When Paulina Michel and her fiance{acute}, Capt. James Noel, heardthey were being transferred from Southern California to the MarineCorps base at Quantico, Michel began cruising the Internet for ahouse.
While searching new-home Web sites, she fell in love with a floorplan offered by Richmond American Homes.
After some back and forth phone calls and a flurry of faxes withRichmond American, Michel sent a $5,000 check to the builder. Theresult: The couple bought a five-bedroom, $265,000 house in Dumfriesthat they had seen only on the Internet.
"It was very scary," Michel said. "But we lucked out. We love thishouse and it just so happens, we got the best lot on our street. Andwe didn't have to fly out several times, go out with Realtors, schlepfrom here to there for days and spend a lot of money doing it."
Michel and Noel are not typical new-home buyers, builders said.Only a handful of buyers are purchasing houses sight unseen fromplans viewed on the Web, but since millions of prospective buyers areclicking onto the Internet as part of their search, research shows,big builders say that their investment in Web sites is paying off.
"The money we've spent has definitely been worth it," said DeeMinick, marketing manager for Washington Homes and unofficialoverseer of the builder's Web site, at www.washingtonhomes.com. "It'sdefinitely good bang for the buck. Some builders would actually bebetter served by backing off their advertising budgets to put moremoney into their Web sites."
Even in this era of dot-com meltdowns, big builders agree withMinick that spending money on their sites, although none woulddisclose how much has been spent, is good for their business.
"Maintaining a Web site is fairly cost-effective," said JasonSchlosser, Web developer at NVR Inc., the largest builder in theWashington area. "It's cheaper than a lot of forms of advertising.You don't have to have a Web site to sell homes, but we definitelythink it's worth it to keep one going."
The largest builders operating in the Washington area reportseveral thousand visits a month on their sites.
Most builder Web sites divide their offerings by geography, thenby development, then by type of house. Some offer virtual tours oftheir beautifully furnished models; others give only floor plans.Some are full of photographs of their houses; others offer onlyrenderings. In addition to information aimed at shoppers, some offerfinancing information, news about the company and listings ofemployment opportunities.
Builders differ in what they're trying to achieve with theirsites. Some are trying to drive customers to their models. Some aremerely putting their brochures on the Web. Others say they are tryingto develop an online relationship with their customers.
Whatever their objectives now, however, it took awhile for thebuilding industry to wake up to the power of the Net.
"Two years ago, nobody thought they even needed a Web site," saidKim Le-Si, marketing manager at Richmond American. "Nowadays, youwouldn't be caught dead without one. I don't know of any builder whodoesn't have a Web site."
Last year, Richmond American added virtual tours and floor plansthat customers can download and print to its Web site,www.richmondamerican.com. "We wanted to give it a new look and feel,"Le-Si said.
Like Richmond American, several large builders have revamped theirsites over the past year to make them more attractive to potentialcustomers -- and easier to navigate. Others plan major overhaulssoon.
But why did it take builders awhile to come around to the Web?
"There's always been a 'build it and they will come' mentality inthe home-building business," said Jim Lesinski, vice president formarketing at Pulte Homes, the country's largest builder. "A lot ofbuilders thought that if you bought the right piece of land, youdidn't really have to market it. But that mentality is changing."
Analysts say that considering the nature of new-home buying, it'snot that surprising that builders didn't jump on the Internetbandwagon sooner.
"Why would builders need to rush to it?" said Jamie Punishill, ananalyst at Forrester Research, a technology research company inMassachusetts. "People still want to walk through the model home andsee the area they're moving to."
An October 2000 survey by the National Association of Homebuildersfound that 47 percent of builders had their own Web site, while 51percent had no Web site and 2 percent had a joint site with otherbuilders. The survey was the first time the NAHB asked builders aboutWeb site development.
Whether a builder had a Web presence depended on its size, thesurvey showed. All the big builders (those constructing at least 100houses a year) had a Web presence, compared with half of all medium-sized builders (25 to 99 houses a year) and a third of small builders(fewer than 25 houses a year).
Pulte has had a Web site since 1998, but Lesinksi said his companywas looking at a redesign of the site, which is at www.pulte.com. Hesaid they want to fashion it more along the lines of the site atwww.delwebblive.com, the community-resident oriented Web site ofactive adult builder Del Webb Corp., which Pulte is in the process ofbuying. (Del Webb has another more traditional site, www.delwebb.com,that's oriented more toward floor plans and virtual tours.)
"We want to create an electronic customer relationship much theway you do in a community," Lesinski said. The community-oriented DelWebb site features message boards for customers, a feature Pulteplans to incorporate after the merger of the two companies iscomplete. After the Pulte-Del Webb merger, the Web sites are to beslowly merged.
