The skyrocketing new home sales of 2021 and 2022 are now post-season news as the home builder industry faces increased competition, with two-thirds (66%) of 2023 buyers waiting for mortgage rates to drop before home shopping, according to an April survey by U.S. News. No longer able to sit back and take orders, leading home builders and developers put a renewed emphasis on their sales and marketing efforts in 2023, with a particular focus on how to be more effective and efficient while generating the highest quality leads.

Seeing an increasing need from current and new clients, SmartTouch® Interactive stepped up to the plate to help home builders and developers modernize their home shopping experiences and optimize their sales and marketing tech stacks to meet today’s changing market demands.

SmartTouch® Interactive: The Solution for Home Builders

As the only CRM and marketing automation solution designed explicitly with workflows and user experiences for home builders and real estate developer sales and marketing teams, the award-winning SmartTouch® NexGen is the go-to marketing technology solution for many of the industry’s leading organizations in the Americas.

Continuously focused on achieving exceptional results, SmartTouch® Interactive is adept at helping its clients pivot to address new sales and marketing challenges. Leveraging the latest technology, including AI, data analytics, and key prop tech partners, SmartTouch recently made available several platform enhancements and more interoperability that further optimizes home builder sales and marketing processes to make it even easier builder teams to generate, track, and manage leads.

The most recent NexGen version features robust data visualization and an impressive user experience that simplifies the home sales process to convert home shoppers into buyers, faster than ever before.

“SmartTouch® is dedicated to making the jobs of real estate developer and home builder marketers easier with their comprehensive NexGen platform,” commented Sara Carbonell, Director of Marketing, Crown Community. “As a leading real estate developer, we are committed to providing a technology-driven experience that empowers both our company, our home builders, and our home buyers with a modern buying experience. The latest release of features and partner integrations for NexGen demonstrates the keen insight that SmartTouch® has into what our sales and marketing teams need, from automation to data and measurement and reporting. SmartTouch® has proven again and again to be an exceptional partner, both as our technology provider and our marketing agency.”

Client Success Stories

SmartTouch clients are achieving exemplary results and winning more new home sales with the help of the SmartTouch® NexGen platform and integration partners. The following are just a few of the many recent success stories.

Blackburn Homes

A new home builder in Austin, TX and Oxford, MS, wanted to automate the capture and recording of onsite visits at their model and spec homes as well as offer self-service tours. To enable these new capabilities, the Blackburn sales and marketing team turned to SmartTouch® for their QR Code solution, digital marketing expertise, and technology partner, Utour® to launch SmartConnect self-guided tours.

Blackburn Homes is now automating the capture of home buyer or realtor contact information and recording a completed self-guided tour. Visitors simply fill out a registration card on their phone and are automatically added to an onsite tour drip marketing campaign. Since launching the solutions and simplifying the home tour process, 30% of Blackburn Homes’ traffic utilizes QR codes to register, and 20% of shoppers opt for self-guided tours, freeing up the sales team to focus more on closing new home sales.

Amblebrook

The exciting Gettysburg, PA, 55+ Lifestyle community, had a unique sales challenge. Crown Communities, the master plan community developer, needed to integrate engaging home buyers into the sales cycle by scheduling onsite lifestyle sales appointments before they meet with the home builders. And subsequently needed to automate builder notifications to let them know when a buyer interested in their product surpasses a set lead score and is ready to meet with them directly.

SmartTouch® created workflows and reports that automated the timely notifications and provided greater transparency to their builders, helping Amblebrook to align the builders with the onsite lifestyle sales team. The solutions directly contributed to significant year-over-year improvements in sales volume and conversions since adopting the NexGen platform in 2021.

Wolf Ranch

Wolf Ranch, A Hillwood Communities development and highly sought-after Georgetown, TX community, Pomona, a Hillwood Communities lifestyle community in Manvel, TX, and Veramendi, an ASA Properties Hill Country master-planned community in New Braunfels, TX, sought to integrate their lot administration systems and mapping/inventory with their developer website and NexGen CRM. To facilitate a seamless first-time home shopping experience that would allow the buyer to search and view inventory without having to leave the community web property, each of the communities implemented Cecilian integrated with SmartTouch® to offer the best of breed property technology to manage inventory, lead campaign, and home buyer info all in one place.

Leveraging the integration with SmartTouch® NexGen, both communities can deliver lead nurturing campaigns via email and text messages based on real-time home buyer insights from the Cecilian XO technology while generating alerts and notifications to the builder sales team to let them know when a home buyer is ready to buy. All leads including those generated from searching inventory on the website are available in NexGen CRM, and communications are completed in real-time. They can also provide marketing reports that include matchbacks and buyer data through shared data with both platforms. To date, 20% of home buyers that pre-register on their websites inquire about a new home by searching the Cecilian map web app providing greater buyer insights to the developer and builders.

