GuildQuality

GuildQuality member, LEFKO Renovations, earned a mention in the December issue of Fortune! Owner, David Lefkovits shares his secret to successful marketing in the latest Fortune Venture column.

LEFKO Renovations is a family owned residential renovation and remodeling company and a sister company of the LEFKO Group, a real estate development, general contracting and investments company co-founded by David.

In addition to David’s leadership at LEFKO, he is also a partner of Custom Building Group, a builder of luxury homes in Metro Atlanta. Congratulations David and LEFKO team!

GuildQuality member 1-800-HANSONS was recently named National Contractor of the Year by Replacement Contractor Magazine, a publication that recognizes the top window, siding and roofing contractors in the United States.

“We work very hard to provide our customers with the best products and service before and after the sale. In this industry it’s all about trust and we work very hard at earning and keeping the trust of our clients,” states owner and President Brian Elias.

Congratulations 1-800-HANSONS!

Even the best businesses get negative reviews. The trick is utilizing that feedback constructively to help your business grow. Negative reviews can be an ideal platform for you to demonstrate just how much you care about your customers. Yelp’s blog for business owners recently posted a video specifically about the positive side of negative reviews, take a look.

Many of our GuildQuality members leverage their customer feedback to strengthen their brand through our survey process which presents a great opportunity to let customers share more information. Their published comments find their way into consumer rating services like Google Places, and with the addition of GuildQuality Reviews, more robust, useful, informative commentary will make its way throughout the web. Don’t shy away from reviews! Encourage your customers and open the door to valuable commentary.

Forbes just picked up a story about I’On that was published by MarketUrbanism a few years ago. Real estate development is difficult, and politics make it more so. An excerpt from the original MarketUrbanism post:

It is important to recognize that our society has politicized property rights and democratized land use to the point that most re-zonings now involve a political campaign. Even with great built examples such as the historic area of Charleston and the Old Village of Mt. Pleasant, one should not make the naïve mistake of assuming that citizens or their elected leaders will understand the concept after hearing a lecture or reading a few articles on Traditional Neighborhood Development. Some may take years to understand the concept, while others may never understand it. And there are some who feel that accepting the design principles of TND involves an admission that what has been built over the last 50 years was a mistake. They may be unable or unwilling to make such an admission. Also, one should not assume that if a politician or appointed board member likes a project or thinks it is “the right thing to do” they will necessarily support it in a public forum. Few are those who possess the political will or guts to stand up to an angry room full of NIMBYs, or a well-connected citizen.

It is extraordinarily difficult to win such a political campaign in most areas of the country for several reasons: (1) Prior to World War II people were excited about growth. Their expectations were that what was built would be beautiful and contribute to their quality of life. However, the overall quality of the built environment of the last 50 years has been poor. This makes people distrustful of anything new, and gives rise to a legitimate belief that anything new will, by association with most of what has been built over the last 50 years, will necessarily be bad; (2) the private/exclusive mindset embodied in the suburban mentality (which has spread to many urban areas) leads people to believe that any more development will degrade their privacy and exclusivity; and (3) it is in the best short-term economic interests of existing property owners because limiting supply of new homes, puts upward pressure on existing home prices.

I’ve mentioned I’On a few times in our own blog. Visit our website here. Also, this Forbes post may help to explain why I occasionally rant about how the political and regulatory process is destroying the building profession.

December 7 Update: Steve Kendrick just pointed out to me that the house in the background is an I’On custom home built by Mount Pleasant builder & remodeler, and long-time Guildmember, Structures Building Company!

Calculated Risk reports that Redfin is bringing more transparency to the real estate brokerage industry.

Listings are as much advertisements for brokers’ services as they are advertisements for available homes, so it’s easy for the layperson to assume that a bunch of signs equals a bunch of sales. Redfin aims to eliminate this confusion by showing agents’ actual production data.

While there are plenty of worthy exceptions out there (an excellent agent is an invaluable resource) the real estate brokerage community has largely attempted to preserve it’s value by controlling the keys to the information castle. In contrast, the best agents out there have embraced service, innovation and professionalism as the path toward success. Their success, coupled with resources like Redfin, Zillow, and Craigslist, is compelling the rest of the industry to either follow them or find another job.

