How Home Builders and Commercial Contractors Can Deliver Tech-Driven Buyer Experiences
The New Reality of Home Buying
It happens every day. Your prospective home buyer just finished buying a car through their smartphone during lunch, Postmated dinner while walking to their car, and matched with 3 potential dates before their commute ended. Now they’re searching for their dream home and expecting the same frictionless, digital experience they get everywhere else.
The disconnect is real. While it seems every other major purchase has gone digital, homebuilding still relies heavily on paper contracts, email chains, and disconnected spreadsheets. And it’s on its way to becoming a competitive liability that costs deals.
39% of Millennials say they’re comfortable buying a home entirely online (Zillow Consumer Housing Trends Report 2024).
Are your processes ready for the new expectation?
Understanding The Digital-Native Buyer
The numbers tell the story about who’s driving today’s homebuying market:
Millennials represent 34% of all U.S. home purchases in 2024—the largest single group in the market. Close behind them, Gen Z buyers are entering the market with even higher digital expectations.
59% of millennials would feel confident making an offer after only a virtual tour, and 71% of buyers under 45 start their home search on a smartphone. Go talk to a millennial. Chances are, they’re probably wondering why real estate hasn’t caught up to the rest of their lives.
The expectation gap creates real business consequences…and opportunities. When your process feels antiquated compared to every other major purchase they’ve made, buyers notice. Some will adapt to your workflow, but others will simply move on to the few builders who’ve figured it out.
Where Old-School Workflows Create Friction
The buyer journey reveals where pain points exist:
Discovery Stage: Static photos and PDF (or printed) floor plans feel primitive to buyers who are accustomed to immersive online experiences. Excitement and engagement stay low.
Contract and Negotiation: Hand-signed paperwork and document scanning create unnecessary delays. Who wants to wait at their house for a packet of papers to be dropped off? Buyers can negotiate car purchases and close personal loans entirely online, so requiring physical signatures feels burdensome.
Funding and Closing: Disconnected and archaic portals between lenders, title companies, and builders force buyers to manage multiple accounts and track progress across them all. This complexity creates delays and generates additional administrative costs for everyone involved.
Construction and Warranty: Manual change orders leave buyers in the dark about their largest investment. Poor visibility during construction leads to anxiety and frustration that can extend well into the warranty period.
Each of these friction points can frustrate and alienate potential buyers.
The Digital Solution
The solution is to digitize the process in a way that makes sense, and make sure each process point is connected.
Immersive Discovery
- 3D tours and interactive floor plans are a clear expectation. Buyers can “walk” through properties on their schedule, spending more time with the homes that interest them.
- Real-time engagement tools like in-page chat and text widgets capture interest while it’s hottest. Instead of playing phone tag or waiting for email responses, prospects get immediate answers that keep them moving through your funnel.
- Mobile-optimized experiences! Remember, 70% of searchers are browsing on phones. Just because something looks great on desktop doesn’t mean it is useful on mobile. QA the entire experience on mobile platforms.
Streamlined Transactions
- E-signature and counter-offer tracking can accelerate agreement timelines by 60% (NAR Tech Survey 2024). More importantly, it eliminates the overhead of physical document management.
- Digital closing and title processes save $400-$500 per file while reducing errors by 80% (ALTA 2024). It’s a double whammy that improves both the buyer experience and bottom-line profitability. These savings also create opportunities to pass cost reductions directly to buyers, improving affordability and creating a differentiator.
- Auto updated milestone portals give buyers visibility into their project’s progress and reduce check-ins with your team. Who wouldn’t want to check on the progress of their dream home at any given moment?
Integrated Operations
- Cloud-based ERP and CRM integration creates a single source of truth and reduces errors. When sales, design, field operations, and warranty teams all work from the same real-time information, everyone is happy.
- API focused architecture ensures that schedules, change orders, and project updates flow seamlessly between systems without manual intervention. This is often a huge benefit from custom tech builds.
- Mobile field applications like Raken and Fieldwire (LINK TO TRADE LABOR WHITE PAPER) feed real-time construction data directly into buyer portals and dashboards. Automated alerts catch budget variances and schedule slips before they become expensive problems. No surprise budget updates.
Passing On The Savings
- Streamlined digital processes can create cost reductions that can be passed to buyers.
