Transcript
Dean Wehrli:
Welcome to New Home Insights. The John Burns Real Estate Consultant Podcast about the US housing market. I’m your host Dean Wehrli. Today, we are going to continue our ongoing examination of all things COVID-19 related, but expand that a bit by talking about both the present and the future. We’re going to have our guest make a … take a take on what’s going to happen in the near term. Specifically, we’re going to talk about how to sell homes in a COVID impacted world, how home selling has changed or is changing, and then we’ll end it with which of those changes might have some stickiness and be around with us for a little while. To help with that, we have Jim Van Kirk of Smith Douglas Homes. Those are very, very successful builder that is active in the Southeast. I believe in five markets in the Southeast. Jim, why don’t you go ahead and tell the listeners a little bit about yourself and about Smith Douglas before we get started?
Jim Van Kirk:
Sure. Dean, thank you. I’m glad to be here. I appreciate you having me on as a guest. Smith Douglas Homes, you’re correct. We operate in five Southeast markets. We’re headquartered here in Atlanta, but we also build in Raleigh, Charlotte, Nashville and Birmingham. We are a regional builder of a size of about 1,500 closings last year. That put us at number 40 on the builder 100 list. And this year we look to be ready to close about 1,700 homes. So a nice … another year of growth on top of previous years of growth. I’ve been in the home building industry now for 14 years and have spent the last almost four years here at Smith Douglas.
Jim Van Kirk:
We’re a pretty affordable builder. Just to put it into perspective for you and the listeners, about 20% of the homes we sold last year were in the one hundreds, believe it or not. Another 65% were in the two hundreds. And that leaves only 15% that were $300,000 and above. And I can tell you from memory, we only sold three homes last year that were over $400,000. So that’s Smith Douglas in a nutshell.
Dean Wehrli:
Wow. Would you say that … I mean, I think I know the answer to this, so you’re pretty much at the entry level in all of the markets you’re in.
Jim Van Kirk:
Yes, we are. But we also have a fair amount of empty nesters who are moving to be closer to their children and grandchildren. So they’re previous homeowners. So when we say entry level, it’s not just first time home buyers that we serve. We have probably, at least a third of our clientele are empty nesters who want to be in the Southeast, closer to their children and grandchildren. They’ve owned homes before, but we have a pretty robust pool of ranch products that they seem to really love. And they don’t mind being in the outskirts of metro areas. So maybe an hour outside of Atlanta is a great place for them to be and still have accessibility to their family members.
Dean Wehrli:
So the bulk of what we’re going to talk about here today with Jim is kind of a best practices, how do you best sell homes in the new home environment in this world where we have shelter in place, or maybe the just barely lifted shelter in place, and it’s still, there still are significant restrictions everywhere, even in places like Georgia and Texas. Let’s start with that. Let’s start with, you guys have been at the forefront of allowing potential buyers to build their own home online. So, that’s something you’ve been doing pre COVID for sure. Where they can go in, they can customize, they can really click the mouse and see what their new home is going to look like. How does that work? First. And has that helped you a lot lately? Has it been heightened? How’s that going so far in this more COVID world?
Jim Van Kirk:
Yeah, absolutely. We’re certainly not the biggest builder out there, but I really do think that we have one of the best online shopping tools around. Years ago, well, for years I would say, home builder website research has always shown that customers really want what they can already get when they buy a new car. They want to go online and they want to build a home. They want to see what it’s going to look like. They want to see what their choices are. So you wouldn’t believe this, but just probably say three, four years ago, we were in the mode of using one color rendering of a home, and then showing people two dimensional black and white line drawings, almost little thumbnails, of the other elevations that were available to them.
Jim Van Kirk:
And we thought, “How are they picking the exterior of their home from these little thumbnails that you could barely see distinctions within?” So I was out in Raleigh and visiting our market out there and came to meet John Lee, who’s the CEO of Rendering House in Holly Springs, North Carolina. And we were talking about expanding our renderings and John’s advice was, “Look, if you’re going to do anything, you need to digitize them. They have to be in a digital format.”
