10 Ways to Improve Your Performance During the Spring Selling Season

8) Personalize Your Communities and Your Ad Campaigns.

If you’re lucky enough to have whole communities to sell, then you should think about giving each one its own website for promotional purposes. For example, if ABC Builders is working on a community called Village Green, it could set up www.livevillagegreen.com as an additional website. The same strategy can be applied to special promotions. You can get your promotion of the home buyer tax credit its own URL using something like www.homebuyertaxcredit.com or perhaps www.8000taxcredit.com. A builder could also use www.800month.com to promote houses with an $800 per month mortgage. Setting up a separate URL is relatively inexpensive, but it gets the word out and allows you to track if the dollars spent were actually effective in driving traffic to the community. “It’s retail thinking applied to the home building industry,” Elkman says. Just make sure the special URL drives traffic back to your main website.

9) Organize Your Back Office to Facilitate Transactions.

In a crunch, there can be no wasted time. This is not the moment to be securing financing to build houses; that should have been under way last fall, so if you’re doing it now, you’re too late. All the proper forms should be close at hand, and all handouts for buyers—warranty information, user’s manuals, and community information—should be stocked and ready to distribute. Moreover, all work, repairs, and punch-list items need to be resolved by early spring.

10) Remember That the Surrounding Community Is Just As Important As Your Houses.

Everyone knows that in marketing you don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle. But in home building, both are important. You can have the greatest house with the best kitchen and most awesome master bathroom suite, but if the house is perceived as being too close to a highway, in an undesirable school district, or out in the sticks, it will sit ... and sit for a long time. Publicize the ancillary benefits of buying one of your homes. Highlight the fact that there is a farmer’s market one mile away, or that it’s located near transit or within walking distance to coffee shops, bookstores, or a swimming center with after-school programs. Promote the community-oriented nature of your location that will make a buyer think, “Yes, this is the house I want to buy in a place I want to live.”