Know the Landscape of Home Builder Marketing Solutions

In 2024, American home builders and developers are feeling the pressure to adopt technology and invest in marketing. Here’s why:

1. Consumers are buying homes differently, and expressing different preferences when they do. Research shows that more than 55% of consumers prefer to purchase a new home instead of an existing one, and 30% of all home listings are new construction. Consumers also expect digital shopping experiences, especially new generations of home buyers. They have new modes of working, living, and housing supply and affordability trends makes purchasing a home challenging. 
2. Evolution from manual services and research to digital platforms, AI, and SaaS or API delivery to meet the consumers expectation of an interactive digital home searching and buying experience in real-time.
3. New marketing product categories to evaluate, learn, leverage, and purchase: AI, CDP, DMP, BI, CX, VR, and CTV. 

All of this conspires to create one truth that home builders today recognize: the consumer is in control. 

The good news? The industry is modernizing their marketing stack to include a suite of specialized tools and service providers that enable them to connect with new generations of home buyers, online and in-person. And a new landscape of marketing technology exists to help them connect and transact with people looking for a new home.

This tech adoption presents a real challenge for an industry that’s traditionally been slow to adopt new tech and tactics. This challenge is made even more complicated, because the landscape is changing faster than any of us can keep up:

• New capabilities, shifting data, the advent of AI, changes to advertising requirements, and broken marketing playbooks all conspire to make choosing the right technology difficult. 
• The housing industry is concurrently challenged by mortgage rates, affordability, and low inventory. 
• New home marketing is noticeably evolving from services to platforms, with new product categories like CDPs, DMPs, BI, CTV, and AI being offered through paid platform subscriptions instead of from service teams or expensive research.

Home builder marketing is changing. But you don’t have to navigate these changes alone.

Today, we’re sharing an overview of the home builder marketing solutions, including both technology and vendors in real estate.

To compile this Landscape, we interviewed over two dozen marketers and PropTech leaders. The categories and names were all mentioned at least once or more. Any categories that are widespread but not used by home builders were omitted...for now! Want a shareable version? Download it here.

Customer Data Platforms (CDP)

Customer Data Platforms collect, unify, and manage customer data from various sources into a single record. They provide a comprehensive, single view of customer interactions from across channels and systems to support creating personalized marketing strategies and improve a customer’s experience (CX) with the brand. 

Examples: Audience Town, Tealium

Business Intelligence (BI)

BI tools help home builder marketers visualize internal and external reporting data to see progress on their business. These tools visualize large quantities of company data into simple dashboards to understand the data their own company has, in addition to market trends, KPIs, and customer behaviors that can be integrated into dashboards for sharing across departments. 

Examples: Audience Town, Funnel, Looker

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM systems are the central hubs for managing interactions with potential and existing customers. They help in tracking leads, automating marketing processes, recording sales transactions, and nurturing customer relationships. These systems range from highly customizable enterprise versions, to vertical solutions just for the real estate industry, and even home grown or DIY versions. 

CRMs have evolved from single-purpose customer record systems to being multi-purpose marketing and automation platforms as well. 

Today, most CRM systems include features and capabilities to better interact with consumers at every touchpoint - from paid advertising, email, and content marketing to the sales office. Most also offer integrations with numerous other solutions, so that users can connect with 3rd party marketing, advertising, and data providers as applicable. 

Examples: HubSpot, Salesforce

Analytics/Measurement 

Analytics and measurement tools are crucial for understanding marketing performance, consumer behavior, and ROI beyond just simple reporting. They provide insights that help optimize marketing strategies and investment. 

With the advent of AI, analytics providers are becoming a primary source of deep intelligence, prediction, and actionable suggestions about what marketing is working, which customers are most valuable, and true attribution of marketing channels and home sales. 

Examples: Audience Town, SEMRush

Marketing Agency Services & Consultants

Marketing agencies and consultants are the primary trusted partner of home builder marketing teams. They often act as an outsourced marketing team, leading account strategy, planning, creative and execution for all marketing activities, paid ads,  and vendor management.

In the home builder sector, there are unique agency models blend consulting, sales coaching, marketing consulting, and marketing execution:

• Sales & Marketing Consultant Agencies: Full service training, coaching, and marketing that emphasizes the coordination of activities between sales, marketing, and advertising strategies. By supporting both the home builder employee teams and executing the marketing, they offer a way to connect marketing and sales. 
• Full Service Marketing Agencies: Specializing in marketing, without the hands-on training of sales and marketing staff. Typically, a full suite of marketing services is included, including creative development, brand strategy, planning, website development, and paid marketing and advertising. Most of these remain independently owned and operate much like a full service marketing agency in any industry would, without the training and coaching of the consultant agencies. 

Examples: Bokka Group, Shore Consulting

Research 

Traditional research into land and property at national and hyper-local level is a large investment for any home builder. Most research available offers trends, benchmarks, competitive intelligence, land, and property statistics via consultative, written reports that are either customized or subscription based. 

The research is a compendium of transaction and public data that is editorialized with detailed visualizations and economic commentary or predictions. 

By default, largely because of its high cost and dearth of other information available, the land development reports become the genesis for marketing planning and client development as well. Area demographics and US Census statistics are incorporated in the research reports that are passed along to the marketing teams to create their marketing and advertising targeting campaigns with. That’s why it is being included in our landscape.

