How a Third-Generation Homebuilder Turns Data into Dollars

For Fort Worth-based Riverside Homebuilders, a generational legacy is no excuse for standing still. Founded on grit, persistence, and a deep commitment to the customer, the family-led company has evolved into a top-30 Dallas-Fort Worth builder and one of the top 100 homebuilders in the U.S. With upwards of $300 million in annual revenue and a product mix that spans entry-level to custom and 55-plus homes, Riverside’s growth has been propelled by one hard rule: accountability.

That rule has become the backbone of how the builder operates today—especially in an environment where margins are tight, cycles move quickly, and errors are expensive. The company's newest advantage? BuilderMetrix, the data intelligence platform from Constellation HomeBuilder Systems.

What began as a quest to escape error-prone Excel reports has transformed into an integrated, real-time decision support platform that reaches from executive dashboards to job sites.

The culture shift we’ve seen just in the past three years is accountability,” says Clint Shipley, Vice President of Operations at Riverside. “Our people know now that if they say they’re doing something, the numbers are there to show it.”

The Market Mandate for Velocity

Spring 2025 hasn’t brought the seasonal lift many builders expected. Mortgage rates remain stubbornly high, and while demand exists, affordability constraints continue to throttle absorption. For operators in the $200 million to $700 million range, profitability is no longer driven just by topline sales—it hinges on operational precision.

This is a slower-than-normal spring,” says Shipley. “You can’t afford delays or bloat. If there’s a way to trim cost or accelerate a schedule, we’re looking at it.”

Riverside isn’t alone. Across the U.S., builders are turning to technology to wring efficiency from every stage of the construction cycle. Solutions like BuilderMetrix are no longer “nice-to-have.” They’re quickly becoming essential tools of survival.

The Excel Tipping Point

Riverside’s transformation began in April 2023 with a weekly milestone report. Operations Analyst Scott Jacobson was spending four hours per update extracting and manipulating data from the company’s ERP system, BuildTopia.

You start building reports all day and realize there has to be a better way,” Jacobson says. “The data was static. By the time we presented it on Friday, it was outdated.”

Things changed at Constellation's Build Smarter conference in November 2023. That’s when Riverside encountered what was then called Constellation’s common data model — now known as BuilderMetrix. The software promised to eliminate reporting blind spots by feeding near-real-time ERP data into customized Power BI dashboards.

Warranty: The $500,000 Wake-Up Call

The first dashboard to turn heads? Warranty cost.

We were hemorrhaging cost without knowing it,” Shipley recalls. “One month we spent nearly $500,000 in warranty. We had no visibility until we saw it on a P&L later. With BuilderMetrix, that report changed everything.”

Riverside cut its warranty expenses by 72% within three months of implementing the warranty dashboard.

We shifted our culture, our sales presentation, our exclusions—everything,” Shipley says. “The data just shined a spotlight. It made us better.”

Silent Manager, Real Impact

The company's milestone completion report was one of the earliest BuilderMetrix success stories. Not only did it replace a cumbersome Excel workflow, it sparked what Shipley calls “positive competition” among field teams.

You could feel the buzz,” Jacobson says. “Construction managers would check the report every Monday morning and compare completion percentages. It created a standard without us having to enforce it. The data managed itself.”

That self-regulating quality earned BuilderMetrix a nickname within the company: the “silent manager.”

You don’t have to struggle to create buy-in when the numbers are real,” Shipley says. “It becomes the truth everyone works from.”

Clean Data or Bust

BuilderMetrix didn’t just reveal data—it forced Riverside to clean it up.

You can’t create reliable reports if your ERP data isn’t accurate,” Jacobson says. “We had to fix field inputs, standardize categories, and really treat data quality as a company-wide discipline.”

That investment in data hygiene paid off. In addition to warranty and milestone metrics, the company now tracks and benchmarks:

• On-time completions
• PO variance by region, supplier, or construction manager
• Sales prospect channel mix
• Job cost accuracy by plan and option
• Customer satisfaction and post-close trends

The upshot: 24.2% more homes completed on time and a 13.5% improvement in project milestone adherence.

Collaboration, Not Isolation

What makes BuilderMetrix different isn’t just what it reports, but how reports are made.

If a report’s created in a black box, it’s probably wrong,” Jacobson says. “We build these reports collaboratively—sales, construction, purchasing, estimating—so every perspective is included.”

The approach also builds credibility.

The facts win,” Shipley adds. “People may argue feelings, but they won’t argue facts. And when everyone has the same version of the truth, the whole team levels up.”

The Variance Report That Changed Everything

One standout dashboard has been Riverside’s variance report—tracking cost overruns by cause.

We set a goal to get variance cost to 0.5%, and I thought that was a pipe dream,” Shipley says. “But BuilderMetrix got us to 0.2% at one point.”

By enabling users to isolate issues by plan design, trade performance, or field conditions, the variance report allowed multiple departments to problem-solve in sync.\

That’s where the jelly is,” says Jacobson. “You want ROI? Go look there.”

BuilderMetrix as Strategy Engine

Constellation's Paolo Benzan, Vice President of Data Strategy, who helped lead the development of BuilderMetrix and NX, explains why systems like these matter more than ever.

Builders need clean, usable data that leads to good decisions,” Benzan says. “Without it, even the best operational intent gets lost in execution. BuilderMetrix eliminates that gap.”

For Riverside, the results speak for themselves. As the company pushes past 700 annual home closings in 2025, it does so with confidence—not from guesswork, but from shared facts.

The bottom line is we wouldn’t be where we are without this data,” Shipley says. “In a tighter market, we have to find the nickels and dimes. BuilderMetrix helps us do that. Every day.”