Disclaimer: This transcript was auto-generated using AI-powered software. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

To listen to this podcast episode, visit Ep 14: Where Home Shoppers Go Online.

Kevin Oakley 00:13

Welcome to market proof marketing the weekly podcast from the marketing minds at DoYouConvert.com where we talk about the current state of all things digital and how they impact Home Builders and developers around the globe. I’m Kevin Oakley and as always we have with

Andrew Peek 00:26

us Andrew Peek here. Yeah, Doctor is Yeah, Doctor, the lead ninja.

Kevin Oakley 00:34

Hey, I just want to say thank you. To you, Andrew. Oh, yeah, big thank you. Yeah, for making the world continue to spin. So I was out of town visiting some builders and in the great states of Utah and Colorado, which was great, but out west. I just I can’t even I blocked out in my mind what life was like before you join the team because

Andrew Peek 00:58

Holy smokes nice. You are you had some fun? Jeez, that’s a lot of flying you did Sunday night, Monday, Tuesday. Right? Is that the days?

Kevin Oakley 01:07

Yeah, I think it was six, six, twice. Yeah. Because every nothing had a direct flight until I came back from Denver to Colorado. But anyway, wow. Thank you again for hopping in. Getting good plans for the weekend.

Andrew Peek 01:20

Whoo. I do I do. Well, working backwards. Mother’s Day is on Sunday. And I live good reminder within three to four minutes of my own mother and my mother in law. So we’re splitting the day in half to make everybody happy. And then Saturday and then part of Friday, I’ll be up in St. Augustine, Florida, on East Coast up by Jacksonville visiting my brother. They just had their second child, and it’s also their first child’s third birthday, so it will be a little crazy. Awesome. Yes,

Kevin Oakley 01:50

that’ll be crazy. But Sunday, family’s always fun. Families always unless the family’s really crazy. And then you just never go see them. So I think that too bad. We are we’re going to be packing like like fiends here at the Oakley household taking my eight year old my 11 year old and my wife to Guatemala City to do some short term missions work with feeding and that is also giving candy and bubbles and jump ropes and all kinds of fun stuff. We’ll try to do a Facebook Live so you Everyone can can kind of see what it’s like down there. But just you know, we got to get our kids away from these devices and I agree what what kind of blended life they live so that that’ll be good, but you know, we’re trying to figure out how do you how do you get presents for 400 kids without and fly fly with it through multiple airports with little children. It’ll be fine. I’m sure I’m sure customs will have no problem with the 400 jump ropes and bubbles solution and everything else we’re trying to get in there.

Andrew Peek 02:59

That will not happen tomorrow. I have faith. Yeah, there’ll be a profit. That’s

Kevin Oakley 03:02

what we’ll be doing this week.

Andrew Peek 03:04

Okay, storytime. If you follow me on any other social, I did a golf tournament charity golf tournament. Oh geez, this was like two weekends ago, three weekends ago. It’s the one time of year that I go golfing. So that’s a it’s a big, it’s a big, it’s a big boy course. And it was rough. It was rough, it was fine. It was still there’s four of us. Four per team, we played best ball or scramble, whatever the name is, you know, you just pick the best ball as far as going down. So you should end up you should end up par. If you think about it four times four. You have 16 shots per hole. There’s no reason you should be very good, but it’s just hard. And what it made me think about was in just talking with different marketers all around the world like Indian industry and not in the industry. If you’re not in like say adverts analytics, Facebook, your thing if you’re not in it frequently enough. So in this case, I I went golfing once a year. Of course, I’m terrible at it. Of course, it’s gonna be harder than it should. There’s all these little nuances. I shouldn’t, that there’s no reason I should know because this one’s here. So I guess my lesson that I’m like, if you’re just not in there doing it every day, once a week, two or three times a week in analytics, and AdWords and Facebook, just getting used to quote holding up club, then I don’t know you got you can’t really have high expectations for yourself, or for the results and just getting used to doing the one marketing. I don’t know. What’s the word? Yeah.

Kevin Oakley 04:35

And that’s I you know, I the way I think about it was just, every morning when I got my cup of coffee, I would come back and sit in my office. Now of course, I had to get in the office early before chaos erupted, but I’d get my cup of coffee. I’d sit down and I never was a newspaper reader. But just like he would sit down in the good old days with a cup of coffee in the in the morning paper. I just pulled up on My accounts and I would just look through the mall and spend, you know, 1015 minutes checking analytics looking at AdWords. I wasn’t checking Facebook originally back then. But say not as that became part of the mix, you know, just just those regular check ins. And starting to get curious and just spending a little bit of time here there. But yeah, you’re right, that frequency is there’s no other way to get around it. Maybe you could watch YouTube videos,

Andrew Peek 05:25

possibly it but I yeah, I think that frequency makes it easier. So like, if I’d golf once a week, I would just naturally get better at it. Hopefully, there might be like, a sticking point where like, I need outside assistance. But if I went every day, every week, you’re going to get better at what you do. So

Kevin Oakley 05:45

yeah, I haven’t gone golfing since I was a market manager for NVR. I just at that point, I thought this isn’t happy. And I haven’t picked up a club in the last four and a half years but one of our clients gave me a good idea of just gotta go My kids in duck golf Yeah. And then it’s you know, Daddy, daughter daddy son time, maybe then I could possibly have a chair.

Andrew Peek 06:07

For me there’s so many other things I would rather do not that golfing is fun but it’s I just want more excitement. For me. That’s my personality.

Kevin Oakley 06:16

Maybe this is another challenge another t shirt meme golf when the downturn hits but for now no golf, right? It’s like when, when homes aren’t selling, and life is harder, maybe then we go golfing guy now it’s time to just grab all that you can get for sure. Well, sure. My storytime comes from doing those visits to builders at the beginning of this week and talking to younger marketing folks, some who were experienced in marketing but new to the industry and some who are just new to the industry and newer to marketing and I was reminded of something as I was coaching them. I’ve just the importance of pattern recognition and incorporating that into how you do it. as a marketer, and a kind of another quick segue story was the pastor of the church we attended in Pittsburgh. He told me a story of when he went to go get his doctorate. You know, he chose to get it on the topic of marriage. And the professor who was advising him said, Well, here’s all you need to do, Ron, is you just go and read every book on marriage that’s been written. And he was like, Okay, yeah, I’m gonna do that. And that’s it went to the library, you know, found that there’s like 20,000 books or plus that have been written on the topic of marriage. And he’s like, to his advisor, I can’t read all these books and advisor said, No, no, I meant just read it until you hear echoes of the same things over and over again. And then you’ll realize that you kind of know all there is to know about marriage from all those books, you know, when you stop hearing something new and you hear just different slight variations on the same ideas. Again, and again, listen for those echoes. And what that really is talking about is pattern recognition. And so to relate it specifically to homebuilding, this particular person said, you know, we’re talking about becoming efficient and organizing their day and how things would work. And I said, Well, what happens when I get the one off requests from sales for, you know, a flyer for realtor event or a one off request here and there? And I said, pattern recognition is what is why do we have to kind of group those seemingly random requests into some organization so we can look for those patterns and something that just pops up once might not be worth creating a process or a system to deal with that. But yeah, if you notice that pattern emerging of, you know, that request comes up multiple times, and it’s and it’s thrown my day off, then that means, you know, part of your job is to recognize that pattern and then create a system or process that standardizes it makes it so that it doesn’t ruin your entire day. And I just think, you know, pattern recognition. When we talk about looking in analytics, we’re often looking for patterns or things that are breaking patterns. But yeah, I just think that that concept was one that I had forgotten a little bit about. I do it innately but just forgot to talk about

