Margins are razor thin. Incentives are deep. Home sales velocity is shaky.

The July HMI survey revealed that 38% of builders reported cutting prices in July, the highest percentage since NAHB began tracking this figure on a monthly basis in 2022,” writes Rob Dietz, Chief Economist at the National Association of Home Builders this week. “This compares with 37% of builders who reported cutting prices in June, 34% in May and 29% in April. Meanwhile, the average price reduction was 5% in July, the same as it’s been every month since last November. The use of sales incentives was 62% in July, unchanged from June.

Consistent with ongoing weakness for the HMI, single-family housing starts will post a decline in 2025 due to ongoing housing affordability challenges per the latest NAHB forecast. Single-family permits are down 6% on a year-to-date basis and builder traffic in the HMI is at a more than two-year low.”

For builders trying to protect profitability in today’s strained new-home market environment, the riskiest position to be in is to be “long on land” with the wrong mix of lots, locations, and floor plans.

Fact is, the homebuilding conference circuit's 2026 and 2027 business case studies of what worked in the very tough conditions playing out in 2025 are being written as we speak.

For a growing number of homebuilding companies and their financial partners, Cecilian Partners’ Lot Vault platform has emerged as a solution – one that mitigates higher risk and, at the same time, isolates on opportunity even in these times of rough-sledding. It digitizes and automates one of the most notoriously cumbersome and error-prone processes in the business: managing lot takedowns and the intricate back-and-forth between builders and land banks.

As asset-light and land-light strategies have gained traction as a homebuilding business model trend, Lot Vault represents not just a technology tool, but a lever with which to gain in performance measures and efficiency. It offers builders and their capital partners real-time visibility, accountability, and accuracy—while stripping hours of manual work, paper trails, and email chains out of the system.

 This shift is one that reflects a meaningful market dynamic,” says Phil Worland, co-founder and chief product officer of Cecilian Partners. “It also puts a whole different set of pressures on the capital providers and the builders to be able to do this at a pace and a scale that they never were having to do before.”

The Context: A Land-Light Era

The homebuilding industry’s pivot to land-light models has been driven by necessity. Rising interest rates, stubborn inflation, and affordability challenges have forced builders to pull back from speculative land purchases. Companies like Lennar and D.R. Horton are doubling down on partnerships with land banks and structured financing entities, leaving the heavy lifting of land ownership and entitlement to capital partners while focusing on vertical construction and sales.

The land-light model isn’t new — NVR pioneered it decades ago — but it has become an increasingly pervasive strategy in 2024 and 2025 as public and private builders seek to protect balance sheets while maintaining growth. As The Builder’s Daily has reported, builders who control too much land risk are locking up capital at precisely the wrong time.

Lot Vault’s value proposition is clear in this environment:

• It provides builders and land banks with a shared, real-time view of every project’s financials, schedules, and lot takedowns.
• It enforces consistency and transparency across dozens or even hundreds of projects.
• It reduces the manual, error-prone steps that cause costly miscommunications or compliance headaches.

The Problem It Solves

Traditional lot takedown processes have long been a thorn in the side of builders and their financing partners.

Early in my career, I was in charge of working on takedowns for David Weekley Homes,” recalls Katie Pennington, Cecilian Partners’ Head of Client Innovation. “That process included walking across the office to a filing cabinet to pull out the deal, hand-calculating lot premiums and escalators with pen and pencil, faxing things to our home office in Houston. It was an interesting process—and not that long ago.”

Pennington’s experience highlights why a system like Lot Vault isn’t a shiny new toy. Rather, it’s emerging as an impetus for companies operating at scale. Builders juggling multiple subdivisions and land banks, managing hundreds of active projects, simply cannot afford the inefficiencies of paper-based tracking or disconnected spreadsheets.

Mistakes aren’t just frustrating—they’re expensive. A wrong lot number, an overlooked premium, or a missed deadline can delay closings, trigger default clauses, or even jeopardize entire deals. Lot Vault’s digital “single source of truth” prevents these errors by centralizing all data and automating approvals, calculations, and communications.

