271 Home Builder Data Management - Greg Bray and Kevin Weitzel Jun 4 2025

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 today to be having another Greg and Kevin discussion where we're going to dive in deep into another element of digital marketing and websites that we think is really important for people to understand better.

Kevin Weitzel: Alright, and today you get the joy of me getting to ask Greg questions because we're going to be talking about data management and your website, how those two worlds collide and mesh and mingle [00:01:00] together. 

Greg Bray: So you think Kevin, anybody's eyes are glazing over already? 

Kevin Weitzel: No, not yet. I promise you they're not. I guarantee you today's going to be a very good episode. So, before we get started, even though I've already asked you several times for an interesting factoid, today I just want to know one of two things. You have a choice. I'm giving you the choice. There's a fork in the road, if you will. You can either name your favorite and your least favorite employee of Blue Tangerine, or tell me what sport if you were just financially completely independent and money was no object, you would just travel the globe following either a sport or playing a specific sport, what would it be? 

Greg Bray: I'm tempted to use the Blue Tangerine employees as a test to see whether they actually are listening to the podcast like they're supposed to and find out what they're thinking. But no, we have a great team at Blue Tangerine. I could never say anything bad about them. They're all my favorite, Kevin. 

Kevin Weitzel: Oh, that's the right answer. That's the right answer. 

Greg Bray: But if I got to travel, basketball's the sport that I enjoy the most. I don't mind a good football game, but [00:02:00] there's something about the climate-controlled environment of the indoor stadium for basketball that just gives you that extra little comfort. 

Kevin Weitzel: Creature comforts, brother. Creature comfort is where it's at. Even golf courses, rain, you know?

Greg Bray: Yep. Absolutely. Well, there's like lightning on golf courses all the time. I don't know why, but.

Kevin Weitzel: What are your teams that you follow? You have a specific team that you follow? 

Greg Bray: I grew up a Carolina Tarheel fan and so that's one. And of course, you know, I'm A BYU grad, and they did really well in basketball this last year. So, it's always great to see them. So, I'm more of a college basketball guy; not super big on the NBA stuff. I don't mind watching a game now and again. Of course, from Georgia, so the Atlanta teams, with the Hawks is where we go, and we enjoy a good game there from time to time.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, let's dive into the nerdy stuff, although I promise you today's not going to be nerdy. To all of our listeners, I like to pick on Greg sometimes because when we look at belt levels, like in karate, I'm like a yellow belt when it comes to nerd factor. Greg is a solid, like Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee [00:03:00] Black Belt when it comes to all things nerdy. Which is a very endearing quality because when you want to go to an expert, you want to go to that person that has that black belt. So, Greg, with your black belt, can you give our listeners just a quick little blurb about your process and how you got into the home building industry, specifically with in regards to Blue Tangerine and website creation? 

Greg Bray: Well, websites is something that I got into just right out of school. It was kind of the new frontier, if you will, at that time. I'm pretty old. But we started working with builders specifically because the owner of what was formerly Blue Tangerine had come from the home building world, and he introduced us to builders. We started working with several of them, started to build up this knowledge and understanding and recognized there was a lot of opportunity to apply website design and development to this industry and really help people because of the long shopping process that goes along with home building, and how much the website can help that process.
Kevin Weitzel: Nice. Okay, so let's talk about [00:04:00] data management. There's a lot of things that are out there in the world data. I mean, there's data migration, there's data management, there's lots of different terms of what is actual trackable data. Can you just get us started with where we could possibly head with this line of questioning?

Greg Bray: So, I think where we want to go today, Kevin, is talking about the information that a builder has that drives the product section of the website. So, we're talking about communities, the locations of those communities, all of the different floor plans and the parts and pieces of the floor plan, the pricing, the location, the elevation imagery, the floor plan image, all of those pieces. The spec homes or inventory homes that builders have that are built on certain plans. 

Getting into the lot information for the site plan or home sites depending on the term you want to use and all of that content and information. That's the kind of data that I think makes a home builder website different from most other types of business websites is the [00:05:00] ability to have to deal with all of that, especially for a larger builder. The larger you are, the more of that you have, and keeping all of that straight and accurate is a lot of work.

Kevin Weitzel: So, this is ignoring how pretty your website is. This is ignoring if you've got interactives on there. This is ignoring if you've got video content. This is putting all that aside, this is just looking at the ones and the zeros, the data that is contained within the website. Correct?

