homebuilding

Multigenerational Living: A New Era in Home Design

December 3, 2024
By Tabitha Warren

The landscape of American households is undergoing a significant transformation, with multigenerational living on the rise. This trend, highlighted by industry voices like Sara Gutterman of Green Builder Media, has sparked a demand for innovative housing solutions that cater to the needs of families across different generations. Lennar Homes, a leading homebuilder recognized for its commitment to sustainable and forward-thinking practices, has risen to the occasion with its NextGen® – The Home Within A Home® concept. This innovative approach revolutionizing how families live together is at the forefront of this movement. .

Lennar's NextGen Home Exterior Elevation with first level floor plan — _{Lennar’s NextGen home courtesy of Builderonline.com}

NextGen: Redefining Multigenerational Living

Lennar’s NextGen homes offer a unique solution to the challenges of multigenerational living. These homes feature a private suite with its own entrance, kitchenette, living room, bedroom, and bathroom. This design allows families to live together while maintaining privacy and independence. Lennar emphasizes the importance of flexibility in housing design, stating, “NextGen homes offer the perfect blend of togetherness and autonomy, allowing families to live in harmony while respecting individual needs.”

The Rise of Multigenerational Households

The trend towards multigenerational living, echoed by publications like Green Builder Media, is driven by a variety of factors, including economic pressures, cultural shifts, and the desire for closer family ties. Sara Gutterman notes, “Multigenerational living is not just a trend; it’s a reflection of the changing dynamics of American families. Forward thinking builders provide solutions that supports these evolving needs.”

The Benefits of Multigenerational Living

Multigenerational living offers a range of benefits for families. It can provide financial support, shared responsibilities, and emotional closeness. Sara Gutterman believes that “Multigenerational living can foster a sense of community and belonging, creating a supportive environment for all family members.” Here more about generational homes and marketing on Sara’s interview on the Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast.

Green Builder Media’s Next Generation Influencer Group: Amplifying the Conversation

Green Builder Media’s commitment to understanding and shaping the future of housing extends beyond construction. Through initiatives like the Next Generation Influencer Group, the company actively engages with thought leaders and influencers like Sara Gutterman, fostering conversations about emerging trends and innovative solutions in the housing industry. You can learn more about it at their webpage: Influencing the Future.

A young man and two young women collaborating in front of a computer screen. — _{Happy business people working on computer by wavebreakmedia courtesy of CanvaPro}

The Future of Generational Housing

As the demand for multigenerational housing continues to grow, companies like Lennar Homes and Green Builder Media are committed to leading the way with innovative solutions. Sara Gutterman envisions a future where “homes are designed to adapt to the changing needs of families, fostering connection and support across generations.”

Conclusion

Lennar Homes’ NextGen concept and Green Builder Media are a few of the companies redefining multigenerational living. These companies provide innovations like flexible and supportive environment for families of all sizes, fostering connection and independence. As the landscape of American households continues to evolve, builders could learn from these smart companies and be poised to meet the needs of families with innovative and adaptable housing solutions.

_{*Floor plan image courtesy of www.lennar.com/nextgen/.}

Optimizing the Design-Market-Sell Continuum: Tips for Home Builders – Part 2

October 1, 2024
By Jim Sorgatz

In the dynamic world of homebuilding, a term that often echoes through the corridors of innovation is “value engineering.” Investopedia defines it as a strategic method aimed at delivering essential project functions at the minimum possible cost. This approach champions swapping out materials and methods for more cost-effective alternatives while maintaining the integrity of functionality—and, we’d argue, quality, too.