What other changes would you like to see in real estate brokerage?

Qualified Remodeler, in partnership with RenovationExperts, published its annual review of customer satisfaction trends from among clients who found their remodeler via the RenovationExperts website. In general, customer satisfaction is up relative to last year’s study. Ken Betz covered the study and also shared a bunch of my comments on some of the trends they saw. Among them:

I think people are more demanding, but I also believe the profession as a whole is rising to the occasion with more professionalism. To say it another way, I think it’s much harder for bad companies to stay in business today than it was five years ago.

Mark Newman of Remodeling just published an excellent piece describing some best practices from nine winners of Remodeling and Replacement’s Service Excellence Award (powered by GuildQuality).

Nick Cogliani, owner of Newpro, recently sat down with Jim Cory for a Q&A. Read the whole interview in Replacement Contractor. Here are a couple excerpts:

Customer service, or customer care, is [the strongest part of our organization]. We’ve recently become disciples of the book Delivering Happiness. We’ve instilled in our culture the idea that customer service includes every department in our company. Customer service was something we always thought we did well, but we realized there was lots more you can do to improve the customers’ experience…

…More than ever customers want to be sure they’re receiving real value. To address that, we’ve focused on building and expanding our reputation through social media channels and online review sites to let customers speak for us. We’ve initiated a new position — our Newpro customer concierge — to make sure every comment, request, complaint, or whatever is addressed and the loop closed. We’re using our family more prominently in our marketing. And we’re relying more on feedback from third-party surveys via GuildQuality.

Thanks, Nick, for the mention! A few weeks ago, my father recommended Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness after seeing him speak. Your endorsement just bumped it up a notch on my reading list.

Last week, I attended the Housing Leadership Summit in Chicago. While the summit’s focus is relevant to what we do here at GuildQuality, it’s especially relevant to my work as a real estate developer. The agenda was impressive, so I decided to go at the very last minute (literally the Friday before the Monday conference). Lodging at the conference hotel was sold out, so I booked a nearby room — in someone’s apartment — via AirBnB.

I’ve been following AirBnB for some time and I like what they’re doing, so the conference gave me an excuse to test them out first-hand. Overall, AirBnB provided an incredibly simple and affordable way to find a great place to stay.

If you follow the tech world, you’ve heard a lot about this startup and, given their press, you would likely think they are a shiny new venture-backed overnight success. But that’s only because, in the beginning, they were nothing. And after that, they were practically nothing — a couple guys struggling every day to build their business. And then one day last year, they woke up and realized they were a big deal and you started hearing about them.

This morning, someone sent me an interview with their Founder/CEO Brian Chesky, and I gave it a listen on my way into the office this morning. If you’ve got an extra twenty minutes, fire up the interview. One of the gems:

Today, looking back at those early days, Brian is pretty sure that lack of money has defined the company and its culture of frugality. That lack of money also made Chesky and his cohorts get used to rejection, which only helped steel their resolve…Being broke and being cheap brings incredible amount of focus. “When you don’t have money you cannot have five strategies and you have to pursue one strategy,” says Chesky. “You cannot build things people don’t really want.”

Exactly what they went on to do isn’t necessarily what you need to do (or have done over the course of your career), but their creativity, their scrappiness, and their moxie should be an inspiration to you, and you’ll likely see a little of yourself in the AirBnB history.

Our members routinely earn recognition on the “leader” lists of home building and remodeling publications. More than 20% of QR’s Top 500 Remodelers are Guildmembers. The same goes for the Remodeling 550. We work with 9 of the Builder 100. 14 of this year’s Big50 (28%!) are GuildQuality remodelers. And when one of our members is ranked by JD Power, it’s common that they’re at or near the top spot for their market.

But among Professional Remodeler’s Market Leaders — the leaders in each of the 19 largest remodeling markets in the United States — fully a third (19 out of 57) are Guildmembers.

Most of this is probably more correlation than causation — many of our members have been on these lists since before GQ launched in 2003 — but it still feels good to see so many of our members enjoying such great success and recognition.

