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While the lack of resale inventory has helped the new-home market in recent years, high mortgage rates have recently deterred many would-be buyers.

“On a macro level, there are a lot of headwinds out there. From interest rates to trade war fears, people are worried,” says Ron Nelson, K. Hovnanian Homes vice president and chief marketing officer.

To calm the nerves of hopeful buyers and attract new ones, Nelson says the main marketing message for K. Hovnanian has been surrounding financing.

Nelson shares more about what he’s seeing in new-home marketing below ahead of his appearance at the CMOs in the Spotlight panel at Accelerate in Austin, Texas, on March 24, 2025.

Ron Nelson
Ron Nelson

How have you shaped K. Hovnanian’s marketing message in recent years?
People are not putting their homes on the market so there’s a lack of inventory out there. Who wants to give up a 3% mortgage for a 7%? But the new home industry has been selling homes in spite of that because we have the inventory and are able to buy down rates for people. From a marketing standpoint, we have been relying heavily on either rate buy downs, discounts, or “flex cash” as we call it so the message has been about financing.

What channels are you reaching interested buyers through?
There's the basics. There's always going to be search. People in the market for a home are going to search engines, Google, Bing, or whatever, and we need to be visible there. If they’re looking for a house in Port St. Lucie, Florida, we need to show up. We also feed into multi-listing services (MLS), which is ultra important, and we push our listings to NewHomeSource, Realtor.com, Zillow, all of those. Those two are the givens, the no brainers. Anything else beyond that is going to be a little bit less efficient because you're marketing toward people who may or may not be in the home search, depending on how you buy the media, but we certainly do social media.

How do you use social media? Does it vary by market?
We do. A lot of Instagram. A lot of Facebook. We've been doing quite well on TikTok. Our social spend is in the mix but performs better in some markets than others. It's an important part of our mix on two accounts: one, it gets us leads that we need and, two, it's probably our biggest awareness campaign.

In addition to financing, what other trends have you noticed in new-home marketing?
Another big trend is that we, and most other builders, have to sell more and more of our inventory that is quick move-in homes. QMIs have become a favorite of the buying public because they know what their rates are going to be. Waiting eight, nine, 10 months is nerve wracking to people and if they can essentially get the home that they want with a couple of compromises, they're going to want to buy a QMI. It’s also a better interest to a realtor. They get paid sooner, right? Their closing is sooner. QMIs have changed our advertising mix, because we're really looking more and more for people who are actively in the market now as opposed to those who are just starting their journey. Additionally, to compete against all the other builders who have massive inventories of QMIs, we've had to spend more. That’s really been the difference because, we were predominantly a to-be-built builder and didn't build a lot of QMIs, however, COVID and the interest rate environment changed that. It’s really been the last three-to-four years that we've had to make that change, and now we're growing. We have higher community counts and we have more QMIs in the ground now than anytime I can remember so that's necessitated us having a more aggressive marketing plan to sell those.

What are your thoughts on traditional marketing like directional signage, etc.?
I believe they bring us traffic, but I believe it brings us ‘tire kickers.’ The common response I hear from sales is they keep people coming in who go, ‘I didn't even know you were here,’ and what that says to me is that that person is not in the market to buy a home. They just saw signs saying model homes and said, ‘let's go take a look.’ I don't think it's a cost effective spend.

So, digital is key?
Everybody who seriously goes to look at a home starts with their computer or their iPhone. That’s the first place they usually go to search, and we need to make sure we show up there or if they go to a listing site, that we’re available there too.