As Spring Selling Season 2025 sputters, homebuilders face a familiar but more punishing challenge: how to make the math work. Mortgage rates remain stubbornly high. Prices, incentives, and sales velocity are not cooperating. Material and labor costs, meanwhile, continue to run hot. What’s left? Efficiency.

While sales may rank among homebuilders right now as Priorities 1, 2 and 3, performance – higher performance that gains efficiency – becomes an equally binding business imperative.

Not the kind of efficiency you toss around at a value engineering meeting. We’re talking ground-up operational redesign — precision, predictability, first-time-right construction cycle velocity, and waste elimination.

Builders are getting squeezed," Chris Brandt, Director of Value-Added Solutions for Engineered Wood Products at Boise Cascade tells us. "Their profit margins are tight, they're doing a lot of buy-downs, a lot of incentives. They need to find ways to cut costs and improve performance without sacrificing quality. That's where precision comes in.”

Brandt, oversees the company’s SawTek platform — a blend of precision-manufacturing tools and digital workflow that’s making real-time, bottom-line impacts for builders across the country.

Builders today have to hit a strike price that gets buyers off the fence, but still leaves a tolerable margin behind.

SawTek stands out as one way to do that — cutting jobsite waste, labor time, and errors, while dialing up velocity and quality.

The Context: A Survival-to-Thrive Inflection Point

Today’s market is not about riding out a soft patch. It’s about strategic pivots that allow builders to keep delivering homes at a cost structure that works, without sacrificing quality or reliability.

• Builders are compressing margins with steep buyer incentives.
• Operational costs — from labor to materials to capital — remain elevated.
• Spring 2025 is flatlining, forcing pricing strategies and lot release schedules to reset.
• Buyers are pausing — some from economic fear, others from psychological hesitation.

For builders, it's not just about getting cheaper by squeezing business and operational partners' pricing. It's about getting smarter.

The Opportunity: Precision That Pays

SawTek, developed by Boise Cascade and deployed through its national dealer network, is a cutting and labeling system that allows dealers to deliver floor systems as ready-to-install kits.

Brandt explains how this translates into savings and speed:

• Pre-cut, pre-labeled components eliminate onsite measuring and cutting.
• Pre-drilled mechanicals speed up rough-in and reduce rework.
• Piece-marked plans create a “paint-by-number” experience for framers.
• Less waste in the dumpster equals less money literally thrown away.

It’s not just the framing crew that benefits,” Brandt says. “It’s your mechanicals, your inspectors, your superintendents. Everyone touches the gain.”

The Questions Builders Should Ask Themselves Now

In our full conversation, Chris and I cover five areas builders should be evaluating as they pressure-test their 2025 operations strategies:

Watch the full interview with Chris Brandt on TBD Player: "Precision Under Pressure: How SawTech Accelerates Builder Performance."

What is SawTek and Why Does it Matter?

• Builders need to know what SawTek is and how it can help address rising cycle times, shrinking margins, and persistent cost pressures.

Why Precision is Now Mission-Critical

• We dig into how precision cutting and jobsite-ready bundles reduce costly errors and warranty callbacks.

How Builders Experience the Value

• Chris shares real-world insights on what changes for a builder or framer working with a SawTek-optimized package.

Immediate Relief in a Challenging Market

• What builders can do now to get started, including working with Boise Cascade’s 80+ saw-enabled dealer locations nationwide.

What’s Next in Smart Construction Support

• From digital floor optimization to floor cassettes and software innovations, we touch on what’s coming—and why starting now matters.

The Real Stakes: Precision as an Operational Discipline

What often goes unstated in efficiency conversations is the compounding value of reliability.

SawTek helps minimize unknowns — not just in the field, but upstream in planning, scheduling, and labor coordination. In a climate where a single blown deadline or back charge can knock profitability off track, this kind of predictability becomes a strategic asset.

Brandt also highlights how Boise Cascade's dealer training and support investments help ensure builders aren’t just receiving pre-cut components. They’re getting a fully supported solution that integrates with their existing construction workflows.

When we talk about cutting waste, it’s not just board feet or dumpster loads. It’s time. It’s mental energy. It’s friction between trades. That’s where SawTek shines."

Reducing Risk, Elevating Trust

Builders operating in multiple markets often have to manage different framer crews, variable permit cycles, and evolving energy code requirements. SawTek standardizes parts of the build that used to be improvised. That consistency supports not only faster builds but also better relationships with trades and inspectors.

Brandt points out that in the highest-performing builder operations, platform-based thinking — like what SawTek enables — lets teams work smarter, not just harder.

FloorValue and the Next Generation of Tools

Looking ahead, Brandt teases Boise Cascade’s continued innovation with tools like FloorValue, a software platform that matches structural performance with cost-optimized design. This kind of value engineering, rooted in data, is where many builders are headed—but only those who first stabilize their operations through precision and integration.

"We’re not asking builders to leapfrog into futuristic systems tomorrow. We’re saying—'start today.' Standardize the things that create risk and drain your resources. Then you’ll be ready to build on that foundation."

Bottom Line: Builders Can’t Wait for a Better Market

If you’re waiting for the next new tool to arrive, you’ll already be behind,” Brandt notes. “Start using these precision platforms now, and your build cycle, your buyer experience, and your margins will be stronger for it.”

Spring 2025 may be a dud, but it’s also a forcing function—a wake-up call for every builder to reassess operational strategy. SawTek is not a silver bullet, but it’s a smart lever. And smart levers, pulled at the right time, separate the survivors from the sidelined.