Why So Slow to Adapt

Dan Levitan, who needs no introduction to many of our readers, recently offered a blog post exploring a question so many of us ask. “If there is no white knight out there ready to rescue a homebuilder, why is the industry so slow to adapt.” Specifically Levitan highlights three questions on so many of our minds:

• If purchasers buy individual communities as opposed to a corporate brand when selecting a new home, why have most builders including the “nationals” failed to provide individual Facebook and Twitter pages for each of their communities and why is every new home salesperson not blogging regularly about his or her community?
• If this target market believes in instant communication, why is it that only one of the largest homebuilders and almost none of the smaller builders provide web concierge services?
• If the homebuilding industry now concentrates a substantial portion of its media budgets on web-based marketing, why are homebuilders not constantly updating SEO (search engine optimization) for their websites?  Why are they not tracking and analyzing all web visitors in real time to determine number of visits, page preference, time on site, etc?  Why are they not obtaining real-time analysis of visitor traffic source to optimize cost and placement of click-throughs, banner ads and other purchased space?

Good questions, ones Levitan and many others are working on solving. As always, we’re interested in your thoughts and experiences. Let us know!

This entry was posted on Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.