Our Story

A Family Affair

Running Meritus Homes is a division of love, labor and laughter for its founders. If that sounds a little bit like a marriage, it's because it is. As former division presidents for the nation's largest homebuilder, Karen and Brian Brunhofer had the rare opportunity to work in an industry they loved, for the same company. After twelve years at the company, 10 years of marriage and three children later, Karen and Brian realized the only way they could enjoy their jobs more was to form their own homebuilding company in Chicago – Meritus Home.

Over the last two years, in a stressful market conditions, Meritus Homes has been able to acquire strategic land assets in some of the most highly desirable submarkets in Chicago's north, northwest and western suburbs at today's market pricing. Karen and Brian's timing, and yours, could never be better.

Meritus Homes

Our Promise

You deserve to own the new home your family will love at a great value. You deserve peace of mind and to partner with an attentive homebuilder you can trust. You deserve to enjoy the homebuilding process. You deserve a new Meritus home.

Here is the Meritus Homes pledge:

Deliver a high-quality product
Offer an exceptional customer experience
Never lose your trust
Listen and be attentive
Have fun in what we do
Be your partner in building your home
Make buying a home more enjoyable, less stressful
Cherish the essence of a home and the memories you will create while living in one of our homes

Building on Experience

Between the two of them, both Karen and Brian have more than 25 years of homebuilding experience, during which time they helped deliver more than 10,000 homes. They understand the concerns you may have about buying a home, especially in today’s real estate market Brian and Karen will be directly involved your project; listening to your questions, answering each head on, and responsive to your needs. The family-run Meritus Homes is focused on making homebuilding an enjoyable experience again.

In a time when it’s hard to trust a builder’s staying power, you can feel confident in our financial strength due to our strong capital assets and disciplined business model. Aligning with a successful entrepreneur, Gary Janko, founder of Janko Group, whose real estate investment company has an existing portfolio of assets in excess of $300 million, allows Meritus Homes to continue through challenges and be positioned well as the market further stabilizes and improves.

Meritus Homes has also been fortunate to bring on board some of the most experienced and respected construction and sales talent in the region who were looking to work with a trusted and proven homebuilding team.

By building Meritus Homes around a small core team of dedicated, industry experts who embrace the small business mentality of working together and the value of entrepreneurship, the homebuilding company can focus on doing things the right way for our customers, our trade partners and the communities in which we build.

Meritus Homes is excited about the future.