HSVPOA Revenue & Marketing Plan – DC Reed
DC Reed is retired from a life-long career in technology sales.
Management has a New Urbanism agenda, which is not what the Villagers want. DC doesn’t think the urbanization plan will work here in Hot Springs Village.
DC Reed developed his sales plan presentation over a year ago and Art Olsen joined DC shortly after he began presenting his plan. Initially, DC presented a spreadsheet to a Board Director about what would happen to Hot Springs Village financially if we happened to sell not three lots, but 300 lots. DC ‘s initial spreadsheet was used in the development of the presentation. The Board Director thought it was a great idea at the time, and brought it up to the Board and they said no, they were not interested. It appears they were not really interested in selling lots, but instead their interest was in accumulating lots.
DC and Art worked to develop a plan to generate the most revenue with the least risk. The two entrepreneurs first determined what Hot Springs Village has to sell. The only thing to sell that has both immediate and long-term revenue is lots. DC and Art did not understand why HSVPOA is not selling many lots.
Negatives to overcome
First, the duo determined that there were a couple of negatives to overcome.
- Arkansas is not considered a retirement state.
- This program did not fit into the agenda of the CEO. DC and Art did not know why but realized this was a barrier that needed to be overcome.
A few additional things
Quickly, DC and Art realized a few additional things:
- Control of the gates is important. They felt that no unauthorized non-property owner should have access to the Village. We need to create exclusivity back in the Village. We had this in the past, but we have lost it. Exclusivity means value to the property owners.
- Not everyone can afford to live in Hot Springs Village. That is not easy to say to some folks. There are places we all cannot afford to live and this is a fact of life.
- DC and Art feel that CCI and the leadership of the Village should have seen the need for a long-term-lot-selling program to continue. There is always going to be turnover. We need to keep the value up in the Village by continuing to market the lots. If this had been an ongoing process, we probably would not be in the present position.
How to recreate the value story of the Village
- Look at where we are right now.
- What is the status of the Village concerning the current POA revenue plan? There is not one in place at this time. The only thing they do to bring more money into the POA is to raise assessments and amenity fees.
- Create a sales program and change our whole approach to selling amenities. The value is in our amenities. A lot-selling program has been very successful two times in the past – once with Cooper Communities and once with NRP.
- The POA needs to be out of the home-selling business.
- The POA’s current decision to shut down lot sales is wrong.
- The POA needs to control every lot here, if possible. By controlling the lots, we can create demand.
- Categorize all lots by two types – buildable and amenity lots. An amenity lot is a lot that cannot be built on, but all the amenities will be available to the lot owner.
- Suspension of lots is not productive. You lose the sales revenue in addition to the monthly assessment revenue.
- Determine how many homes the existing infrastructure in the Village can support – possibly the number may be four to five thousand more before we need a large increase in infrastructure.
- For the plan to work, the support of the Villagers is needed. The plan needs to be defined and introduced as a program and presented to the community.
What is the ‘Value Plan’?
- The lowest lot will be priced at five thousand dollars.
- The number of lots for sale will be limited.
- This plan will increase the value of all property in the Village. We will use the existing real estate agents in the Village to sell these lots.
- We need a simple Hot Springs Village POA marketing website and a customer relations management system program that is separate from the member website.
- Village Homes and Land should be restructured into an amenity-lot selling and marketing organization.
- Email lists with certain defined parameters can be purchased.
- Use social media to market the Village.
- Market to the 10,000 Baby Boomers reaching retirement age every day.
- Focus on families that understand amenity values and are 5 to 10 years away from retirement. These families will come and stay here to enjoy the amenities and if the value of the Village is increasing, they may decide to build here when they retire.
- Promote amenity events such as golf, pickleball, tennis and bridge tournaments.
- Village referrals will be a key component of the program. Any property owner who refers a person who purchases any type of lot from the new sales and marketing team will receive a five hundred dollar referral incentive.
- Contract with our independent real estate companies to give guided tours. They will receive fifty percent of the five thousand dollars of the lot sales, in order to make it worth their while.
- Work with local businesses to create a booklet with discounts to these local businesses and give these discount booklets to the prospective buyers taking the tours.
- Also, give the prospective buyers a free dinner, round of golf, tennis or pickleball time.
How to generate traffic
- Treat every authorized visitor as a sales prospect. Get their contact information (name, address and email address) and market to them.