Andrew Peek 09:08

our so I want to share that with that. So good point is bringing up analytics, because that’s really, when you’re analyzing, you’re not going against like a benchmark, at least the way I, when I’m in analytics, I don’t, you’re going after the pattern of like, Okay, if these five communities are working, and this one’s not working, well, what is the difference in the pattern between those five and number six? And then what can we do to fix that? So time on site is half if traffic from organic is zero compared to 100, instead of the ones that we know there might be, you know, we could find the issue just based off of what is and is not there.

Kevin Oakley 09:45

Yeah, and, you know, one of the problems that you can have at times is getting overwhelmed by the amount of data at your fingertips in today’s world. But again, when you kind of, I used to just say like, let your eyes go blurry, and just look for those broader patterns. As a place to start even, you know, just

Andrew Peek 10:02

so for sure,

Kevin Oakley 10:04

yep. Start looking for patterns. And again, if especially in terms of requests or, or systems and processes that are necessary, look for those patterns of things that are, you know, and one of my old mentors used to always say a predictable objection and sales deserves a predictable answer. Be prepared for that predictable thing. I like that same thing when it comes to systems and processes for creating ads and fixing broken communities with with a marketing approach.

10:33

That’s right.

Kevin Oakley 10:34

All right, Andrew, let’s, let’s start up the news machine. We got three, as usual, great articles to talk about the let’s let’s just dive right into this first one. Because this first one’s cool. I think it’s, it’s, it’s more than cool. It’s maybe scary, maybe amazing, like a minor miracle.

Andrew Peek 10:53

It is. So I’m sure a lot of our listeners have seen this at least on my feed. My Google Everything like this has really taken over the past couple of days at Google’s big conference summit that they have, where they talk about all their products. They released what’s called Google duplex, which is a part of Google Assistant. And it is a AI piece of Google Assistant that can do tasks for you on your behalf. So in the video, they’re explaining this product, and then they go into a live demonstration. All right, it might have been pre recorded, but it’s a real demonstration of what happened in Google duplex, Google Assistant makes a call to a salon to make a hair appointment on behalf of what they’re calling the client, which is you and it is super cool. Scary. It sounds just like a person.

Kevin Oakley 11:46

So you say back to Andrew, we’re gonna play it. Oh, just so everyone can hear him. So we talked about it. So let’s hear it. Take a listen.

Google Assistant 11:56

How can I help you? Hi, I’m calling to book a woman’s hair. Cut for a client. I’m looking for something on May 3. Give me one second. Mm hmm. For what time are you looking for? Well, at 12pm we do not have a quote pm available. The closest we have to that is a 115. Do you have anything between 10am and 12pm? Depending on what service she would like, what service is she looking for? Just a woman’s haircut for now. Okay, we have a 10 o’clock. 10am is fine. Okay, what’s your first name? The first name is Lisa. Okay, perfect. So I will see Lisa at 10 o’clock on May 3. Okay, great. Thanks. Great. Have a great day. Bye.

Kevin Oakley 12:53

Yeah, that sounded pretty darn realistic. I’m pretty sure that salon owner had no idea who they were talking to?

Andrew Peek 13:01

No idea. Even the little I don’t know the correct word for them. But like between your phrases you say things that make you sound like a human. Mm hmm. Like yet. Exactly. Just like that. That was super cool. Yeah. And there was even troubleshooting like, Hey, I wanted the appointment as well. They’re like, No, we don’t have that. Okay, what about 10 to 12? So I assume you set parameters like, okay, here’s my available times and your Google Calendar, of course. And it just works if for you, which is awesome. Imagine how many things you could just delegate and not have to worry about it.

Kevin Oakley 13:34

So application we always like to get to application for homebuilders. It’s it’s obviously, the same service can be used to schedule an on site visit. If it’s a transactional piece, really any transactional piece of information. It’s it’s not though like a chat bot it is. It’s beyond that in terms of like you’re saying the natural language processing the additional pieces what That term there’s a there’s a term for like when computers can behave and make you think that they’re alive. The Turing test was what it is. And and so it passed it. Well, that’s what people are saying. I think Google just passed the Turing test with with with Google duplex, but this is good news. In reality, for online sales people, it’s not nothing, nothing to be scared about at all, because it will allow you to get additional bandwidth with a single person potentially. And again, those are transactional pieces. And just because that appointment would be scheduled by Google duplex, doesn’t mean that there’s not going to be long term follow up, right, that’s, we got to remember that exact just because they schedule a time to come out and they don’t interact with you. That doesn’t mean they’re gonna buy, you know, 90% of the time on that initial appointment. There’s still gonna be follow up. There’ll be weeks months, perhaps even years of additional nurturing to get them to the point where they are ready to buy the house. And, and we’re not there yet. We’re not close to being there yet in terms of the same technology outside of a few very specific use cases, but it definitely is happening even faster than I think a lot of skeptics would have would have believed it to be happening.

Andrew Peek 15:14

Yeah, it’s super cool. It reminds me I don’t know if you’ve seen Westworld on HBO have not but it is. Oh, do you need to watch that? Because it this is Westworld. Except Westworld is I could talk about that for like forever, but essentially, they’re bots in Westworld. Dah dah dah dah dah. But they do get hung up on some things but you have no idea that they are bots. It is super cool. Interesting. It’s good show. recommend it. Alright, definitely on to the next one. Another fun one that we had a lot of fun was this week. So Burger King, which I have not been to in a very long time. Maybe I should go and get a whopper but they used Instagram stories. Have you seen the polls and Instagram stories?

Kevin Oakley 15:57

Yes, I’ve used a couple of them myself. In fact I asked people I had to take one of those smaller commuter planes this past week and took a picture of and I said do you like these size planes? And I was shocked that it was almost a 5050 time people are like yeah every time I talk about those planes people are like oh I hate them the extra turbulence just the way you feel on a smaller aircraft But yeah, I use I use those polls cool.

