Using the right software is an integral part of becoming a highly effective, reliable and profitable homebuilder. If you want to thoroughly enjoy a career as a homebuilder and provide the best client experiences possible, you must commit yourself to learning and implementing the use of the best software systems available to help keep you organized, efficient and on task. Although it can be a challenge to commit time and effort to learning new systems, once you have mastered their use, the software systems will return to you ten-fold the time, effort and efficiency you would spend trying to manage your business otherwise. Best of all, good software works for you 24/7, is very cost effective compared to the expense of paying people to manually do what can be automated, rarely makes mistakes and can make you look like a rock star to everyone involved in your home building business.

Our home builder sites are designed to be an attractive, simple yet highly effective tool for Homebuilders. The sites are designed to help clients easily find house plans that match their needs. You can filter by many different home characteristics such as style, number of stories, square feet, number of bedrooms, baths or garages, etc.  When using our builder’s sites, you can use any of the plans available in our library or upload your own plans to your customized website.  It’s also designed to easily add Communities available to you for building homes in and easily accommodates advertising your Spec or Quick-Move-In homes. Our sites are also automatically integrated with other valuable software tools including HubSpot (a third party CRM), Estimate+ and the Eagle Eye visualizer (more details below). Check out our Builder Websites demo site.

HubSpot is a powerful Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) software used mainly to help convert and move potential customers through the sales process to become homebuilding clients. Subscribers to our Builders Websites are automatically integrated and provided with their own access to HubSpot at no additional cost. For more details on the HubSpot CRM check out the HubSpot website.

This program instantly generates accurate retail pricing estimates for any house plan with potential clients (data for each house plan needs to be preloaded). This is particularly useful when meeting with a potential client that has a fixed budget or predetermined price in mind to build their new home. You start by selecting a plan this is close to the budget. Then you can upgrade and/or downgrade options (i.e. premium cabinets, finished basement, etc.) and get instant price updates as you add or remove the options that your clients choose.

Once all the options have been determined, you can instantly create or update a price report with the options selected to be included in the residential construction agreement. Then once you’re ready to get bids from subcontractors and vendors, with just a few clicks, you can send out a bid requests with all the documents needed for them to provide a full estimate back to you all located and neatly organized in one spot. Estimate+ makes the pricing and bidding process fast, efficient and accurate. See the Estimate+ website.

This program is a high-quality online visualizer for current or potential clients to visualize their future home with the many different product selections you have make available to them through your company’s visualizer account. The visualizer is a great tool when designing a new home to see how well the finished product selections will go together such as siding, brick or stone, shingles, carpets, paint colors, cabinets, etc. Even though the first function of the Eagle Eye visualizer is well suited to help design the character and style of a new home, there are two other very valuable functions the visualizer helps homebuilders.

The second is the time savings you get having your clients use the visualizer try the many combinations that exist among all the different products available in your company’s visualizer account as they can do this on their time and at their leisure. Some clients have been known to spend up to more 30 hours or more experimenting and finalizing their selections online. Once they have made and saved all their selections, you’ll only need to hold a short meeting to approve and coordinate any last details. Once selections are finalized, you simply run a quick report that generates a complete list of all their selections including a small visual image of each selection and its corresponding item number. This can drastically reduce the number of hours the client spends with you or your employees in trying to go through the whole selection process with them in person.

The third advantage of the visualizer that it’s a valuable new lead source for potential clients. This is possible as the visualizer is also integrated into your Builders Website on the individual house plan page displayed on your site. This is like eye candy to a potential build client as they are enticed to engage with the interactive nature of the visualizer, giving you a big competitive advantage over your competitors by keeping them engaged on your site. Then when a user decides to save their selections, they are prompted to create an account to keep and save the work they have done while on your company’s visualizer. Once they register, their contact information is then captured and sent to your CRM to potentially be converted to an actual client. Check out the Eagle Eye website.

These are our two preferred construction management software systems, Contractor Foreman and Buildertrend. These systems will handle the construction management process from beginning through the completion of the construction phase of building a home. Each one has strengths and weaknesses but both are more than adequately to help you efficiently manage your construction projects. Contractor Foreman is by far the least expensive of the two and has almost all the same functionality, as such, this is our preferred recommendation. Both will handle everything from scheduling, daily logs, job financials, documents, etc.

This platform is designed to generate and deliver new home buyer leads directly to you. The Builders Leads system seamlessly integrates with many of the better-known marketing channels available in marketplace (i.e. Zillow, social media, etc.) and with our proprietary tools described above. One of the key elements that makes our system much more effective than other marketing and sales platforms is that we tailor your marketing campaigns with your company’s identity and brand which results in higher conversion rates than just purchasing leads from a generic lead generating company.

Once campaigns are live and leads come in, they go directly into your CRM with an instant notification to you (or your sales staff) that a new lead has been received. Each month we evaluate and compare each advertising channel for lead volume and the cost to generate the leads and continuously make adjustments that improve the system to optimize your advertising budget’s return. best return for your advertising dollars to determine what adjustments, if any, would be beneficial to making the system even more efficient. The Builders Leads platform is great for generating quality leads to hand off to you or your staff to work and nurture until they become your clients.

This system uses all the same tools and processes as described above in Builders Leads except the service offering extends way beyond just lead generation. Builders Marketing+ is a complete lead generation, sales conversion, and build planning platform that delivers clients to you ready to build their home (with a little help from you along the way with excavation estimates and finalizing their site plan). To request complete detailed description of the Builders Marketing+ platform, click here.

When a client is ready to be delivered to you, these clients will have already selected their house plan, made their selections, signed a construction agreement and made a construction deposit. This process requires close collaboration and communications between you as the homebuilder and our representative. Thankfully, the collaboration and communications tools are also integrated into our platform for you observe and communicate with our Rep as we take your client through the various stages of the sales and planning phases.