How Lot Vault Works

Lot Vault is structured as an enterprise SaaS platform specifically designed for the unique workflows of land financing. Its functionality can be grouped into four core components:

1. Project Management – Centralized dashboards track every project’s critical details, from lot groupings to fee structures, ensuring that both builders and capital partners operate with the same data.
2. Takedown Requests – Automated, real-time validation ensures that lot selections match contractual schedules, with built-in rules for premiums and phasing.
3. Fee and Cost Calculations – The system calculates fees, escalators, and economic summaries based on pre-configured rules, removing guesswork and manual math.
4. Reporting and Notifications – Self-service reporting, interactive dashboards, and automated notifications keep all parties—builders, capital partners, legal teams—aligned in real time.

Historically, when there are multiple parties involved, data representation can get muddled,” says Heidi Birchall, Head of Product at Cecilian Partners, emphasizing the transparency Lot Vault brings. “By being a single platform for projects and takedowns, we enable a two-way relationship between the builder and capital partner to ensure everyone is seeing the same project status, the lot takedown summaries, and the represented data.”

Olympus Housing Capital’s Experience

A case study with Olympus Housing Capital, backed by Apollo Global Management, demonstrates how Lot Vault delivers tangible business results. Olympus manages hundreds of land banking projects across the country—a scale that would overwhelm traditional processes.

We were either going to have to hire 15 people to manage these takedown requests, or we were going to have to find a better system,” says Troy Wahlberg, managing partner at Olympus Housing Capital. Wahlberg puts it bluntly. “Lot Vault changed our headcount equation completely.”

For Olympus, Lot Vault’s automation has replaced the repetitive, manual math and constant communication loops that used to dominate their workflows. The platform’s automated PDF generation and email notifications ensure that once a takedown request is approved, all relevant parties—builders, title companies, legal teams—receive the same information instantly.

Why It Matters Now

The stakes have never been higher. Today’s homebuilding market is defined by slower absorption rates, increasingly discretionary buyers, and rising incentives that weigh on margins. The ability to manage lot pipelines precisely—taking down the right lots at the right time—is critical to avoid tying up capital unnecessarily.

In this environment, a missed or mismanaged takedown isn’t just an operational annoyance. It can derail revenue targets and disrupt cash flow.

Wahlberg underscores the importance of discipline:

It has to be a high-volume, very repeatable product. You bring us deals that have a lot of ‘let me explain this one-off thing,’ and we don’t have the time to create a separate model for that and then manage it.”

Leadership and Technology: A Cultural Shift

Lot Vault’s success hinges not just on its features but on the willingness of organizations to embrace a new way of working. As Phil Worland points out, technology alone isn’t the magic bullet:

The number one thing that makes a transformation like this successful is leadership—having someone who’s bought in and driving the change.”

For builders and capital partners alike, adopting Lot Vault often means rethinking legacy processes. It means empowering teams – and making the whole team accountable – to make data-driven decisions. Wahlberg notes that Olympus has streamlined its tech stack by focusing on platforms that “talk to each other” via open APIs, reducing complexity and ensuring Lot Vault integrates seamlessly with their financial systems.

Lot Vault’s emergence parallels the broader shift in homebuilding toward operational efficiency and precision capital management. As The Builder’s Daily has reported, this land-light approach rewards companies that focus on their strengths—building, selling, and servicing homes—while partnering with specialized entities for land acquisition and management.

Builders who fail to adapt to this model may be at risk – of financial inefficiency or strategic disadvantage.

Scott Cox recently wrote in TBD:

Expect more capital entering the space, competitive pressure reducing rates and loosening terms, and public builders enjoying growth without cash deployment. We've already seen "flexibility" in deal sizes and terms, particularly regarding project duration and scale. This creates additional pressure on private builders facing considerably higher capital costs while making it easier for public builders to acquire competitors and immediately transfer assets to land banks."

The Takeaway

For builders facing 2025’s uncertain market conditions, the operational precision enabled by Lot Vault can be a decisive advantage. It eliminates guesswork, reduces costly errors, and builds trust between builders and capital partners.

Lot Vault is not about adding technology for the sake of technology. It’s about making sure every dollar invested in land works harder, every decision is traceable, and every stakeholder operates with real-time clarity. In Wahlberg’s words:

It’s got to be repeatable at high scale. We can’t push the volume if the process isn’t systemized.”

The message for homebuilding executives is clear: In a market where margin pressure is relentless, having a single source of truth for land banking isn’t optional—it’s survival.