Greg Bray: Yeah. I think that's where we want to stay today. All of those other things are critical. This is certainly just one piece of a puzzle, but it's an important piece and it's a piece that I have noticed doesn't get talked about by marketing departments often enough because it's not something they're as familiar with. They're more familiar with some of the visual components. They're more familiar with some of the other opportunities. You can kind of get yourself, to use a building term, painted into a corner if you're not careful and talk about this upfront. So, that's why we kind of want to raise a little bit of more awareness on this particular concept and see how we can help people avoid some of the issues that can crop up.  

Kevin Weitzel: With the unique [00:06:00] product offerings that builders have anywhere from luxury homes down to first-time home buyers, condos, townhouses, single-family homes, builders have different websites. So, how can a builder structure their website to be able to manage the data? 

Greg Bray: And I think, Kevin, that that is an important point to recognize that every builder has some different needs. And so, when we're talking about data management, if you're a custom builder that doesn't sell specs, doesn't put plans on the website, this isn't really as big of a deal for you. As soon as you start having a few plans, you can still manage that kind of manually and be okay. It's as we get a little bit larger and start having the constant updates that need to happen to the site about the pricing, about availability, the ability for different people to manage different parts, all of that is what drives this need to pay more attention to the data management.

And I know, Kevin, you've heard me talk about this before in other instances. I know you have where a lot of website tools are [00:07:00] oriented around what I call a page based structure. Think about like your WordPress or your Wix or your Squarespace. All these tools out of the box are designed to build a website by creating pages, which makes perfect sense because that's how websites are organized from the front end view to the user.

But what happens now when you have a given floor plan that's available in two different communities, and within those two different communities, it's actually at different price points? Or maybe it's in five different communities, and there's different price points for all of them because of the location or land premiums or just because it's in a more desirable area and you can charge a little bit more for it. How do you keep all that up to date without having to edit five different pages on the website? That's the kind of data that we're talking about here, is being able to manage that individually as a plan in the database that has relationships with communities that can have different price points as a simple example to take that one all the [00:08:00] way through.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, what are some issues that can come up with proper data management that maybe builders don't consider? 
Greg Bray: So, I think one of the big issues is just ease of maintenance and missing something. So, in that similar example, if you've got this plan that's available in five to 10 different communities and you need to make a price change and you get it in five out of the six places and you miss one, now you've got bad data out there. So, you have to remember to mark all those places. So, that's one option or opportunity for a mistake to happen because of that extra management work. 

The next place that comes in is the ability to be able to share that data out with others, and I think we'll talk a little bit more about that here in a minute. That becomes much more difficult to do if you don't have the underlying infrastructure. And then kind of the third opportunity is the ability to update that in an automated fashion from other sources of information. Because if it's just this content that's been placed on a page on the site, you don't necessarily have a place that you can update [00:09:00] easily using more automated tools, pulling data from other systems.

Kevin Weitzel: Since you already said it, I'm going to give myself permission to use this four-letter word, WordPress. I know that's more than four letters, but the point being is that in some circles, WordPress and Wix, you know, these page-based ways of building websites are not all that conducive to being able to share that data. Is that correct? 

Greg Bray: Yeah. Absolutely correct. Now, don't get me wrong, it is certainly possible to build proper data management into a WordPress site, but that is not what most people doing WordPress are focused on. There are some folks out there that can build custom plugins and custom management tools and can do that correctly in WordPress. But at that point, you are creating something custom that is not WordPress out-of-the-box kind of a thing. 

So, at Blue Tangerine, we've tried really hard to say, how do we make this data management easier? And this is an area that we've spent a lot of time on and we came to the conclusion, Kevin, that WordPress really wasn't the best place for us to do that. So, we ended up building our own [00:10:00] platform to be able to have that data management in there because it's so important for builders to be able to have that be easy. Easy to do, easy to take care of, and be able to make it so that they don't get stuck not being able to get access to it and being able to use it.

Kevin Weitzel: And not just because we're co-hosts on this podcast, but you're making this interview really easy because you already said my next subject, which is gonna be third-party listing sites. So, how can you manipulate your data or set your data up to where it can more seamlessly feed those third party websites? Can you name just three very important ones that a lot of builders know of?

Greg Bray: In the research that we did a couple of years ago now at Blue Tangerine, we found that over two-thirds of home shoppers start their research on one of these third-party listing sites. So, it's a big deal to have your content out there. That's where buyers are looking. Now, the big names that people are probably familiar with is, you know, Zillow, realtor.com, New Homes Source. [00:11:00] Homes.com is growing in this area. New Homes Directory, and there's other places that you can use this data and put it out there. and I apologize if I left somebody out. But there are definitely benefits to being listed on these sites. 