The Web site, which differs from most other builder Web sites,seeks to foster an ongoing relationship with customers. On the site'smain page, for example, visitors are asked how many books they haveread this summer. There also is a message board, reachable byclicking on a tab titled "Romance," where customers can look for lovein addition to a house.
"A lot of builder Web sites are basically industry brochures,"Lesinski said. "All they do is showcase their homes. For us, thefuture is building a relationship with the customer electronically."Pulte research showed that the Pulte site gets about 2 million visitsa year and that the typical visitor spends 11 minutes to 12 minuteson the site, Lesinski said.
Some builders, however, use their Web sites mostly as a tool toguide potential customers to model homes.
NVR doesn't use virtual tours on its site, at www.nvrinc.com, oron the separate sites of each of its companies, Ryan Homes(www.ryanhomes.com), NV Homes (www.nvhomes.com) and Fox Ridge homes(www.foxridge.com). The sites are similar, however.
Like most others, the sites are divided geographically by state,then by development, then by house type. Floor plans and elevationsare provided for the different house types.
"We wanted to keep our site pretty basic and pretty simple," saidSchlosser, NVR's Web developer, who supervises the four sites. "Ifyou want to buy a sofa, you need to go to the store and sit on thesofas. Homes are like that too. You have to go see them live."
Nick Karris, director of real estate services at Gomez Advisors,an e-commerce research firm in Massachusetts, agrees.
"It's very hard to sense the feel of a home without walkingthrough it even with a virtual tour," Karris said. "The Web is goodat helping consumers get educated and narrowing down their choices.But once they have the properties they're interested in, they go tourthe properties or models. And that's how they determine what they'llbuy."
The NVR Inc. sites tell customers what houses are being sold forwhat price, how to find them, and whom to call or e-mail for moreinformation. "We believe in giving customers the basics," Schlossersaid.
Neither NVR nor Washington Homes, the first- and second-largestbuilders in this area, put exact house prices on their sites. Rather,they use "from the $300s," or the like.
"It's too difficult with the way prices are increasing,"Washington Homes' Minick said. "We decided it was too hard to updatethem all the time."
Minick said the Washington Homes site was overhauled last yearafter the company conducted focus groups on online habits.
"We found we didn't have enough community and area information onour site," she said. "In the focus groups, we found that customerswanted that information online. They didn't want to have to call intothe builders to ask for it." Minick said the company also found thatcustomers liked photographs of houses rather than renderings. Andthey didn't want to read a lot of text.
"What people wanted was a site that was easy to navigate andinvolved very few clicks to get the information you want," she said.Other builders report similar findings.
One of the most innovative builder Web sites on the Net these daysis that of luxury builder Toll Brothers Inc.
On the Toll Brothers site (www.tollbrothers.com), potentialcustomers can play with floor plans by choosing room options. In the"design your own home" section of the site, pick an option and theimage of the floor plan changes to reflect it. In the kitchen, forexample, click on "culinary kitchen" and a new floor plan shows thatlayout of appliances and island. The site also shows what optionswork with each other -- for example, pick a sunroom on the firstfloor, and the site allows you to choose the second-floor plans thatare physically possible to build atop it. The site doesn't tellbuyers, however, how much customizing adds to the base price of thehouse.
"We wanted to be more than just a Web-based brochure," said KiraMcCarron, vice president of marketing for Toll Brothers and a memberof the company's Internet team. "We wanted a very comprehensive sitethat would address the computer-literate, high-end audience that weserve."
McCarron said the Toll Brothers's Web site has undergone half adozen major overhauls -- and many more subtle updates -- since firstgoing online five years ago. "We were among the early adopters of theWeb."
Most builder sites don't go into the amenities of different pricecategories or discuss the basic materials that go into a house.Increasingly, they do give more and more information on thecommunities where their houses can be found. And they're full ofpretty photographs and renderings of their houses.
Analysts believe that the future for builders is a dominant Website that would list all new homes for sale, as sites atwww.realtor.com and www.homeadvisor.com and others do for resalelistings.
There already are sites like that on the Web, such as those atwww.newhomes.com and www.homebuilder.com, which is part ofwww.homestore.com, but they haven't developed the name recognition ofthe resale sites, analysts said.
Karris from Gomez Advisors predicts that a single site will emergeas the database of all new-home listings, with links to separatebuilder sites.
"Some big builders have already pooled their resources to puttheir listings together," said Gopal Ahluwalia, director of researchfor the NAHB, the Washington-based builder trade association, whichis affiliated with the www.homebuilder.com site. "That's the futurefor builders -- everyone on one site, so a consumer looking for a newhome can easily find what's on offer."
Комментариев нет:
Отправить комментарий