In all the years I’ve been associated with the modular home
industry, I can’t think of any factory’s management or owners ever wanting to
learn the demographics of the buyer of their homes.
Some of you have done some research by asking a couple your
authorized home builders and many look at your Google Analytics to see who is
visiting your website but other than that there is nobody doing any real
research.
There is one company that is really zeroing in on who buys
their homes…Blu Homes. If any factory has made an effort to match Maura and
Bill’s marketing machine, I haven’t found it. They have millions of dollars to
spend on marketing and I doubt they would ever share that information with the other
children. I would love to be a fly on the wall at one of their meetings about
the demographics. It would be an eye-opener for other factory owners and
management.
Every factory has a group of builders that buy from them. Of
that group, the 75/25 Rule is very evident. If a factory has 20 active buyers,
only 5 of them do about 75% of the business. I am not counting special projects
that may push the factory to build 100 modules for one buyer but rather the
single family home builder.
Start with the factory salesperson. He or she knows their
builder but I doubt they have sat with the builder while talking with prospective
home buyer for that first meeting. They don’t hear the wants and needs of the
prospect. They never learn the pain the home buyer is trying to solve. Rarely
do they ever learn the ages of the buyers, whether they have children, their
income or what brought them to the builder. These are important questions.
Don’t kid yourself, the log home industry and the
manufactured housing industries know these numbers and use them to market
directly to their target markets.
Now we move on to the factory management. Only the Sales
Manager gives a rat’s butt about the home buyer and that is just to learn the
name attached to a house plan. Their concern is whether the deposit has been
paid and when it can go to the production line. If a special project of 140
modules is headed to the line before the single family home, they try to find a
way to placate the builder and let him be the one to give the bad news to the
buyer that their home will be another 6 weeks.
Builder loyalty goes out the window when a project is on the
line. One factory owner last year sent out a letter to every single one of his
builders apologizing for making this big ass mistake. That owner did one of the
classiest things anyone could do for their builders and they have since become
even more loyal customers. My hat’s off to him.
None of this however addresses the need for the factory to
learn who is actually buying their homes. Factories take a shotgun approach to
getting their name out there by using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Email. All
these things are good but they don’t tell anyone at the factory who is buying
their homes.
Factories need to ask the builders. They need to find out
why the buyer chose that particular builder to talk with. Did the buyer hear
about the builder from the factories marketing efforts, a local home show, the
builder’s website or maybe it was a referral.
I had one factory owner tell me that he has a couple
thousand “Likes” on the factory’s Facebook page. I asked how many of them
turned into home buyers that bought a home from his factory. All I got was the deer
in headlights stare. He had absolutely no idea because he never thought to find
out. DUH!
New home buyers don’t stand out like giraffes. They tend to blend
into the crowd like a single penguin among thousands. What builders and factory
owners need to do is find the penguin that is ready to move away from the
others and build his own nest. You can’t do that without information.
I know that Blu Homes won’t share their marketing strategy
with anyone else and I can’t blame them but the industry has to begin finding
out why people have bought modular homes like Blu has and that will begin
giving us the beginning of a plan to attract the penguins to our industry.
If there was one thing that a group like the Modular Home Builder Association could do to help builders attract new buyers, it would be
to identify those who has bought our homes in the past and develop a marketing plan to attract new home buyers.
