What Home Buyers Want From Property Developers in 2024
Estimated Read Time: 3 Minutes
Understanding your home buyers in 2024
With over 30,000 home buyers utilising our interactive CGI services in the current year alone (January – March 2024), we place paramount importance on prioritising the home buyers’ experience. Delving deeper into the online journey of our homebuyers and gaining insights into their preferences enables us to persist in innovating and designing award-winning tools for the built environment.
So, we took to the streets at William Davis Homes, Skylarks development to gain direct feedback from homebuyers who used our services in their home-buying journey, here’s what they had to say.
Q - Did you purchase your home off-plan?
Before we got started with the nitty gritty, we wanted to know how many homeowners bought their homes off-plan. With a package of interactive services such as virtual showhomes and 360 virtual tours, developers are able to launch their developments much sooner, and start generating revenue off-plan.
55% of respondents at Skylarks revealed they bought their property off-plan, before their home had been built. Whereas only 44% bought their home after it had been built.
Q - Did you make use of a Virtual Tour online?
Currently, William Davis Homes has a mixture of interactive CGI content, included within this is a 360 Virtual Tour, Virtual Showhomes and Active Siteplans. The 360 Virtual Tour enables home buyers to explore each street of the development as though they were walking through on foot. This is often advantageous as many developments remain under construction for some time. Not only does this enable buyers to visualise the end result, but it gives them greater access and understanding of the development.
90% of respondents confirmed they made use of this tool. When asked “Did the Virtual Tour help you visualise the home and imagine yourself living there?” 90% of respondents confirmed the Virtual Tour did help them visualise the development and house types, with an equal 90% agreeing that the Virtual Tour increased their confidence to purchase a new home.
Q - How helpful would it have been to have an online functionality that allowed you to customise and visualise your home upgrade options such as kitchen cupboards, flooring and other features?
Having recently developed an award-winning housetype configurator in partnership with another client, we wanted to test the waters at William Davis Homes to see how helpful this function would be when visualising swatch options.
80% of home buyers at Skylarks agreed that having this online functionality would be very helpful during the buying process, and collectively another 20% of home buyers agreed the function, might – or would be helpful during the buying timeline.
Q - Do you think this feature would have given you confidence to purchase more upgrades?
Following on from our initial question we asked home buyers at Skylarks if the ability to visualise more swatch options would increase their likelihood of purchasing additional upgrades and features during the reservation process.
Given a scale of 1-5, 1 indicating it would not increase confidence at all, 5 indicating it would increase confidence, home buyers were asked to provide their opinion on how they felt a house type configurator would impact their confidence in purchasing upgrade options.
60% of homebuyers agreed an online tool such as a housetype configurator would provide confidence, 30% shared that this tool may improve their confidence and only 10% suggested it would not increase their confidence to purchase upgrades.
Q - Did you use an Active Siteplan online?
A 3D Interactive Siteplan, or as we refer to it, an Active Siteplan provides buyers with a 3D photorealistic aerial overview of the development. Unlike flat 2D maps, Active Siteplans provide a more detailed and accurate representation of each plot on site.
60% of home buyers noted that they had used the site plan online, and when asked what element of their search it aided with 50% selected finding their desired housetype.
30% of homebuyers said it helped them filter homes in the development that were suitable for their budget, and only 10% selected a specific plot.
Q - Overall, do you think that these digital resources enhanced your buying journey?
The home buyer’s journey is centric to everything we do, so we asked residents at the Skylark’s development whether they felt the interactive online resources available to them enhanced their buying journey.
80% of home buyers agreed that the interactive resources available such as virtual showhomes, active siteplans and 360 virtual tours enhanced their overall buying experience.
Q - What would you improve about the sales centre experience?
As we mentioned previously, understanding what home buyers want from their buying experience enables us to continue to develop platforms that enhance their buying journey and provide them with the confidence they need to buy off-plan.
When we asked home buyers at the Skylarks development about what they would improve about their sales experience within the sales centre 60% said the ability to design and customise swatch options.
30% noted an interactive touchscreen to explore the interactive digital resources, and only 10% said they wouldn’t change anything about their experience.
An exceptional home buying experience is an interactive one!
William Davis Homes has been committed to delivering an exceptional home-buying experience to their customers since late 2018.
Their commitment to offering their home buyers a seamless, interactive journey is evident in the feedback from new residents at their Skylarks development in Chesterfield. With these insights, we can continue to understand and develop more platforms and interactive content that not only enhances the buyer’s experience but equips our property developers with a tool kit that allows them to launch off-plan, increase conversions and maximise revenue post-reservation.
