I Toured 5 Model Homes In One Day Here S The Big Problem

I toured five different model homes in one day, different builders, different price points, different parts of DFW, and within the first five minutes of walking into each one, I already knew a lot. Not because I'm looking at the countertops, but because there are very specific things I look for immediately, and most buyers don't even realize they matter. Most people tour models to find a dream home. I tour them to find a high-performing asset. This is the same framework our agents use when we look at new homes with clients. I tour them to audit a builder's vulnerability. As I'm walking through, my mindset is that I'm looking for cracks in their sales velocity and hidden equity in their site maps. Today, I'm walking you through the exact tactical checklist running through my head the minute I step foot into each of these model homes. Okay, let's back up a step. This actually starts before I even enter the house. I stop at the front door and I look around, and here's why. When I tour a model home, I'm not just evaluating the house, I'm evaluating the battlefield. I wanna know where the competing sales offices are. Can I use that to my advantage? Is there a line of sight so I can go back and forth between the builders to negotiate? If builder A's sales office is directly across from builder B's, you have leverage. You can literally tell a consultant, I'm walking across the street to see if they'll beat your design center credit. Builders pay close attention to who else is around them. If two sales offices are within sight of each other, they're watching the same traffic. I mean, just walking into a competitor's office can create negotiating pressure. If builder A knows you just walked across the street to builder B, the dynamic immediately changes. Now, I realize you're probably cracking up laughing at how we have this whole thing planned out, but this is one of the first things our agents are trained to evaluate when we walk into a new community with a buyer. If there's competitive pressure between builders, we wanna know exactly how to use it. So when I stop at the front door and look around, I'm counting how many model homes there are. Usually they're all clustered in the same area. And while I'm doing that, I'm looking to see how many individual builders there are so I can get a take on what my architectural diversity is going to look like. The other thing I'm paying attention to is how busy the model home street is. Is it a ghost town? Or are people everywhere getting in and out of cars? And that matters because builder incentives move directly with traffic. This one will probably surprise you, but while I'm standing there, I'm also paying attention to how windy it is. Believe it or not, the wind tells you a lot about how built out the community is. Windbreaks from homes and trees mean maturity. Open wind usually means the neighborhood is still early. So what I'm thinking about here is where a community sits in its development cycle and how that compares to my client's timeline. Because that matters a lot. If my client has already told me they'll only be here for a few years and I have the wind factor going on, hey, that's a red flag for me. We don't want our buyers competing with new construction when they go to sell. So we're paying attention to the build out timeline and you can get a lot of information about that just through looking around. Okay, so after standing on the porch kind of looking weird for a while, now I'm ready to head inside. Now, if you think about it, once you're inside, you're gonna naturally seek out the offices, the sales brochures and the sales consultant. I mean, after all, you wanna make sure you have the right to be in there, right? That you haven't like, you know, accidentally stepped into someone's house. Chances are these sales consultants probably gonna be on the phone or working with someone else. So your attention usually gravitates to the glossy brochures and display materials that are sitting there. Our agents are usually gonna hit the pause button here because there's just so much to discover. The first thing we always look for, that I always look for, is the site map. So that tells a lot right away. What phase are we in and how many phases are still coming? If you're in an early phase, there is dirt risk. The community is still being built, which means construction chaos is going to be part of daily life for a while. There are a lot of other things to look out for when you have the site map in front of you. All right, check for things like future commercial or apartment complexes. If these are a factor, will the housing part be insulated from it? Okay, so how much buffering or designated green space is gonna be there? Will my home end up being right across the street from an apartment complex? Next, does the site map show a future onsite school? And if so, will my future home end up being right across the street from the school? We're also looking at how many builders there are and how they're spread out across the community. Sometimes you'll see three builders on the same street and you'll be able to see that right on the site map. And that is an awesome thing because it usually means architectural diversity and hopefully price diversity too. Other times you'll see that one builder owns a huge section of the community, sometimes even the entire