GuildQuality

Update: View the 10 most popular Qlistings for the first 30 days
We’ve been spending a good deal of time thinking about how to enable our members to promote themselves to the general public. The result is the GuildQuality Qlist and member Qlistings.

The Qlist
In late fall, we quietly introduced the Qlist: a market-by-market list of members who chose to display some very top-level performance information about their companies. The Qlist also includes the same kind of summary information for thousands of non-member builders and remodelers, whose customers we surveyed as part of our ongoing benchmarking surveying.

Qlistings for Members
Until this weekend, the Qlist was not much more than a list of builders and remodelers. With the introduction of Qlistings for our members, members can configure their own listing page to include as little or as much information about their company as they are comfortable putting on display. They can also opt-in or opt-out of inclusion in the list (the default setting is “opted-in”).

In their Qlisting, members can display their recommendation rate, their company logo and contact information, a description of their company, selected comments or testimonials from their customer surveying, and a list of their company affiliations (i.e. NAHB, NARI, Remodelers Advantage, etc).

How to update your Qlisting… (more…)

Michael Corkery of the WSJ published a great interview (subscription required) with Robert Toll on Toll Brothers recent decision to begin developing urban infill mid- and high-rise condos. In response to the question, “How do you decide which markets to enter?” Toll says,

Is there excitement in the city? Will people want to come? And has someone else succeeded? We are not going first, I will tell you that. It also has to be a great land price. We are not going into this on a ‘let’s try it’ basis. High-rise development is much more dangerous, much riskier than suburban development because you’ve got to build the whole damn thing. You can’t knock part of it off. But first the demand has got to be there. We can create destinations in mountains and valleys. But I don’t think we create destinations in cities.

He goes on to talk about his five cardinal rules for business, his recent visit to Shanghai, and Toll’s potential entry into the hyper-brand-conscious Chinese market.

Later this month, GuildQuality will launch the next iteration of the Qlist. The new Qlist will provide our members with a more direct opportunity to leverage their membership in GQ for marketing purposes. Members may choose whether or not to be included in the Qlisting, and they may customize the content they display. If a member chooses to be included, they can show off great customer comments, promote their relationship with industry organizations like the NAHB or NARI, and describe their company and the type of work they do.

In September, we quietly introduced the Qlist in the hinter-sections of the old website. When we re-launched the new site in November, we gave it more prominence as part of a newly dedicated homeowner/homebuyer section. With the introduction of member-opt-in and configurable content, the new Qlist is realizing our plans of introducing a wider consumer audience to our membership.

We’ll announce the official launch of the Qlist in the next week or two.

I am a big fan of Design/Build, both from my years as a developer and my experience as a customer. To me, separating the design process from the construction process is a recipe for disaster — construction disaster and (more commonly) budget disaster.

In a recent Remodeling Magazine article, Cindy Goff of Morey Construction in Signal Hill, CA, describes the benefits and personal satisfaction she’s enjoyed in the year since Ben Morey asked her to head up their design department.

I now design with confidence and support. I still interact and dream with clients, but I know the budget and the structural approach from the beginning – from the guy who’s going to build it! The clients and I are at ease because we have information. There is a fixed price that we all work toward, and it doesn’t move unless the client moves it.

Van Deusen Construction, of Bel Air, MD, was the focus of a recent article by Linda Case in Remodeling Magazine. Jay Van Deusen took heart when his peers offered him a little constructive criticism: Jay may sometimes cross the line from demanding to unappreciative.

If he wanted certain behaviors, they said, he needed to soften up and learn to recognize and reward those behaviors. “I have struggled with this all of my life, thinking that I am paying everyone so much that they should be thanking me,” he says.

Linda’s article describes Jay’s path from over-demanding autocrat to “personal satisfaction and better business.”

“In the meantime,” Van Deusen says, “I’ll bask in the land of pleasant living, saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and doing things for folks that they enjoy receiving and I enjoy giving.” No, he acknowledges, “it isn’t always glowy and happy, but I seem to end up on the receiving end more than I expected.”

