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

March 28, 2025
By Outhouse Partner

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.

OutThink – The New Blog from Outhouse LLC

March 28, 2025
By Jim Sorgatz

Moving Home Building Forward – Together

One of my favorite activities at trade shows is learning from industry insiders – even our own competitors. Collectively, we share so much knowledge. Yes, we are all vying for our piece of the pie, but builders, trade contractors, and service providers are also working as a community to build and sell the best new homes, and bring our industry into the 21st century. The catalyst triggered by events in 2020 cannot be overstated. Builder marketing and sales strategies have changed forever, and the way new homes are constructed is rapidly evolving as well.

Blocks spelling New Normal.  Homebuyers now expect online engagement with Interactive Floor Plans, Site Maps and virtual tools.
The New Normal: Homebuyers shopping online expect an engaging, interactive experience, similar to when they visit your model homes. Interactive Floor Plans, Site Maps, and virtual tours all play an integral role in online sales.

With an emphasis on pushing boundaries, Outhouse is pleased to present OutThink – our new blog for home builder marketing, sales, architecture, and construction executives who are looking to up their game.  In addition to insights from Outhouse staff, the blog will feature posts from top website builders, online sales experts, marketing gurus, designers, architects, engineers, and developers of new products.  All will focus on ways builders can create the best homes and offer an optimal experience for buyers shopping online and onsite in your sales centers. 

In an industry slow to change, the onset of Covid-19 has catapulted home builders forward in their migration to virtual home sales.  A recent article in Builder affirms the importance of having a buyer-centric website with engaging sales and marketing tools.  Homebuilding is booming, and much of that is due to builders finding innovative ways to market and sell homes online, and/or with minimal contact onsite.  Today’s home buyers expect digital buying solutions.  Sophisticated online marketing tools like animations, virtual tours, Interactive Floor Plans, and Interactive Site Maps play a huge role in building emotional connections with your buyers. 

Interactive Site Map.  Click on lot to view available home plans, elevations and Interactive Floor Plans
Take our most sophisticated Interactive Site Map for a spin. Click on any lot to reveal available floorplans. Then click a rendering to link to the corresponding Interactive Floor Plan.

Traffic is also ramping up at model home sales centers, so it is important to have great displays, and quality print brochures for potential buyers to take away.  You might also consider unassisted model home tours to adhere to social distancing guidelines.  We are in a challenging period, but it is also an exciting time for progression to the next level for marketing and sales. 

To learn more about the latest online tools for builders, email us to schedule an online demo. Or, catch us in one of our upcoming “live” presentations.

Knowledge is Power – Join Us at Upcoming Educational Programs

Home Builder Digital Marketing Summit

You will not want to miss the Home Builder Digital Marketing Summit, which Outhouse presents with leading digital marketing agency Blue Tangerine. Taking place in October and November over four weeks, the once-a-week two-hour program features an engaging roster of new home sales and marketing experts:

Chris Hartley – K. Hovnanian Homes
Michelle Smallwood – Holiday Builders
Ashley DeYoung – DeYoung Properties
Jimmy Diffee – Bokka Group
Angela McKay – Lasso CRM
Dana Kovach – Kovach Marketing
Spencer Powell – Builder Funnel
Bassam Salem – AtlasRTX
Greg Bray & Erik Martinez – Blue Tangerine
Stuart Platt & Kevin Weitzel – Outhouse, LLC.

TecHome Builder Online Summit

We are also pleased to sponsor the TecHome Builder Online Summit where our VP of Business Development & Sales Kevin Weitzel will be sharing his knowledge on the implementation of virtual tools to grow your market share. His presentation takes place on September 30th.

Pulse - Online Sales and Marketing

Finally, the Do You Convert PULSE event hosted by Mike Lyon and Kevin Oakley comes online October 6th and 7th. Although not speaking, Outhouse is proud to sponsor this program where builders will learn to navigate and leverage the current sales and marketing landscape to boost appointments and conversions

Join us for one or all of these insightful programs designed to help your sales and marketing team grow sales.

Now, a Question for You

What is your preferred length of blog?  The “gold standard” for many years has been 500-800 words. Data is now showing articles with closer to 2,000 words are garnering the most reads, likes, and shares.  This is assuming the content is interesting and educational.  As a reference, this post has around 730 words.  Do you prefer 500, 1,000, 2,000 words? Or a mix?  Please let us know your preference in the comments section. 

Thank you for checking out the OutThink Blog!  

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