When Bill Pulte appeared before the Senate committee considering his nomination to be one of the nation’s top housing regulators, he presented himself as the anointed representative of his family’s home-building empire.
Mr. Pulte recounted visiting job sites with his grandfather William J. Pulte, who founded PulteGroup, the nation’s third-largest residential builder. He expressed gratitude to senators from Georgia, Nevada, Minnesota and Arizona on behalf of his family.
“You know, my family’s legacy company is based in Georgia,” he told Senator Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, at the hearing in late February. “Atlanta has been very good to our family.”
But Mr. Pulte, 37, no longer has any official connection to PulteGroup, which has built 800,000 homes across the country since the 1950s. He was pushed off the company’s board in 2020 after one term as a director. And his family’s $500 million charitable foundation, run by an aunt and his father, issued a statement two years ago saying that “Bill Pulte does not represent, nor is he a spokesperson for, all members of the Pulte family, in any capacity.”
These days, one of Bill Pulte’s primary connections to the residential real estate business is a group of five aging mobile home parks he owns in Florida, some badly in need of repair.
His mobile home park investments were not readily apparent on his financial disclosure form because he listed parent companies but not the subsidiaries used to buy the properties in 2023 and 2024. Two of the trailer parks, in Palm Beach County, are only hours from a site where the Pulte Family Charitable Foundation is spearheading the construction of 179 rental homes for people who live below “the poverty line, often in overcrowded trailers,” according to the foundation’s website.
In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Pulte said he owned “passive shares” in the mobile homes and had “no oversight or management in any of these companies.” The spokesman said the mobile homes “represent a very small part of his net worth.”
As President Trump’s choice to direct the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Mr. Pulte oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant mortgage finance firms that control much of the nation’s mortgage market. But he has made his mark by publicizing personal mortgage agreements of some of Mr. Trump’s enemies and calling out what he claims are misrepresentations in the documents.
He has accused Lisa D. Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board, of listing two of her homes as primary residences on mortgage applications and accused New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, of renting out a home that she told her mortgage provider she would use as a secondary residence.
Last month, federal prosecutors charged Ms. James with bank fraud after a criminal referral by Mr. Pulte. She has pleaded not guilty. Citing Mr. Pulte’s allegations, Mr. Trump has tried to remove Ms. Cook from her position at the Fed. Ms. Cook has sued the president in response and remains at the Fed.
Mr. Pulte’s limited disclosure about his mobile homes most likely met the broad federal reporting standards required of top federal officials. But it also fits his pattern of carefully choosing facts to enhance his reputation and associate himself with the Pulte name in ways that have frustrated PulteGroup executives and some of his relatives.
In interviews, two members of the family said Mr. Pulte had created confusion in news releases and social media posts by attributing his own pronouncements to “The Pulte Family.”
He congratulated Elon Musk for buying Twitter. He announced a stake in GrabAGun, an online gun retailer where Donald Trump Jr. is board member. He assailed the chief executive at PulteGroup for selling shares and for “management problems” in 2023 — all on behalf of “The Pulte Family.”
During his first term, President Trump had taken note of Mr. Pulte’s posts on Twitter, retweeting him at one point and boosting his profile in Republican circles. Mr. Pulte went on to forge a bond with Mr. Trump’s eldest son at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida country club, where Mr. Pulte is a member, a person familiar with their relationship said. Heading into the 2024 election, Mr. Pulte and his wife, Diana, contributed nearly $1 million to various campaign committees supporting Mr. Trump and other Republican candidates.
But some of his statements over the years have not sat well with others in the wider Pulte family, which includes the patriarch William J. Pulte’s 14 children and more than two dozen grandchildren, according to two of his relatives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Mr. Pulte has spent years battling with his aunt, the foundation’s president, over his grandfather’s legacy and other issues. In social media posts he has called her “totally fake and phony” and has written that she “defecates” about him and his late grandfather’s legacy on the foundation website.
The spokesman for Mr. Pulte said in a statement that he “was the only Pulte in Pulte Homes, other than his grandfather, and going back to 2013, as evidenced in press conferences, national media and legal contracts involving PulteGroup, Bill Pulte was the only authorized representative for PulteGroup’s founder and the Pulte family.”
Many of Mr. Pulte’s most outlandish posts on Twitter and later X were deleted. Shortly after the Senate Banking Committee took up his nomination, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a top Democrat on the committee, asked Mr. Pulte to provide access to the roughly 25,000 tweets that had been deleted during the few weeks after Mr. Trump’s re-election.
