Thursday, October 25, 2007
Local Internet Marketing for Home Sales
 Lennar Bay Area Homebuilding Taps into Internet Marketing for Home Sales SAN RAMON, Calif., Sep 25, 2007 (BUSINESS WIRE) Lennar Bay Area Homebuilding has expanded its sales and marketing efforts with a dedicated internet-only sales team. The program, which began in May, offers potential homebuyers four ways to communicate with Lennar through the Internet: the company's updated website (www.lennar.com), email, a dedicated internet toll-free number and live chats (also called instant messaging). All of these elements can result in a face-to-face meeting with an Internet team member at a Lennar Welcome Home Center.  This story reflects the true nature of what is happening with the Internet and sales generated. Other homebuilders need to look at the following results of what has happened with Lennar and apply those lessons learned into their own home building domains. For example, in June, Lennar had 251 Internet generated leads and 255 live chat sessions (roughly 7.5 per day). By the end of the month, the internet team helped drive 20% of the total homes sold. In July, the number are even more impressive with internet leads reaching 439 and roughly 25% of sales impacted by one of the internet avenues of communication. The most recent results indicate that the internet channel played an active role with just over 40% of home sales in August.Read more about how Lennar is using local internet marketing. Many builders are still thinking pre-internet days of simply building it and they will come attitudes. The advertising and marketing dollars spent are typically in traditional media advertising outlets such as, newspapers, radio, magazines, and local television shows, instead of taking advantage of the power of the internet and local search. The internet seems to be much of an afterthought with many of the brick and mortar home builders (pardon the pun), instead of wrapping their sales, marketing, and advertising arms around what the internet can do to really drive business sales today. Home builders need to understand that over 70 percent of the people start their home searches online. A newly built house coming on to the real estate market place is no different than that of all the resale homes available in the area. In fact, when a builder first announces a new development to begin with, there may be much fanfare, but that soon dies down, and gives way to simply just having another number of homes now available in the local real estate market place. Builders need to set their homes and developments apart. That means not only taking into account the developer's brand image from the main builder's website, but also developing the keywords and names of the local areas integrated within a real estate development website of all its own. By developing a website, with its own unique name directly for a project, builders will be doing themselves a favor for free publicity online. Not only will it be good from a promotional aspect, but with the ability to include floor plans, home pictures (inside and outside), lot sizes, lot availability, and news of what is happening within the development, potential buyers will be able to see what is going on and buyers will much more likely come by to visit to check it out for themselves. Many of the communities being built today are set up as homeowners associations. After the builder has built out the project, and with the website already in place, or register another website for the homeowners association, the developer can then give the website to the homeowners association with beautiful pictures and floor plans included. This would be a great way to place good will back into the community. This would also add future value to the homes in that area, plus would certainly be making a good name for the builder into the future. Contact Professional Web Services for all your Internet marketing services needs today. We offer the services, strategies, and sales solutions to get your business found online today. Labels: Marketing, Real_Estate |
