Small volume home builders that want to grow may wonder who should they hire to make that happen. The most important positions to create and fill with experienced, top tier employees are a sales consultant, land consultant, and a marketing expert. These employees can help you build and sell homes at scale to take your business to the next level.
1) Sales Consultant
A strong sales process is at the core of growing any business. Ideally, you’d be able to hire an entire sales team with an experienced leader who can make sure the staff is properly trained. But if you can’t hire a sales team or even a sales consultant, a knowledgeable mentor can provide great value on how to sell more homes while being more efficient.
However, don’t hire a sales team without proper management and training. Make sure you have a management team that can find, recruit, train, and onboard sales consultants. Your experienced sales manager can also provide valuable knowledge if you don’t have experience with production homebuilding or a certain market segment you want to go after. You can learn from the first-hand experience of others while avoiding the mistakes they made.
Having a strong sales team in place can also make obtaining financing easier. A strong sales process that includes pre-sales makes your business attractive to banks and investors, as you will have contracts from qualified buyers to back up your projections.
2) Land Consultant
Increasing sales volume starts with a great piece of land. A land acquisition specialist can help you secure the best piece of land for your project. It’s important to be selective and not settle for a B-level site. Available and desirable land has been harder to come by since the Great Recession, but A+ sites are still out there.
Working with a land consultant allows you to get advice on what will work where, who you’re competing with, and what is the cost based on historical data from markets all over the country. For many small builders, it’s a path to bigger things.
3) Marketing Expert
You might be the best homebuilder in the area, but that won’t matter much if you can’t get potential buyers in the door, whether in person or virtually. Marketing experts can help you establish and grow your brand presence in your local market and drive leads to your sales office. Marketing is nuanced and therefore requires continuous evaluation and refinement. It goes hand-in-hand with closing home sales and is worth the investment.
If you can’t hire more employees to help you grow your business, look for a partner to show you the ropes of production homebuilding while aligning with your business goals and vision. A franchise, for example, has a team of experts that can help you increase your sales volume and enter production homebuilding.