- Reduced miscommunication through integrated systems prevents costly change orders and delays that traditionally get passed to buyers. Faster transaction cycles mean lower carrying costs for builders, creating room for competitive pricing. Elimination of redundant administrative tasks reduces overhead.
- In markets where affordability has become a barrier to homeownership, these operational improvements can mean the difference.
Data-Driven Personalization
- Automated workflow triggers can nudge stalled loan applications or proactively address common concerns without manual intervention. This keeps deals moving and reduces manual hours.
- Post-closing service opportunities emerge naturally from construction data and buyer preferences, creating ongoing revenue streams through extended warranties and maintenance plans (if that’s your bag).
Your Roadmap to Consumer Happiness
The most successful implementations follow a phased approach that builds momentum through easy, early wins:
Phase 1: Capture Real-World Workflows
Observe how teams actually work, not just what’s documented. Interview field and office users, collect screenshots of tools in use, and map the data handoffs between systems.
Phase 2: Identify High-Friction Opportunities
Prioritize problems that impact speed, accuracy, or capacity. Look for processes with duplicate data entry, missed handoffs, or spreadsheet-based workarounds that slow teams down.
Phase 3: Build a Targeted Proof of Concept
Create a functional prototype or integration that solves the problem for one team. Keep it focused and lightweight, using real data and user feedback to validate impact.
Phase 4: Expand with Guardrails
Roll out the validated solution more broadly, with clear onboarding and change management support. Watch for exceptions and edge cases that need to be handled as scale increases.
Phase 5: Create a Strategic Technology Plan
With quick wins in place and adoption measured, build a roadmap that aligns future innovation to business goals like increasing capacity, improving margins, or reducing headcount pressure.
Success in Action: A Partnership
One of America’s largest private builders is currently partnering with Simpat to unify virtual tours, digital closing processes, and ERP workflows into a seamless buyer experience from initial interest through warranty service.
This collaboration represents the kind of comprehensive digital transformation that established builders can achieve without disrupting successful operations.
Plan approvals were once handled through a chaotic combination of email threads, SharePoint folders, and Excel trackers. There was no centralized view of project status, and scaling the team meant throwing more people at the process. It was time-consuming, error-prone, and nearly impossible to track accountability.
Simpat started by mapping the existing workflows—sitting with coordinators, reviewing old requests, and identifying the most common breakdowns. We found that one of the biggest time sinks was simply figuring out where a plan was in the approval process and who owned the next step.
Rather than tackling the entire system at once, we built a focused solution that addressed just this one issue. The first phase delivered a clean interface with one-click approvals, status tracking, and a single source of truth for plan progress. We connected the existing SharePoint environment with D365 and their scheduling system to eliminate duplicate entry and status chasing.
The result? Faster approvals, fewer emails, and a foundation we could scale. From there, we expanded the platform to cover warranty workflows, added dashboards for visibility, and created a roadmap for future phases. What started as a quick win became a strategic lever for operational efficiency.
Looking Forward: Meeting Pent-Up Demand
The housing market will only see increased demand from digital-first buyers entering their prime home-buying years. Pent-up demand from delayed purchases, driven partly by process friction and affordability concerns, represents a massive opportunity for builders who can deliver streamlined digital experiences.
Traditional processes weren’t designed for this volume or these buyer expectations. Digital infrastructure becomes essential for scaling to meet demand without having to add to the headcount. Builders who can process more transactions with the same operational footprint will capture disproportionate market share.
Today’s home buyers expect their purchase experience to feel as intuitive as streaming a movie or booking a flight. Builders who deliver that frictionless experience will dominate tomorrow’s market.
The technology exists today. The buyer demand is proven. The competitive advantage belongs to organizations that act decisively to bridge the gap between digital expectations and traditional processes.
Ready to Transform Your Buyer Experience?
Simpat is here to help. We’ve done it for multiple clients and know what it takes to customize it to your workflow.
Book a 30-minute strategy session with Simpat’s expert team. Let’s make buying a home feel as easy as ordering tacos.
Sources
- National Association of Realtors, 2024 Home Buyer & Seller Generational Trends Report
- Zillow, Consumer Housing Trends Report 2024
- National Association of Realtors, Real Estate in a Digital Age 2024
- Builder Online, Digital Trends in Option Sales 2024
- ALTA Digital Closing Survey 2024
- NAR Technology Survey 2024
