Custom builder Ed Tarca and home tech integrator John Brusa find the most successful technology projects use a soft-sell approach.
The small town of Hopkinton, Mass., is perhaps best known as the starting point for the Boston Marathon. This picturesque New England town features large open town common surrounded by traditional Colonial-style homes, a splattering of businesses, and easy access to points north, east, south or west.
Hopkinton is considered a highly desirable address west of Boston. So it is not surprising that custom builder Ed Tarca set up operations in this community. That is especially appropriate when you realize that few local builders are as willing to go the extra mile when it comes to loading his houses with start-of-the-art technology and high-detail options.
But as robust as his homes are with home technology features, the most important ingredient to Tarca is overall mood and environment. As a result, the electronics are largely invisible as you walk through one of Tarca's high-end custom homes. n A typical Tarca home will feature a variety of touch screen and control panels in nearly every room. But the electronics that those controls service are generally much harder to locate. Speakers are often blended into baseboard moldings, with covers painted or stained to match. Or they may be hidden in ceiling lofts, along with a variety of lighting fixtures. The intent is to provide a lot of electronics power, but to not intrude on the décor and atmosphere of any given room.
"Atmosphere is what sells home technology," Tarca says.
While most homebuilders leave home technology entirely in the hands of their integrator sub-contractors, Tarca makes a point of knowing as much as he can about what is available, and how it relates to adding value to a customer's needs. After all, he is responsible for every aspect of the house, no matter who intalls what.
Tarca also frowns on presenting home technology as a series of teered "packages" that offer different numbers of rooms worth of structured wiring and options. Instead, he believes that a builder should demonstrate the overall value of home technology features in their model homes and showrooms—from audio, to video, to security—matching them with the customer's needs, and then presenting a price on what is required to meet those needs.
"The word, sales, isn't in our vocabulary," Tarca explains. "People are going to buy what they see value in, and everyone determines individually what they value. It's my job to package each individual interest and value, whether its high-end woodwork and medium-end woodwork, high-end audio or medium-end audio. There are only so many packages that can be presented, but what does the customer value each at?"
Tarca says the most effective home tech sales are done from the perspective of learning what a homeowner's past experiences have been with home technology, what their lifestyle is like within a home, what they are looking for in terms of atmosphere and décor in the house, and how home tech can enhance the experience they hope to have in a new home.
The low-pressure approach to home tech will result in more sales if you do it right, Tarca says. "You will sell every single time—without selling—if you provide them with the value they are looking for. It is up to me as the builder to make sure that everyone that works for me has that same philosophy, because they can't twist a guy's arm to spend $100,000 on Lutron or $300,000 in audio. If you present the value in having that, they'll evaluate it based on that, and they're going to either buy it or not buy it. But if you do your job and listen, and present the value that they're looking for, you will sell it every time."
Of course, the spending relationship between a homebuilder and a homeowner can often be a tricky one. Builders can often do a job for less then the figure they present. And homeowners can often afford more then they claim. Still, the builder has to get a true sense early on as to just how much home tech is affordable.
"There are subtle key questions we ask," says John Brusa, of Image Tech Home Theater Systems, who serves as integrator on a number of Tarca's housing projects. (for more on Brusa's advice to builders on how to market home tech, see the interview with him on this page) "For example, if you're throwing out a particular modular like Lutron lighting, a number might get thrown out there and we look at reactions. If reactions don't stop the meeting, then we just go forward for the presentation purposes. There are keys that develop very subtly during the exchange. We spend at least 100 hours to engineer a job for proposal purposes. We don't want to do that unless there is some possible success."
Brusa stresses that it is also important to talk to customers in terms of what technology does, and not what products cost, because the average homeowner knows nothing about what really goes into a system.
"I generally feel that customers don't know what home integration costs," Brusa says. "We all know what automobiles cost because they're advertised all the time. We all know what houses cost because we see those in the real estate magazines. There's no reason in the world that anyone would know what an integrated homes costs because we don't experience it in our daily lives." Don't be discouraged by that fact, Brusa says. A little bit of education goes a long way toward convincing a homeowner to spend more then they had ever anticipated.
"I had one specific customer that came into our showroom and said 'I want the best home theater possible. I'm willing to spend up to $10,000,'" Brusa recounts.
"In his universe, from his past experience, $10,000 was the best theater possible," Brusa says. By the end of the process, "He spent, comfortably, $100,000 with us—not because we were trying to push his $10,000 up, but because he wasn't aware of what was available."