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Mountainview Snapshot

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Company: Mountainview Homes

Headquarters: Thorold, Ontario

Principal: Mark Basciano

Employees: 80

Operations: Niagara Peninsula, Kitchener/Waterloo, Ont.

Market segments: First-time buyers (30 percent), move-up families, empty-nester/retirees

Product: Single-family detached homes, attached townhouses

2010 Closings: 150

2010 Revenues: $45 million

 

Mountainview Homes, based near Niagara Falls in Thorold, Ont., closely monitors the customer satisfaction survey data it receives from AVID Ratings. The builder also conducts focus groups and other forms of consumer research to keep track of the Niagara Peninsula’s rapidly changing housing market. As a result, the company’s home buyers have become raving fans, making it possible for Mountainview Homes to win an AVID Award for providing one of the best customer experiences in Ontario.

“We have to understand what buyers want,” says Mountainview principal Mark Basciano. “And we also need to see how the market segments within the region are changing … For instance, with the aging of the Baby Boom generation, we are now seeing an uptick in the empty-nester and retiree segments of the market as a lot of older people, who left Niagara in their youth, are returning to retire in this area.”

Basciano is quick to point out that these are not the family-oriented, second-home buyers of the type that drive the housing market in the “cottage country” of northern Ontario.

“The empty-nester/retiree segment is now probably the fastest growing component of our market,” he says, “and we’ve had to adjust our product, pricing and service to meet that demand.”

The firm closed 150 homes in 2010 for $45 million in housing revenue and achieved an AVID index score of 263.755 to claim the AVID Award in Ontario for builders with 50 to 299 closings a year. Mountainview’s best scores were in these areas:

1. Time until closing (10.14 points above Canadian housing industry average)

2. Offering various mortgage options (+9.34)

3. Number of floor plan designs (+8.19)

4. Condition of job sites (+7.64)

5. Quality of workmanship (+7.39)

The score for presenting mortgage options is significant because both first-time buyers (who make up 30 percent of Mountainview’s business) and older empty-nesters are benefitting from current low interest rates, but need help sorting through all the options available. “We offer the most financing packages in the Niagara market,” Basciano boasts, “and we integrate those selections into all our other processes.”

Basciano is adamant that there is never a hand-off of the primary customer contact at Mountainview. Sales earns the trust of the customer at first contact and remains the liaison to the office and site teams through the whole sales and construction processes, and right into warranty. “We want that personal relationship to remain in place even after closing,” he says. “Buyers go back to the sales office to facilitate their service work during warranty. This operating model probably wouldn’t work in a really high-volume market like Toronto, but we’re not in that kind of market.

“Our customers tell us they want to maintain the relationship with their salesperson, so that’s what we do,” Basciano explains.

Basciano admits that such long-term relationships are not necessarily natural for sales agents. “They need training to maintain that role,” he says, “but they soon learn that referral sales flow from taking care of their customers. They figure out, soon enough, that they really do have skin in the game. And they also learn that customers don’t like hand-offs. When you start handing things off, there’s a seam, and customers can fall through that seam.”

Many of Mountainview’s salespeople are also customers. “They live in our houses, so they understand everything our customers are going through,” Basciano says. “So they believe in our approach. We hire with this in mind. It’s important to recruit salespeople who believe in this concept.”

Trades with a Service Touch

Take a close look at Mountainview’s top five areas of operations and you’ll see that four of them fall into the classification of overall product satisfaction, and prominently include the condition of job sites and quality of workmanship. Basciano runs a tight ship and it shows. But there’s more to it than that.

“Most of our trades have been with us for years,” Basciano says, “and we train them to relate to customers. Our buyers get a hard hat with their name printed on it, and a gift certificate to buy work boots, so they are outfitted to visit the job site whenever they want. All we ask is that they call first, so we can keep them safe. It’s no different than what any of us would want, when we’re making the biggest purchase of our lives.”

Mountainview has formal walks of the home at framing, electrical and the final pre-delivery inspection. The sales agent, site super and construction manager do that final walk. The salesperson is there for all of them. The firm also hires a third-party inspector to do framing and structural inspections against a quality control checklist that Mountainview has developed. And the construction manager does his own pre-delivery inspection before the customer sees the house.

“We don’t want customers to define what our quality standards are,” quips Basciano. “The customers will spot the touchy-feely stuff, but our construction manager has much better training. He knows what to look for in places a customer would miss. We want to find those things before something comes up in the warranty period.”

Employment in Niagara Falls, St. Catharines, and the whole Niagara region took a step back in 2009 and only began to recover last year (see box above). Probably based on the market contraction 18 months ago, Mountainview Homes decided to step outside Niagara and begin operations in the Kitchener/Waterloo market, a 90-minute drive northwest.

Because Mountainview has such tightknit construction teams, Basciano decided to take his trades with him from Niagara on that move. “Some of the companies are too small,” he says, “but in most cases, we like to keep our trades together, so everyone knows exactly what to expect. Our contracts contain both written scopes of work and our expectations for site clean-up, to keep the job clean for the next trade that comes on the site. It’s easier for us to keep things running smoothly with the trade companies and crews we’ve been working with for years.”

That’s good news for the home buyers of Kitchener and Waterloo, if not for the local trade contractors. The customers are going to learn to love the way Mountainview builds houses and services buyers.

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.