- Client
- A national homebuilder
- Industry
- Homebuilding
- Milestones spanning contract to ownership
- 5
- Warranty windows tracked against the real closing date
- 2
- For selections, messages, documents and warranty
- One record
The problem
The single biggest source of buyer anxiety in production homebuilding is not knowing what's happening with a house that doesn't exist yet. Contracts signed years before closing left buyers with a long, quiet gap they filled by calling a superintendent standing in mud on someone else's lot. Contract paperwork, design selections, permits and warranty documents were scattered across email and physical files, hard for a buyer to find again even a year later, let alone three. Two buyers on the same contract, a spouse or co-buyer, had no way to both stay informed without one passing information along to the other and getting some of it wrong. And most buyers never learned they had a 60-day and an 11-month warranty window at all, so those windows closed without them noticing, and what would have been a covered repair became an out-of-pocket one.
What we built
We built a portal organized around the five milestones a buyer really goes through (contract, financing, selections, construction and ownership), with every screen tied to them. A timeline breaks each milestone into steps and checklists showing what's done, what's next, and what's still needed from the buyer. Real-time two-way messaging puts the buyer in direct, written contact with their builder team, which the builder can point back to as a record just as much as the buyer can. Construction progress photos and design-center images let buyers, including the many who bought remotely or are relocating, watch a home go up without ever standing on the lot. Contract paperwork and warranty documents live in one place instead of an inbox. Warranty requests track both windows against the buyer's real closing date and won't open the 11-month request until the buyer owns the home, so a real deadline never slips past unnoticed. A second buyer on the same home can have their own login and see exactly the same thing, rather than getting the information secondhand. The same platform also works in a simpler form: a leaner build for a different program with far simpler needs cuts the experience down to just warranty and document access, since a construction timeline and a design-center link would only get in the way for that kind of purchase.
The outcome
Every question the portal answers is a phone call the sales office no longer has to take, and the buyer is kept informed instead of having to chase. Buyers with a year or more between contract and closing can watch progress instead of wondering. Both people on a joint purchase see the same information at the same time. And the warranty windows that used to catch people by surprise are tracked against a real closing date, so a covered repair stays covered instead of turning into a bill the homeowner pays alone.