Trendmaker Homes Rounds Up More Contacts in Competitive Dallas-Fort Worth Market

Working its homes to the top

Trendmaker Homes (formerly Dunhill Homes) is a privately held home builder based in Dallas-Fort Worth with 18 actively selling communities throughout the cities and towns that make up the DFW metropolitan area. With 326 closings in 2016 and more than $110M in sales, Trendmaker Homes recently cracked Builder Magazine’s Next 100 list of up-and-coming top builders based on closings (#117), and Chris Hartley, vice president of sales and marketing, has his eye on Trendmaker moving up that list.

Hot market, hotter competition for homes

Everything’s bigger in Texas, including the competition. Composed of 13 counties and more than 7 million residents, Dallas-Fort Worth is the largest inland metropolitan area in the country. It’s also one of the nation’s most competitive housing markets, which is why Hartley dedicates 55 percent ($660,000) of his $1.2M marketing budget to online marketing.

“In trying to stand out from the competition, and with a good-sized budget, we can maneuver faster than our competitors and add new programs when they’re viable for us,” he said.

One of those programs involves working with the company Do You Convert, an online sales and marketing platform for builders, co-founded by Kevin Oakley, an author and experienced new construction marketer who includes Zillow Group tools in his builder marketing solutions.

Trendmaker Homes had worked with Zillow Group, but at the time, its pricing didn’t fit Hartley’s marketing budget. After speaking with Oakley, Hartley realized Zillow Group’s updated location-based pricing — largely reflecting builder feedback — might now deliver a more budget-friendly per-sale marketing cost.

“Kevin told us that if we’re going to spend money online, we needed to make good and sure we drive traffic to where people are — and that’s Zillow Group,” Hartley recalled.

He reached out to Zillow Group, who invited Hartley’s general manager and marketing manager to attend its New Construction Forum and learn about the new pricing structure and enhancements to the platform, Promoted Communities. The pair returned home ready to give it a try.

“They came back energized and excited about what they saw, like the additional features Zillow Group didn’t have before,” Hartley said.

Qualified contacts, customized experience

Hartley initially selected a middle price point community to advertise on Promoted Homes. He figured once home shoppers reached the neighborhood, they would discover and explore its nearby communities of lower and higher priced homes.

“We did what every builder does: hold back from starting a brand new lead generation platform with an all-out spend,” Hartley acknowledged. “But once we believed in the Zillow Group leads we were given, we went all-in across the board with our communities.”

Within the first week, Hartley started to see qualified contacts come through. The detailed information included with the Zillow Group contact made it easy for Hartley’s team to quickly respond and follow up.

“You get a very detailed report of who a prospect is, and then you can match the community to the profile,” he explained. “Then you’re informed when you contact the lead, introduce yourself as a new home expert, set up the appointment, and drive the appointment and the sale.”

Being where the buyers are

Before it started advertising with Promoted Communities, Trendmaker Homes considered its incoming contacts to be too generic and found it difficult to pinpoint what home shoppers were looking for.

“The location or price that buyers looked for wasn’t fitting with what we offered,” Hartley noted. “With Promoted Communities, we’re attracting true prospects looking for a home at our location and our price point.”

Today Hartley makes great use of his Zillow Group account manager, Mitch, to ensure Trendmaker Home listings receive maximum exposure and that Hartley gets the highest possible return on his spend. His account manager helped him identify high-performing listings and leverage video walkthroughs on his homes.

“The challenge for any marketer is that you do so many things to drive to a purchase and track it back to a tactic, and Zillow Group helps us determine if our spend is worth it or not,” Hartley noted. “They don’t say, ‘Spend more money with us.’ They tell me how to make my investment work smarter or harder.”

Hartley didn’t initially plan to advertise every Trendmaker Homes community, but due to the success he’s seen, he now markets all communities through Zillow Group.

“Knowing technology is an ever-changing world, we have to stay on top of it,” Hartley affirmed. “We have to catch prospects where the prospects are, and that’s on Zillow.”

Trendmaker Homes by the numbers

• 16 active communities on Zillow Group sites
• More than 10 percent (19 homes out of 183 for the first six months of the year) sales that are Zillow Group contacts
• Tripled listing impressions per day and a 4.7x increase in contacts per day for listings since adding Enhanced Video Walkthroughs
• 415 homes projected to close in 2017

“We can target 19 sales out of 183 through Zillow; that’s a little more than 10 percent of our sales that can be attributed to Zillow Group itself,” Hartley noted. “When we calculate the high end of our monthly spend with Zillow Group, it’s $2,800 per sale, which is pretty inexpensive.”

A key to Trendmaker Homes’ success on Zillow Group is the data Hartley receives: First, with the contact details that enable his team to customize their follow up; and second, with the reports Mitch sends to track how its Zillow Group investment is performing, which helps Hartley identify where his marketing spend is most effective.

“If you don’t have a matrix like Zillow Group gives us, you don’t have the data to support your spend — and that makes it easy for owners to switch ideas because they just heard about the Next Best Thing,” Hartley explained. “Zillow Group data allows us to keep doing what we’re doing, and it’s been a success.”

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