Jim Van Kirk:
And so we partnered with them not long after that and put our entire plan lineup into their app. And so we have our home personalization app that really does allow people to go into any community of their liking, choose from the plans that we offer in that community. They can pick their structural options, which are plentiful. We have a whole bunch of structural options that they can choose to reconfigure their home. And then I think the most fun part of that aspect is then trying on all the different color packages and the brick and stone packages that we offer and really seeing your home come to life visually. And then doing all kinds of fun things with that, sending it to a friend or a spouse or a family member, posting it to your social media.
Jim Van Kirk:
And when we first launched this back in February of 2018, we knew we were onto something, because it didn’t take long. I mean, it was a matter of days. And we had our first customer walk into the door of one of our sale centers, and he had his printout of the home that he built online at home. We’d never seen him before. He’d never come in. And he said, “This is the home I built online. I want a contract for it.” And he contracted for it right on the spot. And then the other thing we just added most recently, this was in February. So two years after we launched this thing, we’ve enhanced it with the 2.0 version of our personalization app. And it’s our real time site maps. Interactive site maps have been available for years. But I think the difference here is that we show them characteristics of the site, but we also show them inventory homes, where they’re positioned in the community and then which homes they can build on the remaining home sites that are available for a presale.
Jim Van Kirk:
And that’s been a great enhancement too, you can really get a sense of the community from looking at these and they update twice a day. So we’re never kind of at risk of promising something to somebody that they can’t get. And that’s just been a really exciting addition to our online shopping tools. And they really couldn’t have come at a better time, because over the last six weeks we’ve been monitoring our usage. And just in the last six weeks, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the usage of our home personalization app is up by 40%. So that’s pretty huge.
Dean Wehrli:
Do you get any sense that buyers are looking for that online experience to be more complete and more thorough in this COVID world? Do you have a sense of that?
Jim Van Kirk:
Yes. I would say even pre COVID-19. Like I said, people have told us for years, they want to be able to design their home online. I would love to be able to help them spin it around and see what it looks like from front, back, side. Those tools are available. We haven’t quite gotten there yet. We’re trying to perfect what we do have. But yeah, I think absolutely the demand and the thirst for these types of tools is out there. And the more we can put out there, I think the more qualified the buyers are going to be when they do actually reach out. And we’re finding that with our chat functionality, with our interest list for coming soon communities, we have people who know pretty precisely what they want. And in many cases they’ve already built it for themselves online. And they’re just waiting for the day to open when we can do a presale.
Dean Wehrli:
Another hot topic, we have of course is 3D renderings and Matterport photography. How does that work for you folks? And again, if you can, generalize it as much as you can, how is that truly critical more than ever now than it was before? Or is that, is it just sort of an extension of how the market was already trending?
Jim Van Kirk:
I think it’s more important for us certainly. And I would say for any builder who competes heavily with the resale homes, it’s critical. Because we always look at the best of marketing of resale homes. Not to say that other home builders don’t do a great job. Some of them do a great job. But we emulate the best of the best in the resale world, because at our price point, chances are the other homes on someone’s shortlist are going to be resales. So again, with over half of our buyers buying from scratch, and then I would say the majority of those who buy a home that we’ve already started, buy it before it’s at drywall stage. So they’re buying it before it’s finished and we have to have tools available to show them how our homes look when they’re finished.
Jim Van Kirk:
So for me, I’m old fashioned. I like the good old virtual tour where I can just hit the play button, sit back and let it do its thing and show me the home and its finishes and how it looks and get a sense of the scale and the spaciousness and the flow of the rooms. But there are certainly other options out there with 3D renderings, 3D tours, interactive floor plans that have furniture on or off. And I think the more of these tools that we can put out there, the better it is again for the buyer. Because you’re going to find certain people who like certain things and certain ones who don’t. I’m not a huge fan of 3D tours. I don’t like to have to position my mouse and go from room to room. It’s a little bit of a clunky experience for me, but I know other people who love it.
Jim Van Kirk:
So, I think in this day and age, the price of these technologies has come down to a reasonable level and there’s really no excuse for us to not have tools available like this. But again, for me, the old fashioned virtual tour, which is heavily used in resale, you can find all over YouTube. We like those. And we use several partners like TourFactory as one of ours that I think does a great job.
