Housebuilders
Digital marketing for housebuilders
I sat on the housebuilder's side of the table for ten years. Nine of them at one builder. That changes how you see the industry's marketing money.
Housebuilders are not short of agencies. They are short of someone inside the business who owns the numbers: what a lead really costs, what the portals actually return, whether the agency's report would survive an honest audit. I have done that job for two builders, one for nine years and one through an intensive twelve month reset, and the pattern of what works is remarkably consistent.
The problems I keep finding
Every housebuilder I have worked with has some version of the same four problems, and none of them is solved by hiring another agency.
The portal invoice goes unquestioned. At one client, Rightmove leads were costing between £220 and £1,650 each while PPC delivered them at £41, and the portal assisted 0.23% of online conversions against 32% for paid search. Nobody had looked, because nobody owned the looking. When someone did, £75k came off the renewal without hurting sales.
The agencies mark their own homework. Reports arrive full of green numbers and "added value", and there is no one client-side with the data fluency to test them. Over nine years at one builder I appointed, managed and where necessary replaced four agencies, each working to contracted deliverables and quarterly scorecards, and the difference in what the same fee bought was substantial.
The website underperforms and the fix is overpriced. When lockdown exposed one client's site as not fit for purpose, the incumbent agency proposed a £50-80k rebuild. A written brief, four agencies scored against 30 weighted criteria and a disciplined selection later, the new site cost £22,560 and enquiries were up 234% year on year within two months of launch.
Nobody can prove what marketing sells. Housebuilders track visits and enquiries but rarely connect them to reservations and revenue. Build the attribution properly and the conversation changes: at one client the board could see £16.6m of revenue and 110 home sales attributed to digital channels in ten months, measured against the offline equivalent.
What I do about it
The engagement usually starts with a digital review: a few weeks, fixed cost, and an honest baseline of your website, your channels, your portal spend, your agencies and your measurement. It is deliberately blunt. At St Modwen Homes the review was delivered within a month of starting and set the benchmarks the board used for the rest of the year.
From there, whatever the review says is needed. A fractional digital director role, a day or two a month owning the numbers and the agency relationships. A website project run as a proper procurement, from brief through weighted scorecards to launch. A portal value review with the renewal negotiation behind it. An agency pitch, handover or replacement managed end to end. A CRM programme rescued, or an email and nurture programme designed and built. I have run every one of these inside real housebuilders, more than once.
The evidence
Two builders, two very different engagements, the same discipline.
A Yorkshire housebuilder: nine years on the client's side of the table
The depth story. Website rebuilt, measurement connected to Salesforce, £16.6m of digitally attributed revenue in one year, four agencies held to account, a GDPR programme delivered and an award-winning online home configurator taken from concept to launch. Nine years is its own evidence: housebuilders do not keep consultants that long out of politeness.
Read the case study →St Modwen Homes: a twelve month digital reset
The speed story. Hired through a board-level selection in May 2020. Strategy review inside a month, website replatformed for £22,560 against a £50-80k proposal, enquiries up 234% year on year, a stalled £225k CRM programme safely closed and reset, and the FY21 budget rebuilt from £1.65m to £1.44m without cutting output.
Read the case study →Who this is for
Regional and mid-size housebuilders, typically selling a few hundred to a couple of thousand homes a year, where marketing is led by a small team without a digital specialist at director level. If your portal renewal is coming up, your agency contract is up for review, your website project is stalling or your board keeps asking what marketing actually sells, those are exactly the doors I have walked through before.
If any of that sounds familiar, the review is the place to start. It is the cheapest money you will spend on your marketing this year, because it stops you solving the wrong problem beautifully.
Thirty minutes, no charge, no pitch
Tell me what is in front of you and I will tell you whether it is worth looking at properly.
If it is not, I will say so, and that costs you half an hour.
Book a free 30-minute call