by Steve Like

The housing market is down and there is no short-term relief in sight. The good news is modular housing has not suffered nearly as bad. Or so we keep on saying. Isn’t time to really think about the future and how we can pull together as an industry to begin to become more ingrained in the building landscape? Maybe we should look at how we have marketed our companies and our industry over the years.

Now while I’m not a marketing expert, it seems to me that the industry in general has never been superb at how it sells itself. And as the J.D. Power & Associates survey on the modular industry indicated, we need to do a better job managing homebuyer expectations in the process. I suspect this also is true in how we manage our builder expectations as well. In boom times, it is easy to sell price. In fact, selling on price tends to be the easiest way to get your foot in the door. Who doesn’t like to hear about low prices? But here’s a thought, who likes to hear more about getting better value for their dollar? What builder doesn’t like to hear about making their jobs easier? A satisfied customer will walk away from an experience knowing they got a great value based upon what they paid for that service. But left unsatisfied, they will walk knowing that even though they got a low price, the end result was not worth it.

Getting customers, both builders and homebuyers, to see the value modular housing can bring requires a change in our thinking. Price is a number, a tangible figure on a piece of paper, simple to show to buyers and builders. But the overall experience and value is intrinsic to the process. It requires the industry and individual companies to look inward and reach outward, and place higher stock in customer experience. It requires accountability. In addition to strengthening relationships with our existing distribution base, we also need to be aggressively reaching new builder and retail customers. We need to enlist those that have never worked with modular housing before. That requires more effort, more energy, more time, and more work. But despite all these things, the reward and payoff is going to be much bigger. By expanding our network and touting the entire modular process, we will gain greater credibility in the marketplace. The modular housing industry undoubtedly offers a number of advantages and value to the customer, including increased quality control, shortened time to completion and product engineering, all of which are getting more difficult to obtain using traditional building methods. Let’s work on selling these attributes.

Bringing your own level of value to the process should be the goal of every company, bringing a completely new level of value to the builders and homebuyers should be the goal of the modular housing industry. Over a million new homes are built each year. Let’s move beyond our complacency, expand and reach into newer markets, and build new and improved relationships with builders and buyers.


I welcome your thoughts and comments. I can be reached at slike@patriothomes.com

Steve Like
Chairman, National Modular Housing Council
Executive Vice-President & General Counsel, Patriot Homes, Inc.