Next week marks twenty years since I graduated from high school and I feel like I’m in the best shape of my life. Over the last few years, I’ve become thoughtful about what I eat, started running and hiking more consistently, and switched to working at a standing desk most of the time. Even more importantly, my wife and kids are keeping me young: I’m once again playing with Legos and riding bikes. Life is good.

At my 20th high school reunion last month, the consensus seemed to be that I look exactly the same. This message was reinforced last week at the Remodeling Leadership Conference where people were asking why Sal Alfano was letting a teenager announce the Service Excellence Awards. Youthful appearance isn’t always a great thing, but I’ll absolutely take it over the other extreme. And I’m thankful to have the health that comes along with it.

I wouldn’t normally share this kind of thing here, but this article featuring new Guildmember Oakwood Homes got me thinking about the importance of health. It seems this Colorado home builder and I both started paying serious attention to our health about three or four years ago.

I’ve found it to be a lot easier to change myself than to facilitate change in others, so I have to give a huge congratulations to the leadership of Oakwood Homes. On the eve of their 20th anniversary, the good people at Oakwood Homes are about to close their 10,000th home, they’ve climbed to number 77 on the Builder 100, and they’re going to be in great shape when they celebrate their anniversary. An excerpt from John Caulfield’s article in Builder (italics are mine):

Oakwood Homes is fit—in more ways than one. This year, for instance, the Colorado-based company’s health-care rates dropped, thanks to a wellness program it launched in 2007. Last year, it added a fitness center with personal trainers to its headquarters.

Oakwood asks all associates to provide blood samples, as part of its requirement for participating in the health-care program, and measures their weight and body fat. Employees who partake in an exercise regimen of 10 hours per month receive $50 in monthly “Oakwood Bucks,” redeemable for everything from ski passes and model-home furniture to race-entry fees, says COO Frank Walker. One employee who met all of the company’s wellness requirements got his health-care coverage for free last year, adds Bob Sanderman, Oakwood’s CFO.

As the number of automated customer service lines and clunky online complaint forums rises, customers are willing to pay more money for services if they are backed up by great customer service. According to yesterday’s Wall St. Journal, 70 percent of American Express customers are willing to pay more (up from 58 percent last year).

Most customers – 90 percent – preferred talking to someone over the telephone, something we still feel is important at GuildQuality. About half said they would embrace technology and chat with a representative online, and about 20 percent said they would feel comfortable over a social network.

The most striking statistic of the study is that customers are willing to pay on average a whopping 12 percent more for great customer service, with 15 percent of customers saying they would pay up to 20 percent more! Last year, only 5 percent of people were willing to do so, meaning there are triple the amount of customers who are willing to pay big bucks for better service.

If you are a homebuilder, remodeler, contractor or real estate professional and haven’t already taken steps to ensure your customers an exceptional experience, try GuildQuality’s free trial today.

Thanks to Leah Thayer at Daily5Remodel for the tip.

In our Newsletter from March, you’ll find our Q1 Member Prediction Report, an article on the benefits of transparency and an overview of our new features.

Subscribe to our newsletter here.

Below is a guest post from Carl Seville, owner of Seville Consulting. Carl has over 30 years of experience in renovation and home construction, has won more than 100 industry awards and has held numerous leadership positions in the building and remodeling industries. Over the years, he has developed a deep interest and steadfast dedication to green building and living, and through Seville Consulting offers his expertise to homeowners, contractors, non-profits, government agencies and manufacturers through consulting and certification of new and existing building buildings under Earthcraft House, LEED for Homes, ENERGY STAR, and other green building programs.

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Thank you to all the builders, remodelers, real estate developers, and contractors that participated in the survey. As in the seven prior surveys, more than 100 of you shared your thoughtful, humorous, motivating, painful, and encouraging feedback about the state of residential real estate and construction in general and your businesses in specific. To view prior reports, click here.

For this quarter’s forecast, I’m pleased to report encouraging news: Relative to any other quarter since we began this survey in late 2008, this quarter a higher percentage of our builders, remodelers, and developers predict their next six months will be improved over their last six months. More than 80% of members predict improvement in their businesses’ performance and more than 60% predict improvement in the market in general.

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