235 Connecting Builders With New Home Buyers - Sarah Cook Sep 18 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, Sarah Cook. Sarah is the VP of Sales and Marketing at New Homes Directory. Welcome, Sarah. Thanks for being with us.

Sarah Cook: Thanks for having me.

Greg Bray: Well, Sarah, let's just start off like we always do, trying to get to know you a little bit better. Give everybody kind of that quick background and overview about yourself.

Sarah Cook: Oh, gosh, professionally or personally,

Greg Bray: whatever you want to share. [00:01:00]

Sarah Cook: Well, let's see. I grew up in the sales and marketing side of home building. My mom was a sales and marketing director for a builder in San Diego, so I was their guinea pig, and in all of their newspaper ads, and spent my weekends at model home openings. So, I'm kind of a lifer. I've been with New Homes Directory for about 20 years. I would say, since around 2005. So, that's been a fun journey. Personally, I've been doing musical theater for 30 years and I love escape rooms.

Kevin Weitzel: Now, when you say theater, are you talking about, viewing or being part of?

Sarah Cook: Being part of.

Kevin Weitzel:

What's your favorite role you've ever done?

Sarah Cook: Catherine Blake in Freaky Friday. That was definitely my favorite.

Kevin Weitzel: Really? I wouldn't have guessed that. I would have guessed something more like one of the more mainstream ones.

Sarah Cook: I was Nancy in Oliver. Have you ever seen Oliver?

Kevin Weitzel: Yes.

Sarah Cook: That was a [00:02:00] good one. I've probably done over a hundred productions, so.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, you know, it's a hard-knock life.

Sarah Cook: Good one

Kevin Weitzel: Sometimes you have to just kind of roll with the punches.

Sarah Cook: Yeah. So, those are my hobbies.

Kevin Weitzel: All right.

Greg Bray: Well, Sarah, tell us a little bit more about New Homes Directory and exactly what you guys offer and how you work with builders.

Sarah Cook: We are one of the original listing sites that started at the beginning of builders building their websites. So, our CEO, Jim Adams really fell in love with the art of SEO and wanted to provide a direct connection from buyers to builders when they're searching for new homes in a specific area.

So, we're a little bit different than your other sites out there where we're really a traffic-generating website. We are not a lead-based generating website. We never capture that information from that user and blast lead forms out to builders. We're really just trying to bridge that gap, get them to the builder site [00:03:00] where they have that engaging content for them to interact with.

Greg Bray: You guys have been doing this for a long time. You have been with the company since you were in kindergarten. The idea here of what you've seen in this industry as it's evolved, I think is fascinating. What are some of those things that you look back when New Homes Directory was young and new compared to now, and what are some of the big changes or evolutions that you've seen happen over this time?

Sarah Cook: Well, definitely the changes in the markets. I've been around for every hot market, cold market. What is the best thing to do for your advertising dollars during those times? And there's always going to be objections to making that decision on whether or not they want to advertise. Back then it was an alternative to newspaper advertising. So, it was trying to get a broader space for them to reach people who are relocating, not just specifically in that market, and it was really cost-effective.

And then, you hit [00:04:00] that big housing boom where people pulled back and they said, well, we don't want to advertise, you know, we have more leads than we can manage. So, they pulled back on that. Or when things get really, really tight in a tough market, they start protecting all their marketing dollars, but then they fall behind because they're not seen because they don't want to spend money advertising. So, it's always going to be that push and pull of finding a consistent baseline and you're planning.

Kevin Weitzel: You know, I've got chills and they're multiplying, and mainly because you said a very good word in my book, which is consistent. Do you feel that it's better to just maintain a consistent flow of advertising or that you should have these spikes, these big peaks and valleys?

Sarah Cook: Well, I think that you need to have a baseline where you have your different sources that are streamlining coming in and then you allocate a little bit more to things that happen to be working really, really well for you, but I believe that information and the way that you [00:05:00] share it is always going to come back to you. So, even though you might be concentrating on your own SEO, and you don't want to be advertising out to syndicating listing sites, but they're linking back to you and they are putting out information.

Like we have original content on our site that's validating the content that is on the builder's website. So, that's gonna be helping their rankings because an outside source is validating what they're doing. So, there's gonna be a relationship between all of your different avenues, and they all work together. It's not always just one avenue that's going to be better than another. So, I think that just adjusting a little bit of your focus is good, but I think completely eliminating a strategy is not the best idea either.

