Company type
Boutique spec and custom home builder
Company name
Crestline Homes
Project types
Single family, attached and 4-plex home construction
Team size
6–8 in-house staff and 10–20 sub contractors
About
Crestline Homes is a boutique spec and custom home builder operating across multiple active sites at any given time. With a lean in-house team of 6 to 8 staff and 10 to 20 sub contractors per project, staying connected across sites, managing sub trades, and keeping field information organised is a daily operational challenge. They build single family, attached, and 4-plex homes, where quality control and communication at the site level directly impact timelines, costs, and client satisfaction.
The challenge
Communication between the office, site supervisors, and field staff is tough to manage across multiple active sites.
- 2 site supervisors each managing 2–4 sites. Responsible for photos, reports, specs, sub trade coordination, compliance, QC, client relations, and office work.
- Organizing photos is a constant problem. 2–3 staff members take photos on personal phones and they never get properly organized.
- Sub trades leave behind mistakes and it’s hard to get them back to fix things, so employees end up doing the fixing at the company’s cost.
- Tracking to-dos is critical because schedules depend on previous items being completed. If the office isn’t in the know, it can throw off trade schedules or important inspections.
How Buildster helped
Having an app where projects are separated into their own entities makes everything easier to find and access.
- Buildster helped with task delegation between site supervisors and carpenters or sub contractors.
- As the company owner, being tagged into communication threads provides a connection to what’s happening on all projects, whether at the office or off site.
- Having photos linked to blueprints and a single photo gallery per project means photos added daily are easy to scroll through and find.
- Buildster provided a more formalized system of site communication and simplified access to important field information, without relying on email or group text.
- Being organized at the field level helps stay organized on many other levels.
Results
One app. More accountability. Better results across the board.
- Sub trades can see the level of organization the supervisors have, which helps track mistakes and allows for a better managed release of sub trade holdbacks.
- It’s easier to hold subs to fixing deficiencies because there is a more evolved tracking tool in place.
- Clients appreciate the communication transparency and photo management, which adds credibility.
- Buildster has eliminated 3–4 apps previously used by the team.