315 Signals Over Stats: 2026 Homebuyer Website Behavior - Nick Chitty Apr 15 2026

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello everybody, and welcome to today's episode of the Builder Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse.

Greg Bray: And we are pleased today to have joining us, Nick Chitty. Nick is the VP of Sales at CommVersion. Welcome back, Nick. Thanks for joining us today.

Nick Chitty: Thank you, gents. Lovely to be back.

Greg Bray: All right. Well, for those people who still haven't had a chance to meet you, Nick, give us kind of that quick intro and background about yourself.

Nick Chitty: I am Nick [00:01:00] Chitty. I'm VP of Sales at CommVersion. I've been working with a team over here for the last five years, specifically with our home builders. For those of you that don't know much about CommVersion, we are a conversion rate optimization solution. Our aim is to convert more of our clients' high intent traffic into qualified inquiries for their OSCs and onsite sales team.

Kevin Weitzel: Some of you may have noticed that Nick talks funny. He talks funny CommVersion's out of the UK, correct?

Nick Chitty: We are indeed. So, HQ is out of London. I head up the North American operation, so I'm an adopted statesman or compatriot to you guys, and I've loved working in the space specifically, and of course being on the ground too.

Greg Bray: Nick, I just want to apologize. I don't think Kevin meant to offend you saying you talk funny. I just.

Nick Chitty: I get that a lot. I get that a lot. I had a webinar last week and one of the comments on the success of the webinar was, I like his accent. I'm not sure that says much about the content, but yeah.

Greg Bray: You take the wins, man. Take the wins.

Kevin Weitzel: We were at IBS not too [00:02:00] long ago, and I love having Nick as a wingman because you can walk around and people want to talk to him just to hear him speak. So, when you look like I do, and you know, Nick, we don't use the video, but Nick's a good looking guy. So, not only is he good looking, but man, that dude dresses to the nines and has an accent. Come on. You can't not talk to this guy.

All right. Getting serious though, Nick, you've already been on here before, so you can't use your previous interesting thing about yourself. Yeah. I'm going to get you with it again. You can't use the family, you can't use your work and you can't use the home building industry whatsoever. We need one interesting factoid about you.

Nick Chitty: Well, I think relevant to today and to the building space, as a result of this job I've currently up to 24 different states, and 32 different cities, which is within the last three years of travel. So, potentially that's interesting, and it tells you that I'm on the road a lot.

Kevin Weitzel: So, in the States, we're usually like, well, what countries do you go to? In your case, you're like, I've gone to this [00:03:00] many states, and you've been all over the place. You've been in Greece and everywhere else. That's awesome.

Nick Chitty: Getting close to 30, so a few more ticked that off.

Kevin Weitzel: There you go.

Greg Bray: Well, Nick, you mentioned a little bit about the company, but just give us a little more detail about how you guys go to market and what exactly you offer builders to drive those conversions.

Nick Chitty: Absolutely. So, we see the same challenges consistently across the space. Which is, and especially now in the current market conditions, we've seen rising acquisition costs, builders spending a significant amount of money to drive the same traffic as they were 12, 18, 24 months ago. So, our proposition is very simple. Buyers are spending longer in their research funnel, research journey, and when they arrive on your website, they're typically more qualified than those previously. So, we look to identify high intent signals where people are browsing communities, multiple floor plans, but failing to convert through the existing channels or CTAs, so whether that's a form fill or via the phone.

And then our job is to use AI, predictive AI to understand those movement patterns and to be able to [00:04:00] serve the right message to the right person at the right time in their journey. When they engage in that conversation, it's then the role of our trained human team who are looking to qualify them and get them into the hands of the OSCs. So, we think of it as an assistive tool to the OSC team and obviously the marketing team, marketing function. Our role really is to qualify those anonymous prospects and get them into hands of other relevant people as quickly as possible and as efficiently as possible to retain the value of that lead.

Greg Bray: You know, it wasn't that long ago that you didn't actually have to say, our human team. Like you didn't have to differentiate. Now you have to explain that there's two teams,

Nick Chitty: Yeah. I think things have changed a lot. I think for us, we look at. Smart chat as the best of both worlds. So, leveraging AI where we think it's most capable, which is in that deep analysis of data to predict those signals and optimize the deployment strategy, as we call it, and then the human interaction. You know, I always go back to it, but this is often and will be the largest purchase for most of us in our lifetime. We want to retain the [00:05:00] authenticity through the interaction, importantly. We know that by building that trust through human connection, we're inclined to convert more of those engagements into qualified leads. So, I think it makes sense in the data. The data shows that. We've conducted a number of different tests, as you can imagine, trying to optimize and confident with our current proposal.

