Long before Janet Benavidez was overseeing sales and marketing for Shea Homes nationally, she was a teenager spending weekends in the back office of a Shea division, organizing files, making copies, and getting a firsthand look at the home-building business.
What began as a part-time job at 15 eventually became a 27-year career that took her from escrow and new-home sales to sales management and, ultimately, national sales and marketing leadership.
“I started when I was 19 years old in the escrow department in sales and marketing,” Benavidez says. “I quickly fell in love with home building, fell in love with what we do and how we provide housing for homeowners.”
After moving into new-home sales and spending about eight years as a sales counselor, Benavidez transitioned to sales management when Shea Homes expanded into California’s Inland Empire. Then the housing market shifted in 2008, bringing consolidation and a larger leadership role.
“With the consolidation that happened, I ended up becoming our vice president of sales and marketing,” she says.
The transition gave Benavidez a valuable perspective on the consumer at a difficult moment for the industry.
“My background was more on the sales side, but it also gave me a great opportunity to look at what the consumers were stating, what they were wanting, what they were looking for. I felt like that really helped me in my transition onto the marketing side of having that front-end experience with our consumer,” she says.
Today, Benavidez oversees Shea Homes’ sales and marketing efforts across the company, including its Trilogy brand. Her focus is on streamlining marketing, strengthening the brand, and using technology to improve the customer experience.
That customer perspective, specifically, continues to shape her marketing strategy.
“I think in looking back at that time frame, putting on the consumer’s hat of how they perceive your brand, how important it is how they perceive your brand, and what you align with, that really helps shape where we go with our marketing strategy,” she says.
That philosophy has become particularly important as home buying has moved further into the digital world. Virtual tours, social media, online reviews, and other tools have changed how consumers research and evaluate homes before ever visiting a community.
“The biggest shift over the last few years has really been just the online presence,” Benavidez says.
AI is now adding another layer to that evolution. Shea is testing AI across sales and marketing, including conversation recording and coaching tools, AI-powered role playing for sales teams, and website chatbots.
“We are looking for those efficiencies, and we are trying to see how we can implement some additional tools that will make it easier for our teams to go through,” Janet says. “I think there’s so much more that we can do with AI.”
But she stresses the importance of reviewing AI-generated content before it reaches the customer.
“I think there still needs to be, especially on the marketing side, the human element,” she says.
After 27 years at Shea, Benavidez isn’t betting on technology replacing the people behind the marketing. She sees AI as another tool in the toolbox, one that can handle efficiencies while people focus on the ideas, collaboration, and authenticity that technology can’t fully replicate.
“I think we still need the talent,” she says. “I think that’s where some of the greatest ideas come from, just the collaboration of the team members who truly understand. You’re not going to be able to replace that.”
