Let us look at your project
Send the site, the plan, or the problem. We will tell you what we would do with it and whether we are the right fit.
Subject
New home sales and marketing for builders
Absorption, pricing, conversion, and the sales center
In short
New home sales performance is a conversion problem more often than a traffic problem. Most communities behind plan are drawing adequate visitors and losing them between the appointment and the contract, which advertising cannot fix.
- Your community does not have a traffic problemCommunities behind their absorption plan are usually converting badly. How to diagnose the four stages of the new home sales funnel.
- How to price lot premiumsLot premiums are the most underused pricing instrument in new home sales. How to set them, when to move them, and why the last lots are the hard part.
- What a model home is forA model home is not a showpiece, it is an objection-removal device. When one pays for itself, when a merchandised spec does the same job, and how to furnish it.
- Hiring an on-site sales agentWhat predicts performance in a new home sales center, how resale experience can work against you, and how compensation shapes cancellation rates.
New home sales performance is a conversion problem more often than a traffic problem, and most builders diagnose it backwards.
The four-stage funnel
Gross sales is a summary statistic that hides where a community is losing. Measure four stages separately.
Traffic. How many prospective buyers arrived.
Traffic to appointment. How many came back for a real conversation. Failure here is on-site experience or follow-up discipline.
Appointment to contract. How many serious prospects wrote. Failure here is price, product, or an unresolved objection about an unbuilt home.
Contract to closing. How many contracts survived. Failure here is qualification, and it is the most expensive of the four.
Only the first is fixed by advertising. Spending into a conversion problem buys more of the same loss.
Price and pace are one problem
Carrying cost accrues monthly, so a community priced higher that sells slower can return less than the cheaper alternative. The question is never what a home is worth. It is what price produces the pace that maximizes return on this specific project.
The instruments
Base price, set against a typical lot rather than the worst one.
Lot premiums, set as a schedule across the community and reviewed monthly against actual absorption. Premium lots that sell in the first sixty days were underpriced.
Option pricing, which determines the gap between the advertised base and what a realistic home costs.
Phasing, which creates genuine scarcity and lets you observe response to a subset before committing the rest.
Who executes it
Everything after the first stage happens in the sales center. Follow-up discipline, discovery quality, objection handling, and qualification rigor are attributes of the person standing in the model, not of the brochure.
References
Where writing in this subject rests on an outside authority, it is one of these.
Written and reviewed by Jason August, President and Employing Broker, Colorado license ER.040029060.ยท