What does selling suits have to do with building homes? More than you’d think. In this episode, Michael sits down with Dennis Webb, VP of Operations at Fulton Homes out of Tempe, Arizona, and the conversation covers nearly 30 years of doing things differently in an industry that gave Dennis plenty to work with from day one.
Dennis came up through retail. Twenty years of it with Hart, Schaffner and Marx, then as VP of Stores at Eagleson’s, a big and tall retailer owned by Ira Fulton — 25 years in retail total. When Ira sold Eagleson’s in 1995 and shifted his focus to homebuilding, he brought Dennis along not because Dennis knew anything about construction — he didn’t — but because he knew about systems, data, customers, and how to run an operation. That turned out to be exactly what Fulton Homes needed.
Dennis describes what he found when he walked in:
“Retail was very sophisticated, had great systems. Homebuilding? They were building houses like they were 200 years prior, and no one really cared about systems or anything like that. I looked at it and said, wait a minute — there’s a bunch of stuff that could be done here.”
He started chipping away at it one piece at a time. First came computerized contracts. Then performance tracking. Then, in 1997, Fulton Homes became the first builder in Phoenix to launch a website — and Dennis negotiated his way into getting it built for free by helping the company sell the same model to builders across the country.
Then came the interactive floor plans. Buyers could see their options laid out visually before they signed anything. Project managers and vendors could see exactly what was being built. It sounds normal now. Back then, nobody was doing it.
The design center gets a lot of airtime in this episode, and it starts with something Dennis noticed when he bought a house himself:
“I had to go all over town. No one would tell me anything. No one knew the price of anything. I’m buying a house and no one can tell me how much this stuff costs. This is the craziest thing in the world.”
That frustration turned into a 13,000 square foot design center with nearly 2,300 options, full kitchen and bathroom vignettes, and a digital portal buyers spend an average of 10 hours on before their first appointment. The philosophy behind it was straightforward:
“We’re going to be completely transparent. We’re going to be completely honest with them, tell them what everything costs. And if they have that transparency, they’re going to trust us more than all the other builders.”
The numbers that came out of it are worth pausing on. In one recent year, Fulton did 40 million dollars out of that single design center, averaging around 86,000 dollars per home in upgrades. When you stack it against dollars-per-square-foot benchmarks from major retailers, Fulton’s design center sits third in the country — behind Apple and a convenience store chain, ahead of Tiffany and Nordstrom. One store. One homebuilder in Tempe, Arizona.
Michael and Dennis dig into pricing strategy too, and Dennis describes using the same good-better-best approach from his retail days. The logic is simple:
“If you don’t have the high end, and you only have the middle, you’re going to sell the lower end. So you have to have it all.”
There’s also a pointed conversation about the trend toward package-only options, where buyers get little to no choice. Dennis isn’t buying it:
“The buyers don’t take the packages. They take what they personalize. All our buyers are different. You’ve got the people that love appliances and the people that could care less. You’ve got the people that love flooring and the people that say, I don’t care about the flooring. If you offer a large selection and explain it to them, you’re going to have a much more satisfied buyer.”
Running underneath all of it is a philosophy that Dennis comes back to more than once, and which separates Fulton from a lot of what’s out there:
“Most builders don’t see the customer as important. They see them as an expense and a liability. They become product centric versus customer centric. And we’re customer centric.”
There’s also a solid stretch on community building — literally. Fulton operates land-heavy, buying large parcels and using the scale to put real amenities in: aquatic centers, open spaces, pickleball courts, lakes. Dennis shares the story of a charter school they helped stand up in six months after a school district closed enrollment to new buyers in one of their communities — a move that cost the district students and gave Fulton Homes another reason its buyers stayed loyal.
The chapter 11 period in 2009 comes up too, and it’s worth hearing how they came out of it. The crash hit Phoenix hard, but Fulton made a deliberate choice to keep moving while others pulled back:
“We did the opposite of all the publics. We kept building, we kept advertising, we kept innovating, we kept going. At the time we entered chapter 11, we had a 3 percent market share. By the time we got out, we had a 7 percent market share.”
By the end of the conversation you get a clear picture of what Dennis has been building for nearly three decades — not just homes, but a way of operating that takes the parts of retail that actually work and applies them to an industry that was slow to ask for any of it. He leaves the episode with one thought that pretty much sums up his whole outlook:
“We as an industry have a great opportunity to really improve things. And yet we’re copping out, we’re doing it halfway. It’s not as genuine as it could be, and it’s not as authentic as it should be. If we can take some of these retail principles and apply them — particularly with regards to treating the customer with the utmost respect — it’s going to improve the industry.”
About Dennis Webb
Dennis Webb is the Vice President of Operations at Fulton Homes, where he oversees Sales, Marketing, Operations, and the Fulton Homes Design Center. In his 29 years there, he has led the charge of using technology combined with retail experience to help transform the company into one of the more forward-thinking builders in the country, particularly around customer experience, operations, and marketing. Fulton Homes was the first builder in the country to build all of their homes to Energy Star version 3.0, and Dennis was awarded the inaugural Indoor airPLUS Leader of the Year award. He served on the Board of Directors for EEBA for six years, including five years on the Executive Committee, and served as President in 2022. Before Fulton Homes, Dennis was VP of Stores at Eagleson’s, and before that spent 20 years with Hart, Schaffner and Marx moving through roles from salesman to Store President. He graduated from Chapman University in Orange, CA, and lives in Tempe with his wife Janis of over 40 years. He is the author of “From Blue Suits to Green Homes — Retail Principles in Homebuilding,” which lays out exactly what the title promises. His daughter Laura is the Executive Director of a non-profit in Los Angeles, and his son Darin is a lawyer in San Diego.
Fulton Homes: https://www.fultonhomes.com/
Dennis Webb on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dennis-webb-39a5287
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