Andrew Peek 16:20

So Burger King used a series of polls in a row there’s I believe as nine questions on their story to build your own perfect and custom Whopper. And at the end of it, you got it somehow you are dm, direct message a coupon or voucher for that, for that one you just made and they could go in it go into and get it for free. Like that’s really cool. We could definitely apply that to the homebuilding space as far as getting research on like, which bathroom Do you like more? Which color do you like all these sorts of things? And then if it’s saying remarketing Rino like okay, these are people who are leads. If they fill it out, you could somehow CRM I’m sure there’s some way to do it. And just to get them engaged and excited and emotional about a home to get out there and

Kevin Oakley 17:08

buy that thing. Yep. Well simply as a remarketing tactic, I think it would be really cool because when you think about the the basic questions you could ask around a floor plan, and I know this because we were not very smart at Hartland, back in the day, we had, again, like 40 to 48 different floor plans to choose from, in total, way too much choice. Most of the time builders have gotten smarter and narrow their product lines, but there’s a real problem of how do we help people, like figure out which one is for them. And we were, we did a lot of quizzes and talked a lot about the logic around this quizzes. And in a sense of, you know, if you ask people do you want your owner suite to be on the first floor, the second floor? That question rules out, you know, half or a third of all the floor plans right there and then you say, you know, how many bedrooms Do you want and that rolls out more? You say, you know, do you want to build your home on a slab or have a basement, you know. And so it really only takes, you know, four to five questions to really narrow down and most homebuilders, you could definitely do that and then about coupon for a home, but you can certainly give them some type of incentive towards the design studio if they end up purchasing one of the recommended floor plans or

Andrew Peek 18:22

something like Yeah, something to give in there. I think it’d be super cool. I haven’t looked at doing I’ll need to look at the tech on that as far as setting up a poll through a sponsored Instagram story.

Kevin Oakley 18:36

Well, I think that Yeah, or just in terms of getting all of the answers to the individual questions to speak to each other would be the thing that we’d have to research a little bit to figure out how they did that but yeah, that’s that’s really a great idea. It’s again, no reason you couldn’t add a smaller scale use that to you know, design your perfect home. You know, pick between two different types of flooring two different types of countertops, then rendering house could probably use their app to, you know, deliver a rendering that would match the selections that they had made want to ask john about that just came on that I like that.

Andrew Peek 19:13

That’s john, if you’re listening to that for us, and everybody, that’d be super cool, I think I think are important, and then

Kevin Oakley 19:19

test it and tell us all the data, and then we’ll figure out if we want to do it or not.

Andrew Peek 19:24

I think an important an important point on this is there is like quiz software out there and all that sort of things. But this works because Instagram Stories is within something that they are already using. And it was just like natural, like super native like, Oh, cool. I like cheese. I like extra salt, whatever they’re going and it’s 20 seconds later, they have this coupon. And so I think that is important to note like, because it worked because it was within the platform that they are already at, versus taking them somewhere else like take this quiz, I don’t think would work is as well.

Kevin Oakley 19:57

Well, that just rolls right into our last news story, which is that Instagram is beginning trials on in in app payments to help you Insta pay so you don’t have to go anywhere else perfect and you know we should get better Andrew about including screenshots in the Facebook group for market proof marketing. I will take a screenshot of this because you know they’ve they’ve already had this other option called when they talk about Instagram shoppable posts where you could kind of tag you know, the purse or the I’ve seen those in the wild. Yeah, absolutely. But that same functionality that alone Why don’t homebuilders do that again, I feel like I’ve talked about this so many different ways. But why don’t homebuilders talk about the pink color of of the walls in the model home? Why don’t they highlight the flooring that was chosen and and not general like this is an oak floor but the specific, you know, lock number and die type and all the rest, because that’s what people expect. Again, we’ll set it many many weeks ago now that you know we’re being trained By Zappos, and Amazon and these other services about what type of experience to expect, so, I just stopped there just when I’m gonna post that that shot in market for marketing. And why don’t homebuilder websites lets you go deeper with you know, we just we’re gonna talk with Jake about the number of photos that you need on a on a good listing. But why can’t the photo be just a little bit deeper in content in terms of being able to hover over different parts? You can do that and matter port tours, you have Mater tags, or you can hover over different parts of it and learn more but so that alone was was great when they introduced that but now they’re taking that next step and just letting you actually add your credit card information into Instagram and buy it right there on the spot.

Andrew Peek 21:45

That Yeah, that’s good. I like that yet. I don’t know why either. I was thinking about that. The other day, I was looking somewhere. I’m like, What color is that on the wall? And that is I don’t know, as far as like a perception thing. If you’re the one if you’re the builder. Doing And they’re looking at other builders as well. But you’re the one taking the time and putting that content out there. I think their perception of you as the builder would be like, Oh, well, they’re, they know what they’re doing. They know the pink color, they’re telling me everything they they know more, they must be smarter, they must build better, all these things that you would just assume whether that is correct or not correct, it really doesn’t matter. But that’s their perception as far as because you’re putting that out there.

Kevin Oakley 22:25

Well, and again, there’s there’s just so much data that you’re sitting on, that you don’t realize it as the homebuilder that people do find value in and it’s all on the selection sheet and Andrew and someone paid the interior designer, and they probably had to turn in receipts and show where they bought stuff so like you know, all that but it’s not organized in a way that the consumer can get access to either as a trade off for an onset registration or and again, I know this is this is like gonna be another joke of Kevin keeps talking about I used to do that in my old site, but we had an iPad version of our site that was specifically just like a very Model tour, but just with photos and hotspots, kind of like the Bing search engine used to do a couple years ago. Oh, yeah. But there’s just little squares over different parts. And you could touch those and see more data about the image that you were looking at. And people love that stuff.