Greg Bray: Well, speaking of data, that was one of the reasons that we wanted to have you back today is that you guys recently did a study, and I saw some of that information. I'm like, wow, this is good stuff. We need to dive in a little bit deeper and share some of that. So, my understanding is that you went through Google Analytics data from last year, so 2025. It was like 50 builders, I think, and all the traffic that you guys were able to see from that and did some analysis and slicing and dicing. What got you guys interested, first of all, just why'd you even want to do that? What was kind of the driver behind it?

Nick Chitty: Traditionally as marketers, we've often approached challenges or challenging conditions with a gut feel. But now more than ever, it's important to [00:06:00] use stats and data to be able to articulate what we're seeing and how to optimize our strategy to get the outcome we desire. So, we've obviously got a great data set. We've got over a hundred builders, 150 builders close to, and we thought we could leverage that to produce some authentic data for the rest of the industry to benchmark how they're currently fairing. I think importantly from our perspective, unlike other studies, obviously our clients are agency agnostic, which means that we have a really good variety over digital strategy and overall paid media strategy. So, we're not benchmarking stats against other clients within our portfolio that are using the same marketing services.

Kevin Weitzel: So, looking at like a 50,000 foot elevation, did you notice any consistent patterns or any kinda shifts that are occurring currently?

Nick Chitty: The data that we've taken is across markets and across different builder sizes, on average, we've got around a million visitors per month across the year we're in question. But we do see some trends when we look at the granularity of some specific data sets. Now, in terms of strategy, you can see that [00:07:00] and we'll share the visuals further down I'm sure, Greg, but we can dig into some similarities that'd be helpful on this data.

Greg Bray: Nick, just to remind people that sometimes if we start talking about numbers and you're just listening, it can be a little hard to keep up. So, Nick is go data available and we'll be able to have that link for you to go download and look at some of these numbers in more detail later. So, our goal today is to just kind of give you a taste of what's in there and some of the insights that the CommVersion team has been finding, which I think are kind of interesting. So, when you think about that, Nick, what was the big wow we didn't expect, or, oh, this is exactly what we thought was happening that now we can prove it? Was there some big wow aha number that jumped out?

Nick Chitty: Yeah, I'm actually going to take a step back and just give the audience a bit of an overall picture of what we've seen. So, headline stats from this data set, as you said Greg, over 50 builders across the states. We've seen an average decline in engagement time across paid channels of 24%. We've seen two to four x [00:08:00] increase in organic search engagement versus paid search. Interestingly, one of the big headline stats was a 400% increase in average social user growth.

Greg Bray: Twenty-four percent decline in time across paid channels sounds like a lot to me. Four hundred percent growth in social sounds like an even bigger lot to me. Those are some interesting numbers. So, let's pick one and drill in a little bit more. So, when you say average decline, sometimes when you group things everybody's the same, or is there one subset that's seeing a much different impact in that kind of decline across the paid channels?

Nick Chitty: So, what the data shows, and when we look at this 24% decline is that even when traffic grew, engagement fell. So, people arrived faster and left faster. So, what we suggest is it's not a traffic problem, it's an intent problem. If we looked specifically at the data sets and the traffic sources, Greg, to your point, the big indicator here is paid social. So, the average time spent [00:09:00] on site from paid social was less than 10 seconds. It was around seven seconds across those builders that we looked at.

Greg Bray: I think that's pretty interesting because I also have seen on my side a growing interest in paid social from builders, which is kind of interesting. You're telling us that, hey, maybe it's not working as well as it used to. But I feel like we see people with some of the reduction in the organic traffic, I think, which is some of that's coming from AI, some of that's Google's just changing the way the results work. So, they've been looking to social to say, oh, how do we get in front of our audience? And now you're kind of saying, well, it may not work quite as well. But, of course, then to be fair, we don't know exactly how good these campaigns are that people are running. Right? So, maybe it's an optimization issue as opposed to a channel issue. Any thoughts there, or am I just kind of off on my own, thinking out loud, which is always dangerous?

Nick Chitty: I think you're completely right. So, we're seeing different market [00:10:00] forces and different channel forces here at play. There is an element from this data that shows that we should be grouping some channels differently in terms of their performance. So, I'm going to go back to actually organic social here. We're thinking short term content, whether it's TikTok or Facebook ads or Instagram, anything Meta.

