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Mentoring & Nurturing


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How mentoring kids enhances a career in nurturing client success

My "Little" and I on top of South Mountain at cancer hike in 2014
On cancer hike with my Little in 2014

One of the accomplishments I am most proud of in life is mentoring two boys through the Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS) program. With no kids of my own, I felt a calling to volunteer with this tremendous organization as I realized how growing up in a relatively stable family helped prepare my brothers and me for adulthood. There are so many kids whose lives are in constant flux or would simply benefit from a little extra adult encouragement and support. BBBS is comprised of Bigs (adult volunteers) and Littles (the kids) who are matched one on one, based on common interests. Although most activities are on your own, each match is supervised by a BBBS specialist. The minimum time commitment for a Big is 2-4 outings a month for one year, but there are many matches that evolve into lifelong friendships.

My "Little", who is no as tall as me, and I on top of South Mountain at cancer hike in 2018.
My “Little” (2nd from right) and I on cancer hike in 2018

The need for volunteers is great, especially for men as the organization seems to have an easier time recruiting Big Sisters. If you are looking to help others in a role that is both challenging and rewarding, this is the perfect opportunity. Does everything go smoothly – NO! Things can and do go wrong. My current Little is now 19 and comes with all the drama and emotions most 19-year-olds experience. Although no longer in the program we still see each other regularly. As I write this, he is staying at my home due to challenges getting along with his roommate and his mom at the same time. So, lucky me, I get the brooding young man! The bottom line is, we have grown very close during our 10+ years together and I want to do everything I can to help him find his way in the world as an adult. Bigs are also not immune to the challenges parents face. Like the title of that famous song “Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll” (or in today’s world – Rap!), Bigs often have to address these issues as Littles navigate their teenage years. There was a point earlier this year where things had gone so awry, I was questioning whether my efforts made a difference at all.

And that is when, out of the blue, my first Little (now 26) sent me a chat via Messenger. Together in the program for 5 or 6 years, our match was terminated by BBBS due to a change in circumstances at his home; and this meant no further contact. Remembering a painfully shy and quiet teenager, I was not prepared for the chatterbox I encountered when we met for dinner. Confident, self-sufficient, incredibly happy, and overly-talkative, he was working as an assistant manager at Fry’s but decided to take a detour as an Uber/Lyft driver as he wanted more freedom. That evening made me realize, without a doubt, the time and energy dedicated to mentoring these young men was worth it.

What I learned while volunteering with BBBS is I am passionate about mentoring, nurturing, and helping people solve problems and overcome challenges. These interests have played an integral role in my career as well.

As former VP of member services at the Home Builders Association of Central Arizona, I helped builders and trades connect with one another through business development events and programming.

Here at Outhouse, rolling out new products (did someone say Visualizer?!) and educating clients on the full range of benefits offered by our interactive tools are two key roles. There is often much more than meets the eye. While builders actively use front-facing tools like the furniture planner, structural options selector, and pricing calculator on our Interactive Floor Plans, they sometimes forget about the lead generation, and analytics available through the back end. Outhouse may not be the largest provider of online marketing tools, but we have always taken pride in being the best. Working with clients to be sure they effectively use these tools to guide successful marketing strategies and close sales is part of that mission.

Nurturing and mentoring play an integral role in both business and our personal lives. There is so much we can learn from one another, and a great deal we can share to help others realize dreams and achieve goals. To learn more about Outhouse, or being a Big, give me a jingle at jims@outhouse.net. There is a great need for volunteers to help guide kids and teens in the right direction. It’s not easy, but I believe you will find the experience rewarding.

Musings from Home Builder, Author & NAHB Speaker Alan Trellis


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“The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.”
— Dennis Gabor

Randomness and circumstance combine to create the daily environment in which we must live, and hopefully thrive. But to believe that these alone determine our destiny is to incorrectly account for our own decisions and actions. Our future is as much about what we do with the hand we are dealt as the hand itself. It is up to each of us to be the best that we can be – to do the most that we can do. Poor circumstances can make this harder, and at any given instant guarantee that our best will be unacceptable, and the most we can do be insufficient. But if we consistently address both the good times and the bad with courage, determination, and thoughtful creativity, we can always impact the outcome of our lives and our decisions. We can always, to some degree, invent our own futures.

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”  
— Reid Hoffman

This quote relates directly to an article I wrote entitled “When Truisms Collide”. In that article, I discussed how two conflicting quotes, generally considered as truisms, could be in direct conflict and yet both be true. The answer to this inconsistency is relatively simple – which truism is correct depends entirely on the circumstances and environment of any given situation. Mr Hoffman is entirely accurate in his assessment if there is huge pressure to get to market and grab market share before a competitor beats you to it. This would be particularly true in the case of new technology-driven products, where obtaining a foothold is the highest priority.

