The Digital Thread Is The Next Frontier For Homebuilders

What we don’t know may now matter more than what we do.

• We don’t know whether mortgage rates – or homebuilders' borrowing costs – will be a point lower or a point higher by next spring.
• We don’t know whether home-insurance markets in Texas, Florida, or California will stabilize.
• We don’t know how fast AI, robotics, and automation will move from experimentation to execution inside homebuilding operations.
• And we certainly don’t know how much longer our industry can afford the costs of disconnected data, redundant workflows, and human friction.

That’s why this year’s Focus On Excellence gathering — October 27 to 29 at the Denver Four Seasons — puts Business Systems Innovation right at the center of its program.

Register here now.

Tuesday afternoon’s panel, moderated by David Rice, founder and CEO of New Home Star, will be the spark before the workshop that follows — a working session where homebuilding business leaders – elbow to elbow – will map their own people-process-platform alignment against the hard realities of margin pressure, buyer hesitancy, and the accelerating pace of technological change.

I’ll be blunt: waiting another budget cycle to tackle this isn’t a strategy — it’s drift. The five executives on this panel are living proof that the next phase of homebuilding performance can be built – and is being built – from the inside out, by leaders willing to rewire their business DNA, committing to and investing in data, systems, and people.

What It Takes to Build a Digital Builder

Brandon Sharp, Chief Information Officer of Brookfield Residential, describes himself as “an operator first.” That framing alone reveals a great deal about what distinguishes this panel from the typical technology conversation.

I’m an accountant who accidentally started running IT departments for a living back in 2009,” Sharp tells us. “I bounced between CIO and CFO responsibilities… What I do is organizational transformation around systems and data, and I do it through the lens of the operator.”

That’s the connective tissue for this discussion — not shiny software demos, but the cultural and frontline operational work of making information credible, visible, and actionable across every function.

Until you have that high-quality data management discipline in place — and you know that every piece of data running through every system is high quality and trustworthy — you can’t do the really sexy stuff,” Sharp says.

The “sexy stuff,” of course, is what every homebuilder CEO now wants: real-time pricing, transparent customer journeys, and predictive insights that shorten cycle times.

As Sharp puts it, none of that happens without a solid foundation of trustworthy data.

Building Transparency In, Not On

Few builders have tested that premise at enterprise scale the way Tri Pointe Homes has. Their dual leadership across business and technology gives this conversation its heartbeat.

Linda Mamet, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, explains how their integration journey began when six companies became one.

At the end of the day, it’s all about being a growing, healthy, profitable company with loyal customers and a great brand reputation,” she says. “We had the opportunity to start with a blank slate at Tri Pointe Homes back in 2014… and built our systems from the ground up with the idea of transparency all the way across the customer journey.”

That commitment required a complete rethink of how marketing, sales, IT, and operations communicate.

Using a lot of integrations to ensure that we could go from one part of the tech stack to the next and give people tools and visibility into how to improve performance from beginning to end,” Mamet says.

Beside her, Urmila Menon, Tri Pointe’s Chief Information Officer, underscores how modern CIOs are no longer back-office guardians — they’re catalysts.

In today’s fast-evolving business landscape, CIOs are no longer merely technology stewards. They’re execution catalysts driving transformation across complex ecosystems,” Menon says. “Legacy systems, organizational culture, and vendor dependencies… those are barriers that stand in the way. My focus is on giving pragmatic, execution-focused views of how CIOs can turn these challenges into opportunities for modernization and agility.”

For every private-builder CEO wrestling with what to invest in next — ERP, CRM, customer portals, AI analytics — this is the conversation that replaces buzzwords with operating logic.

From Customer Data to Customer Experience

For Stephanie McCarty, Chief Marketing Officer at Taylor Morrison, the challenge isn’t lack of intent — it’s connecting systems deeply enough to make “customer-first” more than a slide title.

We’re probably not as far as we’d like to be from a perspective of truly knowing our customer,” she says. “It’s hard in our industry to do that pragmatically. For most of us, we’re behind from a technology perspective — not a shocker.”

Still, Taylor Morrison’s experimentation shows what’s possible when marketing owns the data agenda.

We brought in Qualtrics a few years ago as the 360-degree view of the customer,” McCarty notes. “Maybe we were oversold on some capabilities — or maybe from an integration perspective it’s been a little bit challenging.”

The learning curve has led to a bold next step: a digital portal that reframes the homeowner relationship beyond warranty tickets.

We’ve been behind the scenes developing an end-to-end customer portal — from the true customer-acquisition side to the post-close experience,” she says. “It’s: what are all the perks you get for being a Taylor Morrison homeowner? Having home-care videos dynamically fed to you based on the age of your home, referral opportunities, everything’s in there.”

Her takeaway lands squarely in the wheelhouse of this year’s Focus On Excellence theme: operationalizing trust — by making data tangible and fully-committed service continuous.

Designing the Digital Thread

If Sharp and Menon are engineering the data foundation, and McCarty is defining the customer-experience frontier, Marc Minor and his team are building the connective tissue — the digital thread itself.

Higharc is an integrated software platform for homebuilding — think of it like product lifecycle management from manufacturing, but for homes,” Minor says. “We manage the home as an integrated data object and piece of software from design.”

The problem, as he sees it, is structural.

What you ideally want is an integrated thread of data about the things you’re building — from the specification and design all the way through distribution. But we don’t have that. We have very disintegrated systems, and we don’t have data; we have PDFs that get passed around.”

Then comes the gut punch every builder in the audience will recognize:

Everybody’s on the factory floor, on the assembly line — so how do you upgrade the line without stopping it?”

That’s precisely the dilemma this session will tackle — how to innovate while the machine keeps running.

Why This Conversation Can’t Wait

Moderator David Rice frames the purpose clearly during the prep call:

My objective will be to bring all of that experience and exposure to guide questions and conversation,” he says, describing his role not as a lecturer but as a catalyst.

He also reminds the group that his vantage point spans dozens of builders and $10 billion in annual sales.

That reach matters. It means this session isn’t theoretical — it’s a distillation of what’s actually working in the field, across scale, structure, and culture. And because the panel leads directly into a facilitated workshop, attendees won’t just listen; they’ll map, debate, and stress-test their own systems against peers facing the same realities.

The Call to Act

In a year when builders are budgeting for concessions, battling insurance volatility, and staring down the same backlog of standing inventory, it’s tempting to delay transformation. But here’s the truth: digital alignment is no longer an elective. It’s the only route to resilience.

This session — Business Systems Innovation: Building the Digital Thread of Homebuilding — is where that conversation finally gets real.

Join us Tuesday, October 28, 3 p.m. MT in the Cottonwood Room at the Denver Four Seasons.

Your 2030 homebuilding operator won’t build itself.