After thirty years in this business, everywhere I look I see irony abounding. I was meeting with a media rep the other day. She calls on a lot of builders and she was expressing her frustration that she rarely even gets started with her “needs exploration” before she is asked, “What does it cost”? She hasn’t even dived into her pitch yet; hasn’t even gotten a feel for whether her medium is a good fit for the customer. But in my experience, this is where most builders start the discussion: the cost of any proposed media. I’m amazed that with that single-minded approach to investing in one’s business, you’d think the allure of “free” social media would be a bigger drawing card for more builders. But that’s a topic for another day.

So where’s the irony? Simple. We deal with prospective buyers every day who walk through our models and whose first question is, “What does it cost?” And we get angered that they don’t understand the difference between cost and value. Sure, cost is one component. But value is built through differentiation and if the builder/developer has done his/her job well through creative land planning and well-targeted architecture, the value should be obvious. But to the untrained consumer it rarely is, so we engage sales professionals to help tell our story and create the value that the prospective buyers sometimes don’t see on their own. We’re proud of what we do. We quite often do it well. But we get miffed at our prospects when they ask, “What does it cost” (which is a tip off quite frequently to the cost/sq. ft. mentality). And yet we turn around and ask the same question to our media reps.

Let’s shoot for some parity on both sides of the aisle. Hopefully we can get prospective buyers to understand the value we’ve created in our community that may actually make it worth a few sheckles more than the guy across the street. And maybe when the media reps come calling to try to help us solve our problem of low traffic and lagging sales, we can ask some better questions than just, “What does it cost”, and move into a more salient conversation about things like target markets, distribution/reach, CPM (in whatever form it takes) and ultimately how to measure results post-placement to tell if a reinvestment makes sense. Test, evaluate, test. In this complex and fast-changing world of how we promote our homes these days, it’s simply not good enough to only come with the cost question.