Envision gives customers access to products and builders access to big sales.

Lisa Kalmbach gets very excited when it comes to talking about the opportunity to sell home tech options via the Internet. It’s no surprise. As a marketing director with national homebuilder KB Homes, she says the company boasted $580 million in option sales last year.

That is a lot of options. And while they certainly didn’t all come from online ordering, Kalmbach says the Internet played a huge role.

"Consumers want more detailed information than the KB staff can often provide, so our virtual design center allows customers to get it without KB staff involvement," says Kalmbach. "The virtual design center also allows the sales staff to be in markets where they don’t have studios, and to deal with out-of-state buyers."

The result of having this technology edge has been to increase the company’s options sales from $9,000 per unit to $20,000 per unit over the past five years.

Kalmbach shared her company’s online options ordering success story at the recent Envision Launch Summit, held in Austin, Texas. The summit featured directors from the builder consortium New Home Technologies, and IT directors, builders, marketers and merchandisers from several of the leading homebuilding companies.

They had all come together to discuss the Envision suite of software products, which is an ambitious program to tie builders with leading consumer electronics manufacturers, and to solve back-office IT challenges. The summit attracted over 100 new homebuilders to get updates on the launch of the Envision software applications, but more importantly, to discuss the strategy for a new Web-based service.

If successful, the new Web-based options program has the potential to revolutionize how homebuilders market their options, and homebuyers access product information, according to the summit organizers. Kalmbach is counting on the service to increase options buying by KB Homes customers to an even greater degree.

Envision is the first product line from New Home Technologies, which is a joint venture subsidiary of Builder Homesite, a consortium created to provide cost-effective online marketing for homebuilders. Envision is being released as separate applications for various technology needs (see sidebar), but which all tie together as one integrated enterprise-wide software system.

By far the most ambitious application is the options manager, which essentially ties all participating manufactures into one gigantic database, listing detailed product information and descriptions of everything they offer in the home market. All product information would originate with each manufacturer, be tied to the Envision database, be available to all builders, be then filtered by each builder, and be searchable by all customers.

The intent is to essentially put the entire product catalogs of every participating manufacturer into one database that can be accessed by homebuyers through virtual design centers, hosted by respective builders.

According to Tim Costello, president and CEO of Builder Homesite, the options manager launches this month and will allow the participating homebuilders to access the products they want from each manufacturer they work with, through the builder’s design center. Each builder ultimately has access to all product information from all participating manufactures, but would set up their design center to only access the manufacturers they choose, and the products they normally carry.

The builder has total control over what products they wish their customers to have access to, Costello says. They merely have to say "yes" or "no" to each available product in terms of what they want to be displayed, and they can change their selections at any time.

Easing the Pressure

For home tech items, Beazer Homes Chief Information Officer Jonathan Smoke sees the Envision product as a godsend for builders. "We don’t do a very good job of showcasing products," Beazer says of most builders. But the Envision product will allow homebuyers to review options at their leisure, and to read descriptions written by the manufacturer targeted to them. That makes the job of actually selling home tech features much easier, he says. www.newhometechnologies.com

The Envision Partners

Ten leading new homebuilders are early adopters of Envision technology:

Beazer Homes USA
Capital Pacific Holdings
Centrex Corporation
David Weekley Homes
KB Homes
Lennar Corporation
McGuyer Homebuilders
Morrison Homes
Toll Brothers
Village Homes

Early Consortium manufacturer members include:

Georgia Pacific
Hearth & Home Technologies
Honeywell
Masco
Overhead Door
Owens Corning
Progress Lighting
Square D
Therma-Tru
Weyerhaeuser
Whirlpool Corp.
York International