LATISTA has helped Brookfield Homes to integrate its sales leads by establishing a new CRM system and a customer extranet to improve communications with customers throughout the full life cycle of the home buying process.

Brookfield Homes’ Washington D.C. division closed about 700 homes last year and has 180 employees. The company goes to market under two brand names: Brookfield Homes for production homes and Keswick Homes for custom homes.

Janet Howell, VP of sales and marketing at Brookfield Homes, says the main reason Brookfield selected LATISTA was to help the builder integrate its sales leads. She says Brookfield had leads coming in from its website, from homebuilder portals such as homebuilder.com and newhomesguide.com, and via real estate agents and referrals.

“There was this hole,” Howell says. “Leads were paper based or were coming in by phone. The solution was to come up with one integrated web-based system that collected leads whether they came in from the sales offices or from various other sources.”

Now, all of the sales leads come into a centralized database, and Brookfield salespeople and managers can sort leads by any category. For example, they can compare number of leads from homebuilder.com vs. leads from newhomesource.com for the current year. The leads are automatically forwarded to the appropriate salesperson, based on the community interest of the customer.

“We used to have multiple people calling the same prospects with the same information,” says Howell. “Not only was it a waste of our time, customers got annoyed.” Improved communications with customers is at the heart of the new CRM and extranet systems.

Brookfield’s customers have access to a streamlined view of the same web-based interface its employees see during the construction process. The company’s construction process is divided into 24 stages. As their house is being built, customers can go online and check the status of the project during each stage, send messages through the website’s contact manager application, see current builder’s news, check a calendar to see when inspections are scheduled, and keep notes to remind them to call their customer service representative.

“What we’re trying to do is make sure that our purchasers have up-to-date information from the time they walk into the sales office to after construction,” says Howell. “The system takes all the information and moves it over to the next stage as they go through the process.”

“The vision is, at some point, to have our entire company’s systems integrated” says Mark Gregas, Brookfield’s director of IT, “and we’re working on it”.