Must-Have Reports for Selling New Development
No matter what part of the development business you’re in, these 4 reporting areas will help you answer the important questions
At Spark we have helped onboard and launch over 2000 New Development projects.
From my 5+ years of experience working with developers and brokerages to understand their reporting needs, I have found that role-specific reporting is the simplest and most meaningful way to ensure that each team leader is enabled to achieve your strategic business objectives.
While every organization has its own unique intricacies, deliverables and goals, there are four key areas of the business whose team leaders rely on access to real-time, meaningful reports that drive their decisions. Whether you are the Owner/Partner/CFO, the Sales Leader, the Marketing Leader or the Contract Administrator, your role depends on getting the right information at the right time.
To help your team meet its goals, here are some of the key reports that help every role manage their individual responsibilities and ultimately their New Development project sales.
Sales Leader
As the Sales Leader of a New Development project, it’s your responsibility to ensure that the sales centre is operating in sync while individual sales representatives and contract administrators are meeting their KPI’s. A proactive sales leader develops tactical strategies through careful considerations of market influences, internal construction timelines, the project’s financial limitations and market sales intelligence.
As a result, Sales Leaders are reliant on real time data and information such as Sales Absorption, the health of the market and pricing trends of the project’s unit and inventory types. You’re also proactively looking for ways to improve sales efficiency and control the profitability of your new home sales program.
With all this in mind, you may be asking yourself the following questions throughout several times throughout your pre-sale program:
- Which of my team members are meeting/exceeding quota?
- How can we pace the project sales cycles to meet the project pre-sale requirements?
- How do I adjust inventory prices to meet development objectives?
These questions, among many others, can be answered through a Team Activity Report.
One of the potential challenges that can occur throughout any stage of the project’s sales lifecycle is keeping everyone on your sales team motivated, well informed and accountable.
Team Activity Overviews are a great way to promote transparency and accountability for daily, weekly or monthly activity tracking. This report includes insights such as units sold, meetings completed, phone calls made, appointments booked, most active team members and more.
Each of these activity metrics can be viewed on both a team and individual sales member level, allowing the sales leader to identify areas of improvement, where to allocate resources and how to incentivize team members.
Owner, Partner or CFO
The leader of a New Development project needs to have quick access to the mission critical metrics of your project without getting impeded by the granular details.
Financial stakeholders will want to monitor the fiscal vitality of the project, such as where sales are being attributed, the financial ROI of the marketing and sales efforts and budget profitability relative to sales. Usually these individuals have 3 primary questions in regards to the project at hand:
- How are my mission critical metrics tracking?
- What kind of phased inventory pricing is necessary?
- How close are we to our financing threshold?
Owners, partners and CFOs can have these questions addressed by looking at 2 key reports: 1. Inventory Tracking Report, and 2. Project Activity Report.
With an Inventory Tracking Report, you get a better understanding of the project’s overall sales progress, broken down by the performance of different unit types. The key metrics here are units sold, percentage sold, average price, and median price that allow Owners, Partners and CFOs to gain a better understanding of the project’s performance. As a result, this enables the leader in question to make decisions such as demand-based price changes, reallocation of resources or staffing changes to improve sales efficiency and project performance.
A Project Activity Report gives executives a higher level overview of their project by showcasing metrics such as revenue, outstanding/unsold unit value, project value, the value of received and outstanding and forecasted deposits. This key information allows owners and executives to easily track what’s important to them, ranging from the simple progress of the project sales to the in-depth financial situation of the project.
Marketing Leader
The Marketing Leader is responsible for consultation during all stages of the development sales cycle as well as providing data-reinforced insights on demographic trends, market conditions, purchaser behaviour, product and pricing trends.
More day-to-day, they are responsible for building and utilizing a competitive landscape analysis for decision making, attribution tracking and implementing a strategy that generates leads while also maintaining ROAS (Return On Ad Spend).
As a result, Marketing Leaders must address two main questions:
- Which of my marketing channels are contributing to sales and to what degree?
- How can I get more demographic/behavioural information on my customers to improve my marketing efforts further?
Reports that can help enable marketing leaders to address these questions are 1. Traffic Sources Report and 2. Q&A for Marketing Attribution & Persona Building.
A Traffic Sources Report is an excellent tool to determine what proportion of traffic can be attributed to which marketing channels. This breakdown allows Marketing Leaders to determine the performance, velocity and ROI of every channel so they can take any necessary corrective action to address the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
Demographic and behavioural information on your customers is possibly the single most vital factor for any marketer to truly understand who their ideal customers are. With a Q&A report, Marketing Leaders can gather information from their leads, often through a survey alongside a lead-gen form, that can be used to inform future marketing decisions. Marketers are able to collect insightful information on their leads, such as their purpose of purchasing a development, available budget and desired unit model type.
The information gained will allow marketers to create and refine their Ideal Customer Profiles and better understand how said personas be targeted more effectively in future marketing efforts.
Contract Administrator/Conveyancer
Whether you use the American term ‘Contract administrators’ or the Canadian term ‘Conveyancers,’ these individuals are vital for a finely tuned sales tracking process. Often the first ones in and the last ones to leave for the day, they are primarily responsible for building and maintaining contract and deposit processes, auditing purchasing details, tracking Disclosure Statement amendment delivery, and data organization for commissions.
Conveyancers are highly relied on for the valuable collection of project data so that the other team members and stakeholders in the project can make proactive and reactive decisions as necessary, especially as it pertains to the sales execution strategy.
When the first few weeks of initial sales volume begins to cool down, conveyancers typically catch-up and start relying heavily on their reporting tools. From this point on, conveyancers usually are faced with the following 3 questions:
- Is all the sales and CRM data updated?
- What is the status of each of my deposits?
- As deals approach the rescission period, what is holding up unpaid deposits and is any action needed?
- Who are the top performing real estate agents/brokers driving sales and traffic to our project?
There are two primary reports that will enable the contract admins and conveyancers to answer these questions: 1. Deposits Status Report, and 2. External Commissions Report.
With a Deposits Status Report, Conveyancers are able to track the status of all expected and incoming deposits from purchasers. This report breaks down each deposit by the purchaser, unit purchased, deposit value, amount paid, balance outstanding, due date and status. This allows the conveyancer to easily identify how each of the deposits are progressing and specifically which are at risk of exceeding the due date. The Conveyancer can then take any corrective action to address this or create an alternative backup in the event that the buyer falls through.
With an External Commissions Report, conveyancers can track commissions and sales attribution for external brokerage agents. This allows conveyancers to identify which agents and brokerages are creating sales for the project and their corresponding sales volume, total commissions owed to the agents, commissions paid, the balance of the outstanding commissions and status of the commissions payment.
Conveyancers can ensure that commissions are being paid to the corresponding agent and rectify any issues should the agent not be paid on time. More strategically, the Conveyancer can identify any trends in regards to who is creating sales or who isn’t and why, for example if a particular agent is creating a surplus of sales or there are limited sales from agents overall. This would allow Conveyancers to take corresponding action to encourage or address the situation to increase further sales.
We recognize that sometimes your desired reporting output can vary by your project’s needs, circumstances, ownership, etc. and that reporting and analytics aren’t always a one size fits all ordeal. As a result, having the ability to customize your reporting and analytics may be better suited for your organization and project. On the bright side, it just so happens that Spark offers the necessary tools to perform both standardized and custom reporting!
Let’s explore how Spark can help you measure and achieve your project’s success. Book a demo here.