And, of course, just like everything else, you can manage that data manually. These partners all have tools where you can log in and so I need to change the price. Oh, home A, B, C is sold now, so I need to take it off and remove it. Oh, we've got a new spec available, so I need to add it. You know, we have this new community coming online. I need to add it. But if you've managed the data properly on the website side, the opportunity exists to simply send them a file. And that can be automated so that it goes. Typically, we do it once a day that an update goes out.

And that file is formatted in a special way. It's using what's called XML, for people who want to get more technical. That structure of that file then goes to these other third parties, they're able to then automate the import and the update of that data. [00:12:00] And so, you update your website during the day and change those prices and availability. And then that night, the file goes out to these 3, 4, 5 partners and all of them are updated overnight with those changes. And you didn't have to log in to every one of those and touch it, and that saves a boatload of time. 

Kevin Weitzel: So, how are you doing that? Because like Ford, Chevy and Toyota, all their transmissions bolt up differently to a motor. You can't switch them all around. So, I assume that Zillow and realtor.com and Livabl and all these other platforms, I assume that they all have their own feed input. What tools are you putting in place to allow a builder to be able to send that to these different languages, if you will?

Greg Bray: Yeah, and I'll give a shout out to the folks at New Home Source and BDX. In the past, they kind of pioneered this model, and they created an initial spec that kind of has become the default standard that others use. But yes, the others have taken that and added their own little enhancements. So, Zillow's ideal file is a little bit different from the New Home Source file, and realtor.com has some [00:13:00] nuances there. They can usually take the default, but you can do better if you add more content and use their separate specific formats. And so what we've done is we create export processes from the website.

So, again, you're managing the data just on the website. This is where all this information tends to live and come together. It doesn't typically live in other systems in its entirety and completeness the way that it does on the website. And so we can export that into a Zillow format versus a New Home Source format versus a realtor.com format and get those updated in such a way so that you don't have to worry about that. And if those formats change, then we can just tweak that process in the export and again, keep that flowing through and be able to make sure that that data stays up to date, it's accurate. Because, Kevin, we know how important trust is with buyers, and bad information kills trust almost instantly.

Kevin Weitzel: You know what's funny is that a lot of times we have to ask questions that we already know answers to. I'm about to ask you one that I don't know the answer to. So yes, you [00:14:00] have these protocols that you'll set up, an API, if you will, or some sort of connecting translator that takes the website data and then pushes it to these other various platforms. What about builders that deal with multiple municipalities when they want to push to like an MLS. That could be different from one county to another county, even one city within a county to a different city, the different rules and regulations and process they have. Do you have to create just a separate link, if you will, or a different output feed?

Greg Bray: Unfortunately, Kevin, for the most part, I am not aware of an MLS that has yet opened itself up to receiving data files. They continue to be a locked system where they force you to manually input the data. Now, they will usually let you export out and pull data from the MLS into your website. But if there's someone from the MLS listening, it is time to accept an import feed. It is time to figure this out. This is not hard new technology. This has been around for a long time, and it's a real roadblock for [00:15:00] builders using the MLS effectively because they still have to deal with that piece of the data management manually, and it's really frustrating for everybody involved.

Kevin Weitzel: Wait a minute, so you're telling me this isn't rocket science? This is literally just data feed.
 
Greg Bray: It's just data feed. I mean, it takes more than five minutes; don't get me wrong. But it's not brand new cutting edge technology that we haven't figured out how to do for a long, long time. It is frustrating that it's difficult to push into MLS.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, how can you properly structure your data and your management tools to simplify that process? 

Greg Bray: The ultimate structure is just about making sure that we have all of these pieces that we need to be able to manipulate in small enough fields that we can use them and format them in the proper way. So, again, if we were just putting content on a page, we might put all the sales office information into one field. But within an export file, we might need to break those up into different places. And [00:16:00] so, ultimately, within the database, we have to have those in the smallest common denominator of those field structures so that we can manipulate that data for the different formats that we need.

And sometimes there's fields that we need to use for the third-party listing sites that maybe you don't even want to show on your website. Maybe it's just not important to you to have that information today. For example, maybe you don't want to show lot data, but Zillow is now accepting lot data in their feed. And it's good to have as much as you can give into the feed, even if you're not using it on your website. So, we want to make sure those fields exist in the management side or the back end of the website so that you can manage those as well and take advantage of all that. 

Kevin Weitzel: So, besides MLS joining us in this new modern century that we live in, what other future opportunities do you see for proper data management?

Greg Bray: We see some other third-party tools interested in this data. Some of our partners, like NterNow and NoviHome, they like getting their hands on this data to be able to update [00:17:00] things. An example with our friends at NterNow is if we've got this data mapped properly, if you are using their tools to put the self-touring locks on some of your inventory or model homes, you can rotate those locks around as homes are sold and assign them to a new home in their system. And if we've got a feed connection with them, we can now update the website to flag that home as being self-tourable. Is that a word? Tourable? I think that is. 