Ultimately, these types of campaigns and these types of activity, perhaps we shouldn't be looking at them from a lead generation perspective, and it should be more from a top of the funnel marketing awareness. And I think if we look at these different activities with different end goals, ultimately we can benchmark success to illustrate that. So, I think that the takeaway from the engagement time by channel is that we really should be leaning into those that move the needle most. Goes without saying. And ultimately it doesn't disregard the other channels that we've got at our disposal or in our armory, it's just that we should look to deploy them differently.

Greg Bray: So, then based on what you saw, what is the channel that's working the best based [00:11:00] on the data that you guys saw?

Nick Chitty: I'm glad you asked. Well, the most effective way to convert your traffic or the most effective traffic source is the free traffic source. It's organic traffic coming to your website. So, I think that's really profound that we're spending tons of money and effort and resource into driving people to our website through paid channels and actually the ones that we are seeing are most inclined to convert and progress are those starting the journey from their own comfort and from their own perspective.

Greg Bray: All right. Now, I gotta take one little issue with that comment, Nick. All right. Because. True, good organic traffic is actually not free. You gotta work really hard at it to get it. There's a lot of work, whether that's an agency or partner or in-house person that's doing stuff, it's not free, it's just different where that cost lives. Right. I gotta go on record there. I understand what you mean. The click doesn't cost you at that moment the way that the paid search does, so.

Kevin Weitzel: And can I add to that, Greg? Because I agree with you in the fact that the attribution is not always direct to what that [00:12:00] original touchpoint was. So, if they saw that SEO ad or some kind of paid social ad, they may not activate on that now, but it was a billboard in front of their face that they saw that instigated them to go look up X, Y, Z builders because it's in their area and that's who they want to go to. Is that a fair assessment, Nick?

Nick Chitty: I think so. And Greg, yeah, I'm being slightly facetious here because of course that journey doesn't start with a singular search. Ultimately, we're seeing that when it comes to someone's search for a new home, I think it really compounds that notion that we are aware of, which is that buyers are far more research. So, it makes sense that for those that are typing in a builder organically into an engine, are actually going to convert better than those arriving directly from a pay channel. So, that might mean they've visited. Four or five times before, or they've seen paid media and other activities, but actually if we're just tracking it from a pure kinda UTM link, that's what we're seeing from a conversion and an engagement perspective.

Greg Bray: I think this is a really [00:13:00] powerful discussion to get a little deeper into attribution challenges, right? Because we've always struggled with who gets credit. Is it the last click or the first click or the 25 clicks in between that happen? And as a marketer, if you hear this and go, oh, paid doesn't work anymore, only organic works, I think that might be an overreach in analyzing this data. Would you be comfortable with that, Nick? Or do you feel like you guys went deep enough to say, quit doing paid?

Nick Chitty: No, I think so. I think we'd all be out of a job if that were the case. But I think from our point here, and we spoke about it with some of our partners separately is about how we optimize our traffic and the conversion of traffic to the channel. So, working backwards, if we are looking from an OSC perspective when leads arrive in our CRM, being able to track the source that they're coming from, and then ultimately being able to triage lead by source to be able to deal with them effectively.

Greg Bray: All right. So, this raises a question for me that I'd be interested in that's not [00:14:00] probably really part of this study, but how do you see from your vision of looking at these builders? Are they tracking these types of things consistently? Is everybody tracking or are only some of them actually trying to even capture that kind of data?

Nick Chitty: I think there's limited tracking here and the problem is a lot of builders will work with multiple systems for that tracking. So, whether they're trying to look directly within their CRM or whether they're looking at Google Analytics, there's no consistency, which means that we're seeing data loss. That's consistent. The consistency is the inconsistency. But the best builders will have a fairly good picture, a lifecycle of those leads and those touch points, and the OSC should be treating them accordingly.

Greg Bray: So, I know that one of the data points that I saw that was kind of interesting is that, and I think it kind of makes sense to me, but there was data in there about mobile versus desktop, and the idea that mobile had more visits, but then desktop had the engagement going along with it. So, let's unpack that one a little [00:15:00] bit. What are some of the implications you guys see with that one?

