Times are tough. Every day brings a new challenge to the new home construction industry, and we all know that tough decisions have to be made. Many companies are laying people off or reducing overhead by dumping land. Others are defaulting on loans and closing shop entirely.

Rob and I read a lot of blogs to find new and innovative ideas to bring to new home sales. I stumbled across an mp3 of Let’s All Blame the Marketing Director while reading the Church of the Customer, a blog about customer evangelism and citizen marketing. See Advergirl’s post here.

The song was written in 2001 by Pat Harpell and used in a direct mail piece sent to marketing directors. The Harpell.com website is down at the time of this writing.

Any excited entrepreneur with a great product can attest to the difficulty in concisely explaining their product’s features and benefits in a way that makes sense to the buyer.

We at URBaCS have faced this similar challenge. As we have evolved our sales presentation we’ve worked hard to make it simple to understand yet effectively communicate our core message.

In 15 words we do three things for home builders:

1. We Spread a Builder’s Message Further
2. We Enhance the Sales Process
3. We Build More Referrals

We’ve created an expanded resource at WhatisURBaCS.com to share all of the different features and benefits provided by the URBaCS Referral Builder application. You can read our six steps to engage homebuyers, about how we leverage homeowner generated content and how to avoid losing business to directional signage.

We will be adding a new article every week to showcase how URBaCS can help your company make more sales.

We’re hiring!

Well sort of.

We are looking for a talented student to serve as a Spring Intern. He or she will work directly with Rob and I and will be involved in all of the day-to-day responsibilities of the company. This is a great opportunity for an entrepreneurial-minded business or technology major.

Check out the listing: http://indianapolis.craigslist.org/cpg/859215834.html

Please pass this on to anyone you know that may be interested or contact me with any questions.

We are proud to announce a new initiative to drive awareness and donations to the Habitat for Humanity of Greater Indianapolis and the Salvation Army of Indiana.

Builders that use URBaCS give homeowners their own website that displays photos of their home through the various stages of construction.

Homeowners can email invitations to visit their website to their friends, and we simply embed a printable coupon in each invitation. When the friend brings the coupon into a model home, URBaCS donates $10 to Habitat or the Salvation Army.

See the story on IndyHabitat.org.

This is a response to Have we learned anything? from Cory Schouten at the Indianapolis Business Journal.

When you look at the Indianapolis market (which is relatively stable) you’ll find that there are 15 builders that put 15 or more homes in the ground each year. Yet there are 303 builder members registered with the Builders Association of Greater Indianapolis. That means that the average builder will build between 1.5 and 2.7 homes this year.

So how do builders stay competitive? What makes one builder stand out from the others?

Every homebuilder in town builds a top-quality home at an affordable price (just ask them). Some are more affordable than others…but they all adhere to published standards.

Many builders have tried to differentiate through price. Every homebuyer wants to feel like they’re getting a deal. That’s why many builders provide a free basement or $20,000 in free designer upgrades as a sign-today bonus. But this ‘gimmick’ kills home values in the neighborhoods. If I buy a house today and get $10,000 in free options and you buy next week and get $20,000 my home instantly loses $10,000 in value. Inexperienced new home buyers may not realize this at the time of purchase but it’s been an industry standard for years.

I applaud companies like Estridge for creating a valuable program to move spec homes in an oversaturated market while not discounting to harm the values for existing homeowners.

But the program only works because the buyer has to put ’skin-in-the-game.’

Paul posted “the customer must put up their own money, typically in excess of $20,000.”

I think as a Indianapolis homeowner and concerned citizen that there are some companies that are trying to do the right thing in a difficult market. I only wish more builders tried to build value into their homes and not discount to make a quick buck.

The Builders Association of Greater Indianapolis is putting on the Luxury Home-A-Rama at the Willows in Zionsville from Sept. 20 - Oct. 5.

Rob and I will be taking tickets for the event today from 3:30-6:30pm and we’ll be wearing our new shirts.

Come out and see five luxury homes from: Phil Myers Custom Homes, Heartwood Custom Homes, Castalia Homes, Executive Homes and Henderson Homes.

We hope to see you there.

We’re excited to announce that we have taken over thesalescenter.org and will now be working with new home sales trainers from across the country to provide the best advice and selling tips to people selling new homes.

Back in February we partnered with them to provide RSS feeds for salespeople inside of the secure area of our application. They’ve developed a great resource for new home sales professionals and we’re eager to build upon the infrastructure that has been created.

Look for daily updates to begin again on Oct. 1, 2008.

Here is our presentation to the Builders Association of Greater Indianapolis about building an online authority for little to no cost. We’d like to thank Countrywide Home Loans for asking us to speak.

This week we launched an online help center to aid homeowners in finding answers to their frequently asked questions. We spoke with the development team about creating an interactive knowledge-base application and quickly found that a better solution would be to implement the Get Satisfaction API. It integrates with our website to seamlessly provide an URBaCS branded help center.

As with any off-the-shelf software it doesn’t do everything that we need it to do, but we felt that it would best help our builders’ homeowners. It gives homeowners, new home sales consultants and superintendents the opportunity to participate in online discussions about the URBaCS system. We can also provide links to online resources like Wikipedia to answer questions about digital photography, photo sharing, and social networking.

GetSatisfaction.com - URBaCS Online Help Center