The number of decisions a customer has to make during the design and construction of a new home is immense. I don’t know the exact number, but I have anecdotally been told by a new homebuilder that for a 2,500-square-foot home the number of homeowner decisions is about 135 choices.
Many of them are easy, but many are not. Homebuyers not only have to decide whether they want to add major items like fireplaces, exterior finishes like clapboards vs. stucco, or even balconies and swimming pools, but they then have to choose among a myriad of smaller details for the inside of the home.
Often, in order to make those choices the homebuyers are required to visit multiple showrooms with the designer, integrator, architect and/or builder. The style and color of flooring, carpeting, cabinets, drawer handles, countertop material and colors, backsplash, grout color, sinks, faucet fixtures, shower fixtures, lighting fixtures, wall paint, shades, fireplace, decking, etc.
All of that happens before the integrators gets his or her place at the table with the homebuyer. Working with the integrator, the homeowners have to discuss and decide infrastructure-level systems such as the home network, and then room-by-room and system-by-system selections for the security and surveillance system; keypad/touchpanel sizes and locations; architectural speaker locations and brands; lighting fixture styles and lighting controls; size and quality level of displays or projectors/screens; motorization of shades, blinds and drapes, and on and on.
The entire process gives many integrators nightmares hearing the dreaded phrase, “The homeowner has not decided yet.”
Most builders have set-in-stone construction cycles. The longer it takes to build the house, the more money it costs them. Because the integrator is usually the trade that is on the project over the longest timeframe – from prewire all the way to final handoff – integrators are more susceptible to being caught by project delays and timeline changes caused by client indecision. It creates a snowball effect.
It is one reason that many builders now have an automated options selections process in place. The idea is to have the customers make all the “easy” decisions quickly via a web portal, narrowing it down to hopefully just a handful of choices that will require showroom visits and one-on-one meetings with individual subcontractors.
How to Avoid the Nightmare?
So, what can an integrator do to speed up a client’s decision-making process, especially when working with a new homebuilder? First, there are advantages to getting the builder to adopt certain technology amenities as “standards” versus “options.” It can immediately speed up the process if the hardwired and wireless home network, for example, comes as a standard amenity in the home with the cost already built into the project.
Secondly, for the integrator, having a comprehensive proposal can also hasten the process. That might mean creating a more-expanded version of your normal proposal that presents a higher level of detail for the homebuyer. So, instead of a proposal that might just say, “Security/Surveillance System,” the proposal can lay out the device locations, along with the cost, of course.
Within D-Tools Cloud, the Alternates function can be key to this process. Not to be confused with Optional items, Alternate Products provide various preferences within a proposal. This is commonly used to showcase good/better/best choices for a particular product, such as loudspeakers, or for a system, such as the home theater. The end result is that the integrator is likely to have to make fewer revisions to the original proposal and thus present fewer versions, which speeds up the client’s decision-making process. In essence, Alternates mimics the automated options selections process that so many builders have adopted.
