Westwood-based homebuilding giant KB Home Inc. is moving its headquarters to Arizona in the spring of 2027.
In a company announcement, KB Homes said it’s making the move to the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, Arizona – citing a more business-friendly environment in the Phoenix metro area.
The company also noted that several of its top executives were already in the firm’s Phoenix regional office, and the proximity to the booming Southwest and Texas real estate markets. KB Home also has long had a corporate presence in Phoenix, even briefly having its corporate headquarters there in the early 1960s.
“It was a confluence of factors that led to a Phoenix-area corporate location decision,” said Larry Kosmont, chief executive of El Segundo-based Kosmont Cos., which provides real estate and economic development consulting services, including corporate location analysis.
This the latest in a string of major corporations moving out of Los Angeles County. In February, Glendale-based Public Storage Co. announced it’s moving its headquarters to Frisco, Texas. Other publicly traded corporate giants that have moved in recent years include Occidental Petroleum Corp. heading to Houston, Texas from Westwood; real estate giant CBRE Group Inc. leaving downtown L.A. for Dallas; and steel products maker Reliance Inc. going to Scottsdale, Arizona from downtown.
KB Home was founded as the Kaufman and Broad Building Co. in 1957 in Detroit by the late Donald Bruce Kaufman and Eli Broad. The company’s initial specialty was tract homes. Three years later, the company moved to the Phoenix area, which was then undergoing its first building boom. But in 1963, the firm moved to Los Angeles, focusing on housing tracts with three- and four-bedroom ranch homes ideal for young families in the suburbs. In Southern California, that included building and selling homes in new subdivisions in Valencia, Moreno Valley and Huntington Beach, just to name a few.
Over the decades, Kaufman and Broad acquired other homebuilding companies to become one of the nation’s largest homebuilders. It also diversified into the insurance business.
Kaufman died in 1983. Broad eventually stepped away from the company to focus on the insurance side, turning Sun Life Insurance Co. of America into a juggernaut before selling it to American International Group in 1999 for $18 billion. Broad then turned his attention to philanthropic activities and the redevelopment of downtown. He died in 2021.
In 2001, Kaufman and Broad changed its name to the current KB Home. Last year, the company posted $6.3 billion in revenue and sold homes in nine states across the Southwest and Southeast.
In its April 8 announcement, the company stressed two reasons for the move back to the Phoenix area. One was to consolidate executive and corporate functions that had long been split between the Westwood headquarters and the Phoenix office. The other was the Phoenix metro area’s “business-friendly operating environment that is expected to further enhance efficiency and support long-term profitability.”
Robert McGibney, who became chief executive on March 1, said the move “brings our teams together in a more collaborative environment, and Phoenix is the right place to do it.”
McGibney himself was likely a key factor in the decision to head to Phoenix. Prior to taking over the chief executive post long held by Jeffrey Metzger, McGibney served in several executive posts for KB Home – most recently as president. He had spent the last 10 years or so at the Phoenix office.
“Absolutely in a company like KB Home, it makes sense to have the CEO close to where much of the action is – in this case the booming Phoenix market,” Kosmont said.
Another unspoken factor behind the move could be the divergent directions of population trends in the Los Angeles and Phoenix areas, which in turn drive the demand for new homes.From 2000 to 2025, the Phoenix metro area recorded a cumulative population growth rate of about 60%, reaching 5.23 million last year, according to U.S. Census data and a U.S. Federal Reserve estimate. That contrasts with a mere 2% growth rate over that same quarter-century span for Los Angeles County, which had a population last year of almost 9.7 million.
The expected corporate headquarters in Tempe, which is southeast of Phoenix, is a new location for KB Home. The firm currently has two other office locations in the Phoenix area. In the announcement, KB Home stressed it is not disappearing from Los Angeles.
“KB Home will continue to maintain a significant presence in California through its six operating divisions,” the company said. “Over the years, the company has built tens of thousands of homes across the state and remains deeply committed to serving California homebuyers, with more than 100 communities currently open statewide.”