Dean Wehrli:
Do you think there’s any … I’m thinking out loud here, but do you think there’s any kind of stratification by price or maybe by age, in terms of acclimation to these technologies?
Jim Van Kirk:
It used to be such that you would think that this was more of a younger generation and maybe those with more wealth and income and I would have to tell you, from what I’ve seen here at this price point, and I started my career at Centex Homes. So this prince point is very familiar to me. But I’ve also been in other more upscale price points as well. And I think it’s pretty universal. If you think about one thing that nobody wants to lose, I think it’d probably be their smartphone. And I don’t care if you make six figures a year or you’re barely getting by. That’s just something that you kind of can’t live without. So you have the accessibility literally at your fingertips to use most of these devices and all the things that we’ve put out there with the help of our partners are readily available on a smartphone.
Jim Van Kirk:
So they render nicely on that screen size as well as on tablet sizes. And I think that’s where the older clientele, those folks who are moving to be near their children and grandchildren, they seem to all have a tablet and they use them heavily. And I’ve got some in my immediate family and my parents and in-laws and such, they all have a tablet and they seem to be, when it’s something they really want to do, they seem very happy to use it and figure out how to use it. So, yeah, I think it’s just, it’s pretty universal that the use of these devices and the use of this technology is going to be around for many years to come. And then now the virtual stuff that we’re doing with meetings and such, I think that’s just going to accelerate.
Dean Wehrli:
Yeah. By the way. Thanks for aging me, Jim, because I have a tablet, I love my iPad and I do prefer using it over my phone. So thanks. You just called me old. Appreciate it.
Jim Van Kirk:
Bigger screen.
Dean Wehrli:
Yeah. Bigger screen. So, okay. Let’s pivot to what you were just mentioning though. Virtual touring, virtual tours and all forms of that, I don’t know, virtual agent buyer interaction. Are those more critical now than ever? And how has that gone for you?
Jim Van Kirk:
Yeah. Certainly, in the last several weeks, those have become much, much more important. And prior to the pandemic, we had had the occasional relocation buyer out of state who transacted virtually and did everything remotely. Or we’ve had a couple investor buyers even from China, buy a home. And we’ve had friends show up for the home orientations. And so that’s been done in the past, but it was always more of the exception than the rule. So when the shelter in place ordinances really started coming out in mid March, we knew that buyers were going to want to do this more and more.
Jim Van Kirk:
Now as an essential business in all five of the markets we operate in, we actually remained open and we did not go to a by appointment only model. We followed CDC guidelines very strictly and had basically crowd control. We had notices and things like that at point of sale to make sure that we were keeping our employees and our customers safe. But we were open and we’ve stayed open this entire time. But be that as it may, we knew that there was going to be a need for buyers to virtually tour our homes, because they didn’t want to come out of their own.
Jim Van Kirk:
And to be honest with you, we really weren’t 100% certain that all of our agents, we probably have 80 some across our five markets, that all of them would be equally as comfortable and proficient at conducting these. So we were reluctant to put a statement out there saying, “We’ve gone to a virtual tour mode and you can sign up to virtually tour.” In fact, the folks at Zillow reached out to me early on, I’m on their builder advisory board. And they said they were going to pivot their online tour booking to be virtual. And how we felt about that, and would we want to keep that going or would we want to shut it off? And we kept it going, but we knew that there would be potentially some risk if a buyer reached out to us and said, “Yeah, I’d love to do a virtual tour.”
Jim Van Kirk:
And we had an agent in the particular community that they wanted to tour that wasn’t comfortable doing that. So what we did internally was really do a lot of role playing and then share success stories because all it took was really a couple success stories from agents to say, “Look, I didn’t even think I could do this, but I just sold a home. I’d never met this customer before. She’s a nurse. She is super busy working and she really wants to get this move under her belt, but she had to do everything virtually.” So we celebrated those in our sales meetings and I think those really helped get everyone else on board.
Jim Van Kirk:
And I feel pretty confident now that in virtually any of our communities, if somebody wanted to do a virtual tour, we would have that capability and be able to satisfy them.
