Low Inventory, Anxious Home Shoppers —A Survival Guide

Sold Out, Your Offer Has Been Rejected—a few minutes in the shoes of weary home shoppers can make space for a little empathy. While many of us have enjoyed the buying frenzy of the past year, many home shoppers are missing out and feeling the frustration of an endless search for available inventory in a time where shortages are not just felt in new homes, but in used homes as well. Does the recent four-week market decline in Google searches for new homes show some of the frustration that home shoppers are feeling? If so, what can we do to bring hope and stamina back to home shoppers in a time when we are still in the midst of inventory shortages? While there may not be a silver bullet, we have a few suggestions.

Express Empathy

Being told no to your dream of owning a home over and over again can be frustrating. While we can’t control everything, there are some things we can—our tone, our messaging and our responses are within our power to craft and hone. Our frenzied excitement over a feast of sales can be a mismatch with frustrated buyers.

Tip: Have your team come up with ideas on how to convey empathy so that everyone can be challenged to work from a different perspective.

Build The Excitement

The thought of building a new home is enough to keep a buyer up at night dreaming and planning. Tools that facilitate dreaming like room visualizers and interactive floor plans can keep buyers engaged in the waiting period. Once a home shopper has a hand in designing their perfect home, they are less likely to easily jump on the first available home because they’ve already made a significant time investment in building their dream home with you.

Tip: Room visualizers and interactive floor plans give shoppers the ability to save their dream home once they have created an account. Use the email address you’ve been given wisely and make your follow-up appropriate for the stage of the buying cycle that they are in. What else can you do to throw fuel on the fire?

Take Them Down The Rabbit Hole

The deeper into the visualization journey you can take a buyer, the less likely they are to bail which will give you valuable time to launch a new community or build more specs. Offering an online design experience to buyers prior to contract is the ultimate marketing secret weapon. There’s a saying that if you get a shopper to pick out their faucets and refrigerator, they’re as good as sold. Well, I may have made that up, but isn’t it kind of true? Statistics show that 20—40% of leads that come from the Envision Online Design Center in pre-sales mode convert to a sale.

Tip: Make your interactive and visualization tools a seamless experience with a single sign-on.

If adding interactive elements to your customer journey sounds overwhelming—we get it. We know that you and your staff are probably overwhelmed with the demand right now. That’s why most of our solutions have an express option and our teams do the heavy lifting so you don’t have to. That’s what our customers say at least. Email us or visit us at theBDX.com. 

About the Author

Alaina Latiolais is currently the Marketing Manager and HBA Partnership Program Manager for Builder’s Digital Experience. She previously worked as a Digital Marketing Consultant for BDX working with builders of all sizes in the Austin, San Antonio and Corpus Christi markets. Finding her love for B2B marketing, she now helps educate home builders about marketing and technology and understanding the digital consumer. Alaina has over a decade of experience working with small, medium and large businesses on their marketing strategies, always with a strong focus on the latest technology and results. She has a practical approach that saddles between warm and daring, always challenging businesses to take the next step to adopt new technology and ideas.

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