There’s a moment Michael and Jon Hibbard keep in their heads that no camera ever captured – Sunday afternoons in the display home, their father Bruce Malcolm Hibbard behind a makeshift desk in the garage, contracts spread across the table and clients leaning in. The two of them darting through rooms and sprinting across the backyard, half-listening to their dad close the deal.
“I remember the way he would sit there and interact with the customers, his mannerisms. He was so honest,” Jon, CEO of Hibbard Homes, tells The CEO Magazine.
“Our father would get them exactly what they wanted. It’s something we witnessed for many years, and that interaction and honesty with the client still hasn’t changed.”
What started with an Australian-born bricklayer swinging a trowel in post-war Narromine has grown into one of regional New South Wales’ most trusted and tenacious building companies.
Hibbard Homes now operates across 17 towns – from the north coast to the western slopes – and builds and sells hundreds of homes a year, with a model that puts it in direct competition with the real estate market rather than other builders.
Laying the foundation
Hibbard Homes’ origin story is equal parts scripture and swagger, the brothers reveal with laughter. And it begins with their grandfather Malcolm Sydney Hibbard. He came back from World War II to find the country short on tradespeople but long on need.
Malcolm, not especially well-educated and with limited options, chose bricklaying over farming.
“Before he found God and started preaching, he was an absolute ratbag,” Jon enthuses. “He held the record at the pub for sculling 27 beers and still had the ability to walk a straight line.”
After finding faith, Malcolm became a fixture in the community in a new way – the local ‘brickie’ who preached at the pulpit every Sunday with a bible in one hand and a trowel in the other. He brick-laid for years before deciding to become a builder himself.
And in 1968, the first Hibbard home was built.
“He was a tough man, but he’d help his fellow Aussie in any situation,” recalls Michael, now General Manager.
“He would get personal. These days, I don’t think people get personal enough. If things went wrong or something was dishonest, he’d tell you. His intention was to make you better.”
When Malcolm handed the business over to his son Bruce – Michael and Jon’s father – in the early 1980s, he wasted no time proving he had his own brand of audacity. In a local community where the two leading builders were each selling 15–20 homes a year, he sold 80.
“He was an entrepreneur who just wanted to expand the business,” Jon explains.
Conned into a legacy
Michael and Jon admit they weren’t especially academic in their early years. Both wanted to leave school at the end of Year 10, with plans to do anything but take over the family business. Bruce had other ideas – and the patience to let his sons arrive at those ideas themselves.
“We joke about it these days that he kind of tricked us; he conned us into it,” Michael says, smiling. “But it was actually a good con job.”
Their father offered each of them a carpentry apprenticeship: four years, a trade ticket and then complete freedom to do whatever they wanted. The brothers had their sights set on joining the military, and Jon toyed with the idea of opening a music shop. They had their father’s blessing to do whatever – as long as they completed the apprenticeship first.
Within their first two years on the tools, both brothers began to understand the scale and reputation of what their family had built. Witnessing the subcontractors who had worked for their father for decades, the ebb and flow of suppliers and the principal contractor’s role at the center of it all, something shifted.
“I was sold after the first two years of my apprenticeship,” Michael reveals. “By the time we’d actually finished our apprenticeships, we were both sold – done and dusted. We were ready.”
It was another two-year apprenticeship in construction and joinery before the brothers were able to move from the job site into the office. And by Jon’s account, it was like starting a second apprenticeship from scratch.
“What you do on the job site compared to what you do inside an office is like chalk and cheese,” he says with a grin.
“How you communicate, how you read and study a plan, how you cost a house, how you look at it – it’s completely different. Two different worlds.”
Two paths, one direction
Even before they realized it themselves, the role each brother played in the business was clear.
“It doesn’t matter what the market’s doing. I’m buying land, I’m developing land and I’m building,” Jon says. “It’s Michael’s job to market and promote and sell it, no matter what.”
Michael describes the moment he looked up at the whiteboard in their old office and saw Jon’s handwriting filling a grid of land acquisitions – blocks purchased, plans selected, costings done – and realized he didn’t understand any of it.
“He’s buying different blocks of land, filling them up and creating sales listings,” Michael says. “I would do it if I had to, but I couldn’t get my head around it.”
Jon’s view of Michael’s domain is equally as frank.
“What I do is objective and real,” he says. “Salespeople are trying to sell everything that I build. They’re trying to sell something that’s not there yet. They can do it, but that’s not what I want to do.”
Michael’s edge, Jon believes, comes from a genuine interest in people.
“There are people who are clock-watchers that just want to do this hour to that hour,” he says. “And there are people that really need a purpose and want to get on board and go – where are you guys going? Michael is extremely good at finding those people.”
“If I weren’t interested in people – the best kind and the worst kind – it would make my job a lot harder,” Michael acknowledges. “But I’m actually interested in human behavior and it’s made my job a lot easier.”
The right model
One of the most defining – and commercially differentiated – aspects of Hibbard Homes is its fixed-price, no-variations model. In an industry notorious for locking clients into contracts and surprising them with tens of thousands of dollars in extras at handover, Michael and Jon refuse to play that game.
“Builders lie,” Michael says plainly. “And sometimes people want to be lied to. They see a price, and they want to go for it and hope.
