Vegas builders join open house effort to lure homebuyers

What do you do when sales haven’t budged in two years?

You sell harder.

At least that’s the new strategy of the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association as new-home closings stall at roughly 6,000 units per year.

The association recently revived its sales and marketing committee after a 10-year hiatus. Its first event will be the association’s biggest promotional effort ever, an open house featuring 17 builders, 56 communities and more than 200 model homes. The open house, dubbed “It’s New Home Season” and featuring a multimedia advertising campaign, runs Feb. 21-22 and Feb. 28-March 1.

“We just needed to get everybody together,” said Nat Hodgson, the association’s executive director. “We’re a very small percentage of local home sales, so why wouldn’t we work together?”

It’s a new approach for a trade group whose members essentially endured an industry depression. Local sales plummeted from more than 30,000 in 2005 to about 3,000 in 2011.

Closings have doubled to around 6,000 a year, but new homes make up just 10 percent of the local market, Hodgson said. The industry norm is 30 percent.

The association’s marketing committee went dormant in 2005 because builders “weren’t really looking for new strategies of selling,” given that they couldn’t keep up with their boom-era demand as it was, Hodgson said. And when the downturn hit, no one had homes to sell.

The market has come back enough so that broad promotions make sense. Also, thanks partly to the example set by the four-company partnership developing Henderson’s Inspirada master-planned community, builders have learned it’s wise to collaborate, Hodgson said.

“The recession opened people’s eyes a bit. You always want to work with as many people as you can. What can we learn from what we went through to make sure we can have measurable, sustainable improvements year after year?”

Dennis Smith, president and CEO of local analysis firm Home Builders Research and a member of the association’s sales and marketing committee, called the open house “a really impressive meeting of the minds of homebuilders.”

“Obviously, it will be great if builders pick up sales, but they’re looking at more of a long-term effect rather than a quick couple of weeks of sales activity,” he said. “This will build on the idea that the new-home segment is alive and well.”

For locally based StoryBook Homes, the open house will mean important exposure for its three actively selling communities. The company recently opened its first staged models since 2007, and it has four subdivisions scheduled to break ground in 2015, marketing coordinator Chelsea Covington said.

“We’re one of the only private builders that survived the crash, and 92 percent of the Las Vegas home-building industry is public builders,” Covington said. “We compete directly with them, so working with them helps us in the long run.”

Builders say the event is more about industry brand-building than selling a set number of homes. That’s the case for Shea Homes, a regional builder with communities in nine Sun Belt and Western states.

Shea Homes at Ardiente, an age-restricted community in North Las Vegas, is on the upcoming open-house schedule.

“There’s power in numbers in reaching out to people with the message of buying new,” Shea Homes at Ardiente sales manager Maria Salviati said. “Banding together gives us a great opportunity to reach a larger audience.”

Salviati, who has worked in the industry in three states, said this level of cooperation among builders “is definitely new, in my experience.”

“To be able to find 17 builders who can agree on how to move forward — it’s brilliant. It will be a great service and an eye opener,” she said.

Besides StoryBook and Shea, participating builders include American West Homes; Beazer Homes; Century Communities; DR Horton/Emerald; KB Home; Lennar; Pardee Homes; Pinnacle Homes; Pulte Group; Richmond American Homes; Ryland Homes; Summit Homes; Toll Brothers; William Lyon Homes; and Woodside Homes.

Sponsors include the master plans of Cadence, Inspirada, Mountain’s Edge, Providence and Summerlin, as well as Solar City and Wells Fargo.

Contact Jennifer Robison at jrobison@reviewjournal.com. Follow @J_Robison1 on Twitter.