The goal posts moved.

For enough time to fool ourselves since the year Covid unleashed demand for new homes, the goal line looked to be “how to make it faster and easier” to buy. Yet it always comes back to something else, doesn’t it?

Like “how to make it ‘realer’?”

Removing pain, frustration, time-and-energy-waste, disappointment, and drudge from the homebuying transaction has been and continues to be a worthy – necessary – focus point, especially from mid-2020 to halfway through 2022.

Adding transparency, simplicity, delight, etc. to the beginning, middle, and end of the pathway to the ultimate handover of a set of keys – experiences conspicuously absent from the homebuying process for all but an exceptional few builders and buyers … also, an area of step-change improvement in the past 24 months or so.

All of those great achievements – the result of hard work and brilliance – count. They’re big strides in the right direction, but not the goal.

Removing friction – doubt, uncertainty, risk, and insecurity – from the earliest stages of consideration that lead, possibly, to a decision to buy is where the goal posts stand 38 days before Super Bowl LVII, a proxy for the onset of this year’s Selling Season.

This is the perspective Eric Snider, Ph. D., of Lifestory Research offers in context of his unveiling yesterday of the 11th “

Source: Lifestory Research

They say of a trusted brand, it makes a promise, then over-delivers.

Have a look at this The Builder’s Daily piece on the ROI of Trust.

What to understand about a trusted brand – especially for a transaction-oriented business culture like homebuilding in America – is that it’s more or less equal-parts who you are and who you empower your customer to be.

One of the post-pandemic-era keeper trends – i.e. not a blip nor a fad nor a passing phase – in new residential construction, community development, real estate, and manufacturing is that when it comes to the place people call home, they’re investing in a relationship over time, from purchase, to ownership, to sale.

There’s no better time to earn – mostly the good-old-fashioned hard way – trust among customers who’re grudging about taking a leap for fear they’ll feel like a fool.

That comes down to rigorous behavior – not performative narrative – that’s astonishingly simple to understand but not so easy to practice and perfect.

Say what you’re going to do.

Then do what you say you’re going to do.

And never stop.

That may or may not make the process faster and easier. But in the Selling Season of 2023 – if, hopefully, it can be called that – it’s going to make it ‘realer.’

The new ‘real deal’ extends beyond the transaction. What an opportunity!

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