“But they won’t get away from what they’ve actually been priced on – on what those costs are going to be. We’ve seen a US$100,000 in difference in price recently, and people are still going the other way.”
Jon explains the mechanics of these deals, saying that most of the hidden costs in residential construction come down to site costs – everything from soil tests to surveys, excavation for sloping blocks, retaining walls and more.
Builders who don’t do this due diligence upfront charge them as variations later. Because Hibbard Homes acquires and develops its own land, it already knows what’s under the ground before a contract is drawn up. This fixed price absorbs everything.
“If you own a block of land, pay for a survey, pay for a soil test, make sure you go to the builder and say, ‘Cost my house to this criteria,’” Jon advises. “Then they can’t really lock you in or escape these extra site costs.
“You won’t be paying more than two-and-a-half thousand dollars for both of them – that’s nothing compared to A$50,000 [US$36,000] to A$70,000 [US$50,000] worth of variations.”
Scaling without losing soul
Hibbard Homes hasn’t chased growth for growth’s sake. Instead, its expansion has been deliberate and measured, which is somewhat ironic for a business built on speculative construction.
When the brothers moved beyond Coffs Harbour, Port Macquarie, Tamworth and Dubbo, they did so gradually, picking up just a couple of blocks at a time.
“We do our homework first,” Jon confirms. “What’s wanted and needed, what’s building, how the market is really. If the population hasn’t expanded in over 10 years, there’s really no point.
“But when you see a place is growing, whether it’s mining or agricultural farming, that’s the type of investigation we need to do. We’d buy two blocks, sometimes four. Then build two or four of our homes and see how they’d sell.
“If they sold quickly, we’d continue.”
A key part of the engine behind Hibbard Homes’ geographic spread has been its supplier network – many of whom are partners the company has maintained for more than 25 years and know which regional towns are moving and which aren’t.
“They say, ‘If you guys are building your speculative program here, you should go here,’” Michael says. “They position towns for us. Win, win, win.”
Culture, the pair explain, has been another non-negotiable in their ongoing success. Hibbard Homes now employs a broad team across its 17 regions, but every staff member has Michael and Jon’s direct phone numbers. Michael lent his handyman his trailer to move house last weekend. And their trade network is built on a reputation for paying on time and treating people as more than a number.
One simple data point keeps them grounded in this human-first approach to business.
“Seventy percent of your life is spent with your work colleagues – that’s more than with your family,” Michael points out. “I haven’t forgotten that.
“It doesn’t matter how large we’ve expanded – on paper, we’re considered a corporate business, but with family values and family culture.
“Every single person in our organization has a purpose, and that purpose is to drive toward the company’s goal. We make sure we’re acknowledging each individual that has something to do with that. It takes a team.”
The grind behind the growth
Neither brother pretends the external environment has been kind. The royal commission into banking lending in 2019 all but froze loan approvals overnight – contracts signed, finances already applied for, suddenly nowhere to go.
Builders’ warranty insurance requirements eat up three months of full-time administrative work every year just to prove the company is profitable enough to keep trading. And development application timeframes through the council can stretch to four months and beyond.
“The builders insurance – it’s got to change,” Jon insists. “I’m not talking on behalf of our company. We have assets and we’re very blessed to be third-generational.
“But the smaller builders – they’re tired, they’re rundown and they’re just over it. When I go to Housing Industry Association (HIA) events, I look around the room and see builders I worked with during my apprenticeship and they’re just done.”
It would be easier to sit back and groan about these challenges, but the Hibbard brothers never signed up for easy. Michael and Jon recently met with HIA’s New South Wales representative at Parliament to push for reform on warranty insurance and approval timelines.
Internally, their response to external pressure is a system that Michael calls ‘big rocks’. It references the five critical milestones in each home’s journey from land acquisition to settlement, with each division owning its ‘rock’ and the entire team aware of where the bottlenecks are.
“When we have a backlog within the planning approval rock, everyone’s asking what’s happening,” Michael explains. “The more interest everyone has in other people’s rocks in the company, the more they don’t feel like they’re just fighting that boulder alone. We all own it.”
Underlying that philosophy is the belief about the client that traces all the way back to their father.
“Growing up, our father insisted that people always have to get more out of it than we do,” Jon says.
He describes watching Michael connect a client – who couldn’t get finance – to the right broker, who had them unconditionally approved within days. Jon had already built the house and Michael sold it.
But the moment that mattered was watching the man stand in his new driveway with his family, unable to take the keys because he couldn’t quite believe they were his.
“It’s those moments that drive us and keep us going to work every day,” Jon says.
That same sense of purpose is now being carried into the next generation of the business. Michael’s 21-year-old son Jackson has joined the business in estimating, already showing a sharp instinct for numbers like his grandfather. He grew up at the brothers’ daily breakfast meetings, graduating from offering National Rugby League tips to absorbing details of the family business and the values behind it.
The next generation is already taking shape. And it has the brothers focused on the future.
“I’d love to know that our family legacy has turned into a household name in Australia, like Jerry Harvey, John Symond and Dick Smith,” Michael says.
“But we wouldn’t take the credit for that. It would be the credit of all four generations that got it there, instilling and keeping the same family values we’ve had since Grandfather.”
