The demand for affordable housing across America has been steadily increasing over the last decade. However, during that same period, the supply of unsubsidized, affordable housing has been virtually eliminated from many parts of the country. This supply-demand imbalance has caused chronic, severe housing shortages among unsubsidized lower-middle-income households.
Havenpark recognized that when properly managed, Manufactured Home Communities can be a part of the solution to the affordable housing crisis in America. Havenpark acquired and managed over 85 communities across the country since 2015, and committed to adding several thousand affordable housing units to its portfolio in a short time period.
For Havenpark to be successful in delivering on its commitments, it required a fundamental shift in how the company approached sales and marketing efforts. The company sought to:
Havenpark explored several CRM and Marketing Automation platforms to support its efforts and ultimately decided that HubSpot best met the company’s needs.
Ramie Rajabi, President of Havenpark Communities, describes the situation:
“We planned to add several thousand homes to our portfolio very quickly. We had to innovate and seek new ways of working in order to fill our homes quickly and to provide a better experience to prospective buyers and renters.”
As Havenpark quickly scaled to over 250 employees across 85 locations, the growing number of leads and deals in progress made it increasingly challenging to ensure a consistent and seamless experience for prospective buyers and renters.
In today’s housing market, prospects understand that time is valuable when it comes to making a purchasing decision. To keep up with the rapid growth and to be able to deliver on customer expectations, it was clear that marketing efforts had to be closely aligned with those of sales throughout the customer journey.
Havenpark engaged Lynton, a HubSpot Elite Solutions Partner, to help with the successful implementation and deployment of both Sales Hub Enterprise and Marketing Hub Enterprise.
“We spent a good amount of time in discovery,” says Roman Kniahynyckyj, Inbound Marketing Specialist at Lynton. “We took the time to learn their business, understand their requirements and processes, and then customized Sales Hub and Marketing Hub to meet their needs.”
Using both HubSpot Sales Hub Enterprise and Marketing Hub Enterprise helped to unify all customer data ensuring Havenpark is able to nurture prospects through the deal cycle while enabling cross-functional collaboration.
“By implementing a customized sales pipeline in Sales Hub with stages that fit our process, and leveraging automated communications to prospects using Marketing Hub, we were able to ensure that our customers have a more seamless buying experience and that deals are properly managed from lead to close, and beyond,” said Ramie.
With the scarcity of affordable housing, many prospects hope to quickly learn about available homes and transact when they find something that meets their needs. This means that responses from sellers need to be prompt and ensure that the next steps are clear and timely.
While utilizing various Internet Listing Sites (ILS), such as Zillow and CoStar Group, to market available homes, Havenpark needed a way to efficiently respond to the hundreds of leads generated daily while communicating with customers throughout their buying experience. They also needed a way to properly assess the effectiveness of the different ILSs and estimate customer acquisition costs.
With Lynton's support, Havenpark was able to utilize HubSpot’s APIs and Marketing Hub Enterprise to automatically generate leads in HubSpot whenever prospects fill out an ILS contact form or make a call to the community, and to quickly communicate with customers regarding relevant next steps based on where they are at in the deal cycle. With bottlenecks in Sales and Marketing removed, Havenpark was then able to better determine which marketing channels were most effective in generating qualified leads.
Automated lead generation and marketing automation helped reduce deal cycle time-to-close by 50% while delivering on customer expectations for relevant and rapid communication.
“Havenpark has done a really nice job of using HubSpot’s capabilities, including its APIs, to bring in data from different channels,” says Roman. “Now, we can directly attribute leads to different marketing campaigns, seamlessly.”
The renting and buying process for a manufactured home can be quite cumbersome, especially for those seeking mortgages from 3rd party financial institutions. To further complicate the process, there are several people across Havenpark that play critical roles throughout the deal cycle to ensure a deal gets closed.
Due to this complexity, Havenpark identified the need to leverage technology to streamline tasks that otherwise would have been largely manual in nature, causing deals to take a considerable amount of time to close.
HubSpot, once deployed across Havenpark’s communities, enabled its sales representatives to focus on value-driving activities and to continuously engage with its prospects in a deliberate and meaningful way. The built-in communication features, such as emails, phone calls, and marketing campaigns, between sales representatives and prospects, unlocked a tremendous number of benefits to Havenpark and to its prospects.
Havenpark was able to close 6,000 deals, increase its deal volume by 100%, and decrease its deal cycle time-to-close by 51%, from 2019 to 2021.
“The demand for homes in our communities is incredibly high. We have more people interested in buying or renting our homes than available inventory. HubSpot has truly enabled us to respond to the affordable housing needs of prospects across America and to help people move into their new homes as quickly as possible. HubSpot has been a real game-changer for us,” said Ramie.
With nearly 100 sales representatives across 85 communities and ambitious goals to fill thousands of homes, it was imperative that Havenpark increase transparency and visibility across the deal cycle. HubSpot’s out-of-the-box reports and its ability to easily customize reports have produced insights into community performance that were once impossible to attain.
Havenpark uses the insights its able to gather through HubSpot to produce targeted training for its sales representatives and to better forecast performance.
“With just a few clicks, we’re able to see how many leads are being generated across our various marketing channels, how timely and effective leads are being followed up on, and each stage’s conversion ratio. We can quickly identify where there are potential issues in our sales motions and quickly change course if needed,” said Ramie.
Since implementing the HubSpot CRM Platform, Havenpark Communities has closed 6,000 deals across its 85 communities—with more deals closing every day—since 2019, an increase of 100% in its deal volume. Just as significant, Havenpark has decreased its deal cycle time-to-close by 51%, during that same period.
Havenpark is committed to being a part of the solution to the affordable housing crisis in America by providing high-quality housing options for prospective buyers and renters in its communities and will continue to utilize HubSpot to help alleviate the growing demand for affordable housing across its markets.