3 Takeaways from the 2018 Housing Leadership Summit

With their focus on profitability and scale, U.S. homebuilders have often been at the forefront of tech and productivity advances within the building industry. I recently attended the 2018 Housing Leadership Summit and came back with these key takeaways:

1. Consumers are quickly embracing digital technology to help them with discovery and better inform them during their purchasing process.
2. Helpful data that allows sellers and buyers to engage at precise and meaningful moments will change homebuilders’ business models in ways we can’t even yet imagine.
3. 2018 will be an inflection point for the emergence and embrace of offsite construction as an essential dimension of home building in the United States.

Embracing Tech:

Yep, it’s happening….the use of consumer technology for home buying decisions is here and here to stay! When you look around, you realize how consumer tech has permeated every facet of our life from self-parking cars to the connected, voice-activated smart home. Even AI is emerging quickly in home tech, like the smart shower that learns your workout schedule and favorite temperature settings.

And guess what…those consumers are also the design professionals who specify your company’s products. So, ask yourself a question about your company’s digital health? Does your website provide a seamless consumer-like experience that easily enables professional specifiers to find and compare products intuitively, get pricing and find case studies or reviews that can help them to make the right decisions quickly — on their schedule?

Helpful Data:

It’s a data jungle out there. If your goal is to build trusted advisor relationships with specifiers, then you need to understand if those marketing/sales efforts are leading to increased revenue. To know that, you better have a very clear understanding of what your key performance indicators (KPIs) should be.

KPI’s can vary, but in working with our Verified Manufacturer partners we’ve defined a few key concepts:

1. Marketing ROI: How much are you spending on marketing efforts, digital and traditional? Hopefully your ROI is at least equal to the cost invested into those marketing efforts. But do you really know or are you guessing based on the shakey philosophy that higher revenue must mean that your marketing efforts are working. But this is a very dangerous path because when things start to go south, you won’t be able to isolate what marketing strategies are really working and which ones aren’t. Your back will be against the wall with the pressure of trying to quickly create a successful marketing initiative to turn things around.
2. Data Relevance: What data is relevant to your goals? A few crucial metrics we constantly hear are qualified lead generation, uncovering impressions/clicks per products to understand which products have the most traction, geographical hotspots for product selections, and the type of projects your products are most often selected.
3. Surfacing Data: It is one thing to possess data and it is entirely another thing to be able to easily surface and analyze it. Learn Google Analytics. Become an expert. Because when your KPI metrics are just a few clicks away on any of your devices, that’s going to make you a far more valuable contributor — if not a leader — of your organization. And you’ll truly understand what’s working and what isn’t for your customers. And when you understand their problems the best, they’ll begin to view you as the trusted advisor that builds lasting relationships.

Offsite Construction’s Inflection Point:

1 in 10 developments currently use offsite construction, but this trend will exponentially increase in the next 36 months according to Builder Online. The unicorn getting all the press in our industry and the tech industry is Katerra and with more than 1 BILLION in V.C. backing, you better believe there will be a rapid paradigm shift to the offsite development sector.

Armed with that knowledge, how is your product brand being aligned with the inevitable change? You surely have many solid relationships with contractors and owners/developers. But how much can you rely on them when it’s becoming easier and easier for them to find comparable products at a lower cost? It’s imperative that your brand’s products be represented on a digital platform that’s intuitive to navigate, provides clear metrics so you can make strategic marketing decisions, and most importantly enables you to step away from the low cost commodity game and become a high-quality, strategic solutions provider.

The growth of the offsite construction market is right around the corner. Now’s the time for you to take a critical look at your current marketing/sales processes and come up with a strategic plan to align it with the realities of the fast-changing digital trends happening now. Doing that will position you, and your brand, as the go to source for knowledge-based product solutions.

As always love to hear any feedback, thoughts and perspectives.

Best, Brandon

Business Strategy Director, Arazoo

e: brandon@arazoo.com