| Rating Insights Enables Builders to Better Understand Consumers |
| Written by Jonathan Smoke | |
| 02.01.2008 | |
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Discuss this article on the forums. (0 posts) I am proud to announce the launch of www.RatingInsights.com, a sibling website to HousingIntelligence. After one of our reports or blog posts whets your appetite for the housing industry, you can jump over to RatingInsights for related intelligence with a focus on the opinions and preferences of new home shoppers and buyers. In addit  ion to its reports, RatingInsights offers innovative analytical tools that enable home builders and suppliers to understand their consumers. Both our reports and tools can help builders and suppliers improve their performance and the appeal of their communities and homes.Rating Insights is a joint venture of HousingIntelligence’s parent company, BlueSmoke, and Chadwick Martin Bailey, a best-in-class marketing research and analytics firm. We began Rating Insights this time last year so we could combine our skills and experiences to create a better set of information and tools to understand new home buyers and owners in the U.S. and Canada. Two Essential Reports Currently, two reports are available for purchase and download on the site. The Buyer Experience Report summarizes the 2007 ratings of new home builders and new home communities in the U.S. The 36-page report provides insights into new home buyers’ opinions regarding builder personnel, homes purchased, and new home communities. It also provides focus on what is most relevant in explaining the differences in home buyer experiences. The report covers detailed feedback in each of these areas and tracks differences in experiences by region, by the size of builder, by household income levels, and by size of home purchased. If you want to know what potential buyers find attractive in a home, the Home Shopper Preferences report summarizes the preferences expressed by shoppers looking at new homes in the U.S. in 2007. The 43-page report provides insights into the preferences of new home shoppers, including what home and community features are most relevant to their purchase decisions when they are forced to trade off features against price. Topics covered include type of home considered, reasons for home purchase, information sources used during the shopping process, desired home features, and desired community features. The report covers detailed feedback in each of these areas and tracks differences in preferences by region, household income levels, age of respondents, and stage in the shopping process. Run Custom Simulations and Reports Whether you want more information after you review the reports, or want to jump straight into your own interactive analysis of consumers, the two new tools available at RatingInsights can help. I’ve already used both tools for some consulting projects. The first tool is the Preferences Simulator, which enables the purchaser to run unlimited “what-if” analyses and simulations of home and community features to determine what captures the highest preference of new home shoppers. The application is a simple Microsoft Excel program with the discrete choice data collected from the Shopper Preferences survey. Through the tool, overall preferences can be reviewed by the market as a whole or by specific subgroups (e.g., income, age, first time buyers, etc.). Builder Insights is essentially a best-in-class prospect and customer feedback system that operates on the web. For a low monthly fee, Builder Insights offers extremely powerful visibility of how shoppers and buyers are rating their experiences. Ratings are collected through voluntary surveys completed at www.RateYourBuilder.com and through periodic formal research panels, such as the one used for the Buyer Experience Report. Access covers easy-to-navigate charts and tables revealing responses to buyer and shopper experiences, buyer preferences, goals and motivations, and profile information of respondents. All data can be easily exported into Excel for custom reports and analysis. Builder Insights enables users to filter or compare results using over a dozen data elements including rating source, purchase status, time, state, metropolitan area, builder, and community and buyer demographics such as age, income, gender and home size purchased. Subscriptions are available covering the U.S., Canada or both countries. What Do Your Customers Have to Say? Rating Insights can also be used by builders as a very cost effective way to lower existing feedback program costs while increasing the impact they can have on their business. While the platform can be extended to make it easy for builders to gather feedback from all shoppers and buyers, by directing shoppers and buyers to RateYourBuilder.com, feedback can be captured without any further effort. This innovative and unique approach is not without controversy, but our intentions are clear. In order to provide the best homes in the best locations and in the best way, builders and all of their suppliers and partners need to understand the opinions and needs of consumers. Greater insights should improve the performance of the industry, even if it comes with a bit of criticism. 
We're always looking for feedback from our readers.
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