CRM for Residential Construction: Building Competitive Advantage with CRM in the Homebuilding Industry

After several years of challenging market conditions, the residential homebuilding industry seems to have turned a corner and begun to rebound.  Firms that have invested in technology to help them drive revenue and margin will be positioned to outperform their competitors as the market returns to health.

Implementing an organization-wide CRM platform represents one of these strategic technology initiatives that can help homebuilders excel.  The benefits of a shared CRM platform, tailored for the homebuilding industry, can be realized across several departments:

In marketing to a residential homebuying audience, CRM can help enforce consistent messaging, nurture and manage leads, and gauge the effectiveness of various marketing campaigns.  In the sales team, CRM can centralize community information and provide a single source of truth with respects to lots, floor plans, options, and availability. (Here's a demonstration of how Dynamics CRM can be tailored to help homebuilders better manage community information and sales transactions.) In the warranty department, CRM can streamline the handoff from sales to warranty, and can help analyze the sources of warranty issues.

We've been fortunate to work with innovative homebuilders such as Standard Pacific Homes of Irvine, California, and Connor Homes of Bellevue, Washington, to develop tailored CRM solutions to help these businesses become more effective and productive.  At Standard Pacific, their CRM solution is integrated with their financial accounting application and thus shows sales people more detailed product information, includes a customer-facing web portal to interact with leads and customers, and features a task dashboard to help salespeople manage their work.

If you are in the homebuilding industry and curious about what a well-designed CRM platform can do for your business, reach out to us. We can share our experience, and even help you stand up a proof-of-concept system in a matter of weeks to assess the value of CRM for yourself.

By Madrona Solutions Group, CRM and Business Intelligence, Seattle, WA