Show time: a show home can put your company in the spotlight

Custom Home, July-August, 2002 by Gerry Donohue

Unlike custom homes, show homes don't have any flexibility on the completion date. The magazine has to photograph the home and get it into the scheduled issue; those deadlines are immutable. Hall met his deadline, "but it took a couple of years off my life. At the end, I started in the back corner of the house and just pushed everyone out the front door."

Think back to your most indecisive client to get a taste of what building a show home can be like. These houses are perpetual works in progress. The magazine staff and the architect are forever tweaking the plans, and the manufacturers are often slow to decide which products they want to showcase. White remembers how his 1992 show home came to a screeching halt midway through construction. "The house was framed, and we needed a decision on the roof shingles, but Southern Living was still negotiating who the supplier would be." he says. "The house sat there for six weeks. I was ready to stick pins in someone's voodoo doll."

But finally the house is finished, and suddenly all the problems and challenges of the previous months are forgotten in the bright colors of the magazine pages and the steady stream of visitors "oohing" and "ahhing" through the house. This is when the builder reaps the rewards of investing his time, effort, and money. A successful project will create buzz about his company for a long time to come.

If it's a magazine project, its staff will not only publish the house, but also organize media visits and keep the house open for a period of time to show it off to the local market. "We had our house open lot eight weeks." says Hall. "Probably 40,000 people came through it. Nothing else we ever did could generate that much publicity for our company."

Show homes for charities generate their own publicity. Newspapers and television stations cover the project because it doesn't have any profit-based overtones. "We got a tremendous amount of publicity in the local papers and television." says Dannenbaum. "Advertising in those media would have cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. And at the same time we were able to raise funds for a charity."

It's not enough, however, for the builder just to rely on others to generate the buzz for the house. He must take the responsibility to market the house and his company. During the three weeks he held the house open, Dannenbaum kept it busy with a series of events: an opening gala, a wine-tasting party, and a series of home improvement seminars.

Lowell White used his last show home as a model for as long as he could. "I took people through the home personally, pointing out the features," he says.

Show-home builders order reprints of the magazine article and stories that appear in other publications, using these collateral materials for years after they finished the house. "They have remarkable shelf lives," says Koger.

While most builders don't make any money on the show home itself, they do report a big jump in business. Dannenbaum says he can attribute at least a half dozen new contracts to his show home, most with bigger budgets than the homes he'd previously built.