Q&A with Joan Marcus Webb, former Chief Marketing Officer, The New Home Company “I don’t want to call it retirement because I feel too young to be retired,” said Joan Marcus Webb of her recently announced semi-retirement. The 2019 California Housing Foundation Hall of Fame inductee, 2015 BIA Orange County Chapter president and now former Chief Marketing Officer for The New Home Company thought for a moment, then came up with an answer befitting one of the industry’s foremost marketing luminaries: “Let’s just say I believe in term limits and I reached mine. It’s time to make space for the next generation.” She describes her career as one blessed with good fortune; having the good fortune to have three jobs – at Taylor Woodrow (now Taylor Morrison), Laing Luxury and The New Home Company – where she could have spent the rest of her career. Along the way, she touched the lives of thousands, including new homeowners who benefitted from her skills as a design studio director, then a marketing director; the many young women she mentored; and finally, the women and men who have been transformed by BIA Orange County’s Women’s Leadership Conference, which she founded as the Chapter’s president. It could have been very different. She might still be championing human rights at Amnesty International, her first job after graduating from UCLA, or – very differently – still be working for defense contractor McDonnell Douglas, her second job. But one day an old high school friend, Lisa Stuard, called her and changed her life … and new home marketing, for that matter. Stuard’s father, Dale Stuard, a former BIAOC president and at the time president of NAHB, owned Signature Homes, and there was a job there for Joan in their in-house design studio.
Joan Marcus Webb
Former Chief Marketing Officer, The New Home Company
studio for regional president Tom Redwitz. Things changed with a shake-up from London, but Redwitz soon joined Larry Webb to head John Laing Homes’ new luxury division, Laing Luxury, and Joan followed into her second never-leave job, unsuspecting that she and Webb would marry years later. “At Laing Luxury, we were building about 100 or so amazing semi-custom production homes a year with a philosophy focused on incredible design, quality, and industry-leading customer satisfaction. Why would you ever leave a place like that?” Joan said. The answer came when Webb pulled off the brilliantly timed sale of John Laing Homes to Dubai-based Emmar, which at the time was the world’s largest developer. “Their chairman looked at homes all over the world and appreciated more than anything else the magic of what we were doing here in Orange County,” Joan said. “He wanted to bring that to the Middle East and wanted our Laing human capital to teach his divisions how to create Irvine all over the world. Did homebuilders in Egypt want to learn from an American … who was a woman … and Jewish? In a word, no. Then one day I realized that when you have a hairdresser in Dubai, you’re spending too much time there, and that was it.” Fortunately, the third job she’d never want to leave opened up in 2009 as Webb, Redwitz, Wayne Stelmar and Joe Davis formed The New Home Company.
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“That was in 1988, and I never looked back,” Joan said. The first job she could have spent the rest of her career at was at Taylor Woodrow, where she headed the design
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