If you’re staring at unsold homes and an empty parking lot, you have a problem to solve: Where are all the buyers?
Before you start throwing up lender banners, blindly boosting Facebook Marketplace posts, sending mailers to everyone you’ve ever met, hosting fish fries, or any other promotional endeavor, you need to ask yourself “Why?” Why are too few buyers purchasing a home from my sales center? Why isn’t there interest in that shiny new multi section home? Why can’t we sell more affordable homes in a housing affordability crisis?
If you’re a business owner, manufactured housing or otherwise, there are 3 reasons that buyers in your market are not purchasing your product: 1) Buyers don’t know you exist, 2) Buyers don’t want what you’re selling, and 3) Buyers don’t trust you. It may be one of these, it may be all of them, or it may be a little of each. Let’s look at each possibility and then explore some potential solutions.
Buyers Don’t Know You Exist
Do your buyers know you exist? This is the key question in determining whether your marketing is working or not. The first step is to define which buyer you’re asking about. For most MH retailers and community operators, your buyers are in the lower to lower-middle income brackets, and between the ages of 25 and 44. For MOST markets, this is the $40-$70k per year household income brackets.
If no one knows you’re there, you’ve got a marketing problem. Marketing is how businesses get attention – it is how they become known. All businesses have to promote themselves. Some use word of mouth, some advertise on various media platforms, while others employ guerrilla marketing tactics.
Do most of those in your community aged 25-44, and making $40k-$70k per year, know you exist? If the answer is yes, your marketing is working. If the answer is no, you need to turn up the volume on the marketing.
Buyers Don’t Want What You’re Selling
There is an important distinction I need to make here: when I say buyers don’t want your product, I don’t mean that they don’t need it. Your sales and marketing will create the want, and in our industry’s case, market conditions create the need. It’s no secret that every community in the United States needs affordable housing (manufactured housing). The problem is that there’s not enough want.
How do we make a prospective homebuyer want to purchase a manufactured home?
I like to say that good marketing piques a buyer’s interest, and a good sales strategy turns that interest into a want. Unless you’ve got Don Draper in the back room running an award-winning marketing campaign, your marketing and sales teams are going to have to work together to make home buyers in your region want to purchase a home from you.
To see if you’re creating want in your market, look at your conversion rate for all your leads (phone, web, walk ups, etc.). How many prospects that expressed interest in purchasing a home from you bought one? Is it 1%? .01%? 90%? Do you know?
There is no perfect conversion rate, as all sales organizations differ, even within one industry. However, I can tell you that .1% is way too low, and 100% is too high. The problem with too low a conversion rate is clear, but too high of a conversion rate usually mean your marketing is ineffective—only those that are very eager to buy are inquiring, or your pricing is much too low and slim margins will ultimately prove to be unsustainable.
If the conversion rate is too high, you need to either look at your pricing or look at your advertising. If it’s too low, you need to look at your sales system. Is your sales team working to earn that appointment (at least 8-10 touchpoints per lead)? Do they know the ins and outs of the home so that they can feature benefit both? Are they asking the right questions during the sale to learn what problem a new home can solve for your prospective buyer?
Our industry is in a position now where there is plenty of need, but there’s not nearly enough want. Your marketing and sales systems must both work to create the desire to purchase and live in a manufactured home.
Buyers Don’t Trust You
Conversation creates rapport, rapport builds relationships, relationships build trust, and trust closes deals.
If you’re in sales, you’ve likely heard some sort of variation of the mantra above. It’s what every new salesperson learns in their 101 sales training class. Your salespeople aren’t just in the manufactured housing business—they’re in the relationship business. The more trust they build, the more homes they will sell.
To create more trust in your sales process, you need to look at it and determine what you can change to make it more transparent and beneficial to the customer. Buyers trust things that are clear, honest, and in their best interest. The vast majority of us are certainly trustworthy—we simply need to tweak our processes to demonstrate that to buyers.
Here are some examples of changes that we’ve helped retailers and community operators make to improve their transparency and build trust:
Be Authentic
There is nothing that builds trust better than authenticity. In your conversations, your appearance, and your online content—you need to be authentic. Buyers will recognize authenticity, it will feel real, and they will trust the home purchase advice you give them. People buy from people, and the more ‘real’ you seem, the more likely it is that someone will buy from you.
Consistent pricing
Does your pricing vary from customer to customer? Maybe there’s a cash price and a financed price? Or perhaps you’re tempted to charge more if a customer is willing to pay more?
Those tactics may have been common in the past, but today’s buyers expect consistent pricing—no matter who is purchasing the home.
Clear agreements (purchase, rental, etc.)
The longer and more complex a document becomes, the less a customer will trust the business asking for their signature. Yes, certain legal elements must be included, but are there unnecessary additions that create confusion?
Maybe one bad experience led to an attorney adding extra legalese that may never be needed again. Take a step back and read your agreements from a buyer’s perspective—do they build trust or break it?
Next Steps
As we all know, the manufactured housing industry is in a tremendously advantageous position for growth—we just need to capitalize on it. The nation’s growing affordable housing crisis is showing no signs of slowing, and we have the perfect product to solve the affordable homeownership problem that hundreds of thousands of Americans are facing.
But to do that, we need to change and grow. We need to create awareness, demand, and trust to sell more manufactured homes. We need to show the millions of prospective home buyers in the market the value, durability, and affordability of our product. The strategies above are a great place to start.