He never complied.
The Founder’s Grandson
In 2016, William J. Pulte, then 83, had been retired for six years but was unhappy with the way things were going at the company he had founded as Pulte Homes. The stock price was languishing, and the management had moved the headquarters to Atlanta from the Detroit area, its longtime home.
He wanted to shake things up, and he turned to his grandson Bill for help.
With his grandfather’s help, Bill Pulte, then in his 20s, had started a private equity firm — Pulte Capital Partners — to invest mainly in heating and cooling companies, and founded a nonprofit focused on cleaning up run-down sections of Detroit.
He appeared on CNBC to criticize the company’s management, and eventually the grandfather-and-grandson campaign caught the attention of Elliott Management, a hedge fund, which bought a large stake in PulteGroup and demanded change.
It worked; the company’s chief executive resigned, Elliott was given three board seats and the elder Mr. Pulte got one seat. He picked his grandson to represent him on the board.
For the younger Mr. Pulte, this was a sign that he was the only member of the family his grandfather trusted to help run PulteGroup, according to an e-book he wrote about his grandfather.
But some of Mr. Pulte’s fellow board members viewed his appointment as a necessary concession to the grandfather, two people familiar with the board’s thinking said. Other directors bristled at installing the founder’s grandson, who had never worked at a large corporation, these people said. To them, the appointment seemed inconsistent with Elliott’s efforts to bring more professional expertise to the board.
The board elevated a longtime Pulte executive, Ryan Marshall, to chief executive in 2016 and credited him with revitalizing sales and profitability. PulteGroup’s share price increased 81 percent from the end of 2016 through 2017.
Mr. Pulte claimed the success largely as his own.
In his e-book, he recounted telling his grandfather shortly before his death in 2018 “how much money we had made for him, for the foundation and for the family.”
“I said, ‘We did it,’ and he said, ‘You did it. You did it.’”
Like a ‘Lord Giving Out Alms’
In early 2019, Mr. Pulte started what he called Twitter Philanthropy and proceeded to give away $1 million on the platform, according to his own calculation. Thousands of people went on Twitter to ask him for help, and Mr. Pulte sent money for food, Christmas presents, tuition and new dentures.
Sometimes, he ran sweepstakes for big cash amounts. “I’m giving $10,000 to someone random who RETWEETS this tweet because it’s CHRISTMAS,” Mr. Pulte posted.
And once: “If @realDonaldTrump retweets this, I will give $30,000 to a Veteran on Twitter.” Mr. Trump did, and Mr. Pulte helped out a female veteran who had recently been homeless, according to a press release attributed to “The Pulte Family.”
“Thank you Bill,” the president wrote on Twitter in July 2019.
To get the money, people had to follow Mr. Pulte on Twitter. That way he could message them directly for their online payment information.
Twitter Philanthropy generated a fair amount of press, some of it laudatory. But Timi Gerson, a consultant to nonprofit groups and former executive at a philanthropy watchdog group, likened Mr. Pulte to a “lord giving out alms to the poor.”
“It is a way to raise your profile,” she said.
Executives at PulteGroup were increasingly uneasy. So many people were calling the offices asking for money that at one point the switchboard had to be shut down, according to a memo from the company’s general counsel to the board in November 2019. The company commissioned a survey and found that customers were conflating the Pulte home-building business with Mr. Pulte’s posts on Twitter.
During Twitter Philanthropy’s first year, Mr. Pulte’s followers had swelled from roughly 30,000 to 1.8 million, the memo said.
Board members also were unnerved to learn that Mr. Pulte had reserved the rights to 150 internet domain names featuring the word “Pulte.” The general counsel, according to the memo, believed that some of those names should belong to the company.
Part of the problem was that Mr. Pulte’s Twitter handle was @pulte. Several board members and executives asked Mr. Pulte to use an alternative, such as @Billpulte. The general counsel explained in the memo that Mr. Pulte, as a board member, had “duties of loyalty and candor” to the company. But Mr. Pulte stuck with @pulte.
Eventually, some of the directors became fed up with Mr. Pulte’s self-promotion, according to the two people familiar with the board’s thinking. With the founder gone, there was little reason to keep his grandson on the board. The company decided not to nominate Mr. Pulte for another term starting in 2020. In a lawsuit against a former company executive, Mr. Pulte said the board had raised the issues with his social media handle in an effort to push him out because it didn’t like his disruptive style.
