Home Builders Association of Denver | Gene Myers of Thrive Home Builders named HBA Home Builder of the Year

Gene Myers of Thrive Home Builders named HBA Home Builder of the Year

Gene Myers Accepts 2016 Home Builder of the Year Award

Gene Myers is owner and CEO of Thrive Home Builders. By virtue of its unprecedented four-in-a-row Grand Awards for Innovation from the United States Department of Energy, Thrive is among the nation’s foremost builders of high performance homes. Announced Wednesday evening (12/7/16) at the 2016 Installation & Recognition Reception, the recipient of the HBA’s 2016 Builder of the Year Award has served the Denver housing industry for over 30 years. It can be truly said that this is a lifetime achievement award for a truly innovative home builder. As a long standing HBA member and past HBA Director, he has served the industry with countless hours of volunteering his expertise.

Gene’s path to homebuilding began as a civil engineer, graduating from the University of Denver in 1973 and working for several engineering firms prior to moving to Denver in 1984. He got his first taste of homebuilding working for Park Funding, one of the major landowners around Castle Rock at the time.

In 1992, Gene struck out on his own and founded Greentree Homes, with a view towards providing a more eco-friendly home as society became increasingly aware of its impact on the environment. Gene trademarked the phrase “Eco Built,” and even offered a guaranteed annual heating bill, long before home energy guarantees became commonplace. Gene’s signature project at Greentree was Forest Park, a golf course development in Castle Pines North that helped popularize Craftsman architecture in Denver production homebuilding.

After successfully building homes in the Forest Park, Castlewood Ranch and Tallyn’s Reach communities under the Greentree name, Gene shifted the company’s focus to New Urbanist development with Belle Creek, a nationally acclaimed, multiple award-winning project in Commerce City featured by the Urban Land Institute as “The New Shape of Suburbia”. And with a new approach came a new name, and New Town Builders was born.

Gene Myers celebrates 2016 Home Builder of the Year Award with
Thrive team members and HBA CEO Jeff Whiton

Building on its successes at Belle Creek, Bradburn Village, and a long presence as one of the original builders at Stapleton, Gene built New Town Builders into a nationally-recognized leader in energy efficiency and sustainability. New Town was the first “solar standard” builder in Colorado, the first production builder to use Colorado Beetle-Kill lumber in the construction of its homes, the first production home builder to include net zero energy as a standard feature for an entire series of homes.

Not simply content to rest on the reputation for energy efficiency and innovation he built at New Town, Gene’s drive for innovation has brought him to a new focus on health and indoor air quality. And with that, New Town Builders became Thrive Home Builders, reflecting a desire to build a brand that speaks directly to the customer’s prosperity. Few are aware that while we spend the majority of our time indoors, indoor air can be up to 100 times more polluted than the air outside. Gene views this as a problem that homebuilders can solve, and is excited to embark on his next innovation in homebuilding.

Recently Gene has volunteered his experience and expertise to the HBA’s advocacy efforts on limiting impact fees, keeping residential fire sprinklers amended out of the local codes and advocating for reform in the local and state construction defect laws.

Please join us in congratulating Gene Myers for this well-deserved award for his contributions to the HBA and the home building industry.