year. A Freedom of Information request reported by the Trinidad Guardian found 122 sets of keys handed over between 28 April and 21 November 2025, the months since that year’s general election, one of them to an applicant who had applied in July 2000.
Jamaica Once Had a Builder of Scale
Jamaica’s largest builder was not always the state. In the late 1950s the Matalon family’s West Indies Home Contractors, WIHCON, began selling turn key homes, finished and ready to occupy, a novelty in a country where families bought land and built slowly. Mona Heights came first, about 680 homes in 1959 and 1960 according to contemporary press accounts. Harbour View (1,800 units), Duhaney Park (2,400) and Hughenden (550) followed, according to the company.
Then came Portmore. From the late 1960s WIHCON built on reclaimed swamp land across Kingston Harbour, reached by a new causeway, and, by its own account, reached a pace of as many as 75 houses a week, more than 25,000 homes in the Portmore area over the years. In 1991 it broke ground on Greater Portmore, designed for 12,500 units and financed through the San Jose Accord, under which Mexico and Venezuela set aside part of the value of Jamaica’s oil purchases for low interest development loans. WIHCON describes it as the largest housing development ever built in the Caribbean, and says Mayer Matalon conceived the idea that became the NHT in 1976.
Even that peak pace of 75 houses a week, if sustained for a year, would be about 3,900 homes, nearly twice the NHT’s average annual completions over the last decade. Jamaica has done large scale housing before. It did it with a private builder that controlled land, design, construction and sales in one company, which is exactly the kind of enterprise level contractor the Prime Minister now says the country needs.
Myth Check: Did the NHT Build 50,000 Homes?
In July 2025 the Jamaica Information Service reported that the NHT had surpassed its target of 43,000 housing solutions, “delivering more than 50,000 homes since April 2021”. The figure circulated widely. It is not a count of new houses.
A housing solution, in the Government’s usage, can be a completed home, a serviced lot, a mortgage that lets a family buy an existing house or build its own, or an upgrade. By the Prime Minister’s own provisional figures to Parliament on 19 May 2026, the NHT completed 21,166 homes and issued 67,249 mortgages over the full decade from 2016. Both numbers describe real help to real families. Only one of them measures new homes added to the stock. The Government argues that financing is how most Jamaicans actually get housed; critics argue that a deficit of physical homes can only be closed by building them. Readers should know which number they are being given.
The Arithmetic of 150,000
Prime Minister Andrew Holness puts Jamaica’s housing deficit at about 150,000 units, and warned at a groundbreaking in St Mary in April that while the gap persists, prices will keep rising faster than inflation. Set that figure against the pace of public building and the timescales are stark.
Planning is not the same as delivery. In 2023/24 the NHT completed 2,582 housing solutions against a target of 4,141, about 62 per cent, and started 1,128 against a target of 11,504, under one tenth. The trend is improving: the Planning Institute reported NHT housing starts in the July to September 2025 quarter up 391.4 per cent, driven by 750 starts at Friendship Oaks Phase II in St Elizabeth, and State Minister Abka Fitz-Henley told the Senate on 5 June that annual NHT starts under the Holness administration were 57 per cent higher, about 1,194 more a year, than under the previous administration before 2016. Opposition senators in the same debate argued that NHT money should be kept for housing.
Hurricane Melissa moved the target further away. The Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management counted 156,000 damaged dwellings and 24,000 total losses in November 2025. Replacing those 24,000 homes alone would take the NHT more than eleven years at its recent average pace.
What This Means for Jamaica
Mr Holness said in April, at the start of work on the Galina development in St Mary, that “the Government of Jamaica does not build houses”. Contractors do. He called for a local contracting class able to operate at enterprise level and to take on developments of up to 10,000 units, and said local firms must compete for public projects and meet national and international standards. One of the contractors at Galina is Henan Fifth, a Chinese firm, which he said would be held to high standards and expected to transfer skills.
The obstacles are well documented. Government Senator Kavan Gayle warned the Senate in June that an acute shortage of carpenters, masons, steel workers, electricians and plumbers, driven by migration, an ageing workforce and too few trainees, is slowing projects even where money and contractors are in place. The Prime Minister has said Jamaica may have to import skilled labour. Land assembly, approvals and infrastructure take years. And in June the Senate approved, by 10 votes to 8, a further five years of J$11.4 billion annual transfers from the NHT to the Consolidated Fund, about J$57 billion in all, money the Opposition argues should go to housing and the Government says has not reduced housing spending.
The international record suggests three things. Scale comes from controlling land and finance, as the Texans do, not from heroic effort on individual sites. Scale bought with presales and borrowed money can destroy households, as China learned. And a public builder can operate at scale if it is designed to, as Singapore shows. Jamaica’s choice is not between the state and the market. It is whether either can be organised to build thousands of homes a year, every year.
The Size of the Ambition
Jamaica’s housing debate tends to be measured in announcements: a groundbreaking here, a key handover there, a target of 70,000 solutions followed by a target of 60,000. The world’s great builders are measured differently, by the homes they finish each quarter, without fanfare, year after year. The country built that way once, on reclaimed swamp across the harbour. The 150,000 families waiting now are not asking who gets the credit.
A housing deficit is not closed by a target. It is closed by a builder, public or private, that can finish thousands of homes a year and keep doing it.
Method: Company figures are from annual results and filings: D.R. Horton (year to 30 September 2026; mortgage share from fiscal 2025), Lennar (year to 30 November 2025), PulteGroup and NVR (calendar 2025), Barratt Redrow (year to June 2026), Persimmon (calendar 2025), Country Garden (2021 and 2025 annual results), Sekisui House (business outline, January 2025). Singapore data are from the HDB Key Statistics 2024/2025. China market data are National Bureau of Statistics figures for new commercial property; the 2021 peak is cited as about 17 trillion yuan in revised data (earlier releases gave 18.2 trillion). The 20 million unfinished homes figure is a Nomura estimate. Evergrande figures are from the US Congressional Research Service and the liquidators’ progress reports. Country Garden’s 2022 delivery figure is the company’s own approximate total. Jamaican figures are from the Office of the Prime Minister, the Jamaica Information Service, the Planning Institute of Jamaica, NHT reports and ODPEM. WIHCON history and the Greater Portmore claim are the company’s own account. Housing “solutions” are not the same as new homes; NHT completion figures for 2023/24 and plans for 2026/27 count solutions. NHT figures for 2016 to 2025 are provisional, as given by the Prime Minister. The NHT annual average is 21,166 completions divided by ten. The “years to close the gap” chart is illustrative and ignores population growth and storm losses. Fiscal years differ, so the league table is approximate.
Dean Jones is Director of Jamaica Homes Ltd and a Realtor.
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