Better to be a dog in times of tranquility than a human in times of chaos.” –

Image Source: Bank of America 2022 Homebuyer Insights Report

To keep to those timelines – and remain undeterred – respondents allowed for some compromises to their plan, but stood pat on other needs, preferences, aspirations, and non-negotiables in their pursuit of a home purchase.

In that light of “interesting times,” hyper focus on new homes’ solutions value – a strategy that’s part of most homebuilders’ marketing and sales toolbox, but not necessarily refreshed and ready for challenges to come – may be the capability builders want to dust off and modernize for the moment.

Take a look what goes on in that vein at Delray Beach, FL-based Kolter Homes, one of the bigger privately-held regional homebuilders you seldom hear about because they’re not big on talking about themselves in terms of rankings.

Under the leadership of former Pulte, DelWebb, Ryland, and Taylor Morrison and Levitt Homes executive Bob Rademacher, Kolter – which operates about 25 actively-selling 55-plus, age-targeted, and mixed-age new home communities in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas, and is most widely known for its Cresswind communities brand – has grown in its 25 years into a formidable regional power in some of America’s most hyperactive residential construction markets in the Southeast.

And it’s done so, in the 10-plus years Rademacher has been at the helm, on the back of a marketing and sales discipline and platform almost custom-suited for this tunnel of “interesting times.” The platform draws its sales-approach pedigree from the work championed more than 30 years ago by Neil Rackham, known as SPIN selling, an acronym essential sales journey mapping that build on four types of learning and exchange that define the sales process:

  • Situational questions
  • Problem questions
  • Implication questions
  • Need-Payoff questions (aka Value questions)

Rademacher, with long-time advisory partner Richard Heaston of Reimagine Selling, which has adapted Rackham’s methods to the high-ticket homeselling and homebuying journey, has operationalized SPIN Selling as part of the Kolter business culture.

What’s more, as volatility, supply chain unknowns, fast-changing prices and costs, and other uncertainties plague the process, and often delay the homebuying to ownership journey, disciplines Kolter’s practiced to deepen connections with their customer prospects translates into added capabilities when it comes to housing finance surprises, completion date shifts, and other unpredictables.

Our focus is on how we make a home shopper confident in their decision, and we work across the spectrum of tools Rick and the Reimagine Selling platform on learning how to decipher customers’ needs, desires, pain-points, motivators, etc.,” says Rademacher. “As a result, we feel we’re not in the business of selling homes, we’re selling a customer on his or her making their ‘perfect decision’ confidently, and they’re getting the value of the lifestyle they know they want most. And these days, when schedules get delayed, and move-ins don’t necessarily happen when they’re initially planned, that means we’re able to sell them on being patient, because we’ve bridged being able to be a trusted part of their decision-making. They’re less disappointed along the way, because where they get is where they want to be.”

Rademacher has so thoroughly embraced the Heaston value map approach that he’s rechristened sales team members as new home guides, whose role is to ask, learn, and, as Rademacher emphasizes “selflessly serves” a customer’s full array of needs and desires. Together, the guide and the customer evolve a plan that matches the customer to the community they feel is their perfect decision. That’s not just about a product, a floorplan, an elevation, a site in the community, it’s about how they want to live, who they want to connect with and make friends with, what they want to do to thrive, says Rademacher.

In that sense, Rademacher would go so far as to say that Kolter and its Cresswind communities brand need to be “what our customers think we are and ought to be.”

This really isn’t a home sales program,” he says. “This is an ‘understanding’ program. And when our guides fully carry out that program, they earn that role as a trusted advisor. At a moment like now, if we can take that feeling of risk someone has that they may be making the wrong decision, we’re doing our job.”

No time like now for an approach that gives a customer confidence that they’re choosing the right place at the right time for the right value in the throes of “interesting times.”

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