New Homebuilder Customer Experience Study Highlights Buyer-Centric Best Practices

For homebuilders, too many growth strategies and customer experience tactics are drawn up in a conference room using gut feelings, stale narratives, and outdated practices. 

Homebuilder sales and marketing executives received significant help last month in Nashville when Homebuilder Ops unveiled the results of our 2024 New Home Buyer Customer Experience Expectations study at Shore Consulting’s Sales and Marketing Leadership Summit and BuilderTech Expo.

The report gives homebuilders an edge in aligning their sales and marketing tactics, channels, and messaging with how new construction buyers prefer to do research and make purchases in today’s environment.

At Homebuilder Ops, we are champions of data-driven decision-making in the residential construction industry.

Our latest report will help sales and marketing leaders evaluate their customer experience strategies against the preferences of actual buyers. There isn’t a builder that won’t benefit from these insights into generating more leads, appointments, and sales.

Homebuilder Customer Experience Expectations Takeaways

With more than a third of prospective buyers starting their home buying journey by seeking referrals from friends, family members, their social networks, or reviews, homebuilders are increasingly making their end-to-end customer experience a top priority. 

Other noteworthy insights from the 2024 New Home Buyer Customer Experience Expectations Report include:

• Focus on Affordability. Since 45% of buyers say that concerns about affordability would keep them from signing a contract and 44% say the same about hidden costs, savvy homebuilders have an opportunity to put those fears to rest throughout their process, messaging, and sales tools.
  
  
• Personalize at Scale. The significant differences between how buyers of various ages prefer to be engaged by a builder’s sales team means that homebuilders’ communication channels and sales agent training must adapt based on the buyer profile of each lead. 
  
  • For instance, 68% of Gen Z/Millennials prefer digital engagement compared to only 46% of Baby Boomers & older.
    
    
• Key Website Features.  Buyers prioritize models and floorplans, photos and videos, customization options, financing information, and reviews over promotions, scheduling appointments, and online tours.
  
  

• Critical Pre-Appointment Details. Before engaging with a homebuilder sales professional, 35% of buyers prioritize financing information and 30% look for company reviews, making these factors more important than online tours, promotions, and quick move-in homes.

• Biggest Turn-Offs for Buyers. Slow responses, inconsistent answers, and rushing through the process were the behaviors that make buyers not want to work with a builder’s sales team.
  
  
• What Makes New Home Buyers Buy. In today’s market, only 7% of buyers consider a builder’s company philosophy or their dissatisfaction with their current living situation as important factors when deciding to purchase a new home.

Homebuilder Ops collected data from over 1,000 new construction buyers who are in the market now or recently purchased a home from a builder.

Our research team poured months into making sure the insights in this report are clear and accessible to our clients and the homebuilder community at large. Executives, salespeople, and marketers across the seniority spectrum will be able to put this data into practice immediately.

Homebuilder Ops has made this research available to the builder community for free at HomebuilderOps.com/research.