Chelsey: [00:00:00] Hi, and welcome to Building Perspective with Group Two. We are here to bring value to you and your team by exploring all things, new home sales and marketing, all from different perspectives. 

Ali: Hi, everyone. Thanks for tuning into building perspective. I’m Ali Quedenfeld, and today I’m with Matt Riley. Really excited to have you on this afternoon, Matt.

Matt: Thanks, Ali. It is always fun to be a guest back on Building Perspective. Always, always fun.

Ali: Well excited, but not so excited to talk about what we’re talking about today, which is just a general market update. And really, you know, we’re seeing 99% of our builders, organic traffic is down. We know the market is not doing as well as it had been the last two years.

We knew this was coming, but it’s here. So ,we wanna talk a little bit about [00:01:00] how you specifically have prepared for the downturn. Some things that you have been doing are doing, and then also things our builders can be doing to prepare now, if they haven’t.

Matt: Sure. I mean, first I’m weird like this. I like to make sure I use my words properly from a, you know, like, so I wouldn’t necessarily call it a, I certainly wouldn’t call it a market downturn.

I think it’s, we’re getting back into some market normalization. You might be able to say like, we’re, that’s splitting hairs, but I, I really think it’s when it, for me, it always comes back to compared to what, right. So yeah, you can say it’s really, really slow compared to the last bonkers crazy two years that we’ve had of people showing up, not even showing up like throwing checks at you and begging to buy homes, like, yeah, like we were, we had nowhere to go, but quote unquote down, but really when you start looking at compared to what, okay.

We’re back to, from a traffic level perspective, we’re back to like 2019 levels. [00:02:00] Like, and to me, that was still a great market. I’ll take 2019. And the reason I say I’ll take that all day long is because I went through the great recession. I was selling houses and I was working at a builder and I, you know, I was doing all of that and it was horrific.

And you had no idea when you were gonna see somebody. And so, but the reality of it is, is, you know, we’re, we’re getting back to somewhat of a normalization in the market. And I think it’s compounded a little bit, I think. We are in our normal seasonality slowdown. I think that it’s schools ended summer vacations are starting.

We didn’t get any of that at all over the past couple years. 

Ali: Yeah. 

Matt:We just blew right through it. So I think we’re starting to see some natural slowdown from that perspective. And we can, maybe we can talk about that a little bit later, but also you’re seeing people kind of pause, right? They’re like, wait a minute. They’re seeing, you know, the interest rates look like a heart monitor up and down. Beep beep beep beep. You know, and so you just don’t know, people are really, I think what they’re [00:03:00] looking for is certainty, right? 

Ali: Mm-hmm.

Matt: I think that it’s just so up and down, they, they don’t know what it is. And I think that there are builders out there not to name any names, but there are certainly builders that are out there that have not given anything a hot minute to even figure out what’s happening because this is predictable.

We, we predicted this, you know, Back at the start of the pandemic, I think right. 30 days in, you know, when we realized it was bonkers crazy. One of the things that I was screaming from the mountaintops right here on Building Perspective was don’t get used to this. This is gonna change, you know, and now here we are, it’s changing.

So I think it’s people are kind of hitting the brakes a little bit because they’re trying to figure out where rates are gonna go. The reality of it is, is the rates of 2% and 3% are gone. I’ve talked to lots of different bankers and they feel like we could actually see a little dip in the rates, but towards the end of the year, based on the performance of the bonds and things like that.

So mortgage rates are like crazy hard to figure out what is [00:04:00] triggering them. There’s so many facets that come into play, but I think that’s what we’re seeing. I think we’re seeing a little bit of seasonality. I think we’re seeing people trying to figure out what’s what and re kind of recalibrate from an affordability perspective where they wanna be. I mean, yeah, I think that. You know, our inventory levels have been so low. And I think I saw a statistic a while back, but it was something, don’t quote me on the exact percentage, but let’s just say it’s 70% of Americans that were homeowners had an interest rate lower than 4%. 

Ali: Wow. 