Examples: Zonda, John Burns

Advertising Platforms

Advertising and social platforms are used for reaching potential buyers through targeted ad campaigns via content, search, display, sponsorship and video or new formats like streaming video and Connected TV (“CTV”). 

They are used mostly to drive traffic to property listings and community websites from the open web and social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Google and META are the primary platforms used by homebuilders, with YouTube, TikTok and streaming video formats earning more investment as consumers spend time on feeds and consuming video. 

These large platforms offer advanced targeting and algorithms to most industries outside of Real Estate, which is inhibited from targeting many demographic profiles due to the FHA regulations designed to prevent prejudicial marketing behaviors from housing, credit, and healthcare brand categories. This makes online advertising a less effective channel for homebuilders - unless they have the skill and budget to create targeted campaigns using a mix of data and advertising technologies that comply with FHA to reach qualified consumers. 

Examples: Google Ads, Meta

Data 

Data is the invisible ingredient in most of the marketing of the present and future. Data powers marketing content, targeting, AI, analytics, technology platforms and major business decisions. Data is also its own product, being offered as an input into a marketing team’s other tools (like BI) to make them richer and more detailed. 

Data can take many forms: surveys, excel files, batches, APIs, and dashboards. It can be used on its own, or integrated. 

Data providers offer essential home builders data, including property records, market trends, and demographic information. Data about properties, land, or consumers is the input of many of the leading marketing platforms indirectly. 

Examples: CoreLogic, Zonda

ILS Portals

Internet Listing Sites, still referred to as “portals” by the industry, compete ferociously for audience traffic and property marketing sponsorship ad dollars. Most home builders consider the ILS portals to be a top source of good leads. The incumbents Zillow and Realtor.com are investing heavily in their new home construction products and audiences because of the growing percentage of new home listings that are not active on any MLS. Home builders must list their homes (and therefore pay) the ILS instead of being syndicated from an MLS to the portal automatically. 

The incumbent portals Zillow and Realtor.com are being challenged by a new crop of well-funded new home construction portals, namely from parent company Zonda. Zonda operates NewHomeSource.com and Livabl, which were acquired recently and have become a household name for people looking for new homes. We should anticipate seeing CoStar invest further in their Homes.com portal as well as they stage a battle with Zillow and Realtor.com to grow their site traffic by having every existing and new home listed on their site. 

The primary products being offered by portals are paid listings to drive qualified leads directly to the home builder sales teams. These paid listings, plus advertising on and off the portal websites and apps, are a top source of new leads for home builders, just like they are with real estate agents.

They also provide valuable economic and consumer research on market trends due to their collection of property listings and consumer behaviors, making them a supplier of research to marketing teams as well. 

Examples: Realtor.com, Zillow

Platforms (with Marketing Features) 

Many technologies and data-driven solutions bundle solutions into a single platform that can be used by multiple departments at a home builder., 

Marketing use cases are a natural extension of other features like video tours, floor plans, customer experience (CX) workflows, or outsourced sales. Often, these tools aren’t purpose-built for marketing; instead, they offer marketing tools as add-ons or use-cases to other core features. 

It would be correct to assume that most, or all, of these platforms are using advanced AI to make their platforms intelligent and well-designed. 

Platforms are also the catch-all term for any non-endemic, general-purpose technology or service like email automation leaders Constant Contact, or the growing number of dedicated AI companies that are especially useful for marketing teams. In fact, a leading use of AI is for marketing content, advertising, and creative development. 

Examples: Cecilian, ChatGPT

Websites & Chatbots

Community and property websites are the workhorse of a home builder's marketing strategy, because potential customers need to be able to see lots of photos, video tours, and descriptions of amenities of a housing community. This is especially true because many communities are under construction while being actively marketed. 

Adding to the website experience are a list of chatbot companies that guide consumers through the properties and can connect them to the sales agents for live interactions. 

Many of the website companies act like full-service digital marketing agencies because the website is so central to the customer’s home shopping experience. Advanced site analytics, insights, advertising, and myriad digital services, along with a high level of account service, or part of working with these companies.  

Examples: BlueTangerine

Renderings & 3D tours 

Virtual tours and rendering technologies went from optional to critical during COVID when people started shopping for real estate during lock-down. This is an exciting marketing format that drives high engagement, leads, and customer experience by allowing consumers to virtually tour properties and floor plans. A small majority of younger consumers claim that they would purchase a new home site-unseen if the virtual tours and renderings were good enough. 

AI is making a big impact on these nascent technologies. AI brings every dimension of a new or under-construction home to life through interactive images and design options. And marketing teams can use the user analytics to stay in communication with a home buyer's activities as they tour and build the home of their dreams. 

Examples: NterNow, NoviHome

The present and future of marketing for home builders has never been more promising - or more confusing. Knowing what all the new categories and vendors can do to support home sales requires the right team, experience, budget, and culture. 

The trick is knowing how to orchestrate all of the tools and people to improve marketing performance. And doing so within a reasonable budget and with the right data-driven strategy to back up your decisions.

Remember, consumers are also undergoing structural change to their digitally disrupted lives. As you select your technology, don’t forget to consider the impact it may have on your potential customers.

We strongly believe that the best way to make marketing decisions is with access to accurate, actionable data insights. That’s exactly what we deliver with Audience Town's marketing analytics platform for home builders. 

If you’d like to gain a better picture of how your marketing is performing, and what channels are working the hardest for you, we’d love to show you how. Book a quick guided walkthrough today.

Have questions about the landscape? Reach out to hello@audiencetown.com to learn more.