For prospective homebuyers, falling in love with a potential new home is the easy part. Taking the next steps to secure the purchase is where things can become complicated. But a recent collaboration between Century Communities and PNC Treasury Management illustrates that it is possible to streamline the process to move buyers and sellers an important step forward toward closing the sale.
Century Communities is a homebuilder in Denver, Colorado. They specialize in new construction of single-family homes, townhomes, paired homes, and condos in 18 states and 45 cities across the United States. While Century Communities has had no difficulty in attracting a steady pipeline of prospective buyers, they found that they were consistently running into an impediment in securing a formal commitment toward a sale: accepting earnest money deposits.
“Historically, homebuilders have only accepted checks as a form of payment for earnest money deposits from homebuyers. But a lot of people today, particularly those of younger generations, aren’t in the habit of carrying checkbooks around with them,” said PNC Treasury Management Officer Patrick Cook. “This was leading to scenarios where potential buyers would stop by a model home and want to proceed with formalizing the commitment to buying a property, but they didn’t have a check on them at the time to provide the necessary earnest money deposit. So, they would leave without closing the deal.”
This was a clear gap in meeting consumer expectations, and PNC was able to offer a solution. PNC’s PayerExpress service provides a secure way for businesses to present bills online and allow customers to make payments electronically. For Century Communities, in addition to reducing the three-week cycle time from receiving a check to depositing it at the corporate office, it also gives potential homebuyers the option to provide earnest deposit payments on the spot through credit, debit, or ACH payments, ensuring they make their commitment official while still onsite at a property. Century Communities also leverages PayerExpress to provide an email link with the home buyer contract, which allows the buyer to review the contract at home, digitally sign the contract, and commit to the earnest money deposit simultaneously.
“The complication of accepting earnest money check payments is a very common hurdle for homebuilders across the industry. In the case of Century Communities, PNC helped the company overcome it through a combination of understanding their business and providing a forward-looking solution to address an area of operational friction,” said Marcy Burns, Real Estate Sales director for PNC Treasury Management. “The successful outcome came down to Century Communities’ openness to working closely with us, so that we could understand where there was an opportunity to improve and meet them where they had a need.”
Brilliant Begins Here
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