New Home Builders: Excellence vs. Perfection

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As new home builders, we encourage clients to have high (but realistic) expectations, with a view toward striving for perfection and thus achieving excellence.

New home builders can take lessons learned on the playing field and apply them to the jobsite. For example, though he knew they could never attain it, 49ers Coach Bill Walsh famously demanded perfection from his players during every practice. Why? His philosophy was that if you don’t strive for perfection, you’ll never even come close to achieving excellence.

As professional new home builders, we likewise believe this same philosophy: plan for perfection to attain excellence. Like Coach Walsh, we demand the highest standards possible from our employees, vendors and trade partners to ensure we deliver an excellent new home that satisfies a client’s wants and needs.

In the pursuit of excellence, we coach our homebuyers about the building process so that their expectations are high but realistic. We want our clients to push and challenge us to always do better, but it is also our job to define excellence … and point out the difference between excellence and perfection.

Our most effective method for doing that is listening. Really listening. Not just to find out which floorplan a client prefers, but why and how that particular floorplan will satisfy their family’s lifestyle needs. In this discovery phase, we craft a strategy for a new home that meets our client’s requirements, justifies their reasons for making such a significant investment, and sets us on course to deliver according to those expectations.

To achieve excellence, it’s also critical to maintain a consistent, open line of communication during the construction process. As during the planning stage, a new home builders’ first job is to listen to and then educate our buyers about the subtleties of new-home construction that are specific to their concerns.

Responding to a buyer’s question with “that’s just the way it is” or “it’s complicated” is unacceptable. Instead, we strive to deliver details, demonstrate our methods, and ensure that questions are answered to a buyer’s satisfaction. That approach and level of respect for our buyers helps build a better understanding of our work process all the way through the final walk-through and close of escrow.

Finally, a key component of delivering excellence comes after the sale, once a buyer becomes a homeowner. We make sure to communicate our policies and procedures for warranty service — once again demonstrating the difference between perfection and excellence. Ideally, we’ve done an excellent job of building their new home to the point where service callbacks are kept to a minimum; for those small warranty items that crop up after move-in, we work to be responsive and responsible to address them in a timely fashion.

As a homebuyer and owner, it’s okay to want the “perfect” home. The best new home builders can do, however, is to strive for perfection and achieve excellence that satisfies the lifestyle needs of our clients and protects their investment now and well into the future.