228 Building Connection With Home Buyers - Christopher Brown Jul 31 2024

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello everybody and welcome to today's episode of The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And we are excited to have joining us today, Christopher Brown. Christopher is the Principal at the NEXT Group of Companies. Welcome, Christopher. Thanks for being with us.

Christopher Brown: I appreciate you having me on. This is going to be a fun conversation.

Greg Bray: Well, Christopher, let's just start off, get to know just a little bit about you. Give us some of that quick background and overview about yourself.

Christopher Brown: Yeah, I'm coming up on 30 years in homebuilding. I always joke this is the only big boy job I've ever [00:01:00] known. I'm the Principal at the NEXT Group of Companies. We have three primary operations in home building. Our original company is NEXT New Homes Group. We do sales and marketing for small to medium-sized builders throughout Northern California and Nevada. We have NEXT Crafted, which is our home building company where we do custom and production homes in the same region. And then we have NEXT Real Estate Group where we are a boutique resale real estate operation. So, a little bit of everything and I call it our multiple personalities.

Kevin Weitzel: Before we jump into all that, can you please let our listeners know something personal about you that has nothing to do with work or the home building industry that they can learn about on our podcast?

Christopher Brown: Yeah, so my personal thing is I started a travel blog which is a complete 180 from home building called Life's About Experiences. I started that about eight years ago. As we speak today I'm literally back about two weeks from taking a month-long vacation, a month-long trip to the Maldives, and my wife and I escaped and just explored the Maldives. We bounced around to three different resorts over the course of a month. We've literally traveled all over the world, just her and I, as well as with our son, who's [00:02:00] now 19.

The goal of Life's About Experiences to inspire other leaders in the industry and outside the industry to go take a break. Whether that's halfway down the street or halfway around the world to take a break and see the world because you just never know when your life may end and you don't get a chance to see that one thing and go take a chance and take a break.

Kevin Weitzel: Awesome.

Greg Bray: That's inspirational. If you guys will excuse me, I'm going to step away for a minute. Christopher, tell us a little bit more about how you ended up in home building, and then, especially with such a variety of different activities going on around new homes. Because it's kind of unusual to have those three different companies all doing kind of related but different pieces.

Christopher Brown: Yeah, absolutely. I started my career in Santa Barbara. Again, really rough. Somebody had to do it. I came out of college; I came out of UC Santa Barbara. I grew up in and around home building. My dad was in home building. I eventually got into resort development ala my travel habit, but he was a resort developer for many years. But I always knew I was going to go into home building.

Earlier in my [00:03:00] career, I was an Olympic athlete or a national team athlete. I was planning on rowing in the 96 games and then in the 2000 games. Short story, I blew my knee out right before the 96 games. So, rather than go down that path, I jumped into home building early. So, I just kind of shortened my path.

Got onto a home builder in Santa Barbara selling condo conversions on the beach in Santa Barbara. So, a really rough start into my home building career, and then grew through that. I became an options coordinator. I did a whole bunch of stuff as you are normally doing in a small home building environment, but knew I needed to do something bigger because there's not a lot of home building in Santa Barbara.

I was with my now wife, but girlfriend at the time and fiancé eventually, it was a choice where we were going to go. We were going to either move to San Diego where her family was, or back here to Sacramento where I was from. Got on with a home builder here in Sacramento and moved back here and the rest is history.

So, I worked with a private home builder here in Sacramento. Eventually got on with a public home builder, kind of moved up through the ranks into senior management with a public home builder here in Sacramento, and then [00:04:00] went through a couple of private home builders. And then 2008 happened and nobody wanted me anymore. So, then it was like, well, now what do we do?

And Lynn, a friend of ours got us together for coffee because I had lots of time in 2008 who is now my business partner, and we decided what we were going to do. And we were competitors at the time. We got together and decided, you know, let's start a sales company because we had time. We were trying to figure out what to do during the downturn.

We originally thought we were such competitors that we were the same guy, but we realized we were very different and complimentary. He was much better at dealing with, as we call 'em, the thoroughbreds, our salespeople, and I was much more of an ops guy. So, we were very complimentary. And so, we did the sales ourselves. As we grew and the market started to come out and our home builder friends started to need us a little bit more and more, but none of them had money but we needed marketing.

Because they needed marketing and we needed marketing to sell homes, we started doing it ourselves. So, we started making all of the things up as we went. We started learning website development and we started [00:05:00] learning to do the ads and all of the things that I knew from my years in the business, but I knew how to tell somebody to do it. But nobody had any money, so we had to learn to tell ourselves how to do it.