Dean Wehrli:
And just to be clear, you’re talking about all the way up to literally, they’re going to walk the model on a Zoom meeting with a tablet, the old person’s device, the tablets.
Jim Van Kirk:
Yes, absolutely.
Dean Wehrli:
And walk around and say, “Hey, show me that, show me that.” Let’s talk about that, right?
Jim Van Kirk:
Yep.
Dean Wehrli:
Any tips? Any little tips, like here’s good things or bad things to do? Like hold it high so no one can see your chin or anything like that?
Jim Van Kirk:
Well, I will tell you from the experience we’ve had, I think camera steadiness is something to work on for sure. And there are devices out there that can help you do that. I think a gimbal is one of them that we invested in, in our Raleigh market. And I’ll tell you more about that in a minute. But that would certainly help. I do know that when you take somebody outside and you’re trying to show them the outdoors, the wind can be a huge distraction. So sound quality is an issue there and you just have to be really cautious on what you’re showing them, when you’re showing them and what the conditions are when you’re doing so.
Dean Wehrli:
How about virtual reality? How about VR? Truly putting the thing on your head and walking through in a virtual world, I don’t know if you guys are doing that, but just your opinion, your take on that. Do you think that’s something that could be in demand here in COVID?
Jim Van Kirk:
I think it could, to be honest with you, we have not done a whole lot of dabbling in VR. Again, you can probably tell from my old school virtual tour comment that the ease of using things and the simplicity of devices has been what I lean towards. And putting devices on and the different options that you have to do that I think they’re great. And I think that a time will come when those are probably going to be more widely adopted. But I think it’s a little bit premature for us, at least right now. And I think the ease of use and the accessibility of those devices has to become a bit more natural before it takes off completely in our industry.
Dean Wehrli:
Yeah. It seems like VR has come and gone, come and gone, come and gone. Had these wave where everybody’s thinking, “Now is the tipping point.” And just hasn’t quite been true yet, it has to happen eventually-
Jim Van Kirk:
Sooner or later, I think you’re right. Yeah. If somebody can figure out how to make it super easy and not goofy looking and that sort of thing-
Dean Wehrli:
And not get nauseous.
Jim Van Kirk:
… they’ll have a winner on their hands for sure.
Dean Wehrli:
Yeah. Let’s touch on social media. It definitely seems that now is a time where social media can be even more critical than it was before. And it was already pretty critical. Have you guys been doing anything differently on that front or not? Or how key has it been for you?
Jim Van Kirk:
Yeah. Boy, again, as I look back, timing is everything. We made a conscious decision at the end of 2019 and very beginning of 2020 to double down on our social media efforts. And we chose a partner called October Social Media, they’re based here in Atlanta, to really help us formulate a strategy. We had been active, but just sort of present. Pinterest and Instagram and Facebook obviously is a big audience for us, Facebook is. But we were there. We just really didn’t feel like we were doing our best work. And so great timing again, to have a partner come on board with us early this year. And they helped us, I think, react appropriately in the pandemic crisis.
Jim Van Kirk:
And I have to tell you, this was probably one of the most delicate roads to navigate because, as you know, everyone had and still has very strong opinions about what is an essential business and staying open versus going to a by appointment only model, safe social distancing, and just even how we should communicate. And in our company of 250 or so people, the spectrum of opinions was from one end to the other.
Jim Van Kirk:
So it seemed initially like everyone, and I mean like every company, was posting statements or sending lengthy emails about their COVID-19 protocol. And I remember one weekend early on, it was overwhelming. I mean, I was getting so many messages and it was really making me angry because I really didn’t care about hearing from most of the companies that were emailing me with their policies, unless it had something to do with my four children or my elderly parents or in-laws, I didn’t really care to know. And no offense to some of them like the Pajama Gram company, there are businesses that I occasionally buy a gift from and have it shipped to somebody.
Jim Van Kirk:
So I really didn’t need to know that they were telling their employees if they were sick to stay home. That just seems sort of obvious to me. And so we chose the less is more approach, because I believe that sometimes what you don’t say is equally as important as what you do say. And so we really, we continued to post, but we posted just things that we normally would have posted. We steered away from language about job loss or COVID-19, we didn’t have any red arrows on our website or in our posts. And I’m glad that we did that. I’m a big fan of Meredith Oliver of Meredith Communications in Raleigh. And I know she’s a friend of many of us in the home building industry, but I was really happy when I saw her advice posted on LinkedIn.
