Spring Selling 2023 Is Here ... Opportunity Lies In Patience

In antediluvian times – a handful of years ago – today would have marked a milestone.

The Friday after the Super Bowl, for those of us who are of an age, meant new home construction's annual Rite of Spring, "Selling Season" was fully underway.

Ribbon cuttings, mayoral grip-and-grins and marching-band pomp, and Realtor cocktail parties all came along with pristinely coiffed new models, freshly-coated, blemish-free garage doors, carefully weeded garden beds, and a hive of energized, activated, upskilled sales team members ready to pounce the moment anyone ventured into the model park's "engaging" trap fences.

That was then. This is now. Now, friction as we knew it then – the time waiting, aggravation, arbitrary extra efforts, etc. – has gone away. That's due to superpowers of technology-enabled team members and innovators.

Friction as we know it now – cost-of-living struggles, volatile borrowing costs, falling house prices, an uncertain economy, high levels of volatility – preys both on those with discretionary wherewithal and those whose means to an end that leads to homeownership may need a boost is less about the journey, more about what's there at the destination itself.

That's a wholly different kind of friction homebuilders and their marketing and selling team members face having to remove, and in its place, add meaning.

The post-Covid convulsion brought a goldrush to new home demand, which meant that removing a "waste" of time equated to adding measurable value. The challenge now, we'd suggest, is to add value by not just eliminating the waste of time, but meaningfully giving your customers time in the form of patience, specific focus of attention, and care.

Midway through a glacially slow recovery happening this past decade, we wrote of progress in the ways homebuilding organizations' team members can remove that type of friction:

One of the big ways we can say there's been improvement has been a deliberate, effortful reframing of the terms, work on what this area of business practice really means, how it works when it works, and what its costs and benefits tend to be.

Think, for instance, of the currency of terms used over the years among small, medium, and large-sized home builders, even as design, pricing, materials, and workflows have gone through gyration after gyration in dynamic change.

 (a) Customer Service
 (b) Customer Satisfaction
 (c) Customer Care

Each of the terms means what they mean. Done right, the return on invested time, money, and energy result in positives home builders might affirm as worth it: fewer warranty claims and call-backs, a better shot at referrals to other potential customers, possibly even repeat purchase behavior (loyalty) not often associated with such big ticket items as a new home purchase. And, taken together, most of us might observe a progression, an evolution in how we as organizations--big or small--need to rearrange our mental furniture around this notion of a customer's experience.

If we can "reaarange our mental furniture" to put a customer's experience first and central, what may come clear is that he, she, or they may be feeling whipsawed, swept up, and tugged constantly by a whirlwind of forces. Rates of change across every part of life have accelerated into a blur.

You – as homebuilders and partners across residential real estate's ecosystem – have committed to and done something that can alter that spinning torrent of change for a customer and give them time back.

You're helping each customer not simply by removing friction, but by adding meaning in their effort to be the customer they aim to be.

Especially during this whirligig moment, patience – yours with them, yours with yourself, and yours with your team members and partners – will stand out sharply from the backdrop and do its job.

And remember, per Seth's blog:

The few people you need to thrive in your work might want you to write something they’ll remember for a long time, or to take them on a journey that’s thrilling and challenging and unique.

Or perhaps these are the people that want to buy something that costs a lot but is worth more than it costs.

It’s okay to say, “it’s not for you,” to most people.

In fact, that’s the only way to do work that matters.