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Mattamy GTA Snapshot

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Company: Mattamy Homes, Greater Toronto Area Division

Headquarters: Oakville, Ontario

Principal: Peter Gilgan

Employees: 408

Operations: Southern and Central Ontario

Market segments: First-time buyers (40 percent) and move-up families (60 percent); the company is now entering empty-nester and second-home segments

Product: Single-family detached homes, attached townhouses and condo apartments

2010 Closings: 2,247

2010 Revenues: $718.2 million

 

Growth does present challenges. The bigger a builder gets, the harder it is to nurture personal relationships with home buyers, and the more challenging it is to maintain control of operations in the field, to build a product that turns customers into raving fans. The AVID Awards for best customer experience in housing are divided into categories by number of closings, which testifies that it’s tough for builders of hundreds of houses a year to compete in the customer satisfaction arena against those closing fewer than 50. It’s tough, but Mattamy Homes’ success suggests it is not impossible.

If the size of a home building company was really an insurmountable barrier to excellence in customer service and construction quality, the AVID Awards would be won most often by the smaller builders in each category. And we’d have a devil of a time explaining how the largest home building operation in Canada, Mattamy Homes’ massive Greater Toronto Area division (with 408 employees and 2,247 closings last year) is the 2011 AVID Award winner in a category where it competes with builders closing as few as 300 houses a year.

Mind you, that’s still the largest category in the AVID Awards, but Mattamy GTA posted an AVID index score of 258.657, which is exemplary, and 91 percent of buyers responding to AVID’s customer satisfaction surveys said they would recommend the builder to family and friends. Any builder topping 90 percent on “would recommend” knows how hard it is to get to that level, let alone maintain it. And among Mattamy GTA’s top five areas of operations, one was from the category of overall product satisfaction, two were from home features, and two were in the category of service provided by the builder team. So the firm is achieving results across the board. Here are Mattamy GTA’s best numbers:

1. Storage space (3.05 points above Canadian housing industry average).

2. Explained construction process (+2.02)

3. Time until closing (+1.94)

4. Electrical fixtures (+1.65)

5. Knowledgeable, helpful, courteous staff (+1.21)

Jill Lalonde, Mattamy’s vice president of customer relations, says the appearance of “storage space” among GTA division’s top five survey scores illustrates a key component of Mattamy’s operating methods. “We design our houses and our customer experience to fit the families that are our customers,” she says, “and we do a lot of consumer research to find out exactly what they want and need, everything from focus groups to the AVID surveys to informal information gathered by salespeople. We have to do this constantly because what people want, and what they can afford, is constantly changing.”

Home buyers are always shifting their priorities, Lalonde says, but storage space is consistently high on the lists of many home shoppers, especially first-time buyers coming out of rental apartments. “More storage space for their stuff is often one of the major goals in moving to ownership housing,” she says, “and they know their storage needs will continue to grow right along with their families.”

So it’s no accident that Mattamy pleases customers with extra storage space in its housing products. “We look at customer satisfaction as a two-sided coin,” Lalonde says. “There’s the product side, where design and construction quality are very important, and then there’s the customer experience side, where personal relationships and how we treat people are vital. So we work hard at getting the product right, and on the people side, we have experienced staff and a culture of customer service that is ingrained in all of us.”

Many Customer Contacts

Mattamy salespeople are trained to nurture personal relationships with prospects and buyers, but after a contract is signed, another professional takes over as the personal relationship passes to the design consultant in Mattamy GTA’s design center, who takes customers through the selection process on finishes, options, and upgrades. “That can be very stressful, especially for first-time buyers who have never been through it before,” says Lalonde. “We know we have to hold their hands through that.”

To make sure the handoffs of personal customer touches are seamless, Mattamy has a customer care department, where a customer care coordinator is assigned to watch over each customer. “They are like wedding coordinators,” Lalonde jokes. “They don’t do all the things necessary to move the customer through the process, but they lead them to all the different pieces that make the puzzle come together. They are there to answer all the questions, and to proactively take charge at all the critical points along the way from sales to the design center to construction and, finally, to warranty. They’re really the lynchpins of our culture of service. We know that buying a home is one of the most important financial steps in peoples' lives, so we need to be there for them.”

For big builders, especially in a huge market like Greater Toronto, cycle time creates complications that smaller builders in smaller markets don’t face. In the Toronto area, beset by multiple layers of government and an arduous approval process for every housing development, it can take as much as 18 months to move from contract to closing.

“The sales office is often closed and the salespeople gone by the time we get to closing,” Lalonde says, “so we really can’t depend on the salespeople to maintain the personal relationship with customers through the whole process.”

Construction Touch Points

There are regular meetings with customers during construction, some of which Mattamy will discuss and others it will not reveal. “We do a frame walk and pre-delivery inspection,” Lalonde says, “and warranty service inspections at 30 days after closing and at one year. Those are standard to the industry, but we have some additional meetings with customers during construction that we don’t discuss publicly for competitive reasons.”

Construction and warranty are separate departments, and warranty inspects construction’s work before the customer sees it at the pre-delivery walk. “Construction has to ‘sell’ the house to warranty before delivery,” says Lalonde, “and then warranty does the final walk with the customer, since warranty has the service responsibility from that point forward.”

Cloudy Forecast

Mattamy is a developer as well as a home builder, and that means it must deal with the contentious local and regional political environment that growth brings in a heavily populated area like Southern Ontario. “It’s certainly not getting any easier to build around here,” says Lalonde. “We know we’re going to have to move into higher density forms of housing, both because of political constraints and affordability issues. So we’ll get into more high-rise condos and mid-rise buildings. It all depends on what the municipalities will allow, and that can change overnight.”

Right now, people know what to expect when they drive into a Mattamy community, Lalonde says. “It’s a whole architectural package of streetscapes, schools, and homes. Our approach to everything we do really comes down to caring. If you care about people, it’s easy to put yourself in their shoes and understand their concerns.

“If you really care, it’s easy to make the phone call to tell a customer that the appointment that was supposed to take half an hour now may need to last half a day instead. But if you don’t really care,” Lalonde asserts, “that call is hard to make because you don’t want to answer the question, ‘Why?’”

Mattamy GTA makes those calls and answers the questions. And it shows up in the customer satisfaction score.

Bill Lurz has been reporting on every aspect of the home-building industry since 1970. A former editor-in-chief of Canadian Building and senior editor of Professional Builder, Bill is currently editor-in-chief of AvidBuilder.com. He can be reached at bill.lurz@avidbuilder.com.