Google defines enthusiasm as: a feeling of excitement; or an overflowing with eager enjoyment or approval.
Building a new home creates excitement and enthusiasm for your home buyers. Whether they are building for the first time or the tenth time you can be assured that they are excited about their new home. For some it may be the biggest purchase of their life. For others a new home is the first step in building a family.
As a builder you’ve undoubtedly seen homeowners bring friends and family members out to the homesite to show the lot for their future home. You’ve probably even had some homeowners that visit their homesite every single day during construction.
How can you capture that enthusiasm and help your happy new homeowners spread your message? What kind of tools can you give them to tell their friends about their new home?
We’d recommend you try the URBaCS Referral Builder application. It’s a simple tool that you can give to your homeowners to help them share their enthusiasm. They take pictures of their home under construction and upload them to a website that their friends can visit to see the home progress through the construction phases.
We help you capture your homeowner’s enthusiasm so they can tell their friends about you. If you’re looking to build referral sales there is no better way than to make it easy and fun for your homeowners to tell their friends.
Tags: capturing enthusiasm, enthusiasm, happy homeowners, homesite, lot, new construction, new home, photos, referrals
Yesterday, Oct. 16th, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) announced that Builder Confidence is at an all-time low since they first started tracking it 23 years ago.
“Not surprisingly, builder confidence has taken a heavy hit from the recent financial market crisis,” said Sandy Dunn, president of the NAHB and a builder from Point Pleasant, W. Va.
But what about homebuyer confidence? New home sales are down. Buyers are reluctant to jump in and make the big commitment to build a new home. Maybe they’re worried that the market will continue slide or maybe they truly believe that all builders and mortgage brokers are crooks?!?
It’s sad that builders that have worked hard for 40 years to build a reputable brand can see it tarnished through guilt by association. As a builder, you can try to tell the market that you are trustworthy and honest, but isn’t that the same message the ‘crooked’ builders and lenders are sending? So how can the public trust you? What makes you different?
Maybe you should ask your homeowners.
Buyers trust their friends. So why not give your homeowners a tool to talk about you. If they like what you’ve done for them, they’re probably going to tell people about it. Why not help them spread your message even further?
URBaCS gives every homeowner their own website so they can share their building experience with friends and family.
More information regarding housing statistics is available at: www.housingeconomics.com.
Tags: builder confidence, homeowner confidence, housing economics, NAHB, Sandy Dunn
Create a forum for communication that encourages positive feedback. With enough positive content any negative content gets lost and discounted. Message boards don’t work because very few people leave positive comments and only the negative will use them. Testimonials are ok, but lack significant weight because the new home builder is controling the message. So what can you do?
Blogs are a good start. A company blog with a comment section is a good way to get some positive feedback. It is also a way to publicly address any homeowner concerns. Blogs also have the side benefit of helping you improve your organic search ranking.
One other option is to give your homeowners a tool like URBaCS to help them share their new home with friends and family.
Tags: blog, blogs, forum, message board, search ranking, seo, testimonials
We’re not suggesting that you don’t use directional signage. In fact, we would recommend you use our friends at Wagner Signs (no relation to Rob) for all of your signage needs.
We’re simply stating that when you let your prospective home buyers leave your sales office or model home you are risking your chance at a sale.
When they drive from one of your communities to another to see a different model or style of home what stops them from following the directional signage to one of your competitor’s neighborhoods?
With the URBaCS Referral Builder application you can use the searchable public front-end to showcase photos of every home your company has ever built. You can also use the system to interact with your prospective home buyers as you browse through the photo galleries to help determine what is of importance to them.
You may still run into a buyer that needs to physically step foot in a model home. We know that technology can’t overcome every person’s challenges. But we would recommend you go with them…just in case.
Tags: competition, directional signage, driving, home buyers, new home sales, photo galleries, Wagner Signs
Google “passion-centric marketing” and in .18 of a second you will find 485 pieces of nothing.
Not one definitive word or sentence about what passion-centric marketing actually means. You’ll find white papers and blog postings that talk about passion-centric communities. You’ll also find mishmashes of the words passion, centric, and marketing but you won’t find a definition.
So let’s define it now:
Passion-Centric Marketing - “The act of finding like minded individuals who have an evangelical response to an idea or product and giving them a tool to connect with other like minded individuals and share their passion with the rest of the world.” - Rob Wagoner of URBaCS, Sept. 2008
Now the question becomes, how do we use our customer’s passion to build more referrals?
