How Tim O’Brien Homes Is Re-Wiring Its Buyers' Experience
The U.S. housing market has taken on a choppy, lumpy, spotty, and iffy look to it.
Mortgage rates hover well above 6%, home prices are around $440,000, and a cautious mix of sellers holding back and buyers hesitant to commit has combined to freeze activity. Permits and starts are slipping. Builders everywhere are carrying more standing inventory than they want. And private operators, in particular, face the blunt edge of pressure from larger, better-capitalized public peers who can outmuscle them in land and financing.
Against that backdrop, speed and certainty matter more than ever. Homebuyers don’t just want a house — they want confidence that what they see is what they’ll get, delivered on a clear timeline. And builders who can remove uncertainty stand a better chance of winning.
Tim O’Brien Homes is leaning directly into that challenge. As President Danny Lowery puts it:
Our challenge, especially in this tougher market, is that buyers are a little more cautious about entering the contract phase… The lack of visualization, the lack of certainty of what they’re buying, as well as the timeframe.”
The contract-to-completion period has stretched to nearly a year, he notes, a span too long for buyers accustomed to on-demand digital experiences.
That’s why O’Brien’s team is investing heavily in Higharc, a platform that lets buyers design and visualize homes online. What's more, Tim O'Brien Homes is working across its operations' tech stack to enable direct connections between choices and the company’s CRM (HubSpot) and ERP (Mark Systems). Ultimately, this rewiring will bring clarity to both customers and the builder’s sales teams. The shift is already showing results.
We almost instantly had customers coming to us, and the plans they’re working on our website are being pushed to our CRM,” Lowery says. “They’re coming to us with the home they want to build. It’s starting to cut down a lot on that discovery process.”
We’ll unpack this story in detail during a live conversation hosted by HousingWire and The Builder’s Daily on October 6, 2025.
Please go ahead and register for the Live Stream here.
Sales cycles that once stretched from two to three months are compressing down to weeks. Buyers arrive at the sales office prepared, informed, and more decisive.
Marketing Director Ryan Hillgartner frames the strategy in terms of an investment and commitment to operational efficiency.
We use HubSpot as our CRM, Mark Systems as our ERP, and Higharc as our drafting, visualization, sales, and marketing tool. We’re currently working to connect all three… Once that is done, we anticipate gains in velocity and efficiencies.”
The payoff isn’t just speed. Sales professionals – often working and incentivized in an organizational silo – are now becoming internal champions of synchrony and collaboration with product and construction teams.
Almost every sales pro I meet with is excited about customers coming in with plans and just how fast it happened,” Lowery says.
More importantly, he adds, they’re becoming advocates among colleagues in the field, convincing production teams that fewer one-offs and clearer expectations will reduce errors and warranty costs.
The implications go further still. With integration pushing prospect data into the system, Tim O’Brien Homes will soon be able to shape product design based on thousands of buyer choices, not just the 200 homes it closes each year.
What is the customer spending the most time on? What options are popular? What are they adding to these plans?” Lowery asks.
Tim O’Brien Homes’ ability to move fast and rewire its operations isn’t happening in a vacuum.
The company has long set itself apart as Wisconsin’s leading high-performance builder, having been recognized for five consecutive years with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Housing Innovation Award for its commitment to energy efficiency and indoor air quality. Its “three uniques” — delivering extraordinary customer experiences, building healthier, more comfortable homes, and innovating with new technologies — align directly with the transformation underway now. Those values, reinforced by a culture that prizes communication, team empowerment, and social responsibility, explain why O’Brien’s leaders are willing to invest in system change while others pull back.
That feedback loop could drive smarter design decisions and future-proof the business.
For Hillgartner, the lesson is clear: trimming $500 out of a base home won’t secure long-term competitiveness.
The biggest spot for people to gain an advantage back is to be way better and way more efficient… You’ve got to go quicker.”
None of this comes free. The integrations have been complex, the plan conversions painstaking, and the upfront investment significant. But Lowery is blunt:
The bar is quickly changing and will continue to evolve rapidly over the next five to ten years. The user experience in every other area of what they buy is significantly faster, and their expectations are skyrocketing. We have to stay on the cutting edge of doing our best to meet those expectations.”
That imperative — speed, certainty, and transparency in a market defined by hesitation — is why Tim O’Brien Homes’ pivot deserves attention across the industry. For other private operators facing pressure, the message is stark: remove friction from the buyer’s journey or risk falling further behind.
The team will unpack its story in detail during a live conversation hosted by HousingWire and The Builder’s Daily on October 6, 2025.
Danny Lowery and Ryan Hillgartner will join Higharc’s Conor Sedam to walk through how they’re transforming sales velocity and customer experience, what they’ve learned about internal adoption, and what’s next.