The level of homebuyers' satisfaction has gone up. (Photo: iStockphoto)
The J.D. Power and Associates customer satisfaction survey numbers for home builders are out for this year, as recently reported here on Cyberhomes.com. Overall, customer satisfaction and quality went up in 2008 over the previous year. Paula Sonkin, who runs the real estate and construction industries practice for J.D. Power, was quoted as saying that the results are great news for new-home buyers, and especially first-time buyers, because only the strongest companies have survived in the current market, and they’re offering "unprecedented high levels of quality, value and service at relatively low prices."
As much as I’ve heard builders complain about the surveys over the years – J.D. Power makes money off selling the results to the builders it rates and licensing its awards to the winners for use in marketing -- they have undoubtedly changed the way homes are built and homebuyers are treated, at least by volume builders. Last fall, I had the pleasure of telling Sonkin that BUILDER Magazine had named her one of home building’s top 30 innovators of the last 30 years.
Before the survey started 13 years ago, none of the major builders paid much more than lip service to customer satisfaction. Now that a third-party company is measuring it – and publishing the results – it’s a Very Big Deal. Most major builders do their own surveys throughout the year so they're not blindsided when the J.D. Power survey comes out, and bonuses are often tied to the results.
If there’s a drawback to the survey, it’s that it’s only done in 24 markets. In those, it only covers builders who closed at least 150 houses in the previous year, and had at least 50 surveys returned to J.D. Power. That means that small, local builders -- often the true craftsmen whose customers rave about them -- nearly always are left out of the guest list to this party.
For builders who do meet the criteria, they can expect that every one of their buyers from the previous year will get a survey from J.D. Power, asking a whole bunch of questions about: workmanship and materials; the builder’s warranty and customer service staff; price and value; the builder’s sales staff; the construction manager; home readiness; recreational facilities provided by the builder; the builder’s design center; and location. The buyers have lived in their homes from between four to 18 months, long enough to be thoroughly familiar with what they love and what gets on their last nerve.
Not surprisingly, the builders in the markets where these surveys are conducted go absolutely nuts about these numbers. Are they up, are they down, who’s ahead and who’s fallen behind? The definition of a nanosecond is the amount of time between when the results are released and the first tweets go out from the winners.
So, readers, I'm curious. If you're shopping for a new house, do you care about a builder's ranking in the J.D. Power survey? If not, what really matters to you?—Pat Curry