Andrew Peek 23:16

Sounds like a really good job for an intern this summer. If you’re a builder,

Kevin Oakley 23:21

organ, it’s the same functionality that house has on their images. Now, it’s that same idea, but now they’re taking it Instagram, you’ll be able to purchase it. And as we know, anytime there’s less friction in the purchasing process. People buy more they spend more because of those impulses and emotions. The last thing we have is not actually an article just kind of a PSA. That in some markets around the country, thankfully, not all thankfully, not all of them but in in more markets than I wish were the case. We are really starting to see AdWords and Facebook ads. Expenses rise, some cases dramatically as much as 20% in a single month comparing April to March. And, you know, for many different reasons, some markets are actually starting to cool off a little bit. Zillow, I think had an article about the 10 markets that you might not expect to be cooling off that are in terms of overall demand and pricing, rising prices of homes, interest rates going up, but I think a lot of it has to do still with budgets being finally allocated correctly, to the channels that produce measurable results and increase competition

Andrew Peek 24:38

that will do it. Yeah. And we took a look at that. And we can use like other metrics to kind of negate performance, like if relevance score is still there of click through rate is still there, then it’s a market thing as far as like on the auction for adverts. If we’re still at a 10% click through rate, and then cost per click is rising, rising, rising, that’s because competitors are out there bidding up the Price spending more. And same with Facebook. They’re spending more and more and more in demand for the inventory, then it’s going to push the prices up. Yeah, I think it only has more to go to

Kevin Oakley 25:10

Yeah. And this isn’t a PSA because we’re just like, well, we want everyone to know that it’s just going to go up. That’s That’s not it at all. Because, you know, again, for the five to six markets where this is happening, there’s definitely another five to 10 markets where we’re actually seeing some cases a pretty significant drop year over year or not month over month, but some markets have a 15% drop in AdWords or Facebook ads because of different strategies that we’ve employed. But like you’re saying, if if the strategies are remain the same, the click through rates remain the same, the relevant scores remain the same, but it’s just more expensive. That’s a good indicator of the market driving up the price.

Andrew Peek 25:50

So pay attention.

Kevin Oakley 25:51

Yep. Awesome. Well, let’s, uh, let’s take a quick break and when we come back, Jake from Zillow group is here to Talk to us about listing quality and how to at the end of the day, kick the snot out of our biggest competitor used homes. That’s right. And we’re back with this week’s 360 topic of the week with a very special guest from we call it the Z g here. Those are the note is called z g Zillow Group. Great. Jake Sherrer from Zillow group. Jake, welcome to the podcast.

Jake Scherrer 26:48

Thanks for having me.

Kevin Oakley 26:50

And just tell everyone what is your role there because some people might think you run the place just for clarity. What What is your position not

Jake Scherrer 26:58

not quite have been here long enough. But ya know, I’ve been at Zillow for a little over nine years. I’m currently Senior Director of regional sales. So we have a whole team of 30 plus reps that are reaching out and consulting and really working with our clients trying to find some new builders to bring on. And I oversee kind of that operation. I’d spent about seven years at Zillow on the premiere agent side of things. So I work with brokers and agents and you know, there’s a huge, huge need on the builder side. So I came over to here, right, probably about two years ago.

Kevin Oakley 27:32

Ah, so you started with us Tom’s and now you’re on the good side. Nice. I did. It’s it’s, it’s it’s a it’s challenging, but it’s definitely more rewarding. Yeah, and the that group of 30 people, I’ve had a chance to meet a lot of them. And it’s a lot of fun, because even though they may not all have been in new construction for a long time, they are like obsessed with it. You know, anytime you meet someone else who’s obsessed with new homes and new communities, I mean, they’re just they’re all in so it’s been fun together. To know them, it definitely is, but we we have some mutual friends Jake, one of them is Mr. Duderstadt who thought maybe you had something you want to share about him and I said, Go for it. Yeah,

Jake Scherrer 28:11

no, I definitely didn’t want to make this podcast. Oh, well, but it’s, I kind of need to go that way. So my wife and I were wrapping up a fairly large home project. We’re building an outdoor covered patio with the fireplace. No, the wrapped, you know, everything’s like wrapped in stone and nice. Yeah, we have a gas fireplace. But every time I walk out there while it’s being built, we’ll do too sad is in my head and it’s driving me nuts and has to do with a thought or a tweet that he made, which is, every time a TV is mounted above a fireplace, an architect loses his wings. I don’t see what’s wrong with putting a TV above a fireplace. And I don’t know Am I a bad person? Is this like a real thing? No. I mean, one

Kevin Oakley 28:55

The guy is avocado toast regularly and he’s proud of it. So So we know there’s there’s issues but I mean, here’s the thing that would have been an issue if you have a 12 inch television like, like if you’re that much of a hipster that you have a 12 inch tube, it’s probably black and white TV, then yeah, putting it up that high screen that small, you’re gonna hurt your neck. It doesn’t make any sense but your TV’s probably big enough that you don’t actually have to scream strain your neck and I retweeted back to him and said hey man, what’s the big deal I just had when I built my house with heartland I just had them lower the mantel height by I think three and a half inches was the perfect measurement. So that it was just aligned great. And it was no problem at all. So

Jake Scherrer 29:39

yeah, no, it’s pretty funny. You know, we got like the reclaimed wood mantel and all the features and yeah, adding a TV I think it helps helps round it out and completes it and what else am I going to do? What else we do? So that’s right. What else out there and sit on my my comfy furniture and watch a sporting event.

Kevin Oakley 29:57

Yeah, yeah. Well, thanks again for coming on. Well let’s get let’s hop into it. So you’ve been at Zillow group for a while now and what would you say is kind of surprised you the most in terms of interacting with Home Builders or just Zillow group in general, what’s been the biggest surprise?

Jake Scherrer 30:15

So, so the biggest surprise for me is Zillow, we move incredibly fast. We are always innovating. We’re always wanting to test new things. The builder community, I think sometimes it’s maybe a little bit slower to adopt, but we’re gonna keep pushing that envelope and keep introducing new things as fast as we as we can, as well as teaching everyone how to use this new technology to capitalize on so much of what it is that they’re trying to do capture the homebuyer. And, you know, it was kind of surprising to learn that not everyone had the latest and greatest technology. Not everyone is using it to its fullest. Not everyone is taken advantage of just the simplest things like content. So yeah, we’re trying to help as many builders as fast as we can and that’s something that I didn’t know that would be as big of a task sometimes

Kevin Oakley 31:05

yeah I actually had a builder within the or an individual let’s just say I don’t want to give it away had someone asked me Do you think builders really need websites anymore? How am I like cuz we can just get leads straight from all these other like doing landing pay I’m not really sure what they’re what they were getting that because I think I would just gave him this shocked look of like, of course we still need websites but I mean yeah you’re right. It’s not always the innovation speed of innovation in our industry is you know, classically one of the one of the laggards in comparison to any any other industry so but that’s

Jake Scherrer 31:40

also like that’s that’s why we all and you mentioned this group of sales reps that are so passionate is we all want to help and we want to help everyone take advantage of it because you know, we have a we have a common goal and that’s to take market share away from you know, traditional for sale or use homes, right. We want to capture as much of the homebuyer as possible, and it’s a great product, I own new construction. So I’m I practice what I preach. Definitely, definitely. So along with along those lines, what are some interesting or really cool data points that you’ve seen? As far as one? The all your reach as far as total, like daily monthly that’s out there for a new construction. Yeah, so we just actually just have Updated Stats we had our latest earnings report. Traffic is super important to us everything is consumer focus. And in q1, we just reported 175 million average monthly unique visitors. So when we say unique, these aren’t duplicate visits to the site that stretched across all of our brands on the mobile and web sites, and overall visits, we don’t have the latest numbers, but from q4 overall visits, so not unique people coming back multiple times is over 1.4 billion. That’s, that’s like our overall stat Holy cow. So we’re continuing on You know, making us or that’s making us the largest real estate network out there. But I do have one other stats, and it’s probably our favorite stat and it comes from our consumer housing trends report. So I think Kevin, you you’ve seen the book. Yes, the most recent one,

