A unique online design tool makes it a breeze to customize your new home
The sheer number of design decisions required to build a new home can be overwhelming, but Tartan Homes has found a way to help their homebuyers do it with an innovative online design tool the Ottawa homebuilder introduced earlier this year.
“I wanted to come up with a tool to help make the process of personalizing a new home easier, to make it a little less daunting,” said Heidi Hayley, marketing manager at Tartan Homes. “The online design tool shows their choices more visually and categorizes them in a way that is easier to follow. It gets customers thinking about the things they might want to upgrade and keep a wishlist to keep track of their choices, so that when they get to the Design Centre, they are already on their way and can decide with actual samples.”
When building a new home, buyers have to think of the flooring, the colour of the walls, the type of countertops in the kitchen, the style of faucets in the bathroom, and more; the list is seemingly endless.
“I always say 101 decisions have to be made, and it’s no joke,” said Heather Baltussen, lead manager at Tartan Homes’s design centre. “We have upgrade catalogues, which are a hard copy of what you find on our online design centre, and those books are more than 100 pages in length, so there are hundreds of things to choose from.”
When customers sign up for a house built by Tartan Homes, they have an orientation session that explains the design decisions they need to make, then a fullday meeting where they sit down with a team of new home co-ordinators to examine the finishing samples and make the choices needed to personalize their home. A few weeks later, they meet again to confirm their orders and make any necessary changes.
The online design tool has streamlined the process in that buyers now research their choices anytime or anywhere before they sit down with the design team. The online tool is essentially a virtual catalogue that lets buyers interact with the many customization options they have.
“It’s been really helpful because if people just drop into the design centre for the first time without having a sense of what it is that they’re walking into, they can look like a deer caught in the headlights because there are so many samples and different things for them to select,” said Baltussen, who has heard from many buyers that the online tool makes the process a lot more fun and less stressful.
The tool is also good at keeping buyers on budget, because it keeps a running total of the cost of all the selections they make.
Even with so much of our lives being spent online these days, Hayley said that Tartan Homes is one of the only developers in Canada that is using an online tool to let buyers customize their homes. If most builders are still in the analog world, she believes it’s simply because it is such a Herculean task to digitize so much information. It took Tartan Homes almost two years to launch the tool.
“It was a huge job, but I wanted to do it right, which is why it took so long,” Hayley said.
In its more than 50 years of business, Tartan Homes has built up many of Ottawa’s most popular residential neighbourhoods. Its newest developments are in Russell, Kanata, Stittsville and Findlay Creek.
“We have such a wide demographic of cultures with our customers that there is no right or wrong way to come up with a look for a house, and our team is good to recognize that,” Baltussen said. “We start off by finding out what the buyers are looking for. We’re not trying to steer them in any particular direction. We don’t want every house to look the same. In the end, every house needs to be personalized to each person’s tastes.”
To find out more about Tartan Homes developments or to learn more about their online design tool, visit