Jim Van Kirk:
She basically said, “I’m sticking to the facts, state the positive reasons for buying now, but understand that now’s not a great time for a lot of people who are losing their jobs, don’t be too cute or cheeky. And don’t dwell on the obvious, everyone knows there’s a global pandemic happening. We don’t need you to repeat it.” So I really felt like her tips validated the stance that we had chosen to take, but it really was something we had to resist.
Dean Wehrli:
It’s a delicate balance, isn’t then?
Jim Van Kirk:
Very much so.
Dean Wehrli:
You want to be irreverent, but you also don’t want to be just doom and gloom.
Jim Van Kirk:
Right. And with low interest rates and the lack of resale inventory is a lot of people took their homes off the market. It really is and was an opportune time for new home construction to be a great solution for people and allow them to stay on track.
Dean Wehrli:
How have you adapted to the nitty-gritty stuff like e-signatures and virtual sales completion of the process, has that been rough or pretty seamless?
Jim Van Kirk:
It hasn’t been bad at all. I’m happy to say that we were already set up to have as few hard copies of documents as possible. So getting contracts signed virtually was pretty much a non issue for us on the home builder side. And same with our preferred lenders. We do not have an in-house lending arm, but we do carefully choose our lender partners, particularly because of the price point we serve. We really need to feel good about the lenders that we use in each of our five markets. But to a lender, and we have, I think, 11 or 12 preferred lenders across these five Southeast markets, all of them were in good shape to process the mortgage application process virtually. So, online applications and no need to meet with buyers and do anything face to face.
Jim Van Kirk:
So that was all good. Yeah, I’d say that the closing process was probably the thing that needed to change the most. And with our partners, our attorney partners and whatnot, they needed to step up and they did. They stepped up big time and pivoted really quickly to create their own safe processes. And in some cases that meant drive through closings, where they were handed a fresh pen that had never been opened. And in other cases it meant safe social distancing of parties between rooms at the closing office. So we really, we didn’t miss much, if anything, we might’ve had a few closings delayed here and there for various reasons. But all in all, we didn’t miss a beat. And I’d say that was really not a problem for us to deal with the paperwork virtually.
Dean Wehrli:
So overall, what has been the impact of all this on the selling in the virtual world and selling in a COVID world? I mean, have you seen more activity on your website? How has that changed your process, I guess?
Jim Van Kirk:
Yeah, we’ve definitely seen changes. We were off to a great start in 2020, we were seeing record levels of website traffic, and record levels of physical traffic in February and all the way into March. And so, I can tell you that we’ve analyzed these numbers pretty carefully from its high point to its low point our website traffic dropped off only about 20%, which isn’t too bad. Now. I can’t say for certain that we’re out of the woods completely yet, but over the most recent six-week period, that website traffic has consistently trended back up. And in the last three weeks, it’s come back with a vengeance and we’ve hit all time highs again, significantly higher than we were seeing even in February.
Jim Van Kirk:
So there’s definitely buyers out there shopping online, for sure. And like I said, our home personalization app usage is up by 40% too. So, those are both good. Our physical traffic, we fared pretty well relative to a lot of folks I’ve heard in the industry, but at one point it did dip by as much as 40 to 50%. However, again, in the past three weeks that has been back to pre-Corona levels and I can happily report that last week we had our best week of sales ever in our company history. So we’re feeling pretty blessed and fortunate. And I’m happy that we’re at the end of the market that we’re at, because our homes are affordable whether you’re that empty nester looking to be closer to family members or you’re that first time home buyer, or just anybody on a budget. I think we offer a lot of home for the money. And you can certainly experience that for yourself online.
Dean Wehrli:
You just made a lot of builders in California and a lot of other places, where you have complete shelter in place, very jealous or angry or both with what you just said about your sales. So that’s good news. Let’s pivot to stickiness. It’s a terrible term, I know. But just this idea of which of these new and these changing factors in the home sales world are going to outlast the COVID-19 virus to some degree and maybe which will not?