And that's how we grew the ad agency side of our business by doing it ourselves. And it grew into a thing. And that's kind of where NEXT New Homes started from is not only the sales operation side of it, but the ad agency side of it is purely a DIY, let's figure this thing out because nobody's got any money, but we absolutely need to do the thing and we started doing the thing.

You know, I've always had a marketing brain, but I've also got the sales brain. And so, we just kept growing and kept growing, and 15 years later. Here we are. It was starting from NEXT New Homes Group, and now we branched out into the two other divisions where we are today.

Kevin Weitzel: You know, it's funny you mentioned that you had to kind of learn how to do it on your own. There's so many builders that have that same mentality, let's just figure out how to do it on our own. And they don't realize that there is a massive ramp-up that costs them considerably more money on the front end than just hiring it out. And then, only then, when you can wash, rinse, [00:06:00] repeat those processes, then you can turn that into a profitability engine instead of just an expenditure.

Christopher Brown: Absolutely. From our evolution, that's a lot of where we are today. 08 through 12, really, we had plenty of time. We learned all day long because I had plenty of hours in the day to do all of the things that I would love to sit around and learn because I had all of the time in the world.

I don't have any time anymore. So, we lean into companies like you guys to be able to then go. Okay. We need outsource a lot of our operational side from the marketing because there are guys way smarter than we are that do this day in and day out that can then make us better, make us smarter and we start leaning into that. And as we've grown, that helps us scale. As we got less and less time available, we start leaning into people that are smarter and better and do this day to day.

But while we were grinding and while we had time, it was easy to kind of learn that. But it was good for us to learn that because then we were able to better communicate with those that were smarter than us. And then, we [00:07:00] also had the acknowledgment that we knew that they were smarter than us, but could communicate effectively and help work through that together. So, it was really a cool opportunity.

Greg Bray: So Christopher, when you go back and think about where that point was of saying, okay, we want to do this ourselves. We've learned enough now that we're actually doing it for some others too. But then it's like, gosh, it's really time to bring in that additional expertise or those additional service providers. Where was kind of that inflection point where in your mind doesn't make sense for a builder to try to do things in-house?

Christopher Brown: Yeah, so for our model, from the sales operation side of it, our model works if a builder is building typically four to six subdivisions or less to outsource their sales operation side of it. The way our model works is the marketing goes along with that component. That is all kind of a package deal the way that we work. Then the marketing management is handled here in-house. And whether a component of that is handled either by our own in-house staff or that we're partnering with outsource [00:08:00] companies that are then handling some of those components.

We're now at that scale to where we're realizing that it is helping us scale by now starting to partner with companies that from a marketing standpoint is I can stay leaner longer. Which, being a recession baby, the more I can stay leaner longer and by partnering with other companies to help us scale, then the way we can do that is by partnering with smarter people than us.

That helps us scale and scale faster with people that have already done this and done this way better than we have that scale smarter, faster, and allowing us to stay leaner longer is really a smart play for us. And for home builders, that's our model. We allow a home builder, especially the smaller guys, they can scale faster and stay leaner longer using our model than trying to bring their entire sales and marketing department in-house. It's just that's a very difficult and very expensive thing to do.

Greg Bray: So, let's tap into your marketing experience today, even though it sounds like you've [00:09:00] got some things you could tell us just about operations and everything else too, based on your past. But when you start talking to a builder that you're maybe thinking about working with, what are some of the roadblocks that you've seen them run into with their marketing plans and trying to implement those strategies, and how do you kind of look for those pain points that you're going to help them overcome?

Christopher Brown: I think the biggest difficulty that we consistently have is the build it and they will come. Having taught the MIRM courses for NAHB for almost 20 years now, we inherit land deals, and we inherit product, and then we go find the buyer. That is such a mistake constantly. Even to this day, builders make that mistake.

They either inherent a piece of dirt and they pull a piece of product off the shelf and go, this will work on this piece of dirt, and then we go find a buyer to fit the product instead of the other way around. This is the consumer in the location that then it's so much easier. But we end up putting in so much work and so much money [00:10:00] to then find the consumer that fits the product that happened to fit the dirt. I think that we work so hard with so many builders because they're builders.

Being a builder myself, I totally get it. There's a linear path that happens in builder brain, and builder brain goes dirt, foundation, vertical, sell, close. That's builder brain. That's how we work. That's a linear thing. And then when I'm done with house, buyer buy house, buyer move into house, I get money. And then I go do thing again. That's how we do it, right? I totally understand builder brain. That's what we do, but that doesn't work.