Matt: Right. And so if you think about that when rates have essentially doubled, someone’s not typically gonna just sell their home and abandon their sub 4% interest rate and go buy a much more expensive home, unless they have to, I wanna talk a little bit about conversions and stuff and a little bit, but like that’s where the traffic that you’ve got, the people that you’re talking to, is, they are absolute buyers because they have to [00:05:00] move. They’ve had a life changing event. They got married, they got divorced, they had kids, they had kids move out. They had, you know, they have an elderly parent or, or family member moving in with them or one moving out or what, whatever it is, all of those life changing events that cause people to buy and sell are still gonna happen and people are still gonna move now, depending on your area, on what type of job growth that your area and your market has. I think that that’s gonna be a, a, another kind of driving factor of what type of activity you’re gonna see. Right. I mean, if you’re in the way up in the Northeast and you’re losing population because people are going south, so that’s a different, if you’re in Raleigh, like me, people are still moving.

Ali: Right. It’s looking vastly different from one market to the next. With Raleigh, you know, the Dallas Fort Worth market, Orlando, we’re seeing, you know, still a lot of activity there obviously, but I think the other thing that, [00:06:00] you know, we’ve been talking about is the builders who have inventory are in a much better position than those that don’t.

So, you know, what does that mean now, as we have OSCs who are saying, I don’t have any leads coming in, I don’t have any leads coming in. We’re kind of having to go back to the basics of, well, you know, we kind of gotta start with some sales training or go back and look at some people who have been on our list for a couple months now and start cold calling again.

Matt: So, yeah, that’s what I was saying. And before I went off on my rant was we talked about like, don’t lose sight of the basics. I don’t know how many podcast episodes, how many webinars, like, I felt like I was doing three a week when COVID first hit. Cause we didn’t know what to expect. And then when it was going crazy, it was like, don’t lose sight of the basics. Stay on with your sales people, make sure that we’re following the process with your OSCs. Like, all of this kind of stuff. And I gotta tell you, not many people listened because I’m out driving around [00:07:00] trying to shop competition as I’m getting product together for a new neighborhood, and sales people aren’t in their models. Yeah. Like I can’t even go visit neighborhoods and go talk to people because they’re not literally not at work. Right. I was telling somebody else this talking about, oh my traffic’s down, you know, or walk-in traffic’s way off. And I’m like, well, are your people in the models? You know, and they’re like, oh, that’s really good point.

You know, like, I don’t believe your traffic number. I don’t believe what you’re telling me because I’m driving around and I’m literally seeing nobody’s at work. Right. So first off, open your models, get back to seven, you know, being open seven days a week during normal normal hours. And then we’ll talk about, is traffic actually off.

Ali: Right. I mean, we have builders who let go of sales people who cut down their team, you know, in half during all of this and might be time to staff up again.

Matt: Yeah. Back to the basics is the number one fundamental because we’ve lost that [00:08:00] muscle memory of how to do it. And like I said, people, not everybody, but people aren’t even at work, you know, because they were on allotment from a sales perspective and they could sell, you know, seven houses a month in a neighborhood. Well, they were selling their seven houses on the first or the second day of the month. And so it’s like, well, sales people were punching out.

They even been given a presentation in two years. Right. ‘They’ is a really broad audience, obviously. Yes, there are superstars that are out there doing it, but for the most part. And had to even give a, a presentation. Right.

Ali: Well, and the other piece of that, like a lot of that sales presentation and just the sales process in general, you know, during COVID especially switched over to how can we automate this. How can we, you know, Make it so that people can self tour homes and they don’t need to talk to a salesperson or, you know, they can use our online chat and not interact with a real human being on the other end. Yeah. What are your [00:09:00] thoughts on that now?

Matt: We were at one point, I mean, we were literally trying to figure out how to turn down the SP of leads.

I remember having conversations with builders and we were like, how do we literally not get as many leads? And so we were going through websites and we were saying, okay, we’re not gonna display a phone number or contact us button on the home page, or like you have to get deep into the site before you can even figure out how to contact us because the fire hose was open so wide.

