About Heritage

Heritage was started by people who have spent decades watching builders get this wrong.

Heritage Homes is a mother-and-son partnership building custom homes in the East Metro Twin Cities. Together, Lori and Dustin have closed more than 250 luxury real estate transactions in the East Metro. One operating philosophy: build the way we wish other builders had.

Co-founder

Lori Howard.

Lori owns every Heritage client relationship. She built the way she works around what she wishes she had when her family built their first home.

Twenty-seven years in luxury real estate across the East Metro. Hundreds of buyers, sellers, and custom-build clients walked through her door before Heritage existed. The pattern she kept seeing: builders who were good at building and bad at the relationship around it. The relationship is what Lori does. Heritage is the structure that puts her relationship-led approach inside a builder.

Co-founder

Dustin Gott.

Dustin runs every Heritage build himself. Twenty years in real estate, development, and building, which means selling, buying, building, flipping, and watching every kind of build go right and wrong.

Heritage is the company he started after seeing every version of how custom homes go wrong, including short scheduling, hidden change orders, communication breakdowns, and warranty avoidance. He decided the build experience could be designed to avoid all of it.

Dustin is married to Julie, who homeschools their eight children. Faith and family are the framework everything else operates inside. Heritage is run with the same long-horizon thinking, building homes that outlast the builders, for families staying in them for decades.

How Heritage works as a partnership.

Lori and Dustin are mother and son. They co-own The Royal Home Team, the brokerage Lori has run for over two decades, and they co-own Heritage Homes. The two businesses operate as one team across two services: real estate and home building.

Lori is the relationship person and the client lead. Dustin is the builder and the operations lead. Most decisions get made in conversation between them, usually fast and without process overhead. The partnership is how Heritage stays small enough to give every client direct access to the founders while running operations at the standard a custom build requires.

Heritage’s credentials.

MN Residential Building Contractor License: BC809405
Business formation: Heritage Homes LLC, Minnesota, formed June 2025
Phone: 612-987-8272
Email: [email protected]

Most first conversations happen on the phone with Lori. She reads every inquiry herself.

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