The consumer is a different thing. The consumer shops all day on data, but they buy on emotion and the home is an emotional thing. And that's where marketing kicks in and they build this emotional connection. And if we can start that emotional connection at the dirt, not at the finish, there's a better opportunity. And that's where you guys come in, and [00:11:00] that's where we, as marketers can come in. And if we can come in before we start the dirt, then we can make the entire project that much easier, and you can save money on the overall production of the house. But you can also build a much more efficient house, but you can also save money on marketing. And I think that's the lost conversation in most of this with a lot of these builders is you can actually spend less money on marketing if you start the marketing conversation earlier.

Greg Bray: Now, Christopher, have you already trademarked builder brain, or is that something that Kevin and I can go can go grab really quick?

Christopher Brown: Whoever hangs up first today. I think that's the that's the first dibs.

Greg Bray: So, do you feel like that issue is because somebody who's not a marketer is not including the marketers when they're looking at land? Let's be fair, home builders have to think about land far in advance. It's actually amazing to me how far out homebuilders are really looking at where [00:12:00] is this community headed. What's going on here? Where do people want to live five, 10, 50 years from now?

There's a lot that goes into those decisions about buying land and thinking about it and the time and everything else. Can you really just have the marketers involved in that or is that just something that, because they don't quite get it that's why we wait until we've already figured out what we're going to build and then say, okay, now, go sell it to somebody?

Christopher Brown: I think in today's modern economy, you don't have a choice. You've really seen a shift in probably the last decade and maybe even a little less that you've seen marketing and sales for that matter, get involved a lot earlier. Builders have gotten more sophisticated and starting to get into data analytics and psychographics and demographics, and really started to lean into that. You've seen that happen more often.

And you think about it, most heads of building operations are finance guys and land ac guys. Every once in a while, I have an ops guy and on the rare unicorn, you had somebody from sales and marketing that runs a home building [00:13:00] division. That's just the unicorn. That doesn't exist. It's usually finance, and then the second in line is a land ac guy. Again, you go to builder brain. That's the logic.

And we had a lot of these conversations at PCBC this year is that you've heard a lot more conversations about psychographics and demographics and really digging into the consumer behavior. And if we start talking about consumer behavior, as we talk about community building and connecting, we start hearing that earlier, that starts to make a connection because it makes it so much easier on the back end.

We are seeing an evolution of home building that we start getting involved in that earlier and earlier because if they involve marketing earlier, marketing has a much easier job later on. Otherwise, you're wasting so much money and so much excess money on the back end trying to force a buyer into a bad product. [00:14:00]

Greg Bray: Hey, everybody. This is Greg from Blue Tangerine. And I just wanted to personally invite you to join Kevin and me at the upcoming Home Builder Digital Marketing Summit. It's going to be October 23rd and 24th in Raleigh, North Carolina. You do not want to miss this. We're going to have marketing education. We're going to have online sales counselor education. We're going to have networking, round table discussions, and of course, a whole lot of fun. So, make sure you get registered today and join us. You can get all the details at buildermarketingsummit.com. Can't wait to see you there.

Kevin Weitzel: Let me ask you this, Christopher, what are your thoughts on, because you mentioned two things, one of them revolving around PCBC, another one is about demographics. So, in today's world, there's no secret that the rich are becoming richer, the poor are becoming poorer, and the poor are becoming more.

So, you said something where you said, we need to build where people want to live. Are builders looking at the facilities and the capacities of the fact that they have to look at the buyer's ability to be able to pay for a place, so therefore, it's not even about where they want to live. Because everybody wants to live in, what do they call it in San Francisco's painted homes? What do they call those things? Fancy places.

Christopher Brown: Yeah. Everybody wants, you know, the penthouse on the beach.

Kevin Weitzel: Yeah.

Christopher Brown: And that's logical, but not everybody has [00:15:00] the ability. But we have to have housing attainability, housing affordability. Obviously, coming from California housing attainability is a very difficult thing, especially when we're talking about permits alone for Sacramento right now are running over 100,000 dollars a door. That makes housing attainability very difficult.

Kevin Weitzel: Yeah.

Christopher Brown: You know, we have to work with municipalities to be able to make housing attainability, and trying to figure that component of it out. But you go back to land planning and working with municipalities because I think that's our challenge. Because a lot of the developers and a lot of the builders would like to build density that then builds community, and there's a lot of great ways to build density that builds community.

As somebody that's got a travel blog, I travel all over the world and I see how much better everywhere else builds in the world, except in the states. We do a terrible job. One of the speakers this year was talking about how terrible we started building when we started building subdivisions. We built subdivisions and then we built those centers and we built industrial, like we built segmentation [00:16:00] into how we built America as we grew. And that's why we have such disparity of the haves and have-nots, is because that's how we built America.