For a homebuilder, particularly one with an excellent reputation, I would argue that it is equally important that while our new product need not be perfect, it should not be embarrassing. The cost of reputational damage must always be weighed against the advantages of being first to market. History is filled with unsuccessful product pioneers, whose market share was stolen by the second round of  better designed, better performing, and better priced  alternatives.

“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened”.
— Dr. Suess

Many great quotes are similar in that they are variations on a core theme. The fundamental message contained here is “Be Positive”. “Every cloud has a silver lining” and ”Pessimism leads to weakness, optimism leads to strength” are just 2 other examples of this pro-positive theme. Yet here, Dr. Suess has expanded the base message of positive versus negative to one of appreciation versus lament, with the added message that everyone get’s to decide the outcome of this contest through their individual perspective. To quote another quote, we each get to determine if, in our mind, the glass is half full or half empty. The amount of water in the glass doesn’t change- how we chose to see it is what changes.

“If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way”
— Napolean Hill

Most of us dream, at some time, of doing great things. Yet true satisfaction and long term success come from hard work, commitment, and attention to detail. Big things consist of myriad small things, and getting these right is the foundation on which big ideas, big plans, and big business success are built. As builders, we should understand, better than most, the importance of a solid foundation, and strive to do the nagging, every day small things we must deal with in a great way. Only then, will you be capable of accomplishing great things

Submitted by

Alan Trellis, Author, NAHB Speaker, and co-founder of Home Builders Network.

Alan Trellis

With 40 years of experience as a custom home builder and consultant for the home building industry, Al is co-founder of Home Builders Network, which provides management consulting, marketing, residential design, and land planning for home builders throughout North America. Collectively, their clients build 3,000 homes per year, for a sales value of $1.2 billion. Al is the author of many books on residential construction; has served as chairman of the NAHB Custom Builder, Education, and Business Management committees; and is a leading speaker at the NAHB International Builders Show (IBS).

Growing Sales With OpenHouse.ai – a Case Study with Trico Homes


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What Does OpenHouse.ai Offer?

At OpenHouse.ai, we believe that it is essential for growth and success within the homebuilding industry to understand a homebuyer’s stage of life, motivation, and needs. Therefore, we offer homebuilders a data-driven marketing solution to connect with homebuyers and maximize the opportunity for sales.

Graph showing OpenHouse.ai rate for online visitors to lead conversion across all clients growing from 0.85% to 1.24% from February 2020 to August 2020.

Our platform uses data science and artificial intelligence to offer both an insights dashboard and an engagement platform. The engagement platform tracks a customer’s real-time behavioral patterns to predict the likelihood of purchase, and amenity, location, and price preferences. With this understanding, our system updates inventory search results and creates recommendations for each unique website visitor in real time. This allows homebuilders to put their best foot—or maybe we should say floorplan—forward, for each customer. Our platform also offers a comprehensive analytic insight dashboard, which provides a birds-eye view of homebuilder’s customers and operations. We pair the real-time behavioral data gathered from the engagement platform with changing market trends, to provide the most up to date and relevant insights into a homebuilder’s customers and communities. Builders can leverage our platform to optimize marketing spend, increase lead conversion, improve operational planning and promote data-driven sales and marketing procedures.

Trico Homes – A Lead Nurturing Case Study

Beautiful white kitchen with island n Trico Home.

BACKGROUND

In 1992, Wayne Chiu founded Trico Homes in Calgary, Alberta with the commitment of being a different kind of homebuilding company; one with an extra degree of care to create the best place to live for every individual at every life stage. Trico’s communities have now expanded into Cochrane, Airdrie, Chestermere and Okotoks bringing their quality designs, craftsmanship and customer care to each and every project. Trico Homes continues to show the utmost commitment to improving the homebuilding industry, the city of Calgary, and the homebuying experience. 

CHALLENGE

Trico Homes was in search of a solution to further improve the homebuyer’s web experience, while simultaneously bringing in more potential customers to Trico’s show homes. As 51% of people buy homes they found online, it is essential for Trico, and other homebuilders, to optimize the online experience. Trico in particular needed a new tactic to educate and nurture customers earlier in the homebuying process. 

Homebuilders alike also face the challenge of making high impact decisions on a daily basis, from floor plan selection to land development, solely based on intuition. Trico wanted to ensure confident decision making through the use of data and needed a technological platform that empowers data-driven decisions within homebuilding.

SOLUTION

Trico Homes embraced OpenHouse.ai’s data-driven approach of using adaptable experiences, nudges and a host of other tools to help homebuyers find what they want, faster. OpenHouse.ai’s platform provides the capability of directing prospective buyers to the most relevant products in real time. The user-friendly dashboard uses descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics, ultimately helping Trico better understand their homebuyers and provide a scalable customer experience.  

