The Future of Builder Marketing

 

 

In just three years since its inception, Genesis Homes has proved that off-site construction can deliver a quality residential product with excellent curb appeal in a fraction of the time it takes to put up a conventional site-built home. The results for home builders: fewer subcontractors, faster cash flow and lower operating overhead. Now comes yet another innovation being tested by Genesis — virtual photography — that promises to do for the builders’ selling process what off-site construction has done for their construction cycle.

 

With virtual photography, builders can take prospective buyers on a comprehensive “tour” of available floor plans and elevations right on their desktop or laptop computer. Want to move the garage to the opposite side of the house? Need to enlarge the master suite by a few square feet? Looking to convert a window into a doorway that opens onto a patio? All of that and more can be accomplished — at least visually — with just a few mouse clicks, so prospects can see exactly what they are getting with each selection.

 

In addition, the software can help prospects visualize a predetermined assortment of upgrades and options for inside and outside the home. Again, simply by manipulating their computers, buyers quickly can sort through a host of siding options, floor coverings, cabinet and countertop styles, and other decorative elements. In effect, virtual photography helps builders and buyers personalize a new home before construction begins on the factory floor. Genesis sees the virtual photography technology as a good companion to off-site construction technology, and they plan to offer it on a select number of their American series homes in 2004 to measure acceptance by builders and homebuyers.

“The computer-generated pictures are what stay in the buyer’s mind,” says Andy Scholz, national director of decisions while avoiding headaches with costly change orders later.”

 

The big cost savings for builders come in potentially reduced outlays in model home construction and decorating. “At the 2003 International Builders’ Show, Genesis Homes invested roughly $30,000 [in addition to the construction and installation costs] in outfitting the model we built on the show floor in Las Vegas,” Scholz notes. “With virtual photographs created from CAD files, we can present that identical house for a small fraction of the cost.”

Virtual photography does not and cannot eliminate the need for model homes. “You need at least one model, maybe two, to walk consumers through,” Scholz says. But builders might not need so many models to demonstrate their ability to meet a wide range of buyer tastes and needs. Indeed, a builder couldn’t afford to build enough models to match the structural and decorative options that virtual photography provides.

“Once consumers get a firsthand sense of the overall quality of our award-winning designs by touring an actual model, it’s pretty easy to extend that understanding to other floor plans with other features,” Scholz says. “They can look at the virtual photographs and get a good grasp of all the possibilities.”

 

The images on these pages of Genesis Homes’ new Jefferson model were not taken of an actual prototype home. Instead, they are computer-generated views of what that prototype will look like on the floor at the 2004 International Builders’ Show. With their high resolution, rich and warm colors, and vivid play of shadow and light, the quality of these strikingly lifelike scenes rivals that of photos taken by a professional photographer in an actual home.

“A builder might understandably wonder how a two-dimensional picture on a computer screen can stand in for an actual model,” says Frank Guido, president of Aareas Interactive Inc., which is working with Genesis to implement the new technology. “We don’t claim that it can, but the hyper-realistic images are rendered so convincingly, most people cannot tell the difference between a virtual image and a photo of a real room.”

 

How will Genesis builders and their buyers use the technology? Depending on builder preference, buyers can be invited to work with the software in the privacy of their homes, accessing it via password from a Web site. Other Genesis builders will prefer to accompany buyers through the selection process at a sales center. Finally, some builders will opt for a hybrid approach: Let buyers work through the multitude of options at their pace from their home or office computer and then finalize those choices with one of the builder’s designers at the sales center.

Eventually the number of floor-plan and elevation options will be sizable but not unlimited. “You might call it mass customization,” Guido says. “Initially Genesis will offer its imagery and pre-engineered structural changes on the Americana series. In fact, this is the concept behind the Genesis Customer Design Technology being introduced for the first time at the 2004 IBS in Las Vegas.”

The Customer Design Technology (CDT) allows Genesis to help its builders give their customers the choices they want in floor plan configurations, while minimizing the changes to the model’s footprint. Stretching the concept to the max, CDT even allows Genesis to utilize the same spatial allocations for individual rooms, even though those rooms may be moved to the other side of the house, or even to another floor. Once buyers have selected the configuration that best serves their needs, they can activate the virtual photography imbedded within the CDT to visualize their choices. Visitors to the Genesis Jefferson model, at booth #N-1011 in the IBS, will be able to see the Jefferson reconfigured from its 2-story display version into a ranch model with the help of CDT. In addition to pre-engineered structural changes, CDT offers the builder and his customers decorative choices, as well.

“A buyer might choose from a half-dozen exterior siding and trim colors, another half-dozen carpet colors, and so forth,” Guido says. “The resulting number of options will be quite large, and unlike structural changes, they won’t cost the buyer anything extra.”

 

Maximum choice at minimum cost is the goal, by way of helping differentiate Genesis builders in their local markets.

“Genesis is excited about making virtual photography more available in the future as a standard part of the selling process for our builders,” Scholz says. “We want to make the process easier and simpler for both builder and buyer.

“Make people’s lives easier, and chances are you’ll sell more homes.”