And if you go to anywhere else in the world, it's a great way to build community. And there's connection, and there's the store that's right, literally in the same building as your home. Then your doctor is the next building over and you have that type of sense of community.

But the municipalities would freak out and the NIMBYs would freak out if we tried to build that. If we get to a point of having those types of conversations, then you start to get attainability and that becomes how do we tell the story better as marketers to be able to make that connection in the community because that's how we start getting into attainability for housing.

Kevin Weitzel: I'm gonna anger about 400,000 people right now. Not every city in the United States has the luxury of having a garbage pit like Oakland, where they can just do all their low-income housing in. We don't have that geographic isolation [00:17:00] that that particular region of the area of the country has.

Sorry, Oakland.

Christopher Brown: Hey, I was born in Oakland, so I totally get it.

Greg Bray: Well, Christopher, let's dive in a little more into that concept of emotional connection that you hit on with the role of the marketer is to help make that connection. I know at IBS this year, you were talking a lot about social media specifically, and using that as a tool to get in front of people and help pull them in. Is social media an emotional connection tool or is it too quick and too fast to work for that? What are your thoughts there?

Christopher Brown: It's hands down emotional. Well, social media started as a true connector. Facebook, I mean, it's in the name, it's in the title. It was supposed to be a book of connecting faces. It morphed into a very negative thing for a long time, but I think it's kind of morphing back into a true place of connecting.

The algorithm ruins a bunch of things, and I think there's a bunch of negatives with social media. Absolutely. But I think as marketers, if you treat it not as a push, but as a pull, [00:18:00] that's where the connections can be and you get to authenticity. Don't get so much at sell, sell, sell, but storytelling.

You know, I always joke that home building is kind of 10 years behind the curve in anything that we do ever. I always try to encourage our entire team to go look at retail, go look at marketers in any other industry other than home building, because one, they have the luxury of multi-millions of dollars that we have five dollars to spend, comparatively from a marketing budget standpoint. Look and see what they're doing.

What's connecting in those spaces? What caused you to move down the funnel? What caused you to connect with that brand? How do we do that in home building? Storytelling is key. Authenticity is key. How do you put authenticity into a home? We're one of the last handmade things. We get to make things with a hand. That's one of the things that is not done anywhere, but we as an industry don't tell that story. What a cool story to tell.

Tell the story of the people using their hands to build your home. Put a personality to that home. [00:19:00] Put personality to all of the hands that are involved in that home. There's such an opportunity to do that. I think a couple of builders are doing a good job at that, and I think as an industry, we could do such a good job at storytelling.

As we evolve and as social media evolves, and we get away from push, push, push, sell, sell, sell, and we get into storytelling and it's no longer I've got this three bedroom, two bath house for 445. Get rid of all of that. Just stop telling that thing and get into, here's the thing that is gonna benefit me. How do I help you improve your life? What's something that is important to you that I'm building? How do I improve your life? How do I move you from where you are to where you want to be? It's those types of conversations that we need to start creating social media as a conversation, not as a host. That's where we've got to start shifting to.

Greg Bray: So, how do I as a marketer begin to make that kind of a shift? I'm used to doing, Oh, I've got to get a post out [00:20:00] every week or every day or whatever it is. And I've got this schedule and I'm trying to create content. I'm just trying to keep up. How do I catch my breath and get into more of a storytelling mode in your opinion?

Christopher Brown: A lot of it is getting out of the norm and finding the people that are behind the scenes. There still has to be an element of sell. I totally get that. There still has to be a Plan 3 is the special of the week. There still has to be that that kind of exists somewhere in the feed, but that should be 1 out of 10 posts.

I got that new DJ Osmo and the DJ Osmo is like this little bit of camera that shoots 4k and you can go walk through a model home and shoot these phenomenal videos that you could cut, you could walk through a model home and shoot 40 segments of video that would give you a month's worth of content in 20 minutes. It's those kind of things that you could then start to create the behind the scenes.

What's going on with the framer? Tell the story [00:21:00] of the framer's family. There's those kind of things that go behind the scenes. What went on in the accounting department? There's tons of TikToks. There's one that we're actually going to film on translating corporate jargon, and it's circling back. Literally, we're gonna circle somebody's back and then pushing the envelope. S,o we're literally pushing the envelope at somebody.

So, it's adding humor just to go, stop doing the same dumb things and just having some conversation. It's a matter of breaking the psychology of what they expect and having a conversation and trying to engage somebody and going, okay, what's something different that you're expecting?