Greg Bray: So Sarah, you hit on something that I wanted to dive in a little deeper on, and that is this idea of, from an SEO standpoint, that that's kind of a key part [00:06:00] of what you guys are bringing to the table, is that when a prospective buyer is searching, you're working really hard so that New Homes Directory shows up for that search, and puts the builder in front.

But yet, the builder is also, potentially, working on their own SEO, trying to come up for that same potential search for, you know, new homes and whatever city or location keywords being targeted. How do you talk to builders about, gosh, are we competing against ourselves by putting things on New Homes Directory, or is it really complimentary and supportive to do both? What are your thoughts?

Sarah Cook: Well, I think that it definitely is supportive. We don't pay for a keyword, so we're not bidding on pay-per-click keywords. It's all organic search for people coming to New Homes Directory. So, in that space, it's all supportive and I don't think it hurts anybody to be doing SEO at all. But definitely, I think in the pay-per-click space, I do see it sometimes being a [00:07:00] conflict and that's one of the reasons why we opted not to go down that route was because we wanted to provide organic, legitimate traffic to our builders and be that quality versus quantity, I guess, you would say. We don't want to showboat and inflate our numbers. We want to make sure that it's going to convert well on both New Homes Directory and on the builder side.

Kevin Weitzel: So, a lot of times builders think there's this perfect equation, you know, like somewhere over the rainbow, there's going to be something perfect that they can just implement, and we have 10 percent here and 15 percent there and 33 percent here. Is there a secret sauce to how a home builder should spend their money when it comes to marketing?

Sarah Cook: I think it's constantly changing. It's a market that's fluid because we're dealing with humans that are growing and changing in the way that they search now and the way that they're looking for things. One of the big things that I'm seeing is [00:08:00] that this is the biggest purchase that they're ever going to make in their entire life, to expect them to see you for the first time, trust you, give information is not a realistic expectation that I think a lot of our builders have when they are evaluating the success of a site like New Homes Directory that's a traffic generating website.

Did it convert to a lead? Well, yeah. I don't think they trust you yet. We just introduced them to you. But the point is, is that they have done their research because they've compared you against the builder down the street. They know more about your product than your sales agents probably do because they've spent that time getting to know you before they trust you.

So, in our side of things, I like to say that we're kind of like an online digital billboard. People are getting off the freeway, but they might not drive right into your sales office that first time that they see you. So, it's about creating [00:09:00] that relationship. And people search differently as we're coming up on AI and natural speech search. Sometimes you're not found for that specific keyword that you want to be found for. Everybody is competing for new homes Dallas, right? Well, not everybody's going to search that way anymore, and I am really seeing Google not being in the number one leadership spot in the coming years.

I think AI and that type of search is going to be taking over a lot, and we've really built our website to be AI-friendly. We're found for a lot of that natural speech type of keywords. Find me a home in Dallas that is under 5,000 square feet, and has four bedrooms, and is under $400,000. Those types of questions that they're just like asking. Think about people talking to their phones, to Siri, and now they have ChatGPT on their phones too.

Kevin Weitzel: That's for our domestic people. What about people that live abroad that want to come here? Like [00:10:00] they say to themselves, I want to live in America, you know, like West Side Story? Did you catch that? Greg, I'm just peppering men in there, left and right. It's like a machine gun, just rat tat tatting, you know, theater quotes. Anyway, do you find that you have a relocating foreign source that's wanting to immigrate or move to the United States, being able to use your platform?

Sarah Cook: We see a little bit of traffic coming in from out of the country, mostly like military bases is where our international traffic comes from. But most of the traffic is from the US and Canada. We see a lot of relos from state to state because it gives them that opportunity because they are searching those broad terms. They may want to move to Dallas, but they have no idea what the suburbs are there. They know that sometimes they want to live northeast of downtown, you know, so they might like, be looking for that area.

Kevin Weitzel: Because they don't have memories all alone in the moonlight or even in the daylight when they're relocating to Dallas. Right. Catch that one, Greg. Come on, man, this is gold.

Greg Bray: Kevin, I [00:11:00] don't think our listeners knew how much of a Renaissance man you were and how much time you spent in the theater. I'm just shocked.

Sarah Cook: I am very impressed actually.

