12 Implementation Considerations for Buy Now

By Sara Williams – Anewgo

For the first time in history, a custom-designed home has been sold through an online “Buy Now” offer. Harbor Homes rolled out the BUY NOW feature and received their first offer just two days later. Buying new homes online is not a new concept-it’s been done by several home builders to sell their inventory homes. What’s different about Harbor is that this was the first transaction of a custom-designed home online-down to selecting finishes and homesite. “I had a certain house in mind and it meant a lot to me to be able to explore it first. As a buyer it’s nice to be able to play around without feeling any pressure until you’re ready to buy.” -Harbor’s first BUY NOW buyer.

Harbor Homes partnered with Anewgo to make this possible and buyers were able to pick their homesite, personalize a floor plan, select their finishes, sign paperwork and make a deposit on their own time, remotely. The goal of adding a buy now functionality is to remove friction from the buyer’s journey. Ecommerce has changed the way we all do our shopping and the pandemic exacerbated that. By offering tools that allow shoppers to navigate most or all of their sales journey independently, home builders remove obstacles to the sale.

Historically new homes accounted for roughly 9% of all residential real estate purchases, climbing to as high as 15% of the market share in 2021. As high as seventy percent of all home buyers are open to buying new construction, but only a fraction of them do, largely because of how difficult it is to buy new homes compared to used. New homes don’t exist, and most buyers have difficulty visualizing the final product. There are a lot of choices when it comes to finishes and it can be an overwhelming process especially if buyers don’t have access to pricing or can’t imagine how, it will come together.

Harbor Homes is a new kind of a home builder truly committed to making the home buying process easy, affordable, and fun. Located in southeast Wisconsin, the company was founded in 2018, and they built around 160 homes in 2021. Led by President Scott Thistle who is on the mission to offer buyers similar experience to what they expect when shopping for other products online: “I’m trying to get ahead of the market with Harbor, both from a product standpoint and from a customer interface standpoint” Thistle said.

Many question if Buy Now spells the end of a salesperson, but we think it’s a tool which will enable them to do their jobs better. It allows salespeople to meet buyers where they are in the sales process and to engage them on a deeper level, serving as a trusted concierge. “I look at iDesign (BUY NOW) as my sales assistant. It helps the customer upfront and makes the process more efficient.” – Sarah Petushek, New Home Sales Advisor at Harbor Homes.

 If you’re thinking about implementing BUY NOW, here are the important items you need to consider for your business and what you can be doing now:

1. Exterior Renderings in a variety of elevations and colors/schemes.

2. Interactive Floor plans with the ability to add pricing. Buyers will want to see how much structural options cost in the home and how it impacts their payment.

3. Interactive Site Maps with ability to tie in exterior home elevation content and pricing.

4. Visualizers. This can be Matterport tours, 3D virtual walk-through tours, room visualizers with the ability to incorporate pricing.

5. Connecting the dots. If you invest in 1-4 and someone is creating a design on your site, is there a way to save their work? Having a sign-in or the ability to create a digital brochure would be an example of this.

6. Data/Reports on Content: Whatever content and sitemap provider you go with (or platform), be sure you have the shopping data along with your buyer’s data. The data will help you with your buyer’s journey, but it will also help you streamline your offerings, build your next spec, see trends coming, and market research.

7. Whatever you use (platform or proprietary system) should be web-based with the ability to give access to customers or insert in your website and sales center. Synching your website data with your sales center data (visualizations, pricing, etc) is so important.
   
8. Pricing.
   – Where do you store your pricing? (spreadsheets or ERP)
   – Is it formatted in this place the way you want it to transfer to your buyer ( i.e. packages are becoming really popular now).
   -Do all options and homes have pricing?
   -If you have your data in a system, does that system have an API or a way to export it to post somewhere else? If not, this could pose a problem.

9. Did I mention tying everything together? Can your tools bring it all together even if someone does not want to purchase? Shoppers will want to price out homes, compare them, and come back later.

10. Contract – what are you asking your buyers to commit to? Are they reserving a homesite, reserving a home, or buying a home?

11. E-signature. You need to consider an e-signature platform that connects to your pricing and everything that was tied together.

12. Payment. How will you collect and will any part be refundable or non-refundable? What are the real estate laws in your area for payments/deposits for the transaction you are requesting of your buyer?

Builders have no problem selling homes right now without the Buy Now features (it’s 2022 and the market is insane) and we have more leads than we know what to do with. The journey to Buy Now offers a hybrid approach for builders to meet customers where they want to shop and purchase. Will this end the traditional way to sell homes? Not exactly. The new era of selling will transform how builders offer information to their customers, engage and transact. Salespeople will have to adopt new skill sets. The idea of being technology-challenged and a salesperson will not fly in the near future.  I call all of this a journey because pricing, visualization, and design tools are all necessary for this shopping process. If builders do not have these components, they need to start investing in those today if your end goal is the ability to transact online. The Buy Now feature/function is the final piece to the puzzle (along with training your team on how to use the tools and interact with your online shoppers). Our industry is shifting quickly to this new way of doing business, and if your goals are not improving the shopping journey, that needs to come first. I get to have these strategy meetings every day, and my company’s tools take shoppers through the whole shopping process. Now that the final piece to the shopping journey is in place (Buy Now), our builder partners have bigger plans. They are requesting bidding tools, making an offer and so much more. It is an exciting time for the home building industry and technology is at the forefront of all of it. To learn more about Anewgo’s offerings, schedule a call.