Allan P. Merrill
Management
Well, I think the underwriting of -- and you correctly phrased the question, I think, because if you buy the land incorrectly with the wrong conception of how you're going to compete locally, that's a hard problem to recover from. And one of the interesting things, and I talked about it last quarter a little bit, was if we set aside for just a second the purchase of land and looked at an existing community and said, what's the competitive base that we have in that community? And I talked about the new CMA, or Comparative Market Analysis, that we're doing that, I think, is a dramatic, dramatic improvement in giving us real-time insight into pricing, features, incentives, what's happening in that micro climate, well, what becomes really important, to kind of link back to your question is, you have to have that level of market intelligence on the front end before you buy that deal. The fact that brand X is selling 3 a month in the community is interesting and maybe necessary information if we're looking at a new deal but it's clearly not sufficient. Are they selling single stories? Are they selling 2 stories? Are they selling master up? Are they selling master down? Are these brick sided? Are these hardy-board sided? I mean, that level of intelligence has to be embedded at the front end. So it isn't just a question of competing more effectively at the community level once you've got a community, but it's extracting that knowledge and pulling it earlier in the cycle so that you get it on the front end. And then continue to -- and this is the key, continue to apply that discipline, because notwithstanding perfect information, things happen, things change, competitors react, new market entries show up. So you have to be constantly able to turn and evolve what you're doing. But I think you're right to focus on buying new deals, but I do think it kind of links back to you've got to be locally competitive. You have to have great insight, and you've got to create a culture where it's important, in fact, it's unacceptable, to not have extraordinary knowledge about what's happening. I mean, the litmus test for me is if our buyers walking into a new home community know more about what our competitors are doing than our new home counselors, we've got a problem. And if we fix that problem, you bet that knowledge base, that skill set, is easily shared within the company to our land acquisition teams.