A Home Builder Site With Renderings Instead of Finished Homes

The site

A custom home builder in the Fraser Valley finishes four or five houses a year, mostly on acreages and view lots its clients own.

The home page opens on a two-storey house at dusk: warm light in every window, a flawless lawn, full-grown maples on a lot cleared last spring.

That house does not exist yet. It is a computer rendering, and so are the five houses on the Our Homes page.

The Interiors page shows a marble kitchen, a spa bathroom and a stone fireplace, all from a stock library. Nothing on the site shows a house the company has finished.

The inference a visitor makes

Someone choosing a custom builder is about to spend more than ever before, and trust one company with it for a year or more.

They come for finished houses and find ones that are not there. Many recognise renderings at once: even light, an empty road, trees that would take twenty years to grow.

From there, every explanation hurts. The company is new and has finished nothing, or its homes did not turn out well enough to show, or they did not match the drawings.

Nobody phones to ask which. With this much at stake, a visitor moves on to a builder that shows its work.

What a rendering cannot show

A rendering is made from the plans, often by the designer, before anything is built. Any builder pricing that design could post it.

• Fit and finish: how trim, tile and siding meet at the corners.
• Likeness: whether the finished house matches its drawing.
• The lot: the real slope, driveway, neighbours and view.
• The hidden work: drainage, framing, flashing and insulation.
• Age: how the house looks after five wet winters.

The second is what buyers fear most, and only a photograph of the finished house can settle it.

Unlabelled, renderings pass for a portfolio until someone looks closely. Labelled, they read as plans, and the visitor goes looking for finished homes. Here there are none.

Kitchens from someone else's house

The stock interiors were styled to sell: a marble island, designer lighting, not a cord in sight. Visitors price the job from them.

Some decide the builder is beyond their means and never call. Others call and get a quote for a plainer kitchen than the one they saw.

And interiors are where a builder's skill shows most: the stair, the window casings, the tile lines. A library photograph shows none of it.

Nothing to drive past

People planning a custom home do much of their research from the car. They drive past houses, slow down for a roofline, and sometimes knock to ask the owners how the build went.

After fifteen years in one valley, this builder has dozens of houses standing in plain view. The site names none of them: no towns, no roads, no years.

House numbers have no place online. But a list of towns and roads, cleared with each owner, turns the whole valley into a showroom.

A worked example

The builder found out how its site read when a couple phoned about the house on the home page and asked to walk through it. It was a foundation in a muddy lot.

The site went up while six homes were in design, and the renderings were the most polished pictures to hand. The owner's own photographs were handover snapshots, with tape on the floors.

Stock interiors went in as placeholders, and no home finished since had been photographed properly.

Several past clients agreed to have their homes photographed, and a photographer spent a day at three: each house from the road, the kitchens, a stair, a window seat built on site.

The renderings moved to a page of homes under way, each marked as a rendering with its town and expected finish, beside dated site photographs.

The stock came down, a list of finished homes by town and road now goes to anyone who asks, and the home page opens on a house that exists.

The work the drywall hides

Much of a careful builder's best work is covered within weeks: drainage, framing, building wrap, the flashing around each window, insulation.

Photographs of those stages are the only proof a buyer will ever see. Anyone who has lived with a leaking window cares more about flashing than countertops.

Have the site supervisor take the same shots at the same stages on every build, and date them. They show how the company works, and that it is busy now.

The people who build them

A custom build means a year of site meetings and phone calls, and buyers want to know who will be on the other end.

Photograph the owner, the supervisor and the regular crew at work on real sites, not posed outside the office, with their agreement. Give each a name and a role.

The supervisor matters most: that is the face the client will see every week.

Photographing a finished home

A finished home is worth a professional photographer's day. Interiors need the right lens and light, and phone pictures make good rooms look small and dim.

Late September suits it: summer handovers have had time to settle, and the light is softer.

Start with the view from the road, the one visitors will compare as they drive past, then the stair, the trim and the built-ins.

Keep house numbers out of the frame, and caption each home with its town, its year and one thing that made it hard to build.

The counter-case within the site

Renderings have their place. A builder selling a home before it is finished has nothing else to show, and buyers expect a labelled rendering with a completion date.

A rendering beside a photograph of the same house finished may be the most persuasive pair a builder can publish: the result, matching the plan.

A builder in its first year can lead with work in progress and the crew, adding each home as it is handed over.

Everywhere else, finished homes come first, and every rendering says what it is.

What to change

1. Label every rendering as a rendering.
2. Take down the stock interiors.
3. Ask past clients whose homes may appear.
4. Book a photographer for three finished homes.
5. Photograph every build at the same stages.
6. List the towns and roads where your homes stand.
7. Introduce the people who will run the job.

Step four matters most. One finished house on the first screen answers what every visitor came to find out, and turns the renderings back into plans.

A picture doing the work that plain facts should do is also the trouble with a boat repair site whose contact page is only a map.

Frequently asked questions

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