Client Description American Dream Homes has been building homes and developing communities for over 16 years. They have developed a reputation for providing the highest quality homes at competitive prices, all the while developing communities rich with amenities, value, charm and character. As one of Kansas City’s largest home builders, American Dream Homes needed a website packed with features, yet easily accessible by a wide variety of customers. Most important, the website needed to retain their reputation of value and character.
Business Challenge American Dream Homes develops several unique community neighborhoods, each of which has different requirements for their web site presentation. Yet, for easy administration, each house had to be contained within the same database. General information about each community would change frequently, so each community would need a content management system that could be easily updated by American Dream Homes staff. The database of available homes would change almost daily, with each home requiring a slightly different presentation layout. Finally, their sales staff needed a Customer Relationship Management system to help track sales leads. American Dream Homes choose Cephas Innovation because of our existing experience with real estate web development and CRM systems, our offering of an off-the-shelf realty manager application and CRM system that we could customize to their needs, and our combination of creativity and knowledge that comes from over a decade of web development experience.
Technical Solution Cephas Innovation provided American Dream Homes with our turn-key realty manager product offering that offered an immediate and cost-effective solution to their need for complex data management. This application was then customized to fit their specific needs, including support of multiple display templates for the different communities, the ability to restrict users from printing floor plan images from the web site, integration with Yahoo! Maps for house locations, and much more. An application was licensed to American Dream Homes to provide community managers with the ability to release timely articles and press releases regarding new happenings within their communities. Finally, a web-based CRM system was installed to capture customer contacts for both pre-sales inquiries and existing owner maintenance requests.
Business Impact Complements from customers rushed in as early as the first day the web site was deployed. American Dream Homes transformed from a static web site that required days to add new housing inventory to a completely dynamic site with real-time inventory updates, inventory search capabilities, and a CRM system including workflow rules, tracking, and reporting capabilities to all customer contacts. Adding a house to the inventory takes less than 60 seconds via a web-based administration application. Using the CRM system, customer contacts can be automatically assigned to a sales person or superintendent for that community. Tracking mechanisms allow for existing customers with maintenance requests to be automatically informed of updates to their service request. American Dream Homes management can view reports to show how quickly sales contacts are being assigned and handled as well as how smoothly the maintenance requests are being addressed.
House Inventory Database
Each house is added to the database using a simple, web-based user interface. Fields such as square footage, address, and price are inputted as text fields. Other fields are selection dropdowns. A selection of images can be uploaded from this same interface, including interior and exterior pictures and floorplans.
House Listing Display
The site visitor searches for homes based on their specific criteria and views the individual listing, which displays a general description of the house, the images attached to that listing, and the database field columns. Integration with Yahoo! Maps provides a link to a map and driving directions.
Homeowner Maintenance Request
Existing homeowners can create maintenance requests by completing an easy-to-use online form. By selecting which community (subdivision) the homeowner resides in, the CRM system will automatically route the request to that community's superintendent.
Alternatively, users can simply send an email to a specific email address and a ticket will be automatically created with the contents of the email.
CRM Ticket Administration
An American Dream Homes staff member views all tickets assigned to them. All of the fields captured from the user in the ticket submission form are displayed here. The staff member can easily update the ticket, change the status, re-assign the ticket to another individual, or close the ticket. The user that created the ticket is automatically notified of updates.
