For James Hardie, market strategy starts with understanding what is being built, who is building it, and how expectations vary from one housing market to another.
Sam Moellering, segment manager for single-family new construction across North America at James Hardie, has worked with Zonda or predecessor Metrostudy data for roughly a decade. In this Q&A, Moellering explains how Enterprise BuildingProductPro helps James Hardie evaluate builders, understand local market differences, and support sales teams with more accessible data. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.
Describe your role at James Hardie.
I support our overall efforts in the new construction space, particularly around large builders and large single-family developers.
How often do you use Building Products Pro?
It may not be every single day, but most days out of the week, I’m getting something out of Zonda’s data. Looking at the actual builder data, what they’re selling, what kind of homes — those types of things. And then furthermore, looking at some of the market-level intel, as well.
What questions do the data answer?
What I’m really looking for is what’s getting built and who’s building it.
The big [builders] keep getting bigger, so it’s not a matter of finding new targets so much. It’s more about understanding their business a little bit better: Are we seeing price point shifts year over year? Are they going up or are they trying to go back down in price-point products?
Why is local market detail so important?
I think America gets knocked a lot for cookie cutter houses, production building, all that kind of stuff. But when you get down to the details about how these homes are built in different markets, they’re wildly different.
Knowing those price points at that hypermarket level — down to the zip code — is super relevant to how our sales team goes out.
What other kinds of segmentation are you able to do?
When we segment a builder, we look at their business strategy, including a variety of home features to infer their target market.
Can you give an example of how that helps you approach that builder?
Knowing the home size, price point, and typical home buyers allows us to cross reference with our internal data to put us in a position to partner with the builder where we can provide the most value.
Do you have an idea of how much time it has saved you?
By making those data connections directly to our system, we’ve increased our engagement with the data across my organization probably tenfold.
Has BuildingProductPro been pretty important to James Hardie’s strategy?
One-hundred percent, yes.
