Joe Hardy of 84 Lumber was the last of the World War II veterans to whom we owe our industry. Ed Ryan of Ryan Homes (now NVR) and Cal Jureit of Gang-Nail (now MiTek) were also major contributors. All three returned from winning that war with a drive to transform home building, and they helped each other do it. They each began in the mid-1950s and put their companies on a path that would take them to a collective $20 Billion in sales in 2022. While Ed and Cal retired in the early 1970s, Joe persevered for another half-century, until his recent passing on the day he turned 100.
Ed came home to Pittsburgh, a survivor of a German POW camp, and joined Joe, his childhood friend, in setting up a lumberyard. Joe eschewed his father’s jewelry business to run the lumberyard, while Ed followed his father’s lead and built houses. After a few years, Joe took over Ed’s share in the business and moved the lumberyard 20 miles south to Eighty Four, PA, where it resides today. Ed set up a wall panel and roof truss plant across the road from Joe with a Mark 8 truss machine and Panel-Rite wall equipment supplied by the company that would become MiTek. Both grew their businesses with a consistent, near formulaic approach. Ed expanded rapidly into neighboring states with his easily constructed, fully componentized homes. When his homebuilding volume in new markets supported manufacturing, he cloned his Eighty Four plant, and spread the gospel of component building, and especially panelization. Today, among NVR’s eight facilities, is the world’s largest panel plant that can crank out 40 houses a day. Joe’s component plants are smaller, but he’s built double the number.
Entrepreneur Joe followed a unique “McDonald’s-like” approach to expanding his lumber business but did it without going deep into debt or diluting his ownership. While Ray Kroc brought in two of his major suppliers to fund his expansion, Joe leased new properties with an option to purchase them later at a fixed price. Joe selected new locations by charting the likely expansion paths for a community, securing a property on its periphery, and erecting a standardized metal building. He initially ran a cash-only business, and he paid his lessor from profits generated. As volume and profitability increased, he generated sufficient cash to exercise his buy option, and add to 84’s equity. At a later date, NVR rode a similar strategy to stunning success, optioning land and deferring the purchase until the time they closed with homebuyers.
Joe didn’t get serious about the component business until the late 1980s. He started small, building trusses near his headquarters for his 25 lumberyards that were within a reasonable shipping distance. Then, when his like number of yards around Baltimore/Washington were ready, he built a large, perfectly located truss plant and installed Gang-Nail presses at the recommendation of Abner Yoder of Stark Truss. Within a year he hired a seasoned Ryan Homes manufacturing executive from the Pittsburgh area and embarked on a rapid expansion. Often 84 plants would be located close to NVR’s, and that would necessitate that 84 build wall panels. The bulk of all truss equipment came from MiTek.
Viewing 2022’s array of plants belies the traumas experienced by each of the entities created by these founders. By the mid-1980s, Jureit’s patents had been usurped by the courts, Gang-Nail margins were eroded by price-cutters, and their reserves were sapped by a huge EWP investment. Yet somehow Jureit’s work ended up in the hands of Warren Buffett, and he was feted by MiTek on the 50th anniversary of his founding. In 1991, Ed Ryan’s company went through an even more agonizing ownership change, yet the prolific Ryan Homes name survives, and its meteoric rise rivals Silicon Valley companies. In 2008, Joe Hardy’s fortunes nearly collapsed in the Great Recession, many dozens of stores and plants shuttered, yet, as of today, the business has never been stronger.
Ryan, Hardy, and Jureit helped win the War and the countless battles to secure the dominance of components in much of America. Evidentially, their spirit lives on at NVR, 84 Lumber, and MiTek, and it seems likely to do so long into the future.