Kevin Weitzel: I'm not looking these up on the internet. These are just popping into my brain. All right. Anyway.

Sarah Cook: But yes, We do see relocation, but mainly just from state to state, not necessarily too much international traffic.

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.

Well, Sarah, [00:12:00] you mentioned a couple of times about being a traffic-generating website versus a lead capture website. What kind of went into that strategy choice on your side as to why you wanted to have a slightly different business model? Because I don't think that's what builders are kind of used to when they think about a partner site that does listings of their content. Tell us a little more about some of the thoughts behind that

Sarah Cook: We believe in doing not a lot of things okay. We want to do one thing well. So, that's been our niche the entire time that we wanted to be not the lead-generating website we wanted to drive traffic. We believe that people are very private with their information. They don't always want to give that out. So, it's really just doing that introduction and driving quality traffic to their site where they're going to return over and over again, share that page with their friends and family, and just create that initial connection.

You don't always want to do what [00:13:00] everybody's doing, right? You should do the exact opposite. There's a ton of sites that are all competing to be the best lead-generating website and there's several big players in the industry that you could be spreading that apart. We like being unique and the only ones that really have this model.

Greg Bray: I've seen sometimes personally when I've been doing searches and I get on some type of a directory site, whether it's homes or some other type of content, and I know that the listing site doesn't have all the information, right? So, I'm looking for the actual business. And when you cannot find a link to the actual business in the listings, it's quite frustrating to have to go back to Google and say, okay, I saw the name of this company over here. Now, let me go see if I can actually find them. So, I think that you guys being willing to make it very transparent and easy to move on from your site to the builder's site is good for the builder and good for the consumer, and the potential buyer.

Sarah Cook: Yeah, it's definitely been a little bit of a dance [00:14:00] because as Google starts to change in every update that they do for their criteria. One of the updates was time on site. And we're not a destination website. People are coming to our website and they have specific criteria. They don't really type anything into New Homes Directory. They come in and they're able to filter down.

They might start with 600 communities in Denver, and then they're like, okay, I want this home price range. I will only want something between the 5 and 600,000. I need 3 bedrooms. I need 3 bathrooms. I need this square foot. It must have a dog park and a pool. You know, number of community starts narrowing, narrowing down.

They're like, oh, I really like this school district. And so, they come down and they find exactly what they're looking for, and they have a small group of communities that meet that criteria, and they want more information. So, they don't get lost in the shuffle on our site. They don't have to click on something and get taken to another page on our [00:15:00] site and then have to engage with us and give us more information, and are you sure you want to do this? And do you want to send this to all the builders in the area? Do you want more communities like this? It's so simple. We try to get them to that builder's website in three clicks or less on New Homes Directory.

Kevin Weitzel: So builders spend money on their marketing programs and stuff. Do they ever get past the point of no return to the point where they can't find a benefit from your platform? Or can any builder find a benefit?

Sarah Cook: Anybody will find benefits. You are so funny. But we cater to both small to medium local size builder to the big national builder. We don't have preferential placement on our site when it comes to that. We don't have sponsored ads or anything like that, so you're not competing with national budgets. So, you have the small to medium local builder that has a unique product that is just like a national builder, but it's listed side by side.

That [00:16:00] end user, that potential buyer doesn't know the difference between the two. They're just seeing relevant information of a product that they like, so it's beneficial to different builders of all sizes. We have first-time buyer products versus people who are looking to downsize or upgrade, We have attached products, active adult, all those different types of locations. And we're pay-per-click, so you pay for performance on our site. So, if it doesn't do well, it doesn't cost a lot either.

Greg Bray: Sarah, first of all, I just want you to know how special you are that Kevin sang to you. That does not happen on most of our podcasts. So, I want you to be flattered by that.

Sarah Cook: I am very flattered.

Greg Bray: Maybe we should apologize for it. I don't know. But when you're having builders with this idea of, oh, you're going to put me right next to my competitor on the site, do you get that kind of objection or pushback as you're talking to people? Or do they feel comfortable with the idea that it's better to be in the mix [00:17:00] when somebody is there looking as opposed to not being there at all?

