3 minute readLeft to right: Russell Varone, Co-founder and CTO, Diamond Age, Jack Oslan, Co-founder and CEO, Diamond Age, Genji Nakata, Executive VP, National Operations at Century Communities, Inc.
Slab-pour to close: 65 days
Eloy, AZ, splits roughly in half the couple-of-hour distance southeast on the I-10 from Phoenix to Tucson. There the first of two just-built, 1,700 square-foot homes in the Toltec Arizona Valley neighborhood of mid-$200s to low-$300s, single-level ranch-style houses from In August of 2021, our focus on MINE, a first-of-its-kind furniture and home décor platform for the homebuilder industry revealed that PulteGroup would offer its shoppable showroom experience and free design services to their homebuyers and visitors. Since, MINE has strides in the last year, having expanded its home showroom network to over 600 locations in the majority of states across the country and added many notable builder partners to its roster. Early adopters include Taylor Morrison, Century Communities, David Weekley Homes, Stanley Martin, Ashton Woods, DRB Group, and upcoming launches with Tri Pointe Homes, and Empire Communities. PulteGroup President and CEO Ryan Marshall attests that MINE is improving the customer experience for Pulte home buyers. Helping buyers envision and enable what is possible most certainly helps with the selling process.” MINE ceo Eoin Harrington notes that higher interest rates loom as a bigger hurdle for a new home buyer to afford the furniture they need to complete their home. In today’s more challenging environment, it has become particularly important for a builder to consider every aspect of the customer journey to close a home sale,” says Harrington. “Having an elegant and affordable home furnishings offering is rapidly becoming the standard expectation of a prospective buyer.” Harrington adds, At the start of the year, we conducted a study of new home buyers, finding that 81% of buyers had furnishing needs 6 months after moving in. Factoring in the current climate, that timeline is surely going to increase along with the square footage of empty space in their homes. MINE’s free design services and expansive network of wholesale vendors ensures that we can meet the customers’ home decorating needs while keeping within their tighter budget constraints.” Deep and expansive ties the Builder Advisor Group has with strategic and financial leaders among national, regional, and local market homebuilding companies have allowed both Diamond Age and MINE to develop both financial investment opportunity and build out their client books of business among customers. We have been thrilled to have the strong support of world class builder partners and industry experts like Tony Avila from the Builder Advisor Group, all of whom have been instrumental in helping us craft a product and experience that is truly tailored to the new home buyer. This hybrid strategic-financial stake could make for an important distinction among building technology and proptech innovators that cropped up by the dozens with bigtime seed- and early stage capital raises and a strong story of disruptive capability in the past four or five years, and now must weather an indefinite period of stress The 2010s – a.k.a. the easy-money era – were evidence technology innovators could stand up and grow fast with a strong, episodic narrative, a prototype, and a truckload of promise, based on a big addressable universe and an array of disrupt-able incumbents. The post-easy money 2020s – as investors have been punishing technology and social network platforms for being more hype than value – promise tougher times for fledgling would-be disruptive innovators in the building and real estate space. It’s like watching a football game,” says Avila. “You don’t need to interpret the promise or the hype of a team. You can see the scoreboard. You can see who’s winning. That’s why builders are excited to become customers – and investors – of these companies.” The strong – and connected – will survive and thrive.Value Vs. Hype: Is a Shake-out Ahead?
