Lessons from Accelerate 2025: Why Today’s Digital Home Buyer Journey Demands Smarter Strategy

Last month, Audience Town was proud to be a title sponsor at Accelerate 2025, a gathering of the brightest minds in new home marketing. From top-tier strategy sessions to forward-looking tech demos, one message stood out loud and clear: 

Builders are under pressure to sell, no matter the market. Now is the time to prioritize understanding your audience, so that you can adapt to changing buyer behavior in real time.

That theme was front and center during a roundtable featuring Audience Town CEO Ed Carey’s, Navigating the Digital Home Buying Journey. His message? The buyer journey has changed—and so must our approach. 

Today, top builders are leveraging new data, insights, and technology to market smarter, sell homes faster, improve ROI, and protect your margins. Let’s see how…

The Journey Is Longer—and More Digital—Than You Think

According to Audience Town’s data, today’s home buyer takes 263 days on average to go from first website visit to signed contract. That’s nearly nine months of searching, comparing, and questioning. And the journey starts where you might expect: online.

[IMAGE: Customer Journey Slide]

This process is deeply digital—and deeply complex. A single buyer may:

• Start with paid search or a listing portal ad
• Browse multiple builder websites
• Compare floor plans across communities
• Visit both resale and new model homes
• Fill out a form… months after their first click

Understanding this journey is critical to influencing it. And that starts with visibility into who’s buying and what actions they’re taking as they research their options. Without the right data, you risk wasting spend, misreading your audience, and making strategy decisions based on outdated assumptions.

With Audience Town, you gain visibility into each digital touchpoint, from the first paid search click to the final appointment intake form—offering a behind-the-scenes look at how builders can map and influence each moment.

It’s important to know what actions your closed customers take. 

But your anonymous traffic matters, too. 

One of the unique benefits of using Audience Town is that you get visibility into the demographic, psychographic, and financial profiles of all of your visitors - including the 90% who stay anonymous.

In a Slower Market, Guesswork is Too Expensive

We’re not going to sugarcoat the current climate. With extended timelines and hesitant buyers, wasted sales and marketing spend is a serious risk. That’s why builders must get laser-focused on what’s working—and what’s not.

The brands winning right now are:

• Investing in digital-first marketing that mirrors how buyers shop
• Using data to personalize campaigns (yes, even pet shower ads work!)
• Shifting budget based on performance, not habit or history.

Audience Town’s performance analytics solution based on the largest superset of consumer data available covering 120M US households…this is what we refer to as the Whengine. 

Our customers - more than 20% of new home communities in the US - have all of that powerful insight at their fingertips. They’re marketing smarter, and competing better.

Remember: Our data indicates that there are 1.7M people in the US looking at new construction homes this year. These buyers are knowable. And you can focus your marketing and sales efforts on connecting to them and converting them.

The Tools to Win Are Already Here

The biggest takeaway from Accelerate? Builders don’t need to start from scratch. They just need the right tools—and the right data.

Audience Town’s platform is purpose-built for this market. Our end-to-end solution gives marketers and executives the ability to:

• Understand how buyers are discovering and interacting with your brand
• See exactly what drives conversions across every digital channel
• Personalize your messaging with consumer insights that go far beyond lead forms

In short: we help you replace gut checks with data-backed decisions.

The market may be cooling—but demand hasn’t disappeared. It’s simply harder to capture. Accelerate 2025 made one thing clear: if you want to compete in this market, you need to understand the full digital journey. And with Audience Town, you can.

Want to see how it works? Book a free demo today.