Kevin Oakley 33:16

I stole a copy. I mean, if you if you are ever at an event where Zillow is just walk in the booth and say I want it it’s well,

Jake Scherrer 33:25

plenty of them again at PCBC. But no, we work with a third party, research firm and they help us survey you know, buyers, sellers, renters, everybody tied to basically real estate. But this report, it tells us two things. First of all, it’s like a really cool powerful stat that 52% of homebuyers considered new construction. So right off the bat half of people that are thinking of buying a home are considering new construction. The problem is is US Census shows that only 11% actually buy new construction. So this is like fundamentally the biggest thing I think we’re trying to figure out and I think everyone is trying to solve is how do you close that gap?

Kevin Oakley 34:05

Yeah, I mean, there’s there’s the time issue. Obviously, if builders don’t build inventory that that puts a lot of people off. But what you’re suggesting, Jake, is that it also just has to do with, you know, the data that Zillow has to display IE photos, videos, descriptions, all that stuff, just in comparison to our used home. competitors. new home construction just seems to again, lag behind a bit. Yeah, it does. And by that, we mean like, we’re twice as bad as they are, right. I forget the latest number that you had shared, but essentially, the average new construction listing, I feel like had roughly half the number of images as a as an existing home. And that was two years ago.

Jake Scherrer 34:47

Yeah. I mean, we’ve been working with agents for a long time. And we’ve been training our premier agents, you know, consider, you know, they’re considered to be some of the top agents in the country and we’ve been training them that content. matters. And we’ve had total whole teams focused on making sure they have the content. So we have some catching up to do a new construction.

Kevin Oakley 35:08

And that’s opportunity for everyone who mean like, you don’t have to wait. And you actually don’t even have to wait for the zillo stats on how many photos and descriptions to use. Because just think about yourself and if you were going to go buy a home I love Dennis O’Neal, actually back to Twitter. It’s amazing how often this has come up now Twitter, but it’s Dennis true tweeted an image of a house in Silicon Valley that sold for like, some crazy millions of dollars. I feel like it was a dilapidated dilapidated shack. But it was on great property, obviously. But his comment was, I don’t know what it is more like amazing, you know, this particular house sold for the price of did or that it has, you know, 60 photos in comparison to a home builder who might have 510 and it was in rough condition and it was literally like a burnt up shack. Yeah, it was bad. Exactly. Exactly. Hey, Jake, a lot of people are confused or don’t understand how Zillow gets their data. And we don’t need to get super technical or nerdy. That’s what blog posts are for. But, you know, how does Zillow get data on us homes versus New Homes is that the same process is a different where’s all the data coming from? If this builder listening who says I don’t even understand how, how, why doesn’t Zillow have my data? Like, what’s the what’s the difference in the process and how you guys get data for new homes versus used?

Jake Scherrer 36:31

So the short answer is yes, we actually get data differently for you sounds versus new construction. The first is agents and brokers. Right. So we have majority of the resale homes on Zillow, and we get most of those listings, if not all of them through the MLS. There are a handful of brokers and agents that you know, maybe they don’t subscribe to an MLS, maybe it’s a cost issue, and will actually work directly with them to set up an individual feed where we can still get those listings. On our site, though, on the agent side, an MLS feed is preferred because it’s refreshed, the most often it’s the most accurate. And it’s it’s what we’ve strived to do over the last couple years. But on sold home data, we get all that information from municipal offices as well as public county records. But but for builders, there’s two main options really to get your data and get your information to us. The first being, you know, builders that maybe have a little bit more budget around a website, they might be able to send a direct feed. So this is often slightly more complicated. It does require some more technology, but it’s perfect and it’s it’s really like a great option because when your website’s updated, you’re also updating Zillow. So once again, we know we have usually the most accurate information. Yeah, but the most common way that listings and data comes to our site is through new home fee. So just real quick new home feed. They were an acquisition of ours specifically with the new construction team. From last September, but they offer a single point of entry, they syndicate the multiple new construction websites. And really the builder manages like all of their inventory through the new home feed portal. And because it is our own, we’re able to offer a ton of support even if that means initially helping them get their, their feet off the ground to hell, that live content.

Kevin Oakley 38:21

That’s a big help. Yeah, I mean, that’s what I talked to a lot of people when they go through this process and they’re like, man, I have to do all I’m like, Yeah, but you know, one, you saying that Zillow can often help us is fantastic, but two is you only have to do at once you know, maintaining the the process is always easier than getting it started. And I I just remember whenever house the first season of House of Cards came out, was the first time that I had to get everything on new home feed myself. And we had 20 neighborhoods, 42 different home designs between the 28 and I mean, I’m not saying it was fun. I think I watched the entire first two seasons of House of Cards. Maybe But over the course of a week and a half at night, from seven to 10, I loaded it up and it was painful. And then I was done. And the maintenance really wasn’t too bad. But for sure, like you’re saying, the ideal scenario is a direct feed from your own site. The one word of caution I would give people is just it, it’s not going to be free for you to do that, you know, obviously, the partner is going to need to charge you some some money to do that. They may even charge a small monthly maintenance fee just to make sure you know, because Zillow does offer new features like you we’re going to talk about in a second that that might be new to the listing, and that would need to be updated. But if someone quotes your price of something, you know, like I’ve heard people say 10,000 $20,000 as an initial feed setup, that’s someone who has no idea like that’s the first warning sign of these guys probably shouldn’t build it, because if they think it’s that complicated, or they think you’re that silly that you’re going to spend that much. There’s some red flags. I mean, I think you know, a couple thousand dollars as an initial setup is a reasonable amount. But just just something to be aware of. And again, that single feed just means you have one single point of updating all that data on your own site. And it pushes out live to Zillow group and they take it from there.

Jake Scherrer 40:12

Yeah, and the other part is new home feed is, is as we continue to build new products, and we launched these things to help support builders, we’re going to tie that into a new home feed. So we’re going to be able to support that we’re going to be able to train on that better, we’re going to be able to hold builders accountable, all of that, you know, ties into new home feed. So like I said, majority of our clients are using new home feed. But we’re here to support you know, a lot of other options as well, because not everyone can use it.