The other piece that I think is critical, we do as an industry, do a terrible job, engaging the realtor community, the smart realtors. The smart realtors are engaging us right now, and I've got about five or six that will come out and they'll come out and shoot video. And that's a great user-generated content that they will come out and shoot videos of our models or production houses and they'll put that on their social media and we'll use that on [00:22:00] our social media.

It doesn't cost us anything. We didn't have to spend any time doing it and we get to share their audience and they get to share our audience. I think that's a great way, because then it's collaborations, which is the best way to grow your audience on social media right now. It's the number one way to grow your social media audience and it's user-generated content, which is easy and free.

Kevin Weitzel: I chatted with this builder that wanted to run a whole marketing campaign about chapters, chapters of your book that are written in our homes. It was an awesome concept where they wanted to take, you know, like small video excerpts of baby's first steps in their actual homes and stuff. It never went anywhere. They never fulfilled that, but Quint Lears, uh, out of New Mexico, I think he's with Hakes Brothers.

He did a speech one year at IBS that had easily half the people in the room in tears, where he talked about the new growth trees versus old growth trees, that the pushback that he received was, well, I want to live in a neighborhood that's already established that has old growth trees. He said, well, do you really want to do that or would you rather plant a tree with your daughter? What's your daughter's [00:23:00] name? Penny? Okay.

Wouldn't you rather plant a tree with Penny instead of be Penny's tree? So, then when you're long gone, and the house has been sold to somebody else, that Penny can drive by. Gets me emotional just thinking about it. Penny can drive by that home 30 years later and see her tree that she planted with her mom and dad. That's the kind of stuff that builders need to just really grab a hold of and use versus just I got a three three two bedroom house two level blah blah blah.

Christopher Brown: That's a personal connection. That's a story. That's storytelling. That's what we need to do a better job of. It's those little elements that create a memory point and it has nothing to do with the house, but it has everything to do with the house.

 

Greg Bray: Christopher, do you feel like it needs to be video to connect at that way, or can we do that in text still and with, you know, just writing the story?

Christopher Brown: Video is absolutely king right now. Just ask anybody from Meta. They'll tell you a video is king because they force you to do video to have any semblance of traction in the algorithm. Yeah, absolutely video is king. I still personally love to have some text [00:24:00] and photos and other things, but that's probably me being a little bit old school. Think about the emotional connection that you get with a movie and with that trailer video and the sound effects and the colors and all of those things that come in that trailer video. That's what makes an emotional connection.

So, if you can translate that, like the story of the trees. I'm already picturing the visual effects that go with those two different trees and the rings in the trees and the little girl holding their father's hands. You know, you think about those visual elements that go with that, those things can go in photos and those can go in a video, but both of those should be together. But video is still king.

Greg Bray: Well, Christopher, it's been a great conversation as we wrap up, you mentioned looking at retail, for examples. Are there other specific places that you go for inspiration and new ideas?

Christopher Brown: You know, again, being a travel blogger, you know, I love looking at travel because travel is inspirational. You look at any of the big airlines, any of the big hotel brands, those [00:25:00] are inspirational travels. Those are aspirational things.

Part of what we do in building a home, there's an aspirational element to building a home. There is an element of you are aspiring to live in a home. As we move into the higher end of homes, especially as you get into that upper end of the strata, look to the high-end brands, the Four Seasons, the St. Regis. You look to those brands, that aspirational styling, and you compare that to how we market the higher-end homes. There's an element that works in every element of that, and you'll notice most of those brands have nothing to do with the hotel itself.

Greg Bray: It's all selling the story of your vacation, right? Not the room. They're not selling you the room in the resort, right?

Christopher Brown: It has nothing to do with the room. It's the memories that you create somewhere outside of that room.

Greg Bray: Awesome. Well, Christopher, do you have any kind of last words of advice or thoughts you want to share with our audience today?

Christopher Brown: The biggest thing is think differently. The consumer has changed. We [00:26:00] are constantly evolving as an industry. I think we are constantly getting better as an industry. Our products getting better. Stop doing the same things. Try something different. We are an industry known for doing the same old things. Try something different. Fail forward. Failing's a great thing and we learn from that and do something cool and different.

Greg Bray: If somebody wants to connect with you, what's the best way for them to reach out and get in touch?

Christopher Brown: Yeah, email's great, cbrown@nextnewhomes.com or you can check our website out at next.cool.

Greg Bray: Well, thank you so much for spending time with us, and thank you everybody for listening today to the Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Whitesell with Outhouse. Thank you. [00:27:00]