Kevin Weitzel: Yeah, tourable. Sure.

Greg Bray: You can now have that whole process automated. So, you say, oh, we sold house A, and we moved the lock to House B. And so now on the website, house B now shows as available to schedule a self-tour, and that's something that nobody has to do on the website because you've already done it once. At the end of the day, Kevin, computers are really good at moving data around if they're set up properly. That's what they're good at. It is very tedious and time-consuming for people to do it. And people forget, or they're [00:18:00] busy, or they miss one, in spite of their best efforts. And if you set these up properly, you check the primary place and make sure that happens and let everything flow through all the other connected processes, and it keeps everything in sync in a beautiful way.

Kevin Weitzel: So, I do appreciate your time. How you like that? I used one of Greg's lines. So, in appreciation of your time today, what would be one last little bit of advice you would give to your home builders out there that need to manage their data on their website? 

Greg Bray: Well, I think at the beginning, it all starts with are we going to have a website that allows us to do this or not? Where a lot of people suddenly discover that they haven't done this properly is when they've got this beautiful website. They've been kind of doing things manually, and now they want to push that data to somebody else and they're like, oh, how do we get this out into this XML file format? And it's like, you can't because it's not organized properly, and they hit this roadblock, and all of a sudden, they're stuck. And so, they start having to manage all this stuff [00:19:00] manually, separately, within these different listing platforms in order to take advantage of the services that they offer. 

The next place that they run into is like, man, we spend a lot of time updating pricing when we want to change prices or updating availability. That data's already being managed in our ERP system. Why can't we just move that from the ERP directly into the website to say that this home is sold, or this new home's been released and it's available, or we just changed prices up or down by 5%, and we just need that to flow through the whole system? Those types of connections from the ERP cannot happen if you don't have the database infrastructure within the website to put that data and be able to bring it in and basically update the right spots in the database so that the website will then display those new prices.

That can increase efficiencies dramatically so that your marketing people aren't sitting there just clicking around in the website admin all day long. They can be out doing other things that can help drive more sales and more leads [00:20:00] and let the computers do the heavy lifting. Recognizing that this all starts with, do we have a website built properly? Before we start building it, we have to define these requirements upfront and making sure we understand that.

Kevin Weitzel: Not to be an advertisement for a Blue Tangerine, but if you had a builder that maybe doesn't have an ERP, maybe their website is a little less sophisticated and possibly they don't have the budget to completely rethink their entire website, do you have a service where you could help aid them and guide them from what they have currently into being able to provide, like a vehicle, if you will? Could you sell them a vehicle to be able to push some of this data out to the various platforms? 

Greg Bray: We actually do, Kevin, because we've run into this a lot where people, they just made this new website, it's not time yet and budget doesn't allow for, you know, kind of starting over and building the whole thing, but they still want to be able to manage data and be able to share it. Especially again, starting with these third-party listing site relationships. So, we built a standalone data feed management tool. We need a [00:21:00] better name than that, but it's, uh, it's, but, but it's basically kind of that backend piece that allows you to manage all the data, and it just does the feeds out to the third-party tools.

Now, the downside to it, in all upfront honesty, is that you still have to manage the data on your website separately from the data in the feed because they're not connected because the website wasn't built with that data management piece in mind. But when the time comes for that new website, we do have the data there, and then we can integrate those more tightly and make that more seamless. But if you are looking for a way to more easily manage multiple third-party listing sites, then our feed management tool might be a good fit for you. For sure. 

Kevin Weitzel: Well, all the nerd jokes aside, because you know that I love the snot outta you. If you don't have a nerd in your life that helps you with this kind of stuff, you need to go out and find yourself a nerd, because they do make the world go round. I mean, literally everything you do, there's a nerd behind it that makes that stuff happen. So, Greg, I appreciate your time. I [00:22:00] appreciate your friendship. If somebody wants to get a hold of you, how do they do so? What's the best way? 

Greg Bray: Yeah, so you can reach me via email at greg@bluetangerine.com or LinkedIn. I think there's only like a handful of Greg Brays that pop up when you search LinkedIn. Isn't it crazy how other people have your name? It's like, who gave you my name? But yeah, on LinkedIn or bluetangerine.com. All the information about how we could help: we'd love to help people solve this problem and take advantage of these opportunities on their website.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, Greg, thank you for your time today on The Home Builder Digital Marketing podcast. I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. 

Greg Bray: I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine. Thank you. [00:23:00]