Not long ago, Heather Hall was on the buyer’s side of a new-home purchase. She was copied on an email sent by the sales team to the design center team. Maybe it was a follow-up to make sure they’d seen an automated order in the system—or maybe it was the order, the only way the teams knew to get the information from one disconnected tech platform to another. Either way it was also, she realized, a marker of operational weakness dressed up as an orderly process.
“I had to laugh because it made me think, ‘That’s where transactions go to die,’” says Hall, managing director of HomebuilderONE, a product of sa.global, a Microsoftcloud partner serving the home building sector. “Things are going to inevitably get lost when the process is ‘send an email.’”
For the builder, an overlooked email can equal an unhappy buyer—plus last-minute scrambling to sort out the right selections on top of an already full plate. And while human error is frustrating, the root cause usually isn’t a people problem. It’s a systems problem, and one that tends to get more expensive the longer it goes unaddressed.
The Workaround Trap
When Ryan Grant, chief strategy officer at sa.global, enters a sales conversation with a prospective builder client, one of the first questions he asks is: Who owns the giant spreadsheet?
“I just know, behind the scenes, that business is being run on Excel, because whatever solutions they’re using don’t meet requirements in some areas,” he says. Nearly every builder has one—a sprawling file that exists because the software doesn’t quite cover everything it should. It’s the inevitable outcome of an all-too-common problem: a fragmented technology stack of (often high-quality) software solutions that are all only good at one thing each.
The spreadsheet is just one of the basic symptoms Grant can call out to make his point. Behind it is usually also an IT team spending a significant portion of its time keeping integrations alive between systems that weren’t designed to work together—managing data transfers, troubleshooting sync errors, fielding questions from users who aren’t sure who to turn to when something breaks.
Add to that, the manual workarounds, the re-entered data, and the processes that officially run on software but practically run on email, and the true cost of a “best-of-breed” technology stack starts to come into focus. Besides the price of the software—which itself can be considerable when businesses think they have to purchase numerous solutions for their various workflows—there’s the extra staffing costs, the expense of correcting errors, and the team’s frustration about spending time babysitting supposedly efficiency-enhancing technology when they could be doing something more valuable.
The Value of a Single Platform
It’s tempting to just buy the top-rated software for each task, and it’s easy to get dazzled by sales demos of their proficiency at one area of focus. But the argument for a comprehensive platform can be compelling.
Hall offers a simple analogy: Think about everything your smartphone has replaced, a cellphone, a dedicated GPS device, a digital camera, a MP3 player, a credit card, and possibly your car fob. Each of those was, at one point, a specialized tool that did its one thing very well. The smartphone eliminated the overhead of buying them all separately, and the mental work of learning to operate—and troubleshoot or repair—each tool built by a different manufacturer.
For builders, the HomebuilderONE platform is designed to cover the full operational scope from land acquisition through post-close warranty—what the team calls “dirt to delivery.” That means land feasibility, budgeting, and development; community setup, floor plans, and option pricing; sales, contracts, and all associated documentation; design center selections with real-time pricing updates; construction scheduling, trade coordination, and a dynamic bill of materials that calculates specific material quantities per home.
That’s a huge list that could mean dozens of standalone software solutions—but HomebuilderONE covers it all. Stanley Martin Homes, a top-25 U.S. builder and HomebuilderONE client since 2017, reduced the time required to integrate an acquired company by 60% after moving to the platform, compared with the time typically needed with a fragmented stack.
Because all of that activity lives in a single connected system, the financial side runs more smoothly too. Rather than finance teams chasing down construction managers for vendor information or what invoices to pay, financial transactions generate automatically as work progresses. Finance teams shift from data entry to actual financial analysis—tracking cash flow, identifying margin erosion, and making decisions with current information. And controllers can breathe a sigh of relief knowing that they can trace transactions all the way through a defined process for auditors.
And the email handoff? That becomes a thing of the past.
Getting the AI Question Right
Artificial intelligence—as both add-on within technology solutions and standalone solution—has proliferated across the industry. AI products built for sales call reporting, schedule analysis, pricing intelligence, and dozens of other specific applications are widely available, modestly priced, and easy to add. They’re also, Grant notes, another potential pitfall.
“AI can become another point solution if you’re not careful,” he says. A standalone AI tool still has to connect to the data it needs to be useful—and if that data is distributed across multiple systems, the AI inherits all the same integration challenges the stack already has. Builders could find themselves managing a new layer of fragmentation on top of the ones they already have.
AI adds value instead of more complexity when it’s built on top of unified data. When everything from scheduling to purchasing to financials lives in one platform, AI can make all sorts of complex time-consuming tasks painless. Today, a site superintendent spends all day in the field and talking on the phone, then comes back to the computer to do work orders, approve invoices, and make schedule adjustments. That’s about to change, says Hall.
“The next evolution is an AI agent that will show them what’s happening in that site management portal on the mobile device. They can ask it questions about schedules, what trades are behind, what lots are ahead, what tasks or milestones are behind schedule. They’ll get all of that information by asking their phone. It spits it all out and they initiate changes just by talking to it. The system handles the rest.”
A Different Kind of Partnership
For builders evaluating their own technology strategy, Grant says he wants to help clients understand the breadth of what they’re actually managing with their current setup.
For instance, it may not be an industry people think of as having high security risks, but builders hold a treasure trove of sensitive buyer data, from bank account information to Social Security numbers. Having a plethora of different software with their own (potentially inadequate) security protocols compounds the risk of data breaches and ransomware attacks, versus having a single solution backed by the security strengths of a large provider like Microsoft.
“We want to continually educate and help with what’s changing, what you need to be looking at,” Grant says. “We’re not just trying to put in a solution and leave.”
The builders who are best positioned for what’s coming aren’t necessarily the ones who have adopted the most technology. They’re the ones who have freed themselves from the workaround trap.
Learn how HomebuilderONE can simplify your technology stack from dirt to delivery. Explore our home builder toolkit.