At Outhouse, this principle is at the heart of our Design-Market-Sell methodology. Our suite of services—from drafting to visual aids and digital innovations to print solutions—caters to builders across the spectrum. Yet production home builders crafting anywhere from 30 to 3,000 homes annually, stand to gain the most from our holistic approach. By integrating our seasoned Computer-Aided Design (CAD) expertise, builders can forego the hefty expense of maintaining an in-house drafting team. As our CAD wizards work their magic, our graphics and rendering teams get cracking on interactive floor plans, site maps, virtual tours, and much more, paving the way for a seamless transition to print media and sales office displays. This cohesive strategy not only accelerates your market entry but does so with significant cost efficiency. And therein lies the secret to mastering the Design-Market-Sell continuum.

In the first chapter of this series, we unpacked the foundational tools every builder needs to design, market, and sell new homes. Now, let’s dive into the digital realm that captivates homebuyers and enriches their purchasing journey.

Crafting Emotional Connections: The Power of Interactive Floor Plans and Site Maps

Outhouse has been at the forefront of Interactive Floor Plans (IFPs) and Interactive Site Maps (ISMs) for over two decades, boasting a portfolio that’s as robust as it is innovative. Optimized for mobile use, these tools work like a dream on any device, aligning perfectly with the preferences of over 70% of today’s homebuyers.

Erin Kearney, VP of National Accounts

Erin Kearney, our VP of National Accounts, emphasizes the importance of understanding buyer needs and adopting a personalized sales narrative. The ability to swiftly capture and analyze consumer preferences sets a builder apart in a market brimming with competition. IFPs and ISMs are more than mere marketing gimmicks; they are bridges to potential buyers’ hearts and minds, allowing them to visualize and tailor their future homes. This emotional engagement is akin to the bond formed during a car’s test drive, transforming a potential purchase of “your house” into “my home.”

Moreover, ISMs offer a comprehensive view of available lots, linking directly to elevations, IFPs, virtual tours, and more, thus streamlining the journey from lot selection to home customization.

Marrying market insights with interactive tools is critical to truly excel in sales. These technologies elevate customer interaction and deepen the emotional bond with their future homes, positioning builders as pioneers in their field.

Sketch of Marilyn Monroe against a wood plank backdrop with the words, "Helpful Tips - Interactive"

Maximizing Engagement with IFPs and ISMs

Success with IFPs and ISMs hinges on precise construction documents and strategic website placement. Marcy Smith, our incredibly talented but media-averse Graphic Department Production Manager, shares invaluable tips for optimizing these tools:

Ensure clarity and accuracy in your CAD files before engaging with a digital tools provider. Autodesk offers a free ‘DWG TrueView’ for this purpose.
Incorporate a PDF version of your CAD files for ease of reference.
For IFP projects, detailed CAD files minimize back-and-forth, saving time and resources.
Clearly delineate desired lots for ISMs, especially in master-planned communities, to avoid unnecessary costs.
The placement of these tools on the website is crucial; they should be prominently displayed for easy access by potential buyers, enhancing engagement and site retention.

Outhouse partner Stuart Platt

Virtual Reality: The Frontier of Digital Engagement

Virtual Reality (VR) stands as the latest marvel in digital homebuilding tools, offering virtual tours, animations, and visualizers that transport the model home experience to buyers worldwide. Stuart Platt, an Outhouse partner, advises:

For interior VR projects, consider selecting from Outhouse’s extensive library of interior designs to save on costs, unless custom designs are necessary.
Utilize color and material visualizers to give buyers a comprehensive view of their customization options, though it’s wise to limit exterior color schemes to maintain community aesthetics.

As a quick VR refresher: Virtual Tours are user-controlled tours – buyers click from room to room. Animations are essentially a video tour. And, Visualizers are customization tools that allow buyers to select options, colors, and finishes whether it be interior cabinets and countertops, or exterior roofing, stone, and siding.

In Summary

The key to optimizing the design-market-sell continuum is to work with a sole provider like Outhouse – the outsource hub for home builders. Whether launching a new community or seeking innovative cost-saving strategies, Outhouse is here to guide you through optimizing your design, market, and sell process. Reach out today to explore how we can transform your homebuilding journey.