Jim Van Kirk:
Yeah. I think that’s a great question and I certainly don’t have a crystal ball, but based on what I’ve seen, not just even over the last few weeks, but just overall in my home building years, there are a few things that I think are going to change and a few things that are going to stick. I’d say one of the first things to watch out for is the Facebook live events, like Facebook live grand openings. Just to bring it really close to home. Two weeks ago, we had a very successful one. Our first real, legitimate Facebook live grand opening. It was in the Raleigh area on a Saturday morning, we had over 60 folks in attendance, and these were like 60 legitimate buyers in attendance, not just a bunch of us watching to see how it went down. And we even contracted, well, one that weekend. And then I think two more the subsequent week. And they had all been in attendance at that event.
Jim Van Kirk:
So we felt really, really good about that. But then fast forward just a week later, and again, in a Raleigh area, not too far away from that one, again on a Saturday morning, we had our second one and I have to tell you the results were less enthusiastic. We had less than half of the attendees and many of the attendees were us. So we were disappointed in that. The weather was good and people were starting to come back out of their homes in North Carolina. So I think that had something to do with it. But I am seeing a lot of Facebook live events being promoted right now. And I think we just need to temper our expectations as to how many people to expect to be on in real time.
Dean Wehrli:
So it might be overdone? There’s a danger in maybe overdoing that?
Jim Van Kirk:
Well, yeah, I think they can still be done well and they can be effective. What we’re doing now is we’re continuing to look at that as a tool, we’re using it as an opportunity to create fresh, unique, and more personal content where we get to talk to the construction manager and the lender for that community and whatnot, and get a sense of who you’re going to be working with if you choose to buy with us in that particular community and use that content post event. So whether there’s 10 people or 50 people at a Facebook live event, that content is still useful and can live on after the event. And that’s how we’re looking at them now.
Jim Van Kirk:
I did tune into another builders event the other day, and then I’ve got another one coming up that I’m going to participate in and we’ll see how they go. But I think the novelty of a Facebook live grand opening could wear off pretty quickly. Because I think there are so many of them happening right now that there may be wear out factor on that. iBuying is another one that I really think we need to watch carefully. I think time will tell how many providers decide to stay in that game. And my hope is that they all come back.
Jim Van Kirk:
For some of our clients, and again, I’ll focus on those grandparents, if you will, who may not want to show their home or clean it out, or empty out the home before they put it on the market. For them selling to Opendoor, Offerpad or Zillow is a great option. And we’ve had some experience with them. I’ve personally put my home through the paces of all three of those and got very acceptable offers from all three of them.
Jim Van Kirk:
So when they all really clamp down quickly and stop buying homes, that was a big wow for me, because I’ve been a fan of what they’ve done in the market. Particular, I love some of the technology that these so called disruptors have brought to our industry. I’m a huge fan of pulling into an Opendoor listing with my app open, getting out of my car and walking up to the door and it’s unlocking for me as I get there. And that’s been fantastic. And we’ve used that as motivation to do Nter Now devices on many of our completed inventory homes to allow our buyers to show up and view the home privately from sunup to sundown.
Jim Van Kirk:
So while I think the iBuyers situation may be experiencing some changes in the near future, I don’t think the notion of letting buyers in to tour privately outside of our normal office hours is going to go away. I just think that’s something that we need to be encouraging and facilitating. And that’s not to say that office hours or model homes go away. I just think we need to expand our thinking beyond that and allow buyers who maybe work different schedules. So a third shift, or whatever, maybe they’re sleeping during the day and they’ve only got time to come out before or after their shift. And they want to be able to see our homes as well.
Jim Van Kirk:
So this past weekend, I’ll tell you a real quick, one of our communities reported that five out of their seven units of traffic for the weekend came from Nter Now on a completed inventory home. So when you put that out there and you tell people that they can tour at their leisure, I think it’s something they really like the thought of.