So first off, I think we gotta go back and we, again, go back to the basic and say, have we turned all those methods back on yet? You know, like we turned off chat, turn chat back on. All the things that we were intentionally trying to dial back traffic, we’ve gotta like, turn those back up, turn those back on.

And I would say, we’ve gotta make sure that we do that before we spend anybody spends another nickel and additional dollars [00:10:00] actually turn on the, the stuff that you turned off. Right. From a lead capture perspective, it should be all about conversions and not a focus on the actual traffic number itself.Right. Cause if we’re, if we’ve got a ton of website traffic, and it’s not converting, it doesn’t matter. Right. If you’re getting your conversions, web to lead, and then you’ve got the right people in place and you can get those conversions from lead to appointment and let your sales people then actually run the play. Right. And then you, so it’s all about that conversion. It’s really about the end of it from converting, from appointment to sale. But if you get back to the basics and focusing on what those percentages are from conversion to lead. Lead to appointment, appointment to sale. That should be our real focus because before we had the reason I was going down, that path is.

We were trying to dial back leads and we literally couldn’t [00:11:00] manage the, the inputs, but we were literally trying to dial that back. Now we’ve gotta figure out. So we took off chats, we introduced chat bots. A lot of people put in chat bots. We said, you know, go tour these homes all on your own. You know, we tried to put as much follow up activity on autopilot as we could, because we literally couldn’t get to everyone.

I actually think now it’s time to start going back and turn all that. Right. It’s actually to pull back on the automation and more into personal.

Ali: Totally right. And to your point, you know, we’re focusing on leads and getting the web traffic that we do have to convert obviously is first and foremost, but then, you know, we’re also running into right now, filters just need to also take a look at their budgets that were scaled back during COVID and reintroduce some of that spend that we had taken away whether or not it was because we were trying to slow down leads or because we didn’t need to spend the money. But you know, now we’re seeing more advertisers coming back [00:12:00] into play on Google, Facebook, no matter what it is. 

Matt:Sure. Just cuz they’re all kind of in the same boat now.

Ali: So now we’re competing for those impressions and that impression share with more advertisers and needing to up that budget to get in front of the same amount of people.

Matt: So yeah, I think, you know, Yes, we dialed back our spend. I mean, I was spending almost no money on advertising. I mean, almost none. And I was spending all my time and energy and effort from a marketing perspective and creating content, you know, launching a new website.

I was pushing out multiple blogs a week, creating video tours, pictures. So like now, as we pretty much have built almost everything one time and coming around, obviously with other elevation, I’m still, you know, getting all that stuff furnished and exterior showing all the different exteriors. And so we’re, you know, all of that is kind of, it’s never done because you’re always gonna have something that changes or updates, but for the most part, I’ve got a good, [00:13:00] solid amount of content.

And so I like moved all the money from an advertising perspective and put it into actual content creation and from an SEO and blog article creation, right. And content videos and photos and all those things. But now we do have to start putting money into actual ad spend, right. Like we’ve gotta get there, but we have to make sure we go back and, and reimplement the things that we dialed back. One of my favorite sayings is we’ve gotta collectively get our poop in a group.

And so we gotta make sure, because you don’t wanna dial up the spend if your site isn’t set up to convert. Right. So like we’ve gotta get the poop in a group before we can actually, well, before we should spend more money before we should spend more money and tell, trying to drive more traffic and get more leads.

Ali: Absolutely.

Matt: You’re not gonna recover from poop in group.

Ali: I’ve heard the poop in the group from you before. I never recover each time, but anyway. So we’ve got our conversions down, we gotta get our traffic back up more ad [00:14:00] spend. You mentioned content, obviously we don’t wanna lose that. So, you know, maybe there are things that can be done that do not require as much spend in creating content.

Hopefully most of our builders have kind of gotten to that groove of, you know, gathering more photos and videos and making that a part of their regular marketing plan and marketing schedule throughout the month.

