Maintain trust with homebuyers by keeping them informed

Unfortunately, after the initial contract signing too many property developers still go silent, leaving homebuyers to wonder what is even going on. Taking into consideration that buying a home is for most people one of the largest purchases they will ever make, it really shouldn’t feel like going to a surprise party once they get their key.

Keep in mind that the homebuyer places an immense amount of trust in their property developer to not only deliver the home on time, but also as promised. Maintaining that trust will be much more effective than trying to rebuild it after you lost it. Therefore, if any problems were to come up along the way, it’s better to be proactive and inform them rather than wait for them to find out some other way.

In this article we’ll explore how to make better announcements to your customers by making the most out of Ziggu’s ‘News’ feature and show a sneak peak of an upcoming feature that will help you inform and delight your customers even more.

Homebuyers prefer regular short updates over lengthy newsletters

Homebuyers will start to grow anxious if they don’t receive regular updates from their property developer. The home they’ve bought will likely be one of the biggest purchases they’ve ever made, so it’s only natural to wonder about its progress. While it may seem like extra work to constantly keep up with these announcements, it really pays off in the long run.

At Polyform, a Luxembourgish high-end developer, customer managers noticed their news posts actually make homebuyers take action more efficiently. Invoices are paid quicker because they see that construction has reached the point that the developer is invoicing for. It also acts as a reminder: once they’re on the platform they’ll be reminded of the decisions they still have to make, your ongoing conversations, or the survey you’ve published.

Being consistent in your announcements is important, but size also matters. While you certainly could write an enormous news post, you don’t want your customers to feel like they start reading a novel when they see your post. The ultimate goal is of course not that you make the announcements themselves, but that the customer actually reads them and that these updates reinforce their trust in you.

Your customers see announcements on their dashboard as a news feed, much like how social media feeds look like. So when you’re creating an announcement: try to keep it short and to the point.

Customise your messaging to your customer base

Two other important aspects that should be top of mind when you’re writing an announcement are relevance and comprehensibility.

First of all, your announcement needs to be relevant to the homebuyer. Although in most cases you’ll want to try speaking to as big an audience as you can, you don’t want to bother customers with news that isn’t relevant to their situation. Announcing construction delays in Building A to homebuyers in Building B will only cause unnecessary worry for them. To avoid this, you can customise your announcements to any level: from making project-wide announcements, or addressing all future tenants of a building, all the way down to selecting individual units.
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Secondly, your customers need to understand what you’re saying. Fact: more than half of the countries in the world have more than 1 official language. If you live in a country with multiple official languages, or just know you have a diverse customer base, they’ll definitely appreciate you going the extra mile for them by translating your announcements.

You can translate an announcement into any of the languages we support on the platform. Customers will see the post in their preferred language, or in case you haven’t translated it yet, in your company’s default language.

You can also preview how the message will look like to the customer by switching language on the post itself. This is also a good way to double check if you haven’t missed any translations.

Celebrate the big milestones

Buying a home is a long and emotional process for your customers. Besides giving them the news on the ups and downs of the construction process, you should also create moments of happiness for them by celebrating the big milestones in your project.

That’s why we’re currently developing the ‘Milestones’ feature, slated for release in July 2022.

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