  • Accurately target buyers through improved segmentation using advanced analytics
  • Produce community specific campaigns to increase conversions 
  • Select the optimal product and floor plan designs for each segment based on geographic, demographic and community data
  • Focus on nurturing leads and, overtime converting these prospects to leads
  • Utilize OpenHouse.ai’s dashboards as the hub for all data analytics to provide powerful insights to understand customers needs and the changing market
  • Create an optimized and personalized website experience for online shoppers

RESULTS

  • 45% increase in organic search traffic
  • 41% increase in direct search
  • Increase of over 4 additional homes sold
  • 41% reduction in marketing spend 
  • Contact to conversion rate increased by 29% with no additional training to sales staff
  • 18% reduction in cost/lead
  • 18% increase in foot traffic 

CLOSING THOUGHTS

OpenHouse.ai’s marketing platform ultimately empowered Trico Homes to utilize data and technology to drive high impact decision-making within homebuilding. OpenHouse.ai’s technology enabled Trico to provide a personalized experience from website to sales center; as Trico’s website now learns and grows with every interaction, ultimately narrowing down homebuyers search to homes in the price range, style and community they want. Through utilizing AI-technology, Trico is able to better nurture and educate their leads and offer them a superior home shopping experience in the digital space.

Trico’s improved lead nurturing is also recognized in the acceleration of their sales process. As the integration of OpenHouse.ai’s technology drives more qualified buyers and a higher volume of foot-traffic to their show homes, Trico has seen an additional 4 homes sold per month compared to their previous monthly forecasts.

The adoption of OpenHouse.ai’s technology has ultimately improved the homebuying experience, shortened the sale cycle and enabled data-driven decision-making. OpenHouse.ai’s platform provides robust dashboards that serve as the hub for all of Trico’s data, providing powerful and meaningful insights to drive these informed business decisions. OpenHouse.ai’s technology delivers dynamic analytics and detailed demographics to ensure Trico and their marketing team are effectively and accurately understanding their customer segment and market. The integration of OpenHouse.ai’s technology has created lasting value for Trico Homes, ultimately advancing their marketing function and driving sales while simultaneously improving the homebuying experience for each of their valued clients.

5 Tips for Selecting the Right Digital Marketing Agency for Your Home Building Company


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As a successful home builder, you know that the home buyers in today’s world begin their home buying journey online.  They are searching for homes and evaluating builders’ new home communities and floor plans via their websites long before they ever decide to make contact with a salesperson and visit a community.  

Lady checking out builder website.
An engaging website is critical to new home sales.

You know you need to have a home builder website that generates quality sales leads, and you also want to grow the number of qualified home buyers that visit your site. 

You know it would be terrific to have a trusted partner agency to help you navigate the increasing complexities and options that are available in today’s digital marketing toolset.  But let’s be honest.  You are not an expert in digital marketing techniques and technologies, and you don’t have the time to become one.   You are also working with limited marketing resources and can’t afford to waste money on selecting the wrong partner.

We all fear making mistakes, especially when those mistakes will cost us time and money.  So how can you move forward with more confidence to find the digital marketing agency that is right for you and will help you sell more homes?

Here are some key questions to consider to help you evaluate a digital marketing agency that you are considering as a partner.

1.) Do they understand the home building industry?

There are a lot of agencies out there that are very good digital marketers but don’t have specific experience in working with home builders.  Your local agency down the street may be very good at understanding the nuances of SEO, paid search, email marketing, and more, but do you want to pay them to learn the difference between a floor plan and an elevation, or between a model and an inventory home?  

If you are looking for a partner who can help you execute on the tactical level, and will simply take your direction and implement it, then this type of agency may be a good fit for you.  

However, if you are not sure what the best steps are to move forward online and you are also looking for strategic advice and guidance and an understanding of what others in the industry are successfully doing, then you will want a digital marketing agency who has not just worked with a few other home builders as clients but is also participating in industry events and sharing ideas on industry best practices.

2.) Can they explain the technical things they do in a way that you can understand and be comfortable with?

Just because digital marketing can be technical in nature, doesn’t mean that you must work with an agency purely on blind trust.  It is important that you are comfortable with the direction and tactics that your agency partner is implementing on your behalf.  While it is not necessary for them to train you to become a digital marketing expert yourself, they do need to be able to communicate the details of what digital marketing activities they are doing and why they are doing them and do that in such a way that you can understand and be comfortable.  

These communication skills will continue to be important well beyond the initial sales discussions when you are deciding whether to work together.  While fancy charts and graphs can look pretty and impressive, as the agency reports their progress periodically, ensure they will not just send a canned report but will explain the data and the implications of that report.  With every report should come an understandable answer to the question: “Therefore, what’s next?”