Nick Chitty: Yeah, I also found this really interesting. So, the headline stat was mobile traffic equated to 65% of total visits, but separately, the conversion of the mobile traffic was significantly lower, so around 40% lower than that of desktop. I was looking at this and this is a common trend. We often speak with builders and one of their focuses for, it seems in perpetuity, is around mobile optimization. How can we optimize the website to feel better, to look better, that customer experience? And obviously, that's important because we see that the traffic volumes correlate to that, but then we look obviously further down the funnel, we're not seeing the lead conversions staying in trend.

And I was thinking about my own personal journey when I'm looking to buy home or when I have done in the past, usually, and this might sound a really significant point, but if I'm looking at a floor plan, or if I'm looking at a listing, for example, if it's not in new home construction, I'm going to want the biggest screen possible. This might sound a really silly point, but actually when I'm [00:16:00] looking at something, when I'm looking at floor plans, I want to have a visual which is as clear as possible, and the mobile doesn't offer that. The mobile devices don't offer that to the same extent as a desktop or or as a laptop. That also leads to the buying journey and also speaks to our point earlier around the attribution of this traffic and ultimately that buyer journey.

So, I suggest that what we're seeing here is potentially people starting that journey on a mobile device, their initial journey, whether that's clicking through or being redirected through a pay channel. And then when they thought about it and they sat on it, and they're starting to have those deeper conversations within their family, and I think of this as a family decision, whether it's a nuclear family or indeed a partnership or whatever it might be, they're going to have a different buying journey. So, they're sitting down, taking longer, they're spending longer on site. And that typically involves a desktop device as opposed to a mobile. And I think that makes sense.

Kevin Weitzel: Nicholas, welcome to my world. Thank you for bringing that up, especially about the screen size. I can tell you back in [00:17:00] 2016, we actually did a very deep dive into people finding interactive floor plans across tens of thousands of plans, hundreds of builders across the entire United States. And what we found in 2016 was an 80/80 flip, 80% of the initial engagement came from mobile. This was back in 2016. Eighty percent of the initial touch was on a mobile device.

Then 80% of the engagement time, looking at the amount of time people spend on the interactive floor plan, this is just purely looking at interactive floor plans alone, no other aspects of the website, just the IFP, 80% of the engagement time was on a desktop. Now, 10 years later, we just did this about six months ago, so back in 2025, so nine and a half years later. We found that those numbers aren't that far off. It's still about roughly 80 plus percent. And that slightly rose the number of people that find you on a mobile device first.

But it's only about 75%, 74%, and I don't have the exact numbers in the front of my head, but [00:18:00] it's roughly about 5% less, but about 74% is still being spent on desktop. So, you are exactly right. People get the intrigue, and the interest, and the discovery on the mobile, and then they're doing the deep dive when they get home on their desktop. That rings true. I know for a fact that rings true on IFPs, so possibly, with all the content on the website as well.

Nick Chitty: You're completely right. I don't like to make sweeping statements, but if I were to contrite my own rule, I'd suggest that what we're seeing is the mobile viewer is more of a scroller, they're browsing. The desktop visitor is comparing floor plans and running the numbers, frankly. What does this mean in practice? Well, I think it also goes up to the workflow for our OSCs and backend. Making sure we're treating leads differently according to the source, but also device I think makes sense.

Greg Bray: Well, now to be a contrarian in the room, which is not usually my role, that's somebody else's role here. But could it be that our mobile sites just aren't very good? I have no data to back that up, but maybe there's an opportunity to make our mobile sites better [00:19:00] because they're not converting the way that the desktop sites are. I agree with the premises you guys are putting out there, by the way, but maybe there's some opportunity for mobile optimization as well,

Nick Chitty: Well, Greg, look at the data. Clearly there's an opportunity to optimize because the majority of our traffic is viewing our website in that format. So, regardless of whether we're looking at it from a purely conversion perspective, clearly we want to provide them with a good customer experience and the website should be optimized for that purpose in any case.

Greg Bray: Nick, when you talk about conversions too, and we talk about, what were you guys using in your study to measure conversions? What counted as a conversion for you in this data?

Nick Chitty: Again, always tricky because of the lack of consistency within our goals within GA. But typically we're looking at primary conversions within Google Analytics. So, those are things like phone calls, those are ask a question, form fills, and then register interest in specific communities or floor plans. We try to exclude as far as possible a secondary conversion. So, those would be things like newsletters and some sorts of [00:20:00] downloads, which are less engaged than others.