Kevin Oakley 40:38

And also has some great additional reporting, too. So but yeah, we could talk about that topic. I mean, when I when I do talk to builders, we’re not going to do this today. But if they asked me to explain how syndication and data flow works, I’m like, Okay, let’s let’s get ready to spend two to three hours in multiple whiteboards and I’ll explain it all to you. But you know, at the end of the day, those are the two best options that Jake just

Jake Scherrer 41:00

Definitely, definitely. And Jake, after their feet is set up, they’re sending their homes to you. What are some of the most recent ways that builders can add more content that really makes them stand out? against their competitors? Yes. Yeah. So I won’t go over like the photo part right now or like just the description because that’s, that’s pretty basic. But we do push. First and foremost video, you know, video brings your floor planning community to life, you know, it’s what buyers, you know, they want to picture themselves in that home before they take time to go out and see it in video does that better than almost any other way? It’s fairly easy. We have a video walkthrough product to where you can take an existing video and we’ll actually help put it on the site and attach it to your listings for you. And we do that through new home feed. We also have you know, I think it’s a pretty cool feature that we can work through new home feed on which is a lot of variability. And once again, we’re we’re continually trying to push You know, the most the most, you know, like the most content acts the consumers because once again, it’s about the consumers. And simply with lot availability, we’re representing every lot on Zillow in real time availability, and build options instead of only representing the community as a whole. So, I don’t know if everyone knows this, but you know, part of our package part of our program is, you know, we’ll show the community we try to drive as many people to the community, but they have to go to and had to go to the builder to see which slots are available, which ones aren’t. Is that cul de sac available? Is this home available? Where are the options on that particular lot? And a lot availability provides it in real time, which it makes it huge for discoverability.

Kevin Oakley 42:44

And, and it’s just part of the emotional pull to this whole thing. I mean, it all it always gets left behind. Yeah, obviously you’re gonna fall in love with the house. But oftentimes, the sense of urgency that drives people to take action is the fear of loss of the home site because again, you can Build the Stanford 2020 or 200 times in a single neighborhood, potentially, you just might have to pick a different elevation, but you’ll be able to build the home you want, but putting it where you want it, you know that that’s always a one of a kind situation, you can only build one house on every lot. So showing that information and the kind of fear of missing out that’s caused by wanting to go back and look at the sitemap again and again and again to see if it’s been updated or sold or the fear of that happening, oftentimes can drive. It’s always almost almost

Jake Scherrer 43:31

always FOMO. But yeah, I mean, in the end, though, I mean, the big thing about Zillow and kind of our Northstar, it’s the consumer, right? It’s not necessarily about the builder, but it’s about providing the consumers what they want. So, you know, every product decision, every big decision we have is around, you know, is it going to benefit the consumer because if it benefits them, they’re ultimately going to reach out more and then it’s going to benefit all our partners.

Kevin Oakley 43:55

Yep. So Jake, sometimes homebuilders say to me or my client You know, we don’t want to show based pricing on our website. We don’t really want to show pricing at all. We might show a little bit on inventory, but we don’t want to show pricing and I just total fictitious scenario. But if someone were to walk up to, to, you know, the programming team at Zillow group or Spencer or or Lucy or chat or someone else’s say, hey, let’s consider not showing pricing on homes on Zillow that will make them become a lead first, and then we’ll show them pricing. What do you think the reaction would be?

Jake Scherrer 44:28

That wouldn’t go over? Well, that would go over, as well as people asking to remove zestimates you know, our goal is basically to be as transparent as possible, because that’s what drives engagement. It’s not hiding things. You know, if you think about the travel industry, prior to the expediency of the world, that’s what they did is they held and hid everything behind the computer to where you had to work with them. But in the end, being transparent, showing as much information as you can drive more traffic Yep,

Kevin Oakley 45:00

I started using the example of when I was a kid that like microwave button, or sorry, the popcorn button on the microwave was like, amazing. Because when I was real little, I had to wait for that thing to spin around in the oil to heat up. And it was like this yellow upside down. cylinder thing and it took forever. And then we could just hit this button on the microwave. And now I buy popcorn in a bag just because whenever I decide I want to eat it, I don’t want to wait three minutes for it to pop in the microwave. And that’s just that’s who we are. That’s how we all behave as consumers and what we expect so. Yep, one quick point of clarification. People often ask me, is there a way that I can work with Zillow if I have a fantastic pre done video for the video feature?

Jake Scherrer 45:47

The the videos, most of them I mean, we just we reach out to our product specialists and we can work with you to format it make sure that it can fit on our site. If there’s any hiccups, you know, we’re going to work with you to resolve them, but no, we won’t. videos. So we try to remove all of those barriers to try to include as many as possible on the site.

Kevin Oakley 46:05

The reason I asked that question is because we had someone one time who was using their phone in the in the Zillow app to record the video that they had already made from a professional on their computer screen. And I was like, hold up, I think you could just reach out to Zillow and they might be able to help you get that

Jake Scherrer 46:22

Yeah, no, we used to, in specifically on new construction used to be that you had to use your your iPhone or your Android phone and you there was no sound and that’s why you would see, you know, little little postcards all around houses saying what it is that they’re looking at, because they can talk and But no, we’ve opened it up to where if you have professional video shot, you know, let us help you load that onto the lessons because it’s just that important. We didn’t want that to be the barrier to your success.

Andrew Peek 46:51

Very cool. Yep. Awesome. Okay.

Kevin Oakley 46:55

Amazingly, we’re starting to run up on time here, but let’s jump back to basics. Is there a best practice? Or what is the latest best practice in terms of number of photos or, and length of description because we, everyone kind of we talked about the photos and you’re like, of course, but the length, the description, the impact that that can have talked a little bit about that too, because

Jake Scherrer 47:17

so there’s there’s two things, right, you got images, and you got the description. And those are the most basic pieces of content I think builders think of and they rightfully should think about that. We recommend 15 to 30 images on your listings. Really, it’s 30 or more is ideal. And that’s what we’re going to help you you know, really showcase on there. But there is a direct correlation between the number of quality photos and the results. So builders that have 30 plus photos, see 34% more pageviews just simple right, just literally adding more photos is going to drive more traffic. And we really are pushing to have high quality images, right so when a consumer shopping for a new home, they want to see pictures That helps them visualize themselves living there. Once again, it’s about the buyer. And then you need to have clear subject and purpose with the photos. So for instance, if you have a point of interest, like a gourmet kitchen or backyard with lots of recreation space, take separate photos of each, you know, help the shoppers once again, picture themselves using and enjoying that space. Yep.

Kevin Oakley 48:22

I always find it hilarious when builders are like, well, 30 that’s a lot like, what am I going to take pictures of to get 30 photos? I’m like, well, you should have you should easily be able to get, you know, 10 to 12 just have the kitchen. I mean, think about how important that is, you know, from all different angles, close up shots of the faucets and the appliances and there’s just the kitchen alone, you should be able to get half of those photos covered easily.