Matt: As much as everybody in this audience knows that’s listened that knows me. And that’s listened to this podcast for the past few years.

I’m I like I’m all about the numbers, right? I’m all about analytics. I’m all about looking at what the data’s telling us to do and making smart decisions. But what’s been really interesting for me is the past year, year let’s see we, it was March of last year when I, when we started, we pulled our first permit in July. So let’s just call it a year and a half. I really haven’t been paying attention to the analytics because the way that the company’s being doing business right now, there’s been no, and there’s been no [00:15:00] pre-sale, it’s been spec only. We’ve been releasing in block homes and blocks, you know, it’s like two to four at a time.

They sell instantly, you know? And so we’ve got these gaps where things are not on the market. And so I haven’t really been paying much attention to the analytics. I know exactly where traffic’s coming from. I didn’t need Google to tell me because I was only, I wasn’t hardly spending any money. I knew where it was coming from.

I say that because I was just looking at it more as I was just collecting information. I’m like, I don’t care. I’m not gonna like pull reports on it right now. Like I’m just gathering information. I’m just letting data build up. So then when I need to start looking at things, I can actually start, I can figure out if there’s a problem.

And so I was talking to somebody the other day. Couple people here in this market, in the Raleigh market. And they were talking about how their web traffic’s down, leads are down. And I was like, oh, you know, and I was on the phone with ’em and I said, well, look, honestly, I haven’t even, they were asking about mine.

It’s like, honestly, I haven’t looked, I haven’t, I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t looked, which is [00:16:00] shocking. I haven’t looked, I looked at months. Yeah. And so I was like, all right, well, lemme pull it. I was looking at month over month. This was yesterday. I was looking at 30 days pre you know, the, the past 30 days ending yesterday.

And then I was comparing it to the previous 30 days. So a true 30 day, over 30 day, my web traffic was up 150% and I had no idea. And I’m like, oh, that’s cool. You know, but the reality is I don’t even care. I still don’t care because all I care about is when I release four homes, I wanna sell those four homes.

That’s all I care about because I can only sell one house to one person. You know, I don’t care that I’m not, I may not get 15 offers on a house anymore because I, oh, I could only sell it to one person anyway. So. I just don’t care right now. It was good to see. And it was good to see that what it was, it was a lot of organic driven traffic because I had some really great performing [00:17:00] blogs that were doing really well and pulling traffic in this doesn’t sound like big numbers, but, you know, in a 30 day timeline for a brand new company, I had like 800 unique visitors to one blog post all organically. There was no money driven behind that at all. And so for me, for a company, my size, it’s gonna do 60 homes this year. That’s a significant amount of traffic coming into an organic blog post. So anyway, I say that because yeah, we do have to dial things up.

Well, we gotta make sure that we can convert because that’s what we really should be focused on is the actual conversion and not get so wrapped up in how I’m not, I’m not seeing 14 people on one single house. Like it, it doesn’t matter at the end of the day.

Ali: Are you saying don’t get so caught up in the analytics? Just to be clear, is that what you’re saying?

Matt: Well, yes and no. The reason I’m saying I wasn’t getting caught up in the analytics is because I had such a new company. I didn’t have all this historic data. And the way that we were doing business was different. But what I’m [00:18:00] saying is don’t freak out because you don’t have 14 offers on a house.

You can only sell one time anyway. Right. And I think that’s a lot of builders right now who switched to that spec only model in the last, you know, two and a half years who are in the same kind of situation as you are as a newer builder, where they have a certain number of home sites that they, and well, really inventory that they can release at any given time.

And that’s, that’s it right now. They’re not taking presales. They’re not doing that because all of the other issues that are going on. So you have a certain number of homes to sell in the month, and that’s it. 

Ali: Yeah, absolutely. 

Matt: Anyway, but I think that it was just an interesting take, you know, like I said, people were saying their web traffic was down. I felt that was interesting. It was anecdotal information, right. It was like, all right, my focus over the past year and a half year has been really, I’ve gotta create organic and organic demand. People have to figure out who we are and where we are [00:19:00] because we’re brand spanking new. And so those efforts have really been focused, super heavily on SEO and content creation.

