“When a Trove site captures a lead, it lands in the dealer’s Trove CRM. When that lead closes, or doesn’t, the outcome syncs back to Facebook and Google,” Trove CEO John Connelly said. “The ad networks learn what a real manufactured home buyer looks like, and next month’s spend chases more of them.”
Trove is a new software company built exclusively for manufactured and modular home retailers. It ties together the three business solutions most dealers run through separate vendors — digital marketing, the customer-facing website, and the CRM — into a single connected system.
The company, founded and operated by brothers John and James Connelly, is betting on the convenience and efficiency of selling homes online in one continuous motion — attract, educate, convert, and close. And smart technology should be doing the heavy lifting at every step.
The new software startup is using cutting-edge technology to help manufactured home dealers attract more buyers, convert more leads, and close more deals. It replaces a paperwork-heavy sales process with the kind of modern shopping experience buyers expect.
Attract: Marketing that learns about the real buyer
Trove runs Facebook, Instagram, Google, and local SEO campaigns on behalf of dealers, but the interesting piece is the feedback loop.
“When a Trove site captures a lead, it lands in the dealer’s Trove CRM. When that lead closes, or doesn’t, the outcome syncs back to Facebook and Google,” Trove CEO John Connelly said. “The ad networks learn what a real manufactured home buyer looks like, and next month’s spend chases more of them.”
The platform also auto-syncs each dealer’s inventory to Facebook Shop, and runs an SEO program built for the era of ChatGPT, because buyers increasingly ask AI assistants for recommendations before they ask Google.
Educate and convert: A Smart Digital Showroom
A Trove website is a full digital showroom out of the box. It catalogs and provides inventory management that is already connected to more than 150 homebuilding factories that auto-sync as offerings change. It works as a design studio that allows buyers to pick floor plans, finishes, and upgrades with live pricing and visualization.
“We have a property mapping tool that drops the home onto a satellite view of the buyer’s actual parcel with setbacks accounted for,” Trove President James Connelly said. “It also covers the everyday marketing-site essentials: a built-in blog, custom marketing pages and blog, full branding and domain control, and automatic SEO that ranks the dealer’s homes for hundreds of long-tail searches.”
Among these capabilities, three new features stand out this year.
Smart Renderings. A typical factory photo shows whatever finishes were on the line that day. When a buyer uses Trove’s Design Studio to pick cabinets, tile, countertops, and flooring, the platform generates a photorealistic, floor-plan-specific image of the home as the buyer has just designed it. Buyers fall in love with their home before they ever step on the lot. Factory order errors collapse because the dealer confirms the order against an actual image of the aligned configuration.
Smart Search. Buyers don’t think in checkboxes. They think in terms of “3-bedroom under $80k with an open kitchen” or “something for a young family on a tight lot.” Trove’s natural-language search reads queries the way ChatGPT taught the world to expect, and surfaces matching plans from the dealer’s catalog instantly.
Smart Responses. Every Trove site comes with an AI sales assistant trained on the dealer’s specific catalog. It answers questions on home specifications, recommends floor plans, qualifies the lead, and books tours even at 9 p.m. on a Sunday, when no human is around. Leads stop going cold.
Close: A CRM that already knows what the buyer wants
The last mile is where most dealers leak deals. A buyer designs their dream home at 9 p.m., fills out an inquiry, and it lands in someone’s email inbox. The salesperson rebuilds the quote in a spreadsheet. Two days later, three competitors have already followed up.
“Trove’s CRM helps close that gap,” John Connelly said. “We find that the added focus of a 24/7 optimized system is that we are able to capture many more leads than most websites.”
The CRM ties directly into factory cost data for every plan in the dealer’s catalog. A salesperson opens a proposal, picks the home and the buyer’s design studio configuration, and the underlying invoice cost is pre-populated.
Standard dealer markups can be made to apply automatically.
Site-work estimates layer on next: foundation, utilities, skirting, decks, septic, permits, all from reusable line-item templates the dealer programs once.
Property site mapping drops in where it’s relevant, so the buyer sees exactly where the home will sit.
The output is one branded, line-itemed quote with the home, finishes, smart rendering, site work, totals, and signature block.
“That process goes from ‘I want a tour’ to ‘sign here’ in a single document,” James Connelly said.
Among the other capabilities, Trove takes command of…
Automated email and SMS. Drip sequences trigger on real events that the platform detects, like if a lead viewed a catalog, saved a design, scheduled a tour, or requested a callback. Sales reps can also fire one-off texts and emails directly from the contact record, with every message logged on the timeline.
Native integrations with industry-specific lead sources. Trove plugs directly into the systems dealers already get business from, including factory programs operated by industry partners like Champion Homes. It pulls accepted leads straight into the CRM, pre-attributed and pre-routed, with no copy-pasting from one inbox to another.
A homebuyer portal that bridges shopping and ownership. Each customer gets a secure, branded portal with their assigned team member, their live project details and quote, their tasks, their required document uploads, and a single shared message thread. It’s the kind of experience people are used to from their bank, and increasingly expect from any large transaction.
Why It All Matters
The transaction for a manufactured home should be as easy or easier than most anything else purchased online. With the right technology handling the marketing, the website, and the CRM as a single system, it doesn’t have to be.
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