[00:00:00] Welcome to Building Perspective with Matt Riley and Mollie Elkman. We’re here to bring value to you and your team by exploring all things, sales and marketing related. All from different perspectives. All right. Welcome back to another episode of the sometimes weekly podcast building perspective. cause it’s been crazy busy, right?

Like let’s just, let’s just be real. It’s been crazy busy and so. I wanted to take, like kind of start a new season for our podcast here and, and really come in and maybe start doing some more frequent [00:01:00] mini episodes were Mo Molly or myself or someone else on our team just hops in and kind of shares their thoughts of what we’re seeing or what we’re thinking.

And to me, I was going to go first and so to me, The one thing that’s really on my mind, as of right now, because everything is just so dag-gone busy. And I think of this, this episode is called, it’s a trap, right? It’s a trap, right. Then I’m seeing that in my store, best star Wars, Admiral Akbar voice.

And for all of you who are star Wars nerds, like me, Admiral Akbar is the, I don’t even know what the heck he looks like. He’s the angel and on star Wars and well, a lot of them are, but he’s one of the generals and he’s got like the side heads kind of like a cross between a fish and a lizard. And. A dinosaur who knows.

Anyway, his favorite line is it’s a trap. So where we [00:02:00] are with everything and how busy it is is it’s a trap. And what do I mean by that? Well, first I’m going to, I’m going to just randomly read you off some headlines and then I’m going to, and then I’m going to read you some numbers of, of what we see from analytics.

So, alright. this one came out today, a builder magazine, new home sales jumped 13.8% in June. Right next headline, existing home sales surge, nearly 21% in June. This is CNBC. The highest monthly gain on record. here’s another one. This is routers new home sales shine in June business activity picks up guys.

These are all articles that have been published in the past day. And within the past day, these aren’t like March and April. These are days old, we’re seeing more and more of these. All right. Here’s what we’re looking at from a numbers perspective. We’re seeing website activity still way, way up, overall total website activity.

[00:03:00] We are, we, I, I’m going to call it settled in instead of down. because we are down from the absolute peak of the most, the busiest website activity period on the face of the planet. but. Well, I’d call it. We’re settled in still absolutely destroying year over year. but we settled into what we’re seeing right into from an activity level.

It’s not, I guess it depends on your market, but this is, this number is aggregated, across the country of all the builders that we work with. So I’m still way, way, way up. Just kind of settled in from the previous peak all time highs. which honestly, we couldn’t even handle that anyway. And I don’t even know that we can handle the activity that we’re at right now.

so that’s that another one is, and believe me, I’m going to get to the point in a second. Another one is organic search, kind of the same thing. We’re still at an a, we’re still settled back in. We’re kind of down off the. [00:04:00] All time, high of organic search. Remember organic search is going to be the true consumer intent on what they’re looking for, because these are people that are actively searching for a new homes for sale, not without with zero ad money behind it.

So these are pure organic search terms. and again, we are still above January pre COVID levels, just a little off of our insanity levels. Right. so. All good. All these things are good. Yeah. Also by the way, ads are still on sale. So what I mean by that is let’s see if we’re using Facebook and you’re going to see the same thing.

I’ve only had the Facebook numbers up in front of me, but if you’re looking at Google ads, display campaigns, things like that, these are on sale now, search terms themselves. Are not because those are really low funnel search terms, very specific. And there are about even, but we’re talking about CPM costs on Facebook, which is cost per thousand.

So how much, [00:05:00] how much it’s going to cost us to get in front of a thousand people? It is down. It is on sale still. So from its peak, February 29th, we were seeing about a $14 CPM where we are right now. We’re seeing about a non dollar CPM on average, we’re seeing it lower than that in some really high performing areas with some builders.

And then obviously this, this is just an aggregate average. it’s been interesting. So we saw a big free-fall drop, once it became a reality for the rest of the country, because. Travel industries, things like that. They were all pulling back on their ad spend. So for those of us that stayed in the game, we were able to really take advantage of some savings either.

Spend less money for similar results, spend the same amount of money for better results, or sometimes increase your spend and just double down and not literally double down, but you know what I mean, get in there and [00:06:00] actually, put your, you know, put the, put your foot on the gas. So on April 13th we saw low of $7 and 9 cents CPM.

That was kind of the low point during COVID. But what was really interesting is we saw another low drop, right around the peak of the protests. So we saw like I’m showing June 2nd is the date on my chart. We got down to a $5 and 38 seat CPM. So it’s spike back up. Now it’s kind of settled back in, but ads are still on sale.

