What Builders Need to Start—and Stop—Doing Now

The 2025 Spring Selling Season – now more than halfway through – is running on a spectrum from underperforming to sputtering.

Despite healthy online and sales center traffic, more homebuyers hesitate, spooked by affordability concerns, economic whiplash, and declining consumer sentiment. Meanwhile, operational complexity is rising, and the margin math is unforgiving. In this environment, the challenge for homebuilding strategists is no longer just about price, pace, and product—it’s about capability, specifically, the ability to generate, integrate, and act on real-time, high-quality data.

Chris Laskowski, Marketing Director at New Home Star, says homebuilders have an opportunity right now—this summer—to implement the infrastructure, systems, and decision-making tools they’ll need to adapt and survive the coming phases of uncertainty and competition.

If you don’t have a 21st-century platform, the discrepancy between you and your competition from a marketing and sales perspective will be massive this year,” Laskowski says.

In a wide-ranging conversation with The Builder’s Daily, Laskowski highlights three high-impact, data- and platform-driven actions homebuilders must prioritize now — and three widely common practices that drag performance down.

1. Analyze and fix your website’s weakest pages

Our number one priority is all about conversion rates,” Laskowski says. “We still have great traffic. What’s broken is the ability to convert that traffic.”

Laskowski recommends a disciplined website audit focused on community pages, area pages, and any major lead-generation surfaces.

Every major conversion page should be pulled into a single report,” he says. “Understand what the conversion rate is on each of those pages. Analyze your weakest performers and fix them.”

Fixes can range from improving value propositions and photography to rewriting copy to reflect the target buyer better. In many cases, the solution is more straightforward:

One of the most common mistakes we see is burying the lead form at the bottom of the page,” Laskowski explains. “We’ve consistently seen conversion rates double just by moving the form to the top of the page.”

Beyond structure, builders must meet buyers where they are in their journey. Laskowski recommends offering three types of conversion options:

• Top-of-funnel: downloads or guides for early researchers
• Mid-funnel: signups for incentives, newsletters, or events
• Bottom-of-funnel: complete lead capture forms for buyers ready to engage

You can capture conversions across the entire home buying cycle,” Laskowski says. “It’s not one-size-fits-all.”

2. Track campaign performance like a modern marketer

 Even among well-resourced builders, many still don’t track campaign performance with enough precision to learn from it. Laskowski calls that a major liability.

Builders are running campaigns across landing pages, emails, social media — but they’re not tying them together in a single system,” he says. “You should be able to say: this campaign generated X results, from this date to this date, across these specific assets.”

He urges builders to use CRM and marketing platforms that can report on full-funnel campaign results. Platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce, and Marketo allow for campaign-level tagging of assets and conversion points.

This isn’t just about identifying your best-performing page or email,” he says. “It’s about understanding which full campaigns move the needle.”

3. Start to optimize for AI search

Organic search is changing fast. And builders who are still optimizing only for Google are falling behind.

Search volume on Google has already dropped more than 25%,” Laskowski says. “AI search models like ChatGPT and Perplexity are quickly becoming dominant discovery tools. Most builders are not prepared.”

So what should they do?

Start structuring your content the way people ask questions,” he says. “Every major page should include an FAQ section. Headings and page titles should be framed around the way people search.”

Second, reputation and brand authority will matter more—not less.

AI models don’t just look at your website anymore. They look at your reviews, your Glassdoor profile, and your LinkedIn activity. It’s everywhere,” Laskowski says.

He also recommends that builders run their own searches using AI tools to evaluate how their brand is presented and discover improvement areas.

There’s no Search Console for ChatGPT yet,” he says. “So you have to test it yourself. Find out what AI is saying about your business. And get your content into those results now—before your competition does.”

What Builders Should Stop Doing

Laskowski says too many homebuilders are still spending time and money on tactics that simply don’t work—and haven’t for years.

Here are three he says to eliminate immediately:

1. Stop posting generic floorplan collages on social media.

These posts have zero thumb-stopping power,” he says. “They don’t hook anyone emotionally, and they get no engagement.”

2. Stop blasting your database with one-size-fits-all emails.

It’s easy to segment your email list. Really easy,” he says. “And blasting everyone with the same message is just lazy marketing.” 

3. Stop ignoring the power of virtual sales solutions.

Laskowski points to self-guided tour platforms like UTour or Enter Now as underused tools.

You should have layered coverage,” he says. “Sales agents during show hours, online sales counselors to cover evenings and weekends, and then a self-tour option to extend access even further.”

Make Summer Count

Laskowski emphasizes that the time to act is now.

If you have not gotten to the point where you can pull data on conversions, leads, campaign performance—this is your summer,” he says. “Otherwise, you might as well delay it for another year.”

Why now? Because operational change and technology adoption are difficult. Summer is one of the only windows where disruption won’t sabotage critical selling periods.

You don’t want to migrate into a new system and implement new software during peak season,” he says. “You just don’t.”

Builders don’t need to overhaul everything overnight. But they do need to lead decisively.

Conversion rates are dropping,” Laskowski says. “That doesn’t mean demand is gone. It means builders aren’t meeting buyers with the right message, at the right time, through the right channel. That’s fixable. But only if you act.”