Sales 101: When Negotiating, Pay Attention to Body Language
Your ability to recognize nonverbal cues at the negotiating table can mean the difference between a bad deal and a successful outcome in a sales negotiation
Purchasing Staffing Ratio: What Should It Be?
How to figure out proper staffing in your purchasing department to balance costs and value with profitability
A Six-Step Strategy to Reset Material and Labor Costs
In collaboration with your supply chain partners and internal team, consider this approach to adjust your costs and boost housing affordability
Falling Mortgage Rates Motivate Some Buyers to Forge Ahead With Home Searches
Buyers formerly priced-out by elevated interest rates are continuing their home searches as borrowing costs drop to a four-month low
A Recipe for Retaining Your Purchasing Talent
Talented people are either leaving or avoiding the home building industry. Here’s how home builders can reverse the tide and keep their best purchasing pros
Are Your Trade Contractor Relationships Strategic or Transactional?
Reward those trade partners that work with you to solve problems and treat the rest simply as transactional suppliers
Purchasing
The Strategic Power of Purchasing for Home Builders
Climbing prices are shutting out some potential buyers, but savvy purchasing can help offset pressures exerted by market conditions
Business Management
Ways for Home Builders to Reduce Direct Costs
Direct costs are usually the largest slice of the cost-component pie for home builders. Cutting those costs goes a long way toward saving your business money
Lean Building
PO vs. VPO—Another ‘Voice of the Process’
Your processes can teach you so much and save you a lot of cash. But you need metrics
Purchasing
Is It Time to Change How You Buy Drywall?
Most builders buy drywall turnkey, with both the material and the labor provided by the same contractor. Purchasing expert Charles Schneider offers a better solution
Purchasing
How to Get the Best Price at the Lumber Yard
When it comes to getting the best price on lumber, it’s not always about the volume of material purchased — relationships count
Purchasing
9 Basic Tenets of Purchasing for Builders
Measuring the lowest total cost of operations and counting every dollar, no matter who it goes to initially, are among the key tenets of purchasing. But there are more
Purchasing
Consider True Value Before Switching Suppliers or Products
There's waste, and then there's waste-mistaken. Builders must learn the difference
Purchasing
10 Elements of the Total Cost Model to Purchasing
Home builders that adopt the total cost model to purchasing and operations are guaranteed to save in the long run. Here’s a road map for getting started
Purchasing
The New Rules of Purchasing for Builders
Builders that purchase labor and material on bid price alone are guaranteed only that they will never operate by lowest total cost
Building Materials
Building Materials Price Inflation
The Labor Department’s construction materials composite price index rose by 0.5% between December 1999 and January of this year