Jim Van Kirk:
And as people are, again, emerging from their shelter in place homes, it’s a nice, seamless way for them to get back into the market and start looking at things again, besides just driving through communities. If they can get out, tour a home privately, not have any connection with anybody necessarily, if they don’t want to, they can still do a lot and go from that virtual, online shopping at home to actually physically seeing your products and it’s finished without interacting with people that they may not want to interact with yet.
Dean Wehrli:
And the 10:00 to 5:00 hours Monday through Sunday thing. I mean, or I’m sorry, 10:00 to 6:00 during summer. That’s just, it’s amazing to me that that’s still stuck as long as it has. That’s just not accommodative of how people need that to work.
Jim Van Kirk:
No, you’re right. Especially in markets with heavy traffic, you can’t get places sometimes by 6:00 at night, Atlanta for sure. And then virtual appointments, I think that’s going to stay around as well. And the reason I say that is because we all want to save time. We don’t want to waste our time. And I think when people are in the research gathering mode and they’re still narrowing their choices, I expect some of them to want to do a virtual appointment first before they invest their time in a face to face visit. And we had an Atlanta client yesterday reach out and submit a request saying, “Hey, I’d like to have a virtual tour of two of your homes, this model and that model, and I’m available on Friday or Saturday.” So it’s like, “Okay, we can accommodate that.”
Dean Wehrli:
Let’s end with kind of a throwback question. So bear with me on this, because I have a little bit of a setup, but the National Association of Realtors just released a poll of their agents who asked them to be proxies for their home buyers. And the question was asked about how things were going in the sales process in this COVID-19 environment. So 41% said that, “Okay, the masks help, but it’s still, it’s pretty difficult for me. I need to do things in person. I mean, I’m getting by.” 16% said, “Hey, the restrictions are just making it impossible for me to do my business.” And another 9% said, they basically just, they had to postpone showing homes entirely. So that means only about 30% say, “Yeah, they can do their job more or less unfettered with social distancing in this COVID-19 environment.”
Dean Wehrli:
And that was, I don’t know if I’m misinterpreting this, but that to me said that, at the end of the day, don’t you think a lot of those home buyers, maybe even the majority of home buyers are going to want to go back to this real world walking and touching models like they did before, or am I stuck in the past?
Jim Van Kirk:
No, no. I think you’re right. I think there’s no replacement for being able to get out and see the full picture of what you’re looking to invest in and to touch the surfaces and see what the finish looks like and the quality of the home. And you can only get so much of that from a virtual tour. I don’t know how many times you’ve used Vrbo or something to rent a vacation home, but people can put some really great stuff out there and it can look really, really good. And most of the times, we’ve had a wonderful experience. But I think it burned once at a lakefront property where there wasn’t much of a shore there, there wasn’t much sand. It definitely was not what it was touted to be. And had I had the ability to look at it first, I definitely would have chosen a different place to stay for that vacation.
Jim Van Kirk:
But yeah, I think particularly now, as people have been stuck at home, we’re seeing traffic go through the roof as people want to get out of their home and go someplace safe. And I can’t really think of too many places that are a lot safer than a clean, brand new, newly constructed home that isn’t going to have a lot of people in it. It’s not like we have large crowds of people gathering. It’d be wonderful if we had that problem. But usually with our hours being what they are, we can manage traffic pretty carefully. And just to have a couple people in a model home or a spec home at any given time. And I think, we’re going to see that traffic bounce back, but these tools that have been put into action more so than ever, for the most part, I think they’re going to continue to grow in use and we’ve got to be ready to be able to use them and deploy them effectively.
Dean Wehrli:
Yeah. They’re going to want to touch and feel. I mean, you’re right, you can be tricked by pictures. Like for instance, on Tinder, I’ve heard that. My picture is Brad Pitt. No, I’m kidding. I’m not really on Tinder if my wife is listening. Well, that’s it. Thank you, Jim. I really appreciate your feedback here. Very informative. I agree, I think a lot of this stuff is going to stick post COVID and we’ll be doing things differently in the sales process, even next year and the year after.
Jim Van Kirk:
For sure. I agree.
Dean Wehrli:
Awesome. That’s it for New Home Insights with your host Dean Wehrli and Richard Mones with me in the booth. I don’t know if that’s true. But anyway, see you next time.
