Shawn Van Dyke Archives - Bring It Home

Strategies and tactics to help you survive and thrive in a pandemic economy. It may not be business as usual, but it’s definitely business. That’s one way to view the homebuilding industry’s uneasy coexistence with a pandemic. In fact, if you take a bird’s eye view of the present challenges, you’ll discover enough encouraging developments to lift the spirits of nearly any homebuilder: Growing populationRock-bottom mortgage ratesLow inventories for new and existing for-sale homesSurging 55 and older buyers Consider home inventory, for example. Homebuyer demand easily outpaces the number of homes for sale, which explains stable home prices. Perhaps most encouraging for homebuilders, the marketplace for existing homes plummeted 24 percent for the 12-month period ending in April, as prospective sellers elected to stay put. Even with positive fundamentals, the fog of pandemic uncertainty leaves many builders with understandable concerns. How are your peers keeping projects rolling? What can you learn from others about business practices…

By Shawn Van Dyke Shawn Van Dyke was a guest speaker at the JELD-WEN booth at the recent NAHB International Builders’ Show in Las Vegas. He spoke about how to differentiate your construction business through social media marketing. This is a summary of his seminar. Many construction companies claim to offer the best service. The problem is most construction businesses market their services in the same way. They plaster beautiful pictures of their finished projects on social media and detail their five-step planning-to-completion process on their websites. Marketing your construction business in these ways is not wrong, but it is not the most effective way to differentiate your business from your competition. You may be the best at what you do, but, as StoryBrand CEO Donald Miller says, “People don’t buy the best products or services. People buy the ones they can understand the fastest.” The reason McDonald’s sells billions of hamburgers…