The latest edition of New Towns gives extensive coverage to one our developer’s communities: East Beach in Norfolk, VA. East Beach is a fantastic example of public/private partnerships done right. Their Guild is one among many examples of thoughtful execution with a focus on creating long-term value for themselves and their residents.

Customers are surveyed regularly to determine their satisfaction levels. If builders can’t maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, they aren’t allowed to build in East Beach, says Wood. “We’ve eliminated two builders from the original list so far because they weren’t performing. We have two more finishing houses right now, and they won’t be doing any more.”

Homebuilders are generally a residential real estate developer’s best customers, so it can be difficult to turn down their business. But a developer has to take the long view: they must create value by creating a great place. If a builder, through sub-par service, is devaluing the neighborhood, the developer must stop selling them lots. Removing them from the community reaffirms the developers commitment to quality, inspires other builders to do better, and helps everyone to avoid the inevitable problems that will arise from having dissatisfied customers.

The “public” part of East beach’s public/private partnership is the Norfolk Redevelopment Housing Authority, another GQ member. The RHA acquired the land in 1995 before partnering with the East Beach Company in 1998 to facilitate its development. The nature of that relationship is another contributor to the project’s success.

“In the beginning, East Beach was an unknown entity, people didn’t know if it would be wildly successful or a huge flop,” says East Beach General Manager Rock Bell. “So by giving the RHA 20 percent of the lot sales, we both would benefit from the project doing well. This turned out to be helpful on the political side: The people who are watching you are happy that you’re doing well, as opposed to begrudgingly accepting it.”

The high cost of commuting bodes well for the future of infill development. From a recent BusinessWeek article:

“A new report from the Washington-based Center for Housing Policy finds that in major metropolitan regions around the country, the money you save on housing by moving away from the city is about the same amount you will spend on additional transportation costs.”

But whether you are commuting or walking to work, you’re still hit with big hidden costs. While they aren’t paying as much for their commuting expenses, infill buyers are shouldered with tremendous regulatory costs passed on to them by their builders and developers via the pricing of in-town houses and condos.

Reason Magazine recently outlined the big costs associated with the regulatory process, and pointed out that the real losers are the folks who can least afford it:

With so much wealth created by government-exacerbated scarcity, the housing market has become increasingly politicized, to the detriment of the people who can least afford it. “A century of experience with regulation of various kinds has taught us that regulation typically favors the affluent and the organized over the less affluent and less organized,” said American Enterprise Institute fellow Steven Hayward, testifying before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 1999. “There are few groups less organized or represented than the people who would benefit from houses and jobs that do not yet exist. ‘I think we are being naive if we fail to recognize that growth management schemes can easily become the machinery of negation by existing residents.”

Popular Science’s “Most Innovative Product of the Year” in Home Technology is the Bostitch HurriQuake Nail. In addition to an impressive camel-cased “Q”, the HurriQuake boasts the “perfect combination of features to withstand nature’s darker moods.”

Other award winners include a steam washing machine by LG, a personal wind power device, and Stanley’s boldly named “Fubar” hammer.

The GuildQuality lab has been busy over the past couple months. Here’s a quick summary of what they’ve been working on.

New Features: Scorecard, Multiple Users, and Enhanced Peer Settings
Last week, we finished building several big service enhancements. They include the GuildQuality Scorecard (to give you an executive-level summary of company performance), Multiple Users per Account (so everyone in your company can have their own GQ account), and Enhanced Peer Group Settings (that include price point and more specific product type descriptions). We’ll go live with these enhancements on Sunday. To see more details, check out the brief descriptions in our new GQ Blog.

Live Demonstrations of New Functionality
We have three webcasts scheduled for next week, during which Rob Faraj and Geoff Graham will give a tour of the brand new stuff. Please let us know in advance if you’d like to attend, and we’ll send you an invitation.

Tuesday, November 14 at 10:00 AM EST
Wednesday, November 15 at Noon EST
Thursday, November 16 at 2:00 PM EST
ADDED: Monday, November 20 at 10:00 AM EST
ADDED: Tuesday, November 21 at Noon EST

The New GuildQuality Website and Blog
We also launched the new and improved GuildQuality website. With the new website comes the GuildQuality Blog – an ever expanding resource of feature descriptions, member news, and relevant articles on the building industry or customer satisfaction. If you come across anything you think our members would find relevant, including big news about your company, please send it to me, as I update the blog regularly.

