Excel Homes: Celebrating the Past, Present & Future

35 Years and Still Ahead of the Curve

Over this past year, Excel Homes has been celebrating their 35^th anniversary with new housing models commemorating this milestone, sale pricing and bonuses, customer appreciation events, giveaways and more. Meanwhile, their Edmonton division jumped to BUILT GREEN® Platinum, plus capping off their anniversary year being named Best Employer in North America for 2023!

Kincentric Best Employers partners with organizations to improve their health from the inside, transform at scale, and achieve Best-Employer levels of performance. As part of this, they perform a robust assessment that measures and identifies organizations that have transformed their people practices, driving better results.

This genuine commitment to their people is part of Excel Homes’ core values—playing into their larger theme of responsibility: to their people, their customers, and the environment. They consider the impact of their actions and aim to be an industry leader in areas like human resources, sustainability, and inclusivity. It’s a forward-looking perspective that has pushed them ahead of the curve.

Since 2007, they’ve voluntarily verified their energy performance—and green features beyond energy. They’re a long-standing Built Green builder: among a handful that were early adopters of Built Green’s third-party certified sustainable building programs. These programs support builders in achieving code compliance and building beyond it. Built Green Canada provides performance-based pathways to enable improvements in energy efficiency for code and across seven other critical aspects of sustainability, also addressing materials, air quality, water, waste, wellness, durability, and more, including encouraging greenhouse gas reductions and carbon reporting.

In June, Built Green Canada awarded 25 BUILT GREEN® Platinum third-party certifications for Excel Edmonton homes—an outstanding achievement and jump in certification levels that reflects their efforts across all those aspects of Built Green’s holistic green building program.

“We’re passionate about innovation and leadership—and recognize the value for our team, customers and legacy,” says Sean Nolan, president and CEO of Excel Homes and APEX Group of Companies. “By remaining focused on our customer and supporting our teams, we’re able to drive innovative solutions to prepare for our changing landscape. Building BUILT GREEN® homes is just the right thing to do for our people and for future generations to come.”

Meanwhile, industry prepares for incoming Energy Tier Code. As a result of standardized performance across the industry, builders are approaching an ever-more even playing field: the differentiator originally associated with energy alone is gone (beyond cases of exceptionally high performance). While some builders are having to consider a competitive advantage beyond energy for the first time, Excel is ready for the future and brings a competitive advantage by building beyond energy performance requirements.

This once again speaks to their focus on the customer—which manifests both in the homes they build and in the homebuying experience they provide. Excel enables an aspect of this at the very beginning of their clients’ journey.

While today, we’re experiencing a record pace of international and interprovincial in-migration, back in 2020, Excel was preparing to meet the needs of customers whose first language isn’t English: they introduced a tool that allowed homebuyers to read in their preferred language. Initially, they launched five languages, in addition to English. It was immensely popular, so the next year, they expanded to 10 languages (plus English)!

This aligns with Excel’s tagline, “simplifying your journey home” and enables an easier buying experience for many, addressing the current buying climate, as well as firmly establishing them, once again, ready for the future. Today, as many new Canadians look for their homes, this website feature empowers homebuyers and makes for one less struggle, as they navigate their next major life decision.

“Excel Homes shows vision and long-term commitment to building responsibly for their customers. They’re modest in expressing their achievements,” says Jenifer Christenson, chief executive officer of Built Green Canada. “We recognize their successes over the years and have watched them incrementally improve their homes’ energy performance, alongside other key green features, keeping their eye on their customer and the future.”

Since they began in 1988, Excel Homes has built 14,000 homes across 80 Albertan communities—along the way, earning over 75 awards for design and industry excellence. And this is just the beginning of their accomplishments.