community. That is usually not as desirable because it limits variety and concentrates all the pricing power with one builder. Then we're looking at how many of these lots are being sold for buyers to build on and how many are going to be inventory homes that the builder builds themselves because custom builds usually end up looking nicer because people personalize them. All this time I'm looking and I'm still soaking it in. Something else big I wanna know about is the amenities. It's gonna be right there on the site map too. I'm looking for where they are within the community and you better believe I'm gonna be driving by there later because here's the thing, no matter how flashy the amenities are on the site map or posters on the wall, if they haven't started them yet, you may never get them. Many contracts will even say that, that the amenities aren't promised. Especially if the builder is not the developer, the builder might blame the developer for delays indefinitely and you're out of luck. By about this time in each of the houses, I figure I've blocked the view of the site map long enough. So now I'm moving on to the brochures. And what I'm asking now is how many floor plans are actually offered. Remember, we wanna see a nice spread with lots of offerings so the neighborhood doesn't feel repetitive. I wanna know what's the biggest quick move in? What's the smallest? How wide is the pricing spread? I also really wanna see if they have a list of custom versus standard items. It's usually gonna be a long list, but it's really important to have. Another thing to look for in the brochure is a deconstructed house diagram. Builders sometimes include these visuals that'll show the inside of the walls and the structure of the home. I wanna see all of that. Like what kind of sheathing are they using? What type of insulation are they putting in the attic and throughout the rest of the home? Then there are a couple of financial things to confirm as well. Is there a mud or a pit? And sometimes that won't be clearly advertised and occasionally the sales consultant might not even know. A good builder will disclose it clearly. Next, confirm the school district. Don't assume you already know. Some neighborhoods are zoned to multiple districts. I mean, Harvest in Argyle is a great example of this. Argyle ISD is A plus rated and Northwest ISD is rated around a B. Here's something you might not expect to learn from a simple brochure, but it's something our agents always look for, the builder's exposure. How long is their list of quick move-ins? A lot of buyers assume the MLS shows everything that's available, but that is actually not true at all. Builders will often keep some of their standing inventory off the MLS because they're trying to avoid publicly signaling that they have too much inventory sitting. My agents, me, we're always gonna come right out and ask them. Like we ask to see their full inventory report. We wanna know exactly what's coming. How many homes are already under construction? How many are sitting at the drywall stage but haven't been listed yet? I mean, that's where the real negotiation tends to happen because the builder already has money tied up in those homes. Then we start reading the inventory position. If most of the phase is already sold out and there are only a handful of homes left, that tells one story. But if they just opened the phase and there are 60 open lots sitting there, all right, that tells a very different story. Inventory position equals leverage position. You can also pick up clues just by looking around the sales office. Are they advertising deep discounts with bright, colorful posters everywhere? Or are they quietly closing things out? Keep in mind by this point in each of the houses, I haven't even spoken to the sales consultant or walked through the house. There is just so much to observe at this point. A lot of times my agents will bring a checklist, which by the way, if we sound like you're cup of joe, the best way for all of us to get connected is through our Let's Find Home questionnaire that you can find in the description section. Okay, now let's talk about the sales consultant because right about now, I'd have one headed towards me ready to shake my hand. In my world, the person behind the desk is a data point. All right, not just a host. How fast does the sales consultant offer specials and discounts? Or do they say demand is strong and they're selling fast? I'm constantly evaluating their presentation. I'll also be in all out information gathering mode at this point. And so will my agents. I mean, we're listening for what kind of incentives they mentioned. Are there design center credits? Are there rate buy down offers? Like I wanna be able to take one builder's incentives and use them against another. So I need to know what those incentives are. And here's another huge thing, paying attention to the sales consultant's competence. Is this the primary sales agent? Is this a knowledgeable sales agent? Am I going to be able to get my questions answered from them? And how much influence and decision-making power do they have when it comes to negotiation? And by the time one of my agents sit down to negotiate, they want to already know the sales consultant and now's the time to be figuring that out. And here's the thing, the sales consultant is observing me. I wanna be observing them, all right? Their