Sarah Cook: Oh, definitely. They want to be where their competitors are. So, I don't think that they have any qualms about that. Everything on our site is just factual-based. It's whether or not that community has what that buyer is looking for. We have, like, a little informational bubble where we can put down something that makes it unique that that community has RV parking or corner lots or views or waterfront lots. Or they might be running a promotion and they're doing rate buybacks or anything like that. We can customize things to make them stand out a little bit.

But for the most part, it's just community search-based. We don't list by model or inventory. You've got to remember these people are seeing the community for the first time, so they are just looking for some big qualifying information. Is it big enough? Can I afford it? Is in the right location? All right, this meets my needs. Now I need an introduction so I can begin a [00:18:00] relationship with this builder.

Kevin Weitzel: So, can a builder utilize your platform as a trying basis to see, you know, Hey, we don't have a lot to spend? Can we just try for three months or would they find benefit in 525,600 minutes of the year doing that on your website? You get that from Rent there, Greg?

Sarah Cook: I caught that one.

Kevin Weitzel: I did have to look that one up.

Sarah Cook: That was a valiant effort. But, no, we don't have long-term contracts at New Homes Directory. So, it is a month-to-month listing agreement. And since it's pay-for-performance and pay-per-click, you might have a community that sells out on the 5th of the month, and you remove it, and you only pay for the clicks that you got from the first through the 5th.

We do recommend always trying something for at least 90 days, at least, to see how the trend happens. Like, is this a consistent amount of traffic? Are we seeing them from the same places? What's their behavior from then on? And then, also gauging something based on your [00:19:00] current market. Like, how long is it taking from the first time that they come into your sales office to actually signing? What's your buyer timeline? And so, I would consider how they got to you and how long that took before they began that timeline where you actually are starting to track them.

Greg Bray: Sarah you probably get to look at a lot of home builder websites as part of your job. And often there's this challenge I'm sure you've run into where you're driving traffic to the builder site and they're going, we're not getting any leads from this. And you just want to tell them, well, it's because of this problem on your site where you're not getting the leads through. What are some of those biggest mistakes you see builders making on their own websites that stop that flow of lead traffic that you're trying to send them from converting and taking the next step?

Sarah Cook: It's definitely hard for us to have concrete data because we're no longer able to track [00:20:00] them once we've delivered them from New Homes Directory to the builder site. They are now on the builders analytic side, so, watching their behavior is not something that I can do. But I definitely know for somebody who looks at a lot of websites and a lot of homes, I try to pay attention to ones that I dive deeper into because, you know, I'm still human. I'm like, oh, I could live here. Oh, this is a really nice house.

So, I think it's good, clean, engaging content, a way for them to interact with the builder. If they don't have any actionable items from that spot, that they're landing pages on, and then they have to dig. Or If they don't list their products out well enough, like, if they have to do so much research. We've already qualified them and then we send them to their site, and then they make them jump through a lot of hoops to get the information. That's really something that I see as a red flag.

Not good photography or no photography, or transparency on their site as well. So, if they're not honest with pricing, if they have [00:21:00] pricing and square footage and a lot of that criteria that's on their site, if they don't list that easily, I think that's a roadblock for them.

Kevin Weitzel: So, basically it's a fantastic conduit directly to the builder versus giving the home buyer the ability to ease on down, ease on down the road. Is that what you're saying?

Sarah Cook: I am. You're such a whiz.

Kevin Weitzel: Oh, the Whiz.

Greg Bray: We're going to have to wrap this up before it goes totally off the rails here. Sarah, we appreciate the time you spent with us. Do you have any last words of advice that you'd like to leave with our audience today?

Sarah Cook: I would just tell everybody to be open, try new things, pay attention to what works. Have a good way to evaluate what's important to you. Be transparent with your buyers and with your vendors and what could they be doing. And not just if you hit that spot of where this is not working, I don't want to do it anymore. Or you have a conversation saying, this is not working, what [00:22:00] can we do to make it better? Because that's what we're all trying to do is make this industry better and provide homeownership for everybody.

Greg Bray: Awesome. Well, we appreciate your time today, Sarah, and it was great to learn more about New Homes Directory and you and to learn more about Kevin's theatrical experiences as well.

Sarah Cook: I'm very impressed.

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

Sarah Cook: Oh, I'm all over the place, scook@newhomesdirectory. You can reach me anytime via email or I'm on LinkedIn and they can talk to me through that way as well.

Greg Bray: Thank you everybody for listening to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you. [00:23:00]