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I opened up the Sacramento Bee today and saw, like I always do, the “New Homes” section.

Now, for the record, I like newspapers. I try and read the Sacramento Bee and the Wall Street Journal every day (key word try). What bothers me is that this “section” is nothing more than the homebuilding industry’s primary, and in my opinion, broken attempt at selling houses.

I have to be careful here because I have met a few of these people who write and make this stuff and also know a few of those who are selling some of the projects.

But you guys, come on. Am I really supposed to be interested in articles that quote only employees of the builder or the sales company. And talk about boring stuff… there’s nothing of any journalistic merit because its all just pure and simple market-speak.

Does this sound familiar? “The (unit name left out but you can insert any plant or animal species that comes to mind) includes upgrades such as Travertine floors in some areas, wide plank flooring in the dining room and den, Thermador stainless steel appliances, granite slab kitchen counter-tops, natural stone bathroom counter-tops and cherry cabinets.”

I know I am going off here. But I just can’t take it anymore, an entire section of the newspaper that is paid advertising made to look like real journalism is going too far off the deep end of consumer dishonesty. My guess… and I am going off of intuition here… is that no one (active home-buyers included) cares to read this section; if they do, its out of complete necessity to find out what is out there. It gets used because it’s the “way things are done” not because its actually effective.

What the industry isn’t cluing into is that most buyers are now pretty internet savvy and all the research shows consumers now spend most of their home-shopping time on the internet.

All I am saying guys is that there are better ways of doing things and that the homebuilder community is for some reason the stalest, most behind the times industry out there. Now, we’re not perfect at this either yet—the internet is changing fast and there’s a lot more we need to be doing to make it easy for buyers to get the information they need, but we are NOT going to EVER throw our marketing money at useless, dishonest, manipulative methods like the New Homes section. Our consumers deserve better, we respect our brand and our product too much to peddle it like that, and I suspect the modern urban home-buyer is pretty smart and can see through it all anyways.

So, if this is broken, why does this methodology continue to get used? My theory is that developers think the purchase of a home is the buyer’s biggest purchase of their life (probably true) and that no one will want to go buy something from a builder that is doing anything remotely different than the “standard” (not true).

Which brings me, strangely enough, to sing the praises (shameless plug forthcoming) of our bank, Comerica, who is willing to fund a company that is trying different methodologies, breaking out of traditional molds and challenging long-established assumptions. We searched far and wide to find a bank that was willing to fund anything other than suburban tract, what-you-see-everywhere, type development, who won’t flinch when we say we won’t be in the New Homes section, who knows we blog openly and transparently about our projects, our internal workings, our eco-urban sensibilities, and the wild journey we’re on. Comerica has jumped on board and we’re quite proud to have a financial partner willing to look through a different set of glasses and flex with us.

Let’s hope together we can prove that it pays to step outside the box, to be ethical, and to challenge the status quo when its clearly broken.

Levi