personality, their demeanor, what negotiating approach will work with this sales consultant? And how does the negotiating chain of command work here? So the goal is to learn as much as we can about how things run here. Quota deadlines, how many homes a month they will sell to investors. If anything in the HOA will prevent how many homes can become rentals. And we'll just keep the questions going. For example, are there any major future roadways planned for this community? How many homes are selling per month? What's the current build time right now? Those kinds of answers help me understand the absorption rate. And that tells us two very important things, how strong demand really is and how much pricing flexibility the builder might have. Now I've seen the amenities on the sitemap, but I'm also going to ask the sales agent about them. I'm watching for vagueness when I do that. Ask who's responsible for building them. Is it the builder or is it the developer? So I'm watching for the difference between, you know, the developer is talking about building a pool in phase three versus here's where they've already broken ground for the clubhouse. Okay, now it's time to actually walk through the house. The way I want to do this is ask the sales consultant to walk through the home with me and point out exactly what's standard and what's an upgrade. So I always have in mind as I'm walking through that this is only an example and not even a close one at that. Everything about this house will be upgrades. That's why we so badly want to visualize what is standard versus what's an upgrade. For example, is this flooring standard? Are these cabinets standard height? Is that eight foot door standard? Is that appliance package base? As I'm thinking through upgrade options in the back of my mind, I'm thinking through which upgrades will align best with the principle of relative liquidity. Upgraded kitchen, yes. Designer wallpaper, not so much. I'm also paying attention to the systems of the house, not just the finishes. I mean, for example, what kind of HVAC system are they using? I don't look for just the AC. I look for things like zoned systems and the SEER rating on the unit. I mean, if you're looking at a $1.5 million house and it only has a single stage HVAC unit, okay, that should be a red flag. Then I'm thinking about the attic and the windows. Do they have radiant barrier decking? Are they using spray foam insulation? These aren't just green features that sound nice on a brochure. They actually reduce the operating costs of the house and that matters both to you as well as the next buyer when it's time to sell. And this brings us back to something important about model homes. If the model you're walking through is 80% upgrades, then the base price the builder advertises is really more of a marketing number than a realistic purchase price. The goal when you're touring is to figure out what the true standard baseline of the house actually is. But we're not just looking for upgrades. We're also noticing floor plan flaws, things like door swing conflicts, awkward furniture layouts, and whether there's actually enough wall space for real furniture. Are there long hallways eating up square footage? Is the lighting poor in large rooms? Does the primary bedroom open directly into a high traffic hallway? Is the laundry isolated from the rest of the house? Builders sometimes increase square footage by expanding hallways instead of usable living space. And that's why square footage all by itself really doesn't mean anything. Functional square footage is what actually matters. Now let's talk about signs of construction quality. Within a few minutes, certain things start telling me about where the builder is saving money. Things like hollow interior doors, minimal trim work, basic vent placement, low-end window frames, or short cabinet boxes. Are there actual window sills or just drywall returns? Like what kind of ceiling lights are they using? If I see plain window glass over the tub in the primary bathroom of a model home, okay, that screams cheap to me. Same with plastic tub surrounds instead of tile. And remember, the model home is where the builder should be putting their best foot forward. Anything that looks cheap here will look far cheaper in the inventory home. So these aren't deal killers, but they do tell you where the builder prioritizes margin. So if I start seeing consistent cost compression in materials, that's where I wanna dig deeper. In each of my tours, I was thinking to myself, this model home is a marketing tool designed to bypass logic. My job is to look past the marketing and evaluate it as an asset. I don't tour homes to find a kitchen I like or what I think my client will like. I tour them to ensure my clients are entering a position of strength. You know, I'm not asking whether I would buy today. I'm asking whether I could sell it three years from now. If you start looking at model homes through this lens, you stop asking, do I love it? And you start asking, is this a strong purchase? That shift alone protects more equity than most upgrades ever will. Now, if you're anything like me and you like the tactical strategic side, especially when it comes to new construction, your next stop should definitely be with this video right here. In the meantime, this is Wendy Pinnell, your Dallas realtor and broker, and I'll see you on the next video.