Jake Scherrer 48:52

Yeah, and and that’s like half of it right. Like that’s, like I think maybe we think it’s too easy, but it should be fairly easy to do that. But the other half right is the description. So, you know, compelling listings, gonna have pictures, hopefully videos, we’re gonna push that. And then words and approximately 250 to 450, you know, over the right words is really what engages the home shoppers. But we have once again, similar to the 30 plus photos drives more pageviews 450 plus characters receives 50% more leads, right? So

Kevin Oakley 49:24

say that one more time. Try that one more.

Jake Scherrer 49:26

Yes. 450 plus characters in the description, receives 50% more leads and actually 31% more pageviews. So, super, super simple, just be more descriptive. And I think the thing that people forget about as well as, and I mentioned this in our summit’s but talk about how the community or your home, right like talk about all the amenities that it provides. There’s usually a shopping center nearby. There’s views that you can’t always get with traditional for sale properties. There’s parks, there’s that community feature or feeling that comes with new construction that you can’t always find with traditional or used homes. And and you know, you can really, you can have like 100 words just on that. Yeah. So it shouldn’t be like a chore. It should be something that should come natural. And once again, we’re more than happy to help any builder who wants to increase their descriptions. And that was 450 characters was that 450 plus character that’s like 10 sentences. I mean, depends how long your sentences are. But it’s not. It’s not that much. Not that much. Yeah, well, and again, people

Kevin Oakley 50:36

don’t I know everyone always tells me Kevin, no one reads, I said, Kevin, nobody reads so why bother. But again, the photos, the video, all those things are the, you know, the ticket to entry for the consumers attention. But if someone decides that they are falling in love with that particular home, they’re reading the description over multiple times, probably and in their own tone of voice, and it just it kind of sucks. The their desire for that home in their mind. And so, you know, is it chicken or the egg? Is it? Is it the 450 characters? Or is the fact that the home is good enough, and then they can read those 450 characters like, which is the causality of those results, it doesn’t matter at the end the day just do it and get, you know, 50% more leads on all homes.

Jake Scherrer 51:20

And here’s the here’s the thing, you know, it’s all about separation, right? Within builders, whether it’s builder to builder or more common builder to use home. And I was kind of curious, you know, like, we’re preaching these things, and I and my hope was that we have a ton of people taking advantage of all of these, these these great helpful hints. But when we pulled the numbers because we actually scorecard, every single builder, you know, every client of ours, we give them a scorecard based on how much content they have, right? So do they have videos description, like photos, like all of the things that go into a good listing, and we give them an A through F score, and then we provide that builder with that scorecard. And only things 5% of the builders that we work with currently are receiving an A or a B.

Kevin Oakley 52:05

So, and you work with a few builders.

Jake Scherrer 52:08

Yeah, we work with a few builders. So you know, we’re frantically tried it. It’s like our number one focus is to bring everyone up a level because like I said, it’s very simple change or adding photos or content. Youth will help separate yourself just that much more from everyone else. And it’s, it’s, it’s free. Once you’re on the platform, right like this. We’re not charging you per photo. So it’s definitely in the builders best interest. Definitely. All right, so final question, time to wrap it up. And this might be a tough one, but maybe not. Let’s see. What do you think is the biggest misconception that home builders have about Zillow group? So that’s not a tough question, because we think about this quite often. You know, having to compete with kind of other marketplaces within Zillow, we’re always trying to differentiate ourselves. I personally think it’s too two things. One is is that on a builder, like when builders look at us, I think some of the smaller and maybe even medium sized builders think that we mainly cater to the large national builders. You know, a lot of the larger builders have been on the platform longer. But the regional team, which we’re focusing on the smaller builders, you know, is the fastest growing segment with a new construction and overtime, I think builders are really going to see just how much we’re investing into their success and getting visibility. And the other would be kind of tied to that, which is, you know, why are you guys like, do you guys even know new construction? Aren’t you guys more agent and broker focus? And yes, even though premiere agent and the agent side of things is a huge focus on Zillow. We have support and we have product and we have marketing and we have so much support that we’ve never had, or we at least didn’t have years ago, that rivals some of the larger marketplaces within Zillow and we have a ton of talent. So there’s this huge opportunity in those That work on new construction love it. And we’re super passionate about it. And I would say that both of those assumptions are false.

Kevin Oakley 54:07

Yeah, I mean, I evolved just as a wrap I’ve always said, sometimes people have this fear of Zillow is trying to become the the newspaper all over again. And they’re gonna, and I and I, I look people in the eye. And this is what I tell them. As I said, in reality, if you could pay a set amount of dollars, and you knew that it was going to get you a sale, like you did it for the newspaper, and you weren’t really sure what happened. But if Zillow can prove to you that the dollars that you’re investing are causing sales to occur, you’d probably gladly pay that right. And most of the time, they’re like, Well, yeah, yeah. Are they gonna, are they gonna work to do that? I’m like, Well, if they want more money, they’re gonna have to prove more value. That’s how it works. And so, again, I thanks Jake, so much for coming on. But, you know, you’ve been fantastic to get to know over the years, Zillow as a whole, like you said, just that constant innovation and yeah, you might make it Change that doesn’t quite work. But you guys are always quick to react and and, you know, straightforward and honest about, hey, that that didn’t quite go the way we wanted to. And so we’re going to shift again and try this approach instead. And you know, at the end of the day, it’s that it’s that laser focus on it that’s going to get you get all of us to that to the end goal.

Kevin Oakley 55:18

Definitely. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Jake.

Kevin Oakley 55:19

And we’re back with this week’s question of the week. Again, just a big thanks to Jake and the folks at zillow group. Great, great partners of new home sales and marketing. Again, what was it like? I know he said a billion at some point and true.

Andrew Peek 55:45

Yes, it was. Was that pageviews 1.2 1.4 billion views 100 but then 175 unique people. So they’re spending on average, if you divide that what is that 1010 listing Are 10 pages 10 page views? I forgot the exact metric but there’s spending some quality time on there that is for sure. And I’m sure there’s a segment you at 20 of the whole thing. There’s people that have never hours and hours and hours

Kevin Oakley 56:11

and time that back into Andrew Garberson visit from the metrics. I mean, just all the organic traffic that Zillow is getting, if you had to get that traffic via AdWords. I mean, can you imagine having dollars for a couple hundred million visits via address would

Andrew Peek 56:30

be a lot of money. But I think a good thing if you if you take in what Andrew said a few weeks back but SEO, they solve a problem well, Zillow does the syndication sites. And so there might be something to learn from that as far as navigation and just borrowing the way they do things or content really 30 plus pictures per listing. People want to look at that. Especially so listing would be like inventory home or floor plans on your site. But 30 Plus is the ideal. That is so much but that was last

Kevin Oakley 56:59

year. It was last year at the summit where Andrew reminded to solve that, you know, Zillow never forgets just like an elephant you know, the house sells the data. So for the most part, sometimes pictures get removed, but most of the data is still there for sure the house is still there. And but on builder websites, you know, what we sold out of that neighborhood take it off. Hey, we don’t we don’t build in this town anymore. Take it

Andrew Peek 57:25

off. No, but we might next year two years from now. Oh, no, we lost it.