Tags: connect people, like-minded people, marketing, marketing definition, passion, Passion-Centric Marketing, share passion
Looking for a way to get homebuyers to pay attention to you?
Here are six steps to engage potential homebuyers:
- Encourage your new homeowners to take pictures of their home as it’s being built.
- Take tons of photos of your models, specs and market homes.
- Combine your photos with your homeowners photos.
- Upload and tag all photos in an online photo gallery.
- Publicize this photo gallery so homebuyers can find it.
- Brand the photo gallery so prospects know that they’re your homes.
Or you could just implement the URBaCS Referral Builder application and start experiencing the power of online word-of-mouth with very little work or cost from your end.
We help you engage potential homebuyers and enhance your sales process.
Tags: engage prospects, homebuyers, homeowners, market homes, model homes, photo, photo gallery, picture, prospects, tag, upload
Our society is changing the way we market. At one time, once you had a product you created “the message”. You then purchased television, radio, or print advertising and told the public what they thought of your product. The public had no forum other than word of mouth to effect your message. That world has all changed.
Free and powerful forms of communication called blogs are giving the public a voice. Online tools such as Wordpress, Blogger and YouTube have made it easy for anyone to tell the world what they think about you.
The URBaCS Referral Builder application is the first communication tool of its kind to bring this power to the building industry. Give your homeowners a tool so they can tell the world about you.
Tags: blogger, blogs, word of mouth, wordpress, youtube
Over 80% of professionally designed homebuilder websites have online photo galleries, and those that don’t have at least a few photos of their homes sprinkled throughout. The surprising thing isn’t that builders have photo galleries, it’s that in general builders only share a few photos.
Film is cheap. Digital film is cheaper.
So why do builders only showcase twelve photos when they could show twelve-hundred?
A decent digital camera can be purchased for $300-$500. And for $8 an hour you can hire someone to professionally edit your photos at Elance.com. This means that a simple understanding of basic photography techniques can get you hundreds of professional-looking photos for less than a grand.
Most builders we talk to say that time is really the issue. So if you don’t have the time to take photos and want to showcase all of your design options and customizations one other option could be to let your homeowners take the photos for you.
With the URBaCS Referral Builder system your homeowners take pictures of their homes and you simply approve the photos to be displayed in your online gallery. With hundreds of homeowners taking hundreds of photos it doesn’t take long to showcase your design options to prospective new home buyers.
Tags: cnet, digital camera, elance, home pictures, online pictures, photo gallery, picture gallery
One of my earliest childhood memories is of receiving an annual birthday card from my dad’s insurance agent, Norm Butler of Lafayette Life. I had no idea who this guy was, but every year I looked forward to getting my card from Norm.
His method worked great to remind me about him on my birthday…but with my short memory and even shorter attention span I always seemed to forget about Norm the rest of the year. Unfortunately for Norm, my fond memory of him didn’t put any money in his pocket.
For more than a decade, I worked in new home sales as a salesperson and as a sales manager. Many builders, including four-of-the-five I’ve worked for provide gift baskets to homeowners at closing. Typically the salesperson delivers the basket as the homeowners are moving in, or shortly thereafter, with the goal of gathering names of their friends and family that also might be interested in buying in the neighborhood.
One builder I worked for took this to the extreme. At contract signing, the husband received cookies and the wife received flowers delivered to their work. At the pre-construction meeting the couple received a package with goodies including T-shirts, and at closing they got a large gift basket with gourmet coffee, chocolate, and various trinkets with the builders’ logo. All-in-all these “referral gifts” added up to nearly $500.
$500 may seem like a cheap price to pay if it encourages additional sales. But the problem with this approach is that it is not actually providing the homeowner with anything that helps them tell the story to their friends. In fact, many homeowners would actually say things like, “Wow…I just spent $250,000 on a home and you’re giving me a branded T-shirt.”
With new homes, like any large purchase, the excitement level is highest just after the purchase has been made. We don’t have to ask for referrals, our homeowners are telling everyone they know about their new home. Notice the emphasis is on the word their.
Why do builders continue to use old-school techniques that don’t work? When they could use tools like the URBaCS Referral Builder application that help their homeowners share their excitement from the beginning?