Home builders aren’t just one type of professional. They are a whole industry of professionals — each type with their own focus, skills and technological needs on the job. Custom home builders, spec builders and tract builders may each have incredibly different jobs, but there is one thing that unifies all of them:
Each type of builder needs to be able to create detailed floor plans and renderings to close deals, get feedback from clients and plan construction.
Unfortunately, the number of tools that can do that is unbelievably limited. Some tools work for custom home builders, but tract builders would find them unhelpful, and vice versa. One tool, however, does fit the bill for all kinds of builders: Cedreo.
In this post, the Cedreo team walks you through how Cedreo’s floor plan creator and 3D rendering technology is beneficial for all kinds of home builders. Here’s everything you need to know.
What’s the Difference between a Custom Home Builder, Spec Builder, and Tract Builder?
Before we get into the specifics of how Cedreo’s 3D home design technology helps all builders do their jobs and grow their businesses, we should step back and make sure we have clearly defined each type of builder that can benefit from 3D home design technology.
Here are the three main types of builders:
- Custom home builders
- Spec builders
- Tract builders
Custom home builders work directly with an architect or landowner to build unique, custom homes that fit the needs of the client. The process is highly collaborative, and the result is always a unique home. While the homes that custom home builders create can look a million different ways, they tend to be more on the luxurious side. That’s because landowners who can afford to build their own homes likely have room in the budget for luxury features.
Spec builders don’t work directly with a future occupant of the homes they build. Instead, they build homes “on spec,” or with the speculation that someone will buy and live in them. They buy land and build the homes with the expectation of making money off of the future sale. The homes can still be custom — they just aren’t customized for the exact person who will eventually live in them.
Tract builders, on the other hand, operate on high volume. They tend to purchase or own a large “tract” of land, and they divide that land into lots on which they will build homes. The tract builder may design several types of homes, but the goal is to design standardized units to build at scale on large numbers of lots at one time. This approach can reduce the overall cost of each individual home for the builder, and the builder can then pass some of those savings on to buyers to make their properties more appealing in competitive housing markets.
How 3D Home Design Technology Helps All Three
Custom home builders, spec builders and tract builders couldn’t be more different, but they could all benefit from using Cedreo. Here’s a look at how:
Custom Home Builder
Because the job of the custom home builder is to collaborate closely with the future homeowner, they need a way to not only record but quickly implement feedback they get on designs. As anyone in the custom home building industry knows, the collaboration between builders and clients results in several rounds of changes and additions — no matter how talented you are as a builder or home designer.
This is an area in which Cedreo’s floor plan creation and 3D rendering capabilities can save you time and money. Cedreo stores floor plans in the cloud and allows you to make quick changes on the fly. You could have your floor plan design open as your client is delivering feedback and make the changes instantly. Then, in minutes, you can generate another photorealistic 3D rendering to give the client a real feel for what their newly improved home would actually look and feel like when built.
Spec Builder
Spec builders deal with much less client interaction, but they must focus on creating incredible homes that buyers will want to buy quickly. That means they need to be able to collaborate with their teams to come up with original and appealing home designs that will sell.
Cedreo is the perfect tool for that. With quick drawing tools and time-saving features like automatic roof placement, you can create a complete floor plan for a home in just a couple of hours. And if one of your colleagues thinks it should be slightly different, you don’t have to scrap your design and start from scratch — you simply pull up your existing design and tweak it. What could have taken days will only take minutes.
Tract Builder
Tract builders operate on scale and efficiency to turn a profit, and that means they need to be able to quickly design homes that they can build over and over across dozens of lots.
Cedreo enables quick home design, but it also includes enough detail to enable construction crews to build the home without error or delay. Simply create the housing units you want to build across the tract lots, export the construction drawings and renderings as PDFs and share them with the crews who are going to go out and do the work.
Conclusion
Whether you’re building custom homes for high-end clients or cranking out standardized homes by the hundreds, you need a way to sell more and grow your business. Cedreo is the tool you’ve been looking for.
With a simple user interface — no CAD knowledge required — and 100% web-based operation, Cedreo enables builders of all kinds to design gorgeous homes in half the time, make changes on the fly and build the homes with stunning accuracy and detail. It has everything you need to create detailed floor plans and 3D renderings and nothing you don’t need, sending your efficiency and effectiveness through the roof.
Cedreo shortens the sales cycle and makes the daily work of being a home builder easier. That’s something that custom home builders, spec builders and tract builders could all benefit from. Join the many home builders using Cedreo to run, improve and grow their businesses. Try Cedreo risk-free today to see what you have been missing.