Building blocks

3.) Can they describe their process and demonstrate that they understand where to start and how to get you where you want to go?

You feel like your business and the homes you build are unique and special, and they are.  But usually, those differences, while important, are a relatively small part of the overall picture of what you do and the homes you sell.  This means that an experienced agency is going to be able to see the commonalities between their clients across the services that they offer and define and create their process or framework for successfully serving you. 

Having a process to follow does not mean that you will get a cookie-cutter service or that the solutions provided will not be customized to your needs.  It does mean that you will get consistency in what they deliver for you and it demonstrates a deeper understanding of how the execution of digital marketing services can help you sell more homes, even when your homes are in a different location or target a different buyer demographic than someone else that the agency has worked with previously.

4.) Does the agency claim to be an expert in everything?

Confidence is great, arrogance is not.  It is very challenging in today’s environment for a single agency to be an expert in everything.  Be sure to ask where the agency draws the line of which services they will offer for you.  For example, at Blue Tangerine, we recognize that we are not experts in helping our clients with their core branding or with logo design, so we have established relationships with several other branding agencies so that we can provide referrals if our clients have a need for those particular services.

5.) Will the agency clearly measure success in a way that you are comfortable with?

When working with your digital marketing agency, it is very easy to lose sight of the ultimate end goal, which is to increase qualified leads so you can sell more homes.  This happens because agencies feel, often rightly so, that they don’t have the full control to be held accountable for that result.  Instead, they want to focus on metrics like website traffic increases and specific keyword rankings.  These are, of course, important metrics that need to be reviewed and will inform the tactical execution of your digital marketing plan and strategy.  However, if you double the amount of traffic to your website or your website is now ranking number one for your favorite keyword phrase, and you still do not sell more homes, is that really success?  

handshake
Trust between builder and marketing agency is key.

Bonus Tip:  Most importantly, are they someone you can trust?

Regardless of how the digital marketing agency you are considering measures up with whatever criteria that you apply, at the end of the day, it’s all about trust.  No partnership will ever be successful in the long term if both sides are not able to work together from a position of trust.  While trust is something that takes time to develop, here are a few ideas of ways to determine if an agency is trustworthy even before you’ve started working with them:

  • Do they get back to you in a timely manner, the way they promised to when you filled out the form on their website?
  • Do they deliver a proposal or quote within the timeframe that they told you they would, or if not, do they keep you up to date with where things stand?
  • Do they have a demonstrated expertise by working with other home builders?
  • How do their existing clients feel about working with them?

At Blue Tangerine, we recognize that to be trusted as your digital marketing partner is both an honor and a responsibility.  We’d love to earn that trust.  If you are ready to start selling more homes, reach out today and let’s talk. 

Submitted by  

Mila Sorensen, Director of Marketing & Marketing Services
Blue Tangerine.

Blue Tangerine is your website design, development and digital marketing agency all rolled into one – from mobile responsive websites, SEO and PPC to email and social media, we provide full-service solutions to home builders, online retailers, and businesses.

Insights From Our Online Marketing and Product Expert


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Atlanta Real Estate Forum Podcast

The career path taken by my co-worker and friend Kevin Weitzel is more interesting than most. Starting as a professional cyclist, he was an Olympic Alternate in 1988.  This was followed by service as a highly-decorated United States Marine for eight years.  Returning to his cyclist roots, his many productive years in the industry landed him a very successful career in the motorcycle/automobile world.  A strong belief in and practice of relationship selling catapulted him from floor sales to GM of the largest Motorcycle Dealer network in the United States in less than 5 years. He also has owned his own bicycle shop.  Five years ago, Kevin was introduced to the home building industry through a friend who owned Outhouse where, as Vice President of Business Development, he has led the team to the largest sales growth in company history since the housing downturn.  An expert in Interactive Builder Web and Marketing Content, 3D Rendering, Animation, Drafting, Virtual Reality, Matterport, and Print Marketing, Kevin is also a top-ranked International Builders Show speaker, and co-host of the weekly Builders Digital Marketing Podcast.

The podcast tables recently turned, with Kevin bringing his industry knowledge to the studio for an episode of Atlanta Real Estate Forum Radio. Joined by co-hosts Carol Morgan of Denim Marketing and Todd Schnick, the trio discuss Outhouse’s outsourcing services, as well as the effects COVID-19 has had on the way home builders design product, market online to buyers, and conduct sales onsite.

Click Here for Podcast

An early adopter of working remote, Outhouse has been riding the wave alongside the pandemic by helping home builders come up to speed with new technology. While builders have always used services like interactive floor plans and marketing features, the ongoing pandemic has accelerated reliance on these tools, plus more sophisticated virtual tours, animations, and visualizers in order to stay ahead of the competition in our new virtual world.

Enjoy the podcast!