And the start to see that is starting to come to, to fruition is other people are starting to see traffic slow down because they weren’t as focused on those things. Right. So anyway, it was just anecdotal. There’s not like this data point where it’s like, aha, give everybody go do this. But it was, it was just an, an interesting talking point.

Ali: So speaking of things, people maybe weren’t doing during the last couple years should be doing now, realtor relations, everyone’s favorite topic,

Matt: If you didn’t burn those bridges. I hope.

Ali: Yeah, exactly.

Matt: There’s some giant builders out there that are throwing out incentives already. Like, big incentives on rate locks. They’re already starting to like, try to throw extra bonuses at realtors or bring their commission levels back to what they were before they cut them. You know? So I certainly realtor relations, dust that [00:20:00] off. We’re getting back to normal. That’s really like we’re getting back to normal. We’ve gotta get back to the basics of what we do, what we know we’re supposed to be doing every day, every week, every month. Right. And realtors are great partners. Even during this craziness, I never cut a single realtor’s commission. I never dropped their percentages. I was out in realtor offices, given presentations, having coffee with brokers, you know, like trying to create again, awareness around the new brand and was able to generate some great relationships in a time where realtors were felt like they were being kicked to the curb by a lot of other builders. Right. And hopefully that’ll pay dividends. 

Ali: Yeah. Over, over time. And you know, that was in most markets, a lot of the nationals cutting commissions completely. So that’s a great point. 

And then the other piece I wanna talk about, so working with preferred lenders, so that’s something, obviously right now we talked a little bit about rates and kind of what’s happening with interest rates, but how [00:21:00] can builders partner with their lenders and use that as a benefit they can offer to their buyers?

Matt: Yeah. I mean, obviously the name of the game right now, or I should say the, the big pain point is interest rates, right? So when you’re partnering, if, if you have the ability to partner with lenders, or if you have a joint venture, if you’re a private company and you have your own mortgage company, or you’re a Lennar or a Pulte, or, you know, fill in the blank publicly traded company that has their own mortgage company, they’re doing that. I mean, I got an email today. Lennar. They’re talking about doing buy downs and arms and mm-hmm, all, all kinds of stuff.

Ali: I’ve seen a couple of those Taylor Morrison,

Matt: Take advantage of a seven, six arm of a 4.625 interest rate with Lennar mortgage. So, I mean, obviously a hot button is, is interest rates. I have never seen before buyers.

Mortgage companies as much as they’re shopping mortgage companies right now. I mean, I’ve seen my own buyers shop, like [00:22:00] bouncing around to three or four different companies. And I finally was like, you gotta stop. Like, you’re not, you know, we can’t do this two weeks prior to closing. Right. Anyway, but those partnerships come into play.

But it, I think when it really comes down to it, it comes down to what is a customer looking for? They’re looking for certainty, right? And, but if I’ve got a better house and the interest, rate’s 5.4 or whatever, you know, whatever, compared to a 4.8 arm, they’re gonna pick the better house. And you know, they’re gonna pick the person that makes them feel like you’re solving their problem.

People don’t buy an interest rate. They buy payment. You know, again, yes. I know that an interest rate directly affects the payment. I know what I just said there, but when you do the math on that and you show ’em what the, what the actual Delta is between those two, it’s not that much. And so that’s, if you’re, if you’re in a position where.

You can’t pay to buy down the rate. [00:23:00] I can’t pay to buy down the rate. I’m not gonna pay to buy down the rate. I’m just not gonna do it because it just costs too much. Unless you get into a scenario where you’re gonna do it for a two, one buy down or a three, one arm or a six year arm or whatever it is, you know?

If you sell the difference. If you sell the Delta in the payments, especially if you’ve got a better product. If you’re EV all things being equal, you got a better house. You got a better demo. You can show why your home is better. We get back into actual presentation, right? Just put all coming back to that.