Thanks very much for being a part of our community of quality-minded building professionals. We’re excited to be helping you in your ongoing pursuit of excellence.

Every GuildQuality Member may have as many account users as they need. There are three different kinds of users:

Super. This is the account owner. They have super privileges and can do everything, including delete any other user.

Admin. This is an account administrator. These users can do everything a Super can do, except modify the Super’s settings. Because this user can create surveys and edit customer information, this is the kind of user a person should be if they are GuildQuality’s point person in charge of facilitating customer surveying.

Normal. This is a read-only account that may (at the discretion of its creator) have limited access to some data. When creating a Normal account, the creator can decide how much access to give this person — whether they should be able to see all survey response information, or only that which is relevant to them.

The User settings are located in Account Settings and are, of course, only accessible to Super and Admin users.

Two GQ features put the “Guild” in GuildQuality. Peer Groups and your Company Descriptions work together to share aggregate member information in a way that provides for relevant performance benchmarking, but does not disclose the identity of any single member.

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The Scorecard gives you a single score from 0% to 100% for every area of your company’s performance — whether as broad as your company’s overall performance for all time, or as specific as a single employee’s performance in a single area for a single quarter. This provides managers with an excellent tool to quickly filter through all the white noise of your thousands of data points, and hone in on exactly what you need to know.

Your “score” equals the percentage of all survey responses to your 0 to 4 questions that were either a 3 or a 4. So in the example above, 50% of all answers in At Contract surveys were 3 or 4. For Shortly After Closing it was 78%, and for Long After Closing it was 71%. Generally speaking, this means that people were most pleased with their experience right after moving in. But this is just one example of how the Scorecard can work.
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MarketWatch has a nice description of prevailing trends among Generation X buyers and insight into the perspectives of the emerging Generation Y market.

Many [Gen Xers are] forgoing master suites and separate wings for kids and adults and instead seeking smaller footprints with space designed for family usage rather than individual usage, Chung said.

The market has yet to catch up with their particular demands, he said. “What we’re seeing is a fundamental mismatch between what these buyers are wanting and what the market is offering. They’re settling for what’s available vs. finding what they really want.”

Other predictions/trends include more compact living quarters in urban areas “where they can interact with their neighbors” and more “solo dwellers”.

Here in the city of Atlanta, we’ve enjoyed a nice spike in our intown population thanks in no small part to these emerging buyer preferences and the foresight of a handful of prescient developers. And even in the face of a market downturn, at least one of our significant urban infill developers remains bullish about prospects for the city’s near-term growth.

We have a lot of inventory out there, sales cycles are stretching out, and buyers are enjoying a sudden decline in new home prices. It is a good time to be known as an accomplished building professional with a history of exceptional service.

It’s an especially good time to be on solid footing, considering that some economist are forecasting some pretty serious doom and gloom. My father forwarded me an interesting article from Fortune this morning, highlighting yet another reason to turn your attention to your company’s reputation. If Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab & Co., is correct, the economy is in for a tough ride next year (see her chart to the right).

A couple excerpts from the article:

“The historical record is extremely negative in terms of what comes next,” says economist Ed Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast. “We’ve had 11 sharp declines in the housing market since World War II, including this one. Eight of the last ten were followed by a recession.”

Bruce Karatz, KB’s CEO, thinks it will be next summer at the earliest before homebuilders work through all existing inventory. In the meantime, he’s hopeful that a big upswing in free cash flow – builders have essentially stopped buying new land – will get companies like KB back into Wall Street’s good graces.

Author and journalist James Surowiecki wrote a brief article on historical home prices, in which he asserts that the much-lauded trend of appreciation is the product of bad data analysis.

[I]f you control for inflation and quality…real home prices barely budged between the eighteen-nineties and the nineteen-nineties.

Surowieki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds, a fantastic treatise on “why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations.”