So. Headlines new home sales jumped 13.8% in June existing homes, sales surge, nearly 21% in June a U S new home sales Shaun in June business activity picks up, traffic all time highs, organic search, all time highs, ads on social media and other places. Great buys. If you can take advantage of it. Right.

And I circled back around with Admiral Akbar from star Wars, Akhbar Akbar. However we want to say it. It’s a trap. [00:07:00] What do I mean by it’s a trap. Don’t lull yourself into thinking that this is easy. This is when bad habits start to form, right? This is where we really, really want to focus in what I used to call our method.

Right? When a previous life, as a builder. Is our method, right? That’s what we always focused on. We knew we didn’t as much focus on where we were sales wise. We always focused on the method, the process, because if those things are on point, then the sales are going to be ancillary benefits of making sure that your method, your processes, your systems are all on point.

All right. So. This is where you can start doing kind of any activity creates a positive result. And some of you might be thinking well, in my market, it’s tougher in my market. It’s not that I get it right. Like every market is totally different. I’m not [00:08:00] painting the United States with a brush here with one singular brush stroke, but looking at the headlines, right.

Looking at the aggregate numbers. It’s crazy busy. It’s crazy busy. It’s why we haven’t even had we, we had the, we’ve been spotty on our podcasts because we’ve been crazy busy helping builders and also just kind of taken a break from it a little bit because we were a really hot and heavy two or three episodes a week during COVID trying to make sure that we, not that we’re out of COVID, but during the peak scare of COVID, making sure that we were trying to provide as much information in real time.

As we possibly could to you guys, but. Keep your eyes on the ball, right? Like the ball is our method. The ball is our process. Don’t get lulled into, you know, the good results that you’re seeing. There is meat on the bone. We’re leaving money on the table. I assure you. Most of our sales teams cannot keep up with the interest level with the [00:09:00] traffic they’re getting, we want to stay focused on the process, stay focused on the followup activity, stay focused to make sure we’re not that we’re not cherry picking deals, cherry picking, buyers, because one’s easier than the other.

Here’s the other thing. I’m guys I’m telling you I’m so new construction has always been really plan B right to the buyer. But if you look at it from a nation perspective, a national perspective, new construction gets about 10% of the market share that’s plan B. Okay. And so what we saw was a suppression of inventory in an already tight inventory market.

And so we saw this man dash for new construction because that was playing B, there was no other option. Buyers are taking their homes off the market. They didn’t want people walking through their houses. They weren’t putting their homes back on them, on the market at all. So on top of a strained and constrained inventory, people started pulling homes off the market and [00:10:00] not putting homes on the market causing even more strained inventory, which then was like, That crazy nation when it comes to home builders.

Now we’ve got builders that are, that are running out of inventory that are, you know, we’re like, we gotta focus on presales. We’ve got to get, build sold. We’ll be starting specs and builds at the same time. Like we’ve got to replenish our inventory out there, but. Existing homes are going to start coming back on the market.

They are already, there are people who are going, okay, this isn’t as scary as I thought it was going to be, or I’m okay with taking the risk of getting, you know, it’s going to be okay if someone tours my home, if I’m not here, because the reality is if it’s in the room, right location, and it’s priced halfway decent, you know, and halfway decent sometimes means 20 or $30,000 over list.

guys, I’m telling you. New home. The existing inventory market is going to start coming back and people are going to go back reverting to plan a, so new homes are going to continue to be [00:11:00] playing B so we could see a little bit of softening in the demand for new construction and that it could be part of new construction, home builder numbers, kind of settling back in off of their all time, like crazy highs that we were talking about before.

So. Don’t lose sight of that. Don’t lose sight of your processes. Don’t lose sight of your method and don’t take your foot off. The gas is the time to evaluate your marketing. Don’t feel like you can totally do it. You should just ease up and coast in. I’m telling you, make, you know, the old saying, make hay while the sun shine and we need to make hay.

don’t take your foot off the gas and don’t fall into the trap of. The results that we’re seeing lawless into this sense of security? Not that we shouldn’t feel secure because we should, but this false sense of security that deals are just, you know, we just call them flopping in the boat, right. Deals just flop it in the boat with no effort.

You’re not even fishing. Fish are just jumping out of the water, straight into the boat. [00:12:00] And we don’t want to lose sight that there, or get lulled into that false sense of security because that’s happening and it’s where bad habits form. So. I’m going to leave you with this. It’s a trap. Make sure your methods are right.

If your methods are right, the results, the sales will be ancillary effects of where you are, right. Of, of the focus of the process, the focus of the method. So don’t forget. Where we’re at, it’s a trap focus on the process. Hope you guys have a great week. Reach out if you need anything, or if we can be of any help, talk to you soon.

Have a great day.