Sunlife Homes, despite kickstarting operations during the economically wobbly and environmentally volatile pandemic era in Southwest Florida, operated among the fastest-growing homebuilders in the nation last year.
The company ranked 11th fastest-growing builder in the 2025 HousingWire Homebuilder Rankings, based on year-over-year growth in residential sales volume. Last year, the regional builder grew sales volume by 31.8%, and is on pace to grow even faster in 2026.
Sunlife Homes President & CEO Jeffrey Kershner told HousingWire’s The Builder’s Daily the company has closed 43 homes this year, has 19 pending contracts, and is on schedule to eclipse 2025’s total closings around midyear.
Sunlife Homes’ origin story
Kershner and his business partner, a top REO broker, met while working for Invitation Homes, where Kershner served as Vice President of Operations in Chicago and Minneapolis. After helping scale Invitation Homes’ portfolio to more than 4,000 combined homes in both markets, the pair launched Clickinvest as an acquisitions platform partnering with family offices, fix-and-flip investors and buy-and-hold operators.
Kershner, a native of the Chicago area, was a homebuilder early in his career and always had an interest in returning to his roots in homebuilding. This shift back to homebuilding began when Kershner and his family visited Florida for a month during the COVID pandemic. While much of the country was shut down, Florida was open, and Kershner fell in love with the state’s sunshine, beaches and warm weather.
Soon after that trip, Kershner moved down to Cape Coral, a coastal city in the southwestern portion of the state. Clickinvest then rebranded to Sunlife Homes in 2022, initially beginning with build-to-rent and short-term rental development projects in Cape Coral.
However, the company quickly shifted to a for-sale model, launching retail homes in 2024.
“Building for investors is one thing, but building for homeowners is my passion,” Kershner said.
The Sunlife Homes model
Sunlife Homes builds in Cape Coral, and recently entered Port Charlotte, located roughly 40 miles to the north. The core product line consists of four models aimed at the entry-level and more affordable segment, with homes available between $290,000 to $400,000.
The company also delivers multiple higher-end homes a month, with prices ranging from the $500s up to the $800s or higher. These properties are typically located in more premium locations, often on waterfront lots, and often come with pools.
As Kershner put it, this strategy – building for a variety of buyer segments and price points – diversifies and expands Sunlife Homes’ reach to a larger addressable market. While some homes are sold to locals, a large share of the company’s customers are people moving south from northern or midwestern states.
For now, all of Sunlife Homes’ projects are on scattered lots – albeit with the efficiencies and product standardization of a high-volume production homebuilder, largely due to the local dynamics of the markets where they operate. Cape Coral and Port Charlotte were largely platted in the 1950s and 1960s as massive master-planned communities, creating extensive scattered-site lot availability with much of the infrastructure already in place.
As a result, the company’s near-term growth strategy is focused on expanding its scattered-site footprint and broadening its product mix, but in the long run, there are also opportunities to build small communities.
Staying land-light and nimble
Sunlife Homes stays true to a land-light strategy, with an emphasis on keeping cycle times around 95 days, and delivering a completed home within 100 days of buying an individual lot.
“The nice thing with scattered lots is that it allows us to be land light. We take down lots as we need them, and we average from the day we buy out a lot to the day we sell that house, about 240 days,” Kersher explained.
Sunlife Homes also pursues a pace over price philosophy and delivers about 85% of its homes as spec builds. This is part of a concerted strategy.
“We can’t do a ton of customization and keep our cycle times where they are,” Kersher said.
Leveraging operational precision to compete with public builders
There are several public homebuilders in the Southwest Florida market, including the likes of D.R. Horton, Lennar and PulteGroup.
For Sunlife Homes, an unrelenting focus on cycle times is an essential tool when competing with the public operators.
“Obviously, as a privately-held builder, capital is expensive for us compared to the national public builder, so every day matters in our schedule. We’re relentless about making sure we can cut every day we can out of our process; on days to permit, on days to build and on days to sell. We’re clock watchers when it comes to that,” Kersher said.
“Once you’re operationally tight, it’s much easier to grow,” he added.
Sunlife Homes aims to differentiate itself from the public builders by targeting product niches that larger competitors don’t serve. This includes Sunlife’s best-selling, 1,800-square-foot, four-bedroom, three-bath floor plan with dual primary suites. According to Kersher, this is a product that the public builders in his market don’t deliver.
Additionally, instead of attempting to directly counter the public builders that utilize heavy incentives, Sunlife Homes competes through upgraded standard features such as quartz countertops, impact windows, larger baseboards and two-panel doors.
Sunlife Homes averages a roughly 3% incentive rate. In comparison, Lennar, which has a large presence in Southwest Florida, posted an average incentive rate of approximately 14.0% of the final sales price during Q1 of 2026.
Growing despite adversity
Sunlife Homes entered Southwest Florida just as the region became one of the toughest homebuilding markets in the country. Hurricane Ian hit the Florida coast in September 2022, just before Sunlife Homes poured the foundation for its first build-to-rent product. A difficult hurricane season in Southwest Florida in 2024 also helped drive one of the steepest price corrections nationwide.
Sunlife Homes’ internal data shows a substantial 18.5% decline in home prices in Cape Coral and Port Charlotte from the peak. However, that same internal data indicates that the market bottomed out in July of 2025 and has now normalized.
As Kersher put it, “if you can build a homebuilding company in that market, then you should be very successful.”
“We had to find every $100 in a house we could find, and we had to work with our trade partners to get competitive pricing and to get our cost per square foot down. We were able to do that. We were able to greatly reduce our cycle time over that period, as well,” he explained.
What Kersher said next will probably resonate with a lot of private homebuilders trying to compete in today’s difficult homebuilding market.
“I’m not going to tell you that everything is magical, and that margins are fantastic, because they’re not. But we’re surviving. We’re making a few bucks. It’s a matter of operating at a very high efficiency and maximizing every dollar,” he said.
Conditions began to improve marginally in Southwest Florida, but then the war in Iran broke out, pushing mortgage rates higher and creating economic uncertainty.
“We’re fortunate enough that we’ve done some work with our lenders so that we can still offer a below-market interest rate, but if rates continue to stay elevated, I think we will probably see a little squeeze in that,” Kersher added.
In Southwest Florida, another issue is overcoming the public perception. People want to live by the beach and enjoy the Florida lifestyle, but they are also worried about hurricanes and high insurance rates. Sunlife Homes typically avoids flood zones, so their home insurance rates are usually between $800 to $1,200 a year, which is much lower than what many buyers expect.
“For us, it’s about overcoming the public perception and showing them the reality,” Kersher said.
For now, Sunlife Homes is focusing on building out operations in Cape Coral and Port Charlotte. However, the team is also eyeing some markets on the east coast of Florida for future expansions, in a bid to diversify geographically.
“We waited to expand to Port Charlotte until we were hitting our metrics here in Cape Coral. We wanted to make sure that we could repeat the system there, and we’ve been able to do so thus far,” Kersher said.
