David Auld and Paul Romanowski

With over 1.1 million closings and counting under its belt, Arlington, Texas-based D.R. Horton is indisputably the largest homebuilder in the nation — a title it has held for more than two decades. 

The firm’s revenue from nearly 90,000 home sales in 2024 alone reached $33.9 billion, according to D.R. Horton’s fiscal year-end earnings report, a 7 percent gain year-over-year. Its net income for 2024, meanwhile, was $4.8 billion, up from $4.7 billion in 2023. It operates in 126 markets in 36 states. 

Much of that success comes down to the leadership of D.R. Horton’s late chairman and namesake, David Ray Horton, who founded the company in 1978 with an emphasis on affordability and high construction volume. Horton, who in 2024 died suddenly at age 74, was also a proponent of decentralized operations, allowing local offices to make flexible decisions on price, buyer incentives and home features for their given markets. 

That decentralized approach is a “critical ingredient” of D.R. Horton’s success, according to Executive Chairman David Auld, as it allows for both high development efficiency and quick adaptation to market conditions. Auld leads D.R. Horton alongside Paul Romanowski, who has been the homebuilding titan’s president and CEO since late 2023.

The firm’s sheer scale and the strength of its balance sheet aside, weaker consumer demand and uncertain economic conditions have affected D.R. Horton like any other homebuilder, driving it to adopt incentives such as stronger mortgage rate buydowns. Within the first nine months of D.R. Horton’s fiscal year 2025, revenue dropped by 7 percent and net income fell by 23 percent compared to the same period in FY 2024, according to its latest earnings report. 

The same figures revealed $8.6 billion in revenue from 23,160 closed home sales in the company’s third quarter.