- Each amenity group (golf, pickleball, tennis, bridge, etc) needs to be responsible for driving more traffic into the Village.
What can happen if we make these changes
If only half of all our property owners sent us one referral that actually closed, we’d sell our 10,000 available lots. This will generate a minimum of fifty million dollars revenue if it was only 10,000 amenity lots.
We need to start today
We want to sell 500 lots in 2020. Even if we only sell 250, we are “light years ahead of where we are now.”
Click here for the Hot Springs Village Revenue & Marketing Plan Video
By Cheryl Dowden
Author’s note: This article and video express the opinion of DC Reed. Scroll down to read the comments. Thank you.
NittyGritty
07/22/2019 — 12:37 pm
A “non-profit” HOA is not supposed to have a revenue plan. According to the federal government, a “non-profit” HOA is supposed to collect assessments from its members to cover 90% or better of its expenses. Otherwise, the HOA does not qualify federally as a non-profit and owes federal tax on its revenue.
This Village is still emerging from the debacle of a wave of unimproved lot owners demonstrating that they had insufficient incentive to pay assessments. Instigated by the board and with their majority, they voted to double resident assessments. Hopefully, a repeat performance can be avoided by the board now aiming to DECREASE the number of unimproved lot owners (as they are so doing), NOT increase them!
Tom Blakeman
07/22/2019 — 5:25 pm
OK Nitty – based on your analysis all services and amenities like golf, tennis, fitness, etc. should have no user fees and assessments should cover everything. How much of an assessment do you think that would take on a per Member basis? And, at what point do we curtail the expanding bureaucracy to help ameliorate the Fees?
NittyGritty
08/03/2019 — 4:23 pm
You addressed me rudely, misconstrued the first half of my reply to the previous post in regards to their question about the lack of a revenue plan, ignored the second half of my reply, put words in my mouth in the form of a solution YOU came up with, and then tried to provolk me into making sense of your confusion. Whew! No thanks, Tom. (Maybe if you pay me a few hundred thousand!)
Walter
07/22/2019 — 12:50 pm
Spot on. I have written a lot of the same ideas. Thank you.
Melissa
07/22/2019 — 1:37 pm
Thank you! Very interesting read, I am against any kind of urban/ CMP the POA has up their sleeves! Keep our village safe and secure!!!
Melvin west
07/22/2019 — 7:26 pm
You mAke sense but why is the “board so dead set against it? I think they have another idea of what should be done. So they fight for their ideas so nobody wins
Mike
07/23/2019 — 6:49 am
Another opinion that goes against the direction of our leadership. DC, you have your work cut out for you. Makes everything sensible is impossible to achieve until they can stop the madness of CMP.
You said,
Control of the gates is important. They felt that no unauthorized non-property owner should have access to the Village. We need to create exclusivity back in the Village. We had this in the past, but we have lost it. Exclusivity means value to the property owners.
Well, there you go. Entering these gates, one needs to feel like it is a privilege, and you are on the verge of a country club experience. Not an open playground for anyone and his brother. No kidding.
Shirley
07/27/2019 — 2:47 pm
Pricing of the least desirable lots at $5K is nothing short of brilliant! If the CEO and BOD had any smarts, they would bring DC Reed into their fold and use him as a marketing consultant. He’s offering free consulting, Phil Lemler did, which in any corporate situation companies would be paying 10’s of thousands of dollars for. But POA management does not believe there’s anyone smarter than themselves.
And we all know that our legacy BOD members and CEO have their own agenda, none of which makes any sense to the most sophomoric among us.
Thank you DC Reed for your efforts.
Lucie Botkin
07/30/2019 — 1:21 pm
The lettering on the east/west gate walls cannot be read most of the day – the lettering blends into the brick. This has been a BIG issue for almost five years. After having spoken with several POA management people re this matter, the final say was they knew this is a big problem but there was NO MONEY to paint, change out….whatever it takes to make the lettering stand out. Here we are, almost at the end of another summer and the visitors must think this is a very poorly run village. Hummmm… I am embarrassed and ashamed we can’t do better than this – the folks who have the power to provide monies to fix this issue should pony up and realize this is the first thing our visitors see when they come into the Village. With all the flack going on about how much our upper management is paid, here is an idea…let them contribute to an in-house “fix the signs” fund – they can afford it. Shame, shame, shame!!!!