Kevin Oakley 57:30

Yeah. Oh, it’s keep building up a VIP list. Why not just say, Hey, we don’t build there right now. But would you like to know if we ever do sign up?

Andrew Peek 57:37

Yeah. Link to related communities. A lot of ways to solve that. All kinds of Yeah, that’s a that’s a

Kevin Oakley 57:45

goldmine of opportunity. Right there. Okay, question of the week. Last week’s question of the week was pretty straightforward. What is your favorite business or marketing book? Andrew added the bonus points. If you post a selfie and we get we

Andrew Peek 57:58

think Everyone was surprised because I was looking at the list of people I’m like, all of I’ve seen all of you on camera. I know you have a webcam. So sad. So maybe next week someone will do that for us. And we all know each other, which is funny. Maybe not. We’ve most people have met at some point with IBS and the summit. We’ve all said it’s a friendly group. Yeah, a lot of ants. Yes.

Kevin Oakley 58:22

So we gave our recommendations last week. Thais from Lasso jumped right in and said content rules was one of her favorite books, how to create killer blogs, podcasts, videos, ebooks, etc. Mr. Ryan Snarr had competing against luck. And that one, it looked very interesting to me that’s definitely gonna be on my my list. Rene Garcia. Start with why by Simon Sinek that’s a classic and one it is still I think the most listened to it at all time.

Andrew Peek 58:54

In terms of view count, let’s see going down the list here. We have Beth Ann. I like this one or that influence the psychology of persuasion. I’ve heard of that book. That’s one of your favorites you have I have it right here because I think I picked up on a call the other day. It’s right here in front of me.

Kevin Oakley 59:10

Charlie Murphy says right now spending more time in browsers to buyers than anything else. But he also recommends never split the difference. Yeah, Charlie’s in the middle of trying to get his own online sales program up betrayed emails. Very cool. So that’s definitely good book to be digging through. But he also recommends never split the difference negotiating as if your life depended on it. strongest, and then a not read off a Nautilus. He’s got some great ones in here.

Andrew Peek 59:36

He has a very intimidating list. No, it’s awesome stuff in here going down. Steve Jobs. That’s the biography on Steve Jobs. That is great. And then we go on to Elon Musk Tesla, SpaceX and the quest for a fantastic future by Ashley Vance. That sounds interesting because Ilan was was the co founder, founder, founder of PayPal, like he’s done. Yep. So many huge projects, there’s something crazy going on in his mind.

Kevin Oakley 60:04

Now in the matches is huge projects is this huge ego. So I’m just honestly not sure it’s true about that one.

Andrew Peek 60:09

I think the ego might be required as I’m learning to get that level of insanity. That’s true inbound marketing. Everybody writes Don’t make me think, predictably irrational. That’s a good one Thinking Fast and Slow.

Kevin Oakley 60:25

Yeah, by Daniel Kahneman. It’s a classic as well, one of Jeff shores favorite books. I know. And don’t make me think I chuckled when I saw that because I think that book was written in like 1995 or 96. And it’s about how to design websites and not make people think about what what is the next step? or What am I supposed to do on this page? That’s funny, but those principles are still completely relevant today. Even the websites look nothing like they did back in the geo cities day.

Andrew Peek 60:48

I think it’s I think it’s even more important because today, there’s so many different options as far as the technology to use on the site. And then what does it look like? It’s It’s worse than before. It’s like Okay, here we just here’s what We can do and that is it. Yep. Yeah. So and then he also said plus everything Kevin said, so yes.

Kevin Oakley 61:06

So they’re good job. And if you are the clear winner of the marketing market proof marketing t shirt this week because you had a great list with some oldies, but goodies and some and some current stuff, and you kissed up in just the right way, not not too aggressive, not too, not too shy. So, congratulations, sir. We’ll get that T shirt off. And over

Andrew Peek 61:27

to you. And this week’s question of the week, Andrew is what is how often are you able to get out to visit communities or homes that you are marketing for? And is that time well spent or not? That’s a good question.

Kevin Oakley 61:41

Yeah, this one came to me again, I spent time with some younger folks, and it was kind of like, you know, I remember the graphic designer that I worked with in Pittsburgh. I think it was like two years into working with her after I had started and she made a comment about she had never been In one of our homes, I thought, oh my goodness,

Andrew Peek 62:02

what a square right now.

Andrew Peek 62:04

basa? Yeah, I think that’s what we I think we went to and toured a house and then went out to lunch. But like, some people never go out in the field. And then we have other people in marketing who are trying to do like a quasi sales manager role where they’re having someone told me they have like a weekly one on one meeting with every sales rep. And I think Oh, my

Andrew Peek 62:22

goodness. That that’s crazy.

Kevin Oakley 62:26

Yeah. But my answer to this question, when I was a builder was I would try to spend at least half a day a week in the field, and whether that was grabbing imagery or video of inventory or stuff on the run that I needed to get to keep the site updated current sometimes was just to check on sales offices and set up models on our construction meet with decorators, but oftentimes to just to connect with salespeople, not once a week, but you know, I would try to get out to see each person once a quarter at least every six months to For relationship into, you know, you can get a lot from from analytics, you can get a lot from the CRM. But getting face to face and understanding their specific perspective on what’s going on the community is also always helpful. Right? So let us know what you think. Are you? Are you chained to your desk and you never leave your meetings all the time? Or do you avoid the office like the plague and try to stay out in the field? How’s that working for you?

Andrew Peek 63:26

I think some people like that. They like the drive

Kevin Oakley 63:29

for sure. For sure, well, if you got some good podcasts to listen to, why not? That’s true. Very true. More audible books. Yep. All right. Well, that’ll do it for this week. Again, for all of our published articles and professional builder magazine, blog posts, videos and more. Check out to doyouconvert.com it’s also the best way to find out how to connect with all of us at DoYouConvert. Andrew myself, Mike Lyon, Jen Barkan. Jackie Askews and we have someone else joining the team. I don’t think we can say her name. just yet. She is put in her notice I’m not sure if everyone in the company knows that she’s leaving. So we don’t want to say her name but we are super excited. We are going to have a new addition to the family that we’re excited to, to share with all of you very soon. But once she is on there, that will also be the best place to get to know her better as well. That’ll do it. Great rest of the week. We’ll see you next time.

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