Growing Sales with Bitmojis – a Lesson for Home Builders from Ralph Lauren

October 2, 2024
By Jim Sorgatz

How resilience, agility, and focusing on what matters most lead to success in both retail and in home building.

Ralph Lauren Bitmojis on Smapchat

Who knew Ralph Lauren had their own Bitmojis? In a recent webinar featuring Matthew Shay, President & CEO of the National Retail Federation, and Patrice Louvet, President & CEO of Ralph Lauren, the two men discuss the importance of resilience and agility in 2020. Hired in 2017, Patrice is a brand guy and was brought on board to, “write the next great chapter of the iconic brand.” How the company interacts and engages with consumers is where Patrice centers his attention. And that is why, when the pandemic hit, this rather traditional brand stepped outside the box and designed their own Bitmojis for Snapchat. Launched in August, there have already been more than 3 million downloads. Building amazing partnerships with social media in recent years is one of the company’s greatest strengths.

An “opportunity in crisis,” the shift to digital moved light-years ahead in 2020.

Heavily focused on what the digital age wants, Patrice believes digital will become like electricity – we won’t notice it, but it will be everywhere, and it will power everything. An “opportunity in crisis,” the shift to digital moved light-years ahead in 2020.

What was most interesting about this webinar is how retail and home building share many of the same challenges and goals. To move the company forward in the Twenties, Patrice has 5 primary areas Ralph Lauren is targeting:

Elevate and energize the brand – bring in a new generation of consumers.
Shift to direct-to-consumer. Stores will continue to play an important role, but online sales are growing.
Digital
International expansion
Develop high-potential, under-represented categories

A tech-savvy generation of home buyers has accelerated the digital revolution.

In the homebuilding industry, the pandemic along with a tech-savvy generation of home buyers has accelerated the digital revolution. Sales centers will still play an integral role, but much of the interaction between builders and buyers will take place virtually. International barriers are being toppled as builders crisscross “the pond.” Landsea Homes and Sekisui House (Woodside Homes) are just a couple of examples. And, builders are constantly working to develop under-represented categories – affordable housing for one.

Also needing attention are four areas affected by Covid that Patrice believes are here to stay:

Health and safety have become a huge factor in human behavior and will continue to be for quite some time, if not indefinitely.
The move to connectivity – people are not going to quit using apps and having home deliveries. Mom and grandpa just learned how to do all that!
Consumers are looking for a personalized experience.
Importance of values and purpose, “What difference will we make?” Consumer response to companies focusing on these has been amazing. Authenticity is a core Ralph Lauren brand value.

With the world staying home, resilience, agility, and focusing on what matters most have become critical to the success of every business.

Three valuable lessons Patrice learned from Covid:

Focus on what matters most
Resilience
Agility

Companies who quickly learned these lessons and adapted have survived and even done well.

This insightful webinar brings home the importance of your brand, company culture, and marketing. As home builders, our industry tends to not be on the cutting edge. We have been building and selling homes the same way for 100+ years. Builders have been making strides forward, but nothing prepared us for the events of this year. With the world staying home, resilience, agility, and focusing on what matters most have become critical to the success of every business. Engaging with consumers online is key. This is where Zoom, Online Sales Counselors, CRMs like TopBuilder and Lasso, chatbots like those powered by AtlasRTX, and online marketing tools including Interactive Floor Plans, Virtual Tours, Matterport Tours, and Visualizers play an integral role. Focusing on what the digital age wants, and thinking outside the box (Snapchat Bitmojis anyone?) to write the next great chapter of your iconic brand are keys to success.

Drive engagement on your website with the Outhouse Interactive Floor Plan.

On a final note, Patrice talks about citizenship and sustainability. Companies like Ralph Lauren cannot be successful if they don’t take the lead. Consumers and partners expect it. “People will remember you for what you did and the way you behaved.” These words hold true for home builders as well.

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

October 2, 2024
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.