Self-Serve Meets White Glove Service: Empire’s Homebase

The question may not always have been this. But now it is; and for the foreseeable future, it will be this.

How would a best-of-class organization treat a client prepared to invest $300,000 to $700,000?

Pre-pandemic, that question already occurred to homebuilders.

New owner-occupier homebuyers – the wake-up call made clearer – are not so many lemmings, behaving in a pre-determined way, susceptible to dirt-cheap interest rates, and rising rents, and make-able monthly payments, that creates a $1 trillion new residential real estate and construction marketplace.

The news here: Homebase

Six months into its Intown initiative HomeBase transformation, Empire Atlanta’s sales performance metrics have begun to speak for themselves. Simmel’s sales analytics team tells us:

• Since HomeBase is a by appointment only, a key part of its success is Empire’s Online Sales Counselor program.
• All digital traffic is directed to the OSC. From there, the OSC educates the buyer about the communities, surrounding neighborhood, floorplans, and availability. Depending on the prospect needs, the OSC will either book the prospect an appointment at HomeBase and introduce them to sales team or continue to nurture and educate them until there is something available that is the right fit.
• Key stats:
• Lead to Kept Appointment conversion 48%.
• Kept Appointment to Sale conversion rate already climbing at 35%  (should be higher with more inventory)
• Online Sales Consultant’s contribution is 77.7% of company sales
  Since opening in May of this year, there have been 50 closings taking place at Homebase. The forecast is for 123 in total by the end of the year.
• Empire’s OSC program was implemented six years ago and is out-performing based on industry standards. The streamlined process with seasoned professional at every step of the process are the key factors that have made Homebase so successful within its first 6 months of operation.

Industry standard highest-level performance for lead to sales-center-to-conversion clocks in at 2o% to 25%,” says Simmel. “Since we opened HomeBase, our convert rate is 48%. Once we start releasing more normalized inventory in the upcoming months, I’m thinking we can get to 50% conversion of our ‘kept-appointment’ rates.”

Why it matters for homebuilding

Think again of the question at the top:

How would a best-of-class organization treat a client prepared to invest $300,000 to $700,000?

If the order of homebuilders’ world began with that question and developed process, technology, resource-access, and talent from that baseline outward, how would the business change?

In fact, putting homebuyers and their journey first and foremost is actually reworking Empire Atlanta into a more streamlined, cost-efficient overhead organization. It was able to consolidate siloed selling teams from five separate neighborhoods, into its centralized excellence center at HomeBase – eliminating tens of thousands in commissions, and turbocharging its absorption rates for all five communities.

Our agent teams never imagined – before now – that they’d be able to do their job from an offsite, virtual location,” says Simmel. “Now they can’t picture doing it any other way.”

The story of Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb often involves note of his response to the question of how many failures it took to reach the final success.

I didn’t fail 1,000 times,” he replied. “It was just a 1,000-step process that lead to the invention.”

Homebuilders, too, have taken many steps in their answer to the question.

How would a best-of-class organization treat a client prepared to invest $300,000 to $700,000?

Now, it seems, they’re onto the right answer.

Join the conversation