Two friends of ours, Bill O’Gorman from Lushin and Associates, and Lori Lewis from Residential Warranty Company LLC (RWC) have been encouraging us to join the Indianapolis homebuilders association.

Bill has been active in the Builders Association of Greater Indianapolis for years and Lori is an associate member of BAGI, the Detroit Metropolitan Building Industry Association, the Southern Indiana HBA and the Homebuilders Association of Fort Wayne.

We are excited about the opportunities that are available to us now that we are members of BAGI and the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB).

On June 1, 2008, URBaCS unveiled the Simple Referral Program for homebuilders. The Ultimate Referral Builder and Customer Satisfaction application now has a way to monitor the effectiveness of referral generation.

Many builders have excellent incentives in place for homeowners that refer friends that buy. We’ve seen a few builders that pony up as much as $2,000 for each referral. This is a great tool to increase sales but too many times there are rules and stipulations that make giving a referral too difficult (i.e. not available if a realtor is involved).

The Simple Referral Program from URBaCS was created to simplify the referral process and drive traffic to the model homes and sales offices. The process is easy:

1. The homeowner e-mails an invitation to a friend to visit the model home/sales office
2. The friend brings in the e-mail which includes a unique code
3. The salesperson enters the unique code into the URBaCS application
4. The homeowner and their friend each get a gift-card from popular stores like Amazon.com, Starbucks and Wal-Mart.

The best part about the Simple Referral Program is that we at URBaCS manage, monitor, mail and pay for each and every referral that is generated.

For more information check out www.SimpleReferralProgram.com