If you put it, if you just put apples to apples. If you just look at two things on paper and people we used to ask like back in the day, can I get your price sheets? It’s like, no, I don’t give out price sheets. Why? Well, because if you just look at my price on paper and you look at. This builder down the street on paper.

They beat me price per square foot, but you don’t know on paper that my house is better. You have to walk the house, you have to experience the house to understand that it’s better. And I think when someone is making the biggest purchase of their [00:24:00] life, they will pay more within their budget. You’re not gonna, like, you’re not gonna get somebody to, they can’t, they can’t afford it.

They can’t afford it, but they will pay more. If you show them why to pay more. And that comes down to quality and that comes down to your presentation. It’s getting back to the basics of differential demonstration, you know? Right. I’m I’m in the process. I’m, I’m getting ready to start hiring. Some sales people.

And I met with somebody yesterday for coffee, just to chat. And we were talking about demo. Cause I wanna know, like I’m terrified right now to hire salesperson. And the reason is, is because I’m driving around and I’m seeing people aren’t at work. You know, and I’m terrified that someone is gonna come in and not wanna work because they haven’t had to show up to work for two years.

And so I’m like, I wanna know, like what’s demonstration mean. Do you tell me what it means before I tell you what I think it means, right? Tell me what it means and because the we’ve gotta be on the same page of differential demonstration, because I can tell you with certainty even during. [00:25:00] The craziness, you know, when you have no product to show and no pictures to show, and you’ve got nothing to, nothing for anybody to see, like, I got nothing to show you, but it’s beautiful.

You know, demonstration with houses that are just started framing and your brain spanking new, no one knows who you are. They’ve never, they, they could have, they’ve never walked in one of your homes because you’ve never walked in one of your homes. You know, being able to sell somebody. Is truly differential demonstration, not walking in the kitchen and being like, this is the kitchen.

Well, no kidding. There’s the kitchen sink. You know, there’s the appliances. I could have figured that out. And so it all comes back around to the basics of demonstration, showing up to work, following the process, staying disciplined, doing the things that you know, you need to be doing and focus on the conversion and not just how many people you get in front.

Ali: Right. And another piece of that, you know, talking about certainty, you know, how can we get back to positioning the benefits of new construction and, and what [00:26:00] that means in, you know, a time again, where we’re back to more uncertainty this time in terms of rates and yeah, and what’s gonna happen with the economy and things like that, getting that built into the demonstration as well, and really focusing on how new construction can give you that certainty and peace of mind that you don’t have with resale.

Matt: This is a really interesting, and this ties back into what I was saying earlier about roughly 70%. U.S. homeowners have a sub 4% interest rate. Maybe it’s sub four and a quarter something, but it’s really close. Right? The good news for us is new construction. We may be one of the, the, the only options.

For someone to purchase. Yeah. You think about, unless they have to move, are you bailing on your 3% interest rate to cause just cuz you want a new house? Not because you need one. Right? But because you want one probably not. And I think that’s gonna keep inventory levels suppressed and as new construction, we’re the ones that can [00:27:00] generate and create inventory.

You know, we can literally create inventory. Nothingness versus someone who’s in an existing home has to, has to have to move to create that inventory unit to hit the market right now, the other good news is people are flush with equity cash, right? So if we do see a little bit of dip in rates, people could certainly wanna cash out, you know, and, and, and hit the register for what they, what they’ve ran up from an equity perspective and appreciation over the past few.

But I, I think that as new construction, we have a little leg up on the game that we may be the majority of option of the options for people wanting to buy a home. Which means it’s gonna, it is gonna be more competitive and a new from a builder to builder perspective, which is why we have to get really, really good.

Get back to being really, really good at the basics. Right. Totally agree. It all, for me, it always circles back around to the basics.

Ali: Yeah. I mean all of this, really. And again, like we talked about this, I know [00:28:00] you and I even sat down the beginning of COVID and, and talked about this, how we’re gonna be having these conversations.

