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An Evolution of Innovation

Our journey began in 2018 through a collaboration between a leading residential real estate marketing agency and an innovative homebuilder client. The effort was the first of its kind in the new home industry. With each success, the self-guided home tour experience grew and evolved until UTour was born in 2020, created to meet the modern home shopper's demands and support the new home sales process for builders.
 
Today, UTour stands as the most robust on-demand self-tour solution in the industry. It empowers home shoppers to enjoy interactive, self-guided tours of new homes at their convenience, even during early mornings or late evenings. UTour is the first integrated platform within the residential real estate industry that seamlessly combines unattended access, AI-powered chatbot and voice technologies, and smart home security. This combination creates a relaxed environment for potential home buyers, allowing them to explore new homes without the pressure of a salesperson.
 
With a track record of delivering hundreds of thousands of self-tours to date, UTour is reshaping the traditional home shopping process, making it easier, smarter, and more efficient. It helps builders sell more homes and allows home shoppers to find their dream homes on their terms.
 
In August 2023, UTour embarked on an exciting new chapter with its acquisition by Zonda, a prominent provider of housing market intelligence, data analytics, and leading digital visualization solutions. This acquisition was further complemented by Zonda's ownership of Livabl, a comprehensive new home construction listing site.
 
The integration of UTour into the Zonda family expands Zonda's capabilities, enhancing its ability to deliver the finest builder and customer experience for new homebuyers. This strategic move aligns with Zonda's overarching mission to advance the homebuilding industry, ultimately contributing to the creation of better lives, stronger communities, and the transformation of the future of housing.

The Team

 

Leadership

Tom Nelson

Tom Nelson

Founder

Tom established NDG Communications, a nationally recognized advertising and marketing agency, in 2002 with a vision of combining his passions for branding, marketing, advertising, and residential real estate to help builders and developers grow their customer bases to sell more homes. NDG is also an award-winning digital innovator developing technology solutions for homebuilders including mobile applications, CRM/CMS platforms, and sales and marketing AI technologies. For years, Tom has been influential in helping shape the marketing strategies for builders and developers around the country and now he has taken his expertise in home building and is the founding partner of UTour. Tom is an active member of NAHB, NVBIA, MBIA, and WMSMC.

Victor Furnells

Victor Furnells

Vice President of Business Development

As an entrepreneurial B2B sales, business development and team leader, Victor’s core talents include creating and leading sales teams that produce results and build trusting relationships. While at Myers Research and Zonda, Victor was a sought-after industry speaker and led a successful team that surpassed their respective growth goals. His leadership and experience will greatly contribute to UTour’s continuing success within the new home industry.

Dax

Dax Eckel

Chief Operating Officer

Having spent the last eight years in homebuilder marketing as Vice President of Operations for NDG Communications, Dax has coordinated the day-to-day operations of UTour since its inception. He is in charge of overseeing the development of technology that is used by homebuilders and incorporated into the homes, as well as managing and growing the essential integrations with industry-leading third-party vendors and partners.

Tim-Wilkins

Tim Wilkins

Client Success Manager

Tim enhances the UTour customer experience, ensuring seamless integration of the platform’s innovative features through strategic customer engagement and support. Drawing on over 13 years of diverse experience across communications, marketing, and various client-facing roles, he brings a depth of knowledge and adaptability. Tim excels in building strong professional relationships, leveraging his expertise in CRM management and a passion for technology to deliver outstanding service and insightful solutions to UTour’s users.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, homebuilders had to reevaluate and shift technology priorities from “nice to have” to “must have.” This included self-guided tours, which had always been on our roadmap at Mattamy, but we weren’t sure when we would be able to implement them. That’s where UTour came in.
The UTour team went above and beyond to get us onboarded, offering ample support and training for our entire team. They made sure we were fully prepared prior to launch.
UTour’s platform is very intuitive and easy to use, and UTour has also created an automated follow-up campaign to help Mattamy Homes stay closely connected with our self-touring customers.
— Marketing Manager at Mattamy Homes
The UTour development team has been extremely responsive to our requests for updates. They’ve worked diligently to continuously enhance the platform’s functionality, making it clean and easy to use for our admins and local teams at every level.
UTour has allowed us to improve the home shopping experience and has made things easier for our internal team as well as the home shopper. And we’re already seeing results. Allowing prospective homebuyers to self-tour our homes has resulted in 33 sales so far.
Most notably, we were able to sell a multi-million dollar home that hadn’t had activity in months.
— Trish Welch at K. Hovnanian Companies, LLC
We could not be more pleased with the addition of UTour. It has quickly become a proven tool — our very first tour resulted in a sale! From the set-up process to the launch, the team was extremely responsive and helpful. The integration with our CRM and the built-in UTour follow-up has been seamless.
We chose UTour over other self-tour options because of the smart design and functionality it offered. It is clear that the developers carefully considered the needs of homebuilders, including CRM integrations, home listing integrations, security integrations and follow-up. They thought of everything!
One of the most exciting aspects of UTour has to be the reporting — it is easy to analyze and customize the tour data. UTour has been a game changer and we have seen steady tour demand outside of our normal office hours. Plus, the real-time updates make it easy for our team to stay informed and prepared for each tour.
If you make one investment in new technology this year, I would highly recommend UTour.
— Marketing Director at Simmons Homes
Our sales process has become more streamlined and we’ve seen overall improvements since partnering with UTour. They offered a straightforward integration with Lasso, our CRM system, so our sales team was able to adapt quickly and identify key prospects.
Through self-touring, home shoppers are able to qualify us as a suitable builder for them, accelerating the traditional sales process. UTour allows us to meet the demands of modern home shoppers and create a personalized buying experience.
We’re seeing our prospects connect on an emotional level — without a salesperson present. We recently had two sales conversions where the shopper began their journey with a self-tour and later came directly to our sales team ready to purchase a similar floor plan.
UTour has supercharged sales team productivity.
— Anthony Kent, Vice President at Cothran Homes
UTour is a safe, trusted system that has increased our efficiency immensely. Especially throughout COVID-19, it’s been an essential tool that’s helped us safely accommodate social distancing protocol while continuing to serve our customers. It’s really helped control traffic in our main model.
Their platform is user-friendly for both our home shoppers and sales team to navigate. On the backend, information was pulled in directly from our website. UTour also integrated flawlessly with our CRM system to ensure all of our new leads were logged into Lasso.
With self-guided tours, it’s like we have a silent salesperson always working to capture . And our home shoppers love the additional freedom to experience our homes after hours when site agents aren’t there. It’s been a win-win.
The UTour team has answered all of our questions diligently and thoroughly — WONDERFUL customer service!
— The Sales and Marketing Team at Chesapeake Homes
UTour has been an invaluable tool for my team, making it significantly easier for home shoppers to visit our homes by greatly reducing the friction in their home-buying journey. Additionally, the platform allows us to collect verified data from all self-tour registrants, providing valuable feedback and insight into our customer base.
— Ananth Rao, Senior Marketing Director, EYA Marketing, LLC
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