Perry Homes leverages a headless CMS for flexibility, scalability and multi-brand support

Perry Homes operates multiple brands that build superior quality homes at various price points in over 180 communities across Texas and Florida. Over the past decade, the business has tripled in size, placing growing pressure on its legacy, home-built CMS, technology stack and operating model, which could no longer support the company’s scale or ambition. The business was looking to simplify its processes and operations to manage growing scale, consolidating everything onto one modern platform. Key aims for the modernization included flexibility, scalability and support for multiple brands with different workflows and permissions attached. 

Perry Homes had spent years building a CMS from scratch in-house, and was hoping to be able to leverage a marketplace of expert digital partnerships.To make this happen, they needed a vendor who offered multiple best-of-breed options available to plug and play from a single marketplace, so that they wouldn’t have to compromise on customer experience or innovate for every aspect. 

“The customer experience we know is going to continue to change dramatically in the next one to five years, with the introduction of Gen AI, and things we can’t even anticipate now.” Randy Volkin, Chief Information Officer, Perry Homes said. “One of the desired outcomes of modernization is to be able to quickly try, experiment, pivot, A/B test and evaluate modern approaches to CX as they hit the marketplace. We’re not just talking about matching today’s leading brands, but asking ‘What do tomorrow’s leading brands look like?’”

“We love setting very high expectations for our customers and then shooting for an even better experience to achieve that for them. We have incredible CSAT scores and NPS scores and we need to back that up with proper customer experiences.” said Daniel J. Neumann, Senior VP of Marketing & Customer Experience, Perry Homes. Perry Homes launched a comprehensive search for the right CMS, speaking to customers of major players in the industry to get insight into the challenges users face when they are implementing and using their CMS solutions day-to-day. These ranged from the need to compromise on capabilities to complex licensing or a fragmented partner ecosystem. 

“The conversations we had with peer companies who use these technologies painted a picture of composable vs non-composable, and then within composable, we heard a ringing endorsement of Contentstack — both the product and the team behind it” Volkin said. “That really gave us confidence.”

After challenges in their initial implementation, Contentstack stepped up to smooth out Perry Homes’ implementation process and regain trust. “I’ve never been involved in a project that has gone roses from inception through to completion, and you find out who your true partners are when things don’t go as planned,” Volkin said. “Contentstack brought an army of people to the table to support the challenges our partner was going through, helped us shore up the communication and hit a home run making sure we were successful. A long-term relationship doesn’t happen because of just a good product or smart people, it comes from saying what you’re going to do and then doing it.”

Perry Homes launched its new website in September 2024, with no downtime, and no impact to traffic volume or search engine ranking. “The website didn’t miss a beat,” Neumann said. “One shining star was mobile experience, which was vastly improved.”

Today, Perry Homes delivers a highly optimized, mobile-first digital experience that consolidates data from multiple sources, displaying it in various formats for the customer as part of home builder journeys on perryhomes.com and brittonhomes.com. The business can also use templates to spin up new microsites quickly and easily, such as the Perry Homes Foundation, and pick best-of-breed solutions from a robust marketplace of technology partners. “When we were customizing every aspect of our website in-house, we had to innovate and originate every part ourselves,” Volkin said. “With composable, we can evaluate what solutions are out there, then navigate the marketplace and find the best.” Making the digital experience memorable is a crucial part of Perry Homes’ CX strategy. Its new website can support dynamic content capabilities that help customers visualize the buying and construction journey online with a personalized experience that is second-to-none. 

“We haven’t seen any other production home builder that has a detailed and elevated experience like ours, where even our construction staff is uploading images for each stage of construction for our customers’ benefit,” Neumann said. “The 30% of our customers who are relocating from further away can receive an SMS notification and check progress online without ever needing to visit on site. This is just one of the signature experiences we provide.” 

The modernization project has also helped Perry Homes with scaling its business nationally. Before moving to Contentstack, the effort required to expand into a new region would have taken months, becoming a bottleneck to the experience the business could provide to customers in the new locale. Perry Homes expanded into Florida with just a couple of weeks of behind-the-scenes work needed in order to go live. This is a significant reduction in effort over their previous tech stack.

In Contentstack, Perry Homes has found a true partner in their success and growth, and as a customer it has become entrenched in the Contentstack community. When asked what advice he would give to anyone thinking about going composable, Randy’s #1 tip would be to go to ContentCon! “We’ve been two years in a row now and it's such a great forum for sharing information. It’s all heavily market-driven with a lot of practical information and lots of takeaways and time spent leveraging each other's expertise.”

Perry Homes is looking to the future, planning for high degrees of personalization and more advanced integration with its CRM. The team would also like to experiment with advanced chat capabilities, behind-the-scenes automation and Gen AI solutions that enhance customer experience. 

Key wins for Perry Homes with Contentstack include: 

• 25% boost to productivity: Development teams now spend more time planning and executing and less time verifying and testing code. This shift enables them to operate at a more strategic level, focusing on high-impact opportunities.
• Limitless flexibility with best-of-breed tools: Contentstack’s integration marketplace empowers Perry Homes to evaluate and adopt the most effective solutions and integrate them with ease in their own digital ecosystem. 
• Agile marketing operations: New sites and campaigns can be spun up in a fraction of the time, with innovative and personalized digital campaigns creating the high-quality experiences customers expect.