We don’t know when exactly of, you know, making sure. People don’t forget how to sell and what they need to do to stay in front of people. And we’re here. So the other piece, I wanna talk about automation. We touched on this a little bit too, but a lot of builders have gone to things like self tours, you know, setting up.

Different like automated chat programs and emails and things like that. What’s a good indication that, you know, it’s time to retire some of those things or lessen some of those things and kind of bring back that human element?

Matt: I think it’s now. So I don’t think self touring is gonna go away and it shouldn’t go away. You know, like if you’ve got a completed inventory home, I think that is the seamless. If someone wants to go see a house, I think we should let, ’em go. You know, let ’em go see a house, right. You, you can set it up to get all the notifications. So, you know, someone’s going, if you wanna make sure your [00:29:00] salesperson’s there, you can do that.

But if we wanna make it really, really easy for people to see a home, if you have a home that’s finished that you can actually have self touring with, you know, that’s key. But so I think. The self tour, the, you know, the intern nows, the U tours of the world, the rentees the, you know, I think there’s a couple more that are out there that I’m forgetting, but you know, those are still there and they should there, I think those are gonna be a viable part of our day to day business.

I don’t have any of those set up right now because I don’t have any finished inventory and I haven’t now I’m, I’ve got the hardware. Built into the houses, the locks that are coming standard, the, you know, I’ve got the stuff. So if I need to turn on self touring, all I have to literally do is go call one of these companies and say, I’m ready to roll.

I need to turn it on because I’ve got the stuff in the houses to actually make it happen. I’m. Planned ahead from that perspective with the kind of our smart homes and the included features that we do. And we made sure that the hardware that we put in the houses are compatible with [00:30:00] these self touring systems.

So I don’t have any, I don’t really, all I have is a really turn on a switch to get that process started. But if you have inventory homes that self touring makes sense to do absolutely, that’s still gonna be a part of our business. I think there’s still a little bit of automation from a. Someone hits the website.

They, you know, they, they convert, they get an automated email. They, you can still insert a couple of automated email steps in there, but that should not take place of the normal follow up process that an OSC or whomever’s handling those web leads are doing it should not take the place. It should be the instant. Thanks for your submission confirmation. Maybe a follow. If, if the salesperson hasn’t been able to get ahold of them immediately, maybe there’s another one or two. I I’ve got some steps set up in my follow up that are automated, but that it’s a supplement to, you know, talking to a, you know, as a human being, talking to buyers and it can be turned off [00:31:00] instantly. When you, if you do get a hold of somebody, you’re like, oh, I don’t need that on automated. I don’t need that next quick little touch point to go out.

Ali: Yeah. And that’s a good point because I do think a lot of builders have relied more heavily than they would have post 2020 on those automated emails. So really kind of taking a look at your overall follow up process and seeing, okay, where do I need to go back and insert some more, you know, follow up directly from an OSC or from a sales person is a great next step.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. I think for the most part, we’ve gotta get back engaged with personalization and less reliant on automation as the only answer. I think there’s always an element of some form of automation that helps our people, but it should not be what is relied on to do our jobs for us.

Ali: Absolutely.

All right. Well, thanks Matt, for kind of giving us some of your insight here. I think moral of the story is get your poop in a group here. 

Matt: And is that our title? Get your poop in a group. 

Ali: That’s our [00:32:00] title for the episode. But really like getting back to the basics, like we said, that that’s the main thing, taking a look at your overall process and what you have going on from a content standpoint and making sure that you’re checking all those boxes is more important now than ever.

Matt: So focus on the conversion, get your poop in a group so you can convert and then start turning your, get, pulling that money that you saved, getting it out there, unless you’re in Raleigh, then you can just like, forget it, then. 

Ali: It’s fine. Forget it. 

Matt: But yeah. So other than that, that’s it. I think instead it back to the future, it’s back to the basics.

Ali: Absolutely. All right. Well, thanks, Matt. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and we’ll talk to you soon.

Matt: Absolutely. Thanks, Ali. Bye.[00:33:00]