PulteGroup did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
‘Personal Vitriol and Harassment’
Mr. Pulte’s aunt Nancy Pulte Rickard is the president of the Pulte Family Charitable Foundation.
The foundation helped revitalize Roman Catholic churches, funded housing for developmentally disabled adults and gave money to the University of Notre Dame to address poverty. Ms Rickard told an interviewer in 2022 that the foundation followed the example of her father, a “quiet giver” who shunned publicity.
Ms. Rickard and other members of the family were put off by Bill Pulte’s style of giving, which they felt was not quiet at all, according to one relative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. They worried that he was sowing confusion about the family’s primary charitable work.
They were particularly unhappy that Mr. Pulte repeatedly invoked his grandfather’s name, another relative said. In some of his Twitter Philanthropy posts, he said the gifts were coming from “The Pulte Family.”
In June 2023, the foundation released the statement distancing itself from Twitter Philanthropy. “Some of Bill Pulte’s public communications through social media, public appearances, interviews, self-published articles and more may suggest that he speaks on behalf of the entire Pulte family,” it stated, pointing to the “important distinction” between the foundation and “Bill Pulte’s personal pursuits.”
Mr. Pulte soon took to X, calling his aunt a “phony Catholic” and a “fake.”
After Mr. Pulte’s ouster from the board, an anonymous critic had attacked him online. The poster was unmasked as a PulteGroup executive and was fired. Mr. Pulte filed a defamation lawsuit against the former executive.
As the litigation unfolded, Mr. Pulte eventually accused Ms. Rickard of siding with the fired executive, citing no evidence.
He subpoenaed her for a wide variety of documents. She asked a judge in Palm Beach County Court to block the subpoena and said it stemmed from Mr. Pulte’s “longstanding campaign of personal vitriol and harassment against” her. Ms. Rickard said in court papers that she had nothing to do with the fired executive.
By then, Mr. Pulte had been confirmed as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The judge had yet to rule on his aunt’s motion to quash the subpoena when Mr. Pulte withdrew his lawsuit in June.
The foundation’s statement about Mr. Pulte is no longer on its website. Asked recently for comment about her nephew, Ms. Rickard noted that she had not spoken to him in several years. “We have absolutely no comment about Billy,” she said.
In a statement, a spokesman for the F.H.F.A. said Mr. Pulte “enjoys a great relationship with the majority of his family.” He added, “Families are never perfect.”
Overflowing Trash Bins
Mr. Pulte put out many press releases about his projects, including his investment in a heating and air-conditioning company in Salt Lake City and the more than a dozen suburban homes that he acquired in 2023 to rent out.
He did not issue press releases about the five mobile home parks his companies acquired in Florida for about $3 million in the two years before he was nominated to become the F.H.F.A. director in January.
Recent visits to two of the mobile home parks revealed a broken fence and overflowing trash bins. The dozen or so trailers at the parks were aging. Some had windows covered with faded American flags and cardboard. Duct tape patched torn screens.
Documents show Mr. Pulte was the signatory on a $2 million mortgage taken out on three of the properties in August 2024. The woman listed as an agent on some of the mobile home parks also works in his charitable organization. In January 2024, he told an interviewer on an investing podcast that the “Pulte Family” was buying mobile home parks and planning to revamp them amid a market of rising rents.
In the same interview, Mr. Pulte said he planned to make them into “nice communities.”
But his companies have been slow to make repairs, said residents of three of the parks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.
A resident of one property, in Lake Worth in Palm Beach County, said he had gone months without a working stove, despite asking the management company to fix it. Another resident said he had spent $300 to repair his broken air-conditioning unit. Some trailer park leases warn tenants that if they miss rent payments, which are due weekly, “they will be removed for trespassing by the local sheriff!!”
At some properties, rents have been rising. A resident at a mobile home park in Cottondale in the Florida panhandle said in a filing in Jackson County Court this summer that his monthly rent had increased to $950 from $550 after Mr. Pulte’s company took over. At a park in Ruskin, south of Tampa, rents recently rose $100 a month — about 16 percent — to pay for a new dumpster, several residents said.
None of the mobile home properties carry the Pulte family’s name.
Elisabeth Parker and Kenneth P. Vogel contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.
Matthew Goldstein is a Times reporter who covers Wall Street and white-collar crime and housing issues.
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