National Homes

An award-winning builder in Toronto, CA, and Ballantry Homes, a leading-edge home builder in Markham, ON, were challenged with rising interest rates and costs that reduced the previously abundant demand and new home sales. To address the downturn, they needed an easy-to-use solution that sales would embrace to manage and follow up with buyers post marketing events. Both builders were prior users of the SmartTouch® NexGen marketing automation solution and have now embraced using NexGen CRM to manage sales for the first time.

By implementing email marketing automation, reengagement scripts, text marketing, QR code marketing, and the NexGen phone app, their sales teams are fully integrated with marketing using a single platform to generate and nurture leads. The sales teams now benefit from taking full advantage of key capabilities such as hot lists to manage priority leads, access to centralized marketing for multiple communities, and the ability to implement automation and workflows that create tags to identify interests and preferences to ensure personalized communications easily. Both builders now have 90% sales participation using the NexGen platform, up from less than 10% participation when the builders only had the marketing solutions deployed.

Condo Advisory Group

An asset management company in San Francisco, CA needed a solution to manage their multifamily assets sales communications for multiple properties and owners, all with different data sets. This required being able to communicate based on property rather than the individuals. The SmartTouch® team custom-configured NexGen CRM to help them manage multi-owner property records, reporting, and communications. The Principals of Condo Advisory Group had prior experience working with SmartTouch® and seamlessly customizing NexGen technologies to address their unique needs. For this project, NexGen was customized, and COA teams onboarded in under 60 days.

SmartTouch’s Comprehensive CRM and Marketing Tools

“With fluctuating market conditions, this is a critical time for home builders and developers to focus on improving their team’s ability to deliver the most advanced home buying experiences that generate, track and convert home buyers into new home sales,” added Robert Cowes, President & CEO, SmartTouch® Interactive. “We have developed the industry’s go to marketing automation and CRM solution for home builders and developers for new home marketing. And our commitment to delivering the most impact and greatest value for our clients is evidenced by their ability to utilize NexGen to continuously evolve and succeed in any market situation.”

Recent Enhancements and Integrations

SmartTouch® offers the industry’s most comprehensive sales CRM and marketing automation solution. It enables home builder and real estate sales teams with the data and reporting critical for sales and marketing teams to understand precisely what is generating the best leads and driving new home sales. To further empower clients with the most advanced sales and marketing tools, SmartTouch® has released a growing list of enhancements and integrations over the past year, including:

• Appointment management with a personal calendar web page that syncs with all calendars, including Outlook, Google, iOS, to set and manage home buyer appointments all in one place.
• QR Code to enable home builder and real estate developers to easily launch unique event-driven QR codes to provide a quick and recognizable way for home buyers to engage.
• Over 20 app integrations (Cecilian, UTour, Zapier, Nylas, Full Contact and more) for optimal interoperability and comprehensive data insights within the platform.
• Seven robust KPI reports and KPI Scoreboard for enhanced detailed reporting to leadership teams.
• BTR lead nurturing with property managers to automate lead management and build stronger prospect relationships that lead to higher rental conversions.
• Sales transactions for a complete home buyer picture within one platform.
• SmartTouch® dashboard customization options to empower sales and marketing teams with the data and insights most critical to their teams.

SmartTouch®’s mission is to provide home builder and developer sales teams with the industry’s most intuitive lead management platform through continuous improvement of the user interface. The new UI launched this past month was a year in the making, and to celebrate the release of the new features and UI, SmartTouch is offering new packages to help home builders and real estate developers quickly ramp up their CRM and marketing automation. Packages include customization and free onboarding for $750/month for three communities (per market), or $1,500/month with unlimited communities (per market). A six-month commitment is required. Visit here to learn more.

About SmartTouch® Interactive

Founded in 2010, SmartTouch® Interactive is the only marketing and full-service agency that offers a proprietary award-winning CRM and marketing agency solution focused on serving home builders and residential developers. We are strictly focused on the home builder and real estate developer industry, and our efforts are consistently effective and efficient, providing campaign and lead management, branding, messaging, sales and marketing communications. Combining our award-winning CRM, SmartTouch® NexGen, supported by marketing automation and our implementation experts, we help you streamline the sales pipeline and dig through backlog while executing data-driven creative strategies that drive lead gen and lead nurture that convert more home buyers into sales.