A LOOK INTO THE EVOLUTION OF HOMEBUYER BEHAVIOR

BACK IN THE DAY…
How we buy homes has changed quite a bit in the last ten years (and especially in the last few months). Traditionally, model homes and printed maps were essential. Now, they’re optional and one day, they could be obsolete.

Real estate transactions have a long history of being a slow and stressful process. In the past, new homebuilders spent hours upon hours planning, designing, building, and staging model home after model home.

They’d hire photographers to take photos of each and every angle of the house, sometimes over the course of a few days.

The photos taken by the photographer are then used as a marketing tool to engage buyers, via pamphlets, brochures, billboards and more.

So, as that model home begins its marketing journey, another one is planned, designed, built, staged, and photographed.

New home construction requires a blueprint floor plan of each house available in a neighborhood or community. As builders, it’s important to understand that every homebuyer is different, so creating a floor plan to meet every single need of every single homebuyer is difficult. This tends to lead to custom homes, which mean more printed floor plans, more model homes, and more staged photoshoots.

And that’s just the homebuilder’s path to building and selling a new home. Don’t forget the homebuyers that have to search each community for their ideal home, gather pamphlets or brochures for each one that piques their interest, find the contact information of a sales rep, visit a sales center to see every single option available and apply it to their tentative home….

IN WITH THE NEW
Since 2010, e-commerce sales have jumped three times faster than brick-and-mortar sales. This year alone, e-commerce accounts for 9% of total retail sales in the United States.

Who’s to say homebuilding can’t hop on the e-commerce bandwagon?

Interior and Exterior Renderings, digital brochures, Visualizers, and everything in between have simplified the homebuying and selling process tenfold. Roll up those huge blueprint floor plans and check out the same one from your phone.

Take it up a notch by allowing your buyers to interact with the floor plan; click into hot spots, check out the renderings associated with that plan, and get even more details on the community without even being there.

Virtual Tours have played a key role in changing the game. Zillow reported that one out of three homebuyers prefer a virtual tour instead of touring the home in person, thus prompting a “purchasing sight unseen” situation which has gained steam in recent years. For buyers, this kind of digital content is close to essential. On the flip side, 61% of those looking for a home said they would prefer to see a virtual tour of a home before visiting in person.

A SNEAK PEEK INTO THE FUTURE
Did you know that virtual sales centers are an actual thing now? Zoom isn’t just for class sessions or afternoon team meetings. Billionaire Mark Cuban suggested that closing deals via Zoom have taken over closing deals over dinner.

The idea behind a virtual sales center (Specifically, our virtual sales center!) is to ease the struggle and eliminate the daunting process of walking customers through a sales center physically when sometimes, physical interaction isn’t possible.