Kevin Weitzel: Can I expand on that and ask you this question? Does that conversion vary based on the sophistication of the use of the CRM by the individual home builders? Because, you know, a HubSpot or a Lasso, those are just tools and you can use it for its full breadth of the services that they offer and you can use it for a very narrow, simplified scope. So, for a builder that basically is taking all attributions and linking them all and tracking everything and putting action items in position for that.

Do you find that those builders that are less sophisticated, that are just using for just the basic touch base information, you know, like, oh, I need to call Billy Bob back because he asked about this plan, do you find that you're getting the same consistent data or are the builders that are making more links, making more integrations, are they finding more successes with being able to track those attributions of how they're coming in?

Nick Chitty: The key here is that if we oversimplify our conversion [00:21:00] metrics and using simplified goals for conversion ultimately could be quite misleading. So, to your point about calling, you know, Bobby, whoever it is, well, are we confident that those calls are meaningful sales increase or are they going to be warranty, things outside of that sales process that, you know, marketing, accounting as leads and doing a good job, but fundamentally aren't driving value. So, to your point, I think the most successful builders are going to granular level, and they should be using a single source of truth, but that's not consistent.

Greg Bray: Well, Nick, I think this kind of information's really interesting. I think we have to be careful that we don't, like you said overgeneralize and just say, oh, therefore everybody thinks this, or everybody's doing that.

But did you see any other kind of patterns like related to size of builder or locations or anything like that, that jumped out, that made things different? You know, are big builders doing better than small builders in some of these things? Or is that not a slice that you were able to look at?

Nick Chitty: That wasn't a slice that we drilled in too much. So, just [00:22:00] to give a bit more detail into the data set. This is anonymized data across that pool. We did ask permission for those builders to do that individual benchmark. We didn't segment the conversion by size of builder. What we did do was segment trends in terms of activity or how traffic was moving across builder size. So, we have that data, but in terms of the conversion of specific builder sizes, that's not something we've offered.

I wanted to drill into one slide here, guys, which I thought was interesting, which is cost per acquisition for 24 versus 25 and some trends that we see across the year. Ultimately, what we've seen across, and again, builder sizes is that CPA has increased, when we compare the two time periods. But we also see significant trends in terms of the months and the quarters, and we'll share this graph afterwards.

But we saw that 2025 fairly aligned with the previous year, but a big gap towards Q4. So, in [00:23:00] October, we see a big spike in cost per acquisition as people were potentially making up the numbers for the following year. And it's interesting to me that that was consistent across the industry. So, we are seeing that the feelings of builders within different locations that are reflected in their strategy overall.

Greg Bray: All right, so Nick, let's cut down to the chase, right? If there's one thing that you think builders should understand about, based on this data and this research that you guys did, what's like the one big takeaway?

Nick Chitty: Well, I'm going to be slightly biased, but I'd suggest that as we're seeing the trends of engagement time reducing, cost per acquisition increasing, and genuinely, fighting harder for every click, the biggest key piece in this puzzle is the conversion of that traffic. So, how do we optimize our websites to convert more of that traffic, and particularly when we're looking at those sources that are most effective? So, the builders that are going to win in 2026, from my perspective, are those that can understand who's coming to the website [00:24:00] and that lifecycle journey but ultimately can capitalize on that intent to convert them into qualified opportunities.

Greg Bray: Awesome. That's really insightful. Appreciate that. Any last thoughts or words of advice you want to leave with our audience today?

Nick Chitty: So, I think the takeaway from our side is that the buyers are there, they're on your website right now. They're visiting, they're browsing, they're researching, they're spending real time on your floor plans or communities. The question isn't really whether the demand exists, it's whether you have the visibility to see it, and the speed to act on it. So, the theme of this data pool that we've pulled together is signals over stats. So, that's the shift. The good news for builders is you don't need to rebuild your entire tech stack to make it happen. You just need to be looking at the right numbers to optimize.

Greg Bray: Well, Nick, if somebody wants to connect with you and get in touch, what's the best way for them to reach out?

Nick Chitty: Best way is via LinkedIn, so Nick Chitty, on LinkedIn. And then my email address is nick@commversion.com. I'd love to send the report across to anyone of interest.

Kevin Weitzel: Comm, C, O, M, M, [00:25:00] version.com.

Greg Bray: Good clarification, Kevin. Thank you. Well, thank you again, Nick, for sharing this data with us, for putting the work in for your team to pull it out because I know that's not a five minute job. Even with AI, that's not a five minute job. So, it's great information and thank you for sharing, and thank you everybody for listening today to the Builder Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse. Thank you.