A conversation with an award-winning veteran of the new home sales process.
- Focusing on price is a sure way to lose a sale. Instead, help resolve the buyers’ emotional needs.
- There are a dozen possible emotional needs, and they will vary by the type of buyer.
- Modular builders can help buyers feel more secure by familiarizing them with the process and showing them the quality they will get.
Gian Hasbrock and I first met when I enrolled in the National Association of Home Builders’ Master in Residential Marketing (MIRM) classes in 2005. He was one of my instructors, and after classes ended, Gian and I became friends. I even hired him later to present a couple of seminars for one of the companies I worked for.
Gian Hasbrock is a housing consultant, a speaker, an instructor for the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) and a 30-year veteran of new home sales. He has also solely authored one NAHB curriculum and co-authored four others.
Based in Durham, North Carolina, Hasbrock was awarded Builder of the Year in 2019 from the Home Builders’ Association of Durham, Orange and Chatham Counties, North Carolina and served as that HBA’s president in 2018.
In 2015 and again in 2017, he was awarded Salesperson of the Year from the Triangle Sales and Marketing Council. In 2011, he was the recipient of the Sales and Marketing Educator of the Year Award by the NAHB’s National Sales and Marketing Council. He also received the Institute of Residential Marketing’s Trina Ripley Excellence in Education Award in 2003.
He is currently President of WOWISM, a real estate marketing consulting firm specializing in education, training, motivation, research, and accountability (WowismNC.com).
Through Gian’s decades of sales experience for several national homebuilding companies he is well-placed to provide insight into the techniques of selling new homes.
Whether it’s offsite new construction, scattered lot, single-family housing or new construction in planned suburban communities, buyers all possess the same rational and emotional concerns and it’s these that salespeople must help them navigate.
Understanding the nuances of each phase of the sales process and recognizing what drives or slows a sale is key to being successful. It’s similar to the brake and gas pedals of a vehicle and sometimes a salesperson unintentionally applies the wrong pedal.
In this question-and-answer session, Gian shares insights he has gained over the years.
Q: What is the biggest mistake salespeople make during the course of a sale, and can they be corrected to keep a sale on track?
A: The biggest mistake is probably focusing on the price of the home and the possible discounts, versus how the home’s sale can fulfill an emotional need for the buyer. Yes, it can be corrected but the salesperson must understand the motivating factors of the sale and must be cognizant of the elements that may slow or derail the sale for that particular buyer.
Q: Do you mean that the salesperson spends too much time talking about the cost of the project and that could slow the sale?
A: Yes, that is the issue, instead of listening to the customer to determine why they need a new home, the salesperson will talk too much about the pricing model, the construction process, timetables and loans. This kind of talk will slow, if not put the brakes on, a sale. It can also feed into the prospective buyer’s internal fears.
Q: What do you mean by fears?
A: By fears I’m just saying that life-changing transactions can be scary, especially when they involve a lot of money. Unless you are purchasing an airplane or an expensive yacht, a home will be your largest single purchase. So, a purchaser’s fear can take many forms.
They might have the fear of buying at the top of the market, known as FOBATT, or like we saw in 2021, they could have the fear of missing out, FOMO.
Or even FOC, which translates into a fear of commitment. This is when a potential buyer obsessively researches every possible option when faced with a decision, fearing that they’ll miss out on the best choice. These customers love the thrill of the hunt and become addicted to it.
Q: What accelerates the sales process?
A: Every potential buyer has a level of discontent about their current living situation. A salesperson’s job is to assess the level of a prospect’s dissatisfaction. If their current living situation is tolerable, they are less motivated to buy.
Dissatisfaction can take many forms. It could be that a growing family has a lack of bedrooms and baths, or their current commute is too long.
A salesperson needs to acknowledge, understand and appreciate the prospect’s dissatisfaction with their current circumstances. I like to think of this as filling emotional holes. These holes are filled by the purchase of a new home. Typically, there are 12 emotional needs that contribute to an environment where a buyer is willing to make a move.
Q: What are the 12 emotional needs?
A: In no particular order I have broken emotional needs into these categories:
1. Culture represents home ownership as a fulfillment of the American dream.
2. Convenience does not exclusively mean the commute to work, but also the distance to conveniences like shopping and schools.
3. Requirements represents the physical attributes of the home and the homesite. It may mean the number of bedrooms and baths, its square footage and lot size, what direction the home is facing and its floor plan.
4. Recreation can mean both active and passive features as in tennis courts, pools and nature trails.
5. Romance translates into things you fall in love with or that positively reinforce your connection to the property. It could mean the attraction of a primary bed and bathroom suite or the nostalgia of a front porch.
6. Investment can be broken down into both short and long-term objectives. Are you capable of fulfilling the monthly payments for the short term and will the property likely appreciate in value in the long term?
7. Security represents freedom from fear of crime as well as feeling secure in the property as an investment to build wealth.
8. Status lends itself to ego. “I have made it to this level, and I deserve it.”
9. Privacy can mean the amount of acreage, a fenced-in yard or the actual personal privacy of the layout of the home and if the windows face neighbors, or not.
10. Prestige differs from status because the home and neighborhood represents one’s accomplishment.
11. Family fulfills the emotional needs and expectations of their spouse, children, parents and even their pets.
12. Lifestyle is the emotional need where the purchase reflects one’s self-image as consistent with their values and morals.
Most basic issues that motivate new home sales are a prospect’s “stage and wage.” Meaning, what stage of life they are currently in and how much they can afford to pay. I usually deal with suburban move-up and move-down homebuyers. Their most frequent emotional needs are family, lifestyle, convenience and security. Other well-known stage and wage groups include the first-time homebuyer and the 55+ buyer.
Q: And, for the prospect of an offsite builder, what are their emotional needs?
A: I suspect for the prospective offsite homeowner the top emotional needs would be family and lifestyle, followed by privacy and requirements.
Offsite homeowners, I think, want to exercise their freedom of choice, so they may like to see and select from many options before making their final decision. They have chosen where they want to live by purchasing their homesite and want to choose what specifically their home will look like and how it will function inside and out.
Q: Aside from fulfilling the emotional needs what are sales accelerators?
Implicit in the home purchase is a promise, like an insurance policy. I call it “hope insurance.” A home purchase represents fulfilling your hopes.
For an offsite prospect, hope insurance could mean visiting a model home, visiting the plant, or watching a home set. Customer testimonials and videos are also helpful here. All of these things build trust, confidence and hope.
Q: Is there a way offsite salespeople can put these ideas into action?
A: Yes. That happens when emotional holes are filled and hope insurance is experienced. Hope insurance (HI) and dissatisfaction (D) with their current living circumstances, can overcome and eclipse expense (E) and fear (F), which have an additive relationship.
A sale can take place when hope insurance times dissatisfaction is greater than expense plus fear. Just as a high-definition television delivers clarity in entertainment, a well-defined sale delivers clarity to the sales process.
I have distilled the process into a simple equation:
HI x D > E + F = Sales
The left side of the equation must be greater than the right side. Hope in what a new home can provide and dissatisfaction with their current living situation accelerates the sale while fear and expense puts the brakes on a sale. When I stopped trying to match the other guys’ price incentives and started focusing on filling those emotional holes that is when things turned around for me.
Reed Dillon is a marketing consultant, freelance writer and owner
of Creative Brand Content, in Moneta, Virginia.
