KB Home Moving Headquarters from LA to Tempe, Arizona

KB Home Inc. announced on April 8 that it’s moving its corporate headquarters from Westwood to Tempe, Arizona, with the relocation set to wrap up by 2027. The move ends more than 60 years of Los Angeles County presence for one of the country’s largest homebuilders, a company that recorded $6.3 billion in revenue last year and sells homes across eight states throughout the Southwest and beyond.

The departure won’t surprise anyone who’s been watching the slow bleed of major employers out of Southern California. Occidental Petroleum left Westwood for Houston. CBRE Group departed downtown Los Angeles for Dallas. Public Storage, headquartered in Glendale, announced a move to Frisco, Texas. Reliance Inc. pulled out of downtown and landed in Scottsdale, Arizona. KB Home’s decision slots into that same pattern, and it doesn’t appear to be slowing down.

The company framed the relocation as a matter of operational logic. Several of KB Home’s senior executives had already been working out of its Phoenix regional office, and splitting corporate functions between Westwood and Phoenix had created an arrangement that leadership concluded wasn’t sustainable. Tempe puts the company’s top brass closer to the Southwest and Texas markets that have been driving a growing portion of its sales volume. That’s where the homebuilding business is growing. That’s where the company is headed.

“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., a firm that provides real estate and economic development consulting including corporate location analysis.

There’s some irony in the destination. KB Home’s roots in Arizona go back nearly to its founding. The company started as Kaufman and Broad Building Co. in 1957, established in Detroit by Donald Bruce Kaufman and Eli Broad. Kaufman’s co-founder would eventually become one of Los Angeles’s most prominent philanthropists, but the early business was simpler: tract homes and expansion. Within a few years of launching, the company moved to the Phoenix area to catch that region’s first wave of residential construction growth. It didn’t stick around long. By 1963, Kaufman and Broad had shifted its base to Los Angeles, where it spent the following decades building ranch-style subdivisions across the San Fernando Valley and beyond.

The company’s story after that is one of expansion and transition. It grew through acquisitions and moved into insurance. Kaufman died in 1983. Broad stepped away from homebuilding to grow Sun Life Insurance Co. of America, which he eventually sold to American International Group in 1999 for $18 billion. Broad later turned his attention to downtown Los Angeles redevelopment and philanthropy before his death in 2021. The company had already rebranded as KB Home back in 2001, a name that’s stuck through multiple market cycles and housing downturns.

So in a narrow sense, Tempe isn’t entirely foreign territory. The company’s returning to a region it knew at its earliest stage. That doesn’t make the departure any less significant for Los Angeles County, which now adds KB Home to a list of large employers that have exited without much public fanfare.

The LA Business Journal first reported the headquarters move. Corporate site consultants and groups including the California Business Properties Association have pointed to a combination of regulatory climate, state tax structure, and operational costs as factors influencing relocation decisions across the region. The Arizona Commerce Authority has been active in recruiting California-based companies, and Tempe in particular has attracted several corporate arrivals over the past few years.

What gets lost in the corporate announcement language is the ground-level reality. Headquarters relocations don’t move every employee. But they do move decision-makers, which changes where budget conversations happen, where vendor relationships develop, and where the company’s civic footprint lands. Los Angeles County loses that gravitational pull when the executives aren’t local anymore.

KB Home hasn’t disclosed how many employees will make the move to Tempe or what happens to its remaining California operations. The company sells homes in California and that isn’t expected to change. But the people running the company, the ones deciding which markets to enter next and where to put resources, they’ll be doing that work in Arizona by 2025, when the transition is expected to be substantially underway ahead of the full 2027 completion.