buildquest Revealed: The Planning Platform Behind the Podcast

All right, everybody. I'm going to go off the rails a little bit today and I'm going to be talking about what I identify as some of the key problems and challenges for both the homeowner and the professional — the design and construction professionals that I've seen over all the years that I've been operating a design-build business model in Northern California in the Silicon Valley area.

And as you know, I've been talking about the BuildQuest application I've been developing over actually the last couple of years. And a big part of this is what I'm trying to do — I'm trying to solve a problem from both sides. And here are kind of the key challenges or problems or uphill battles both the homeowners and the pros have.

Number one, a homeowner — and the idea here of this episode is for both, because I know there's a lot of design and construction professionals listening to this podcast, and I also know there's a lot of homeowners. And that's kind of the whole idea of my mission here is to kind of bridge that gap and help people with their projects, not only in the book that I wrote and the podcast that I have, but I'm trying to come up with an actual solution, something that people can actually use.

And keep in mind, my focus has been on the front end of a project — the planning, way before you break ground. Even way before, from you as the homeowner, before you even hire anybody, before you even call anybody. And then the flip side of that is to try to provide a solution for architects, designers, contractors that are not running around with their heads cut off, wasting time and money chasing projects, chasing homeowners that don't necessarily have complete focus.

So one of the biggest problems I've seen, and again over three decades of doing this, is when somebody walks in the door into one of my showrooms, they just have no idea. They're lost. They don't know where to start. They're very nervous, very concerned about who they're going to hire, what's important, what's not important. They don't necessarily have a focus, and they especially don't have a realistic budget or a budget at all. And nobody's even asked them about their budget as they've interacted with people.

So there's just a lot of hesitation and confusion. And really, before they even walk in the door, they didn't even really know where to start. And the consequence of that is they just start somewhere. And they pick up a phone, or they fill out one of these infamous forms online because they want to remodel their kitchen or they want to build a new home, and they start searching for people online that way — filling out these forms which are actually created by lead services, which we're going to talk about in a minute.

And this is where it starts — this lack of focus. And it's not a homeowner's fault, right? If they've never done anything like this before, they really don't have any idea. And they kind of go by word of mouth, hearsay. You know, my neighbor spent a million dollars on this project. My neighbor spent a hundred thousand dollars on that project. And they think that's what they're going to spend, irrespective of what they want. And they just start building all these delusions.

In the beginning part of my book, called the Discovery Series, I talk a lot about this and help homeowners understand what are the things they should be focusing on before they even pick up the phone. But they come in with this confused, concerned, paranoid set of delusions for a project. And it's our job as the design professionals to help them focus and zero in and ultimately build some kind of project brief to begin a project.

So that is the first problem. And then they start going down a path with somebody. They don't know if they should hire an architect or a contractor first. A lot of people start with calling a builder, a contractor. And I know that that is one path you can do, but ultimately you need somebody to design the project. They don't know who. They start talking with designers, residential designers, unqualified designers, drafts people, thinking they can get their plans drawn for five thousand dollars — which is a joke for a new custom home. And if they do get it for five thousand dollars, that's what you get — a piece of crap set of plans. And then what does that lead to? Just a variety, a multitude of problems.

So again, informing the customer is the mission here, so that when that phone does ring or that email does come in on the professional side, we have a homeowner here that has been taken down a journey, taken down a path to help them focus in.

And then on the other side of the coin here, what I'm hearing from a lot — and I personally have experienced this — there's these lead services, right, that are out there. And from the business-to-business side, and for you homeowners you should know this, there's these lead services, and there's a lot of them. And what they're trying to do is get a piece of the pie without doing really much work. They have these online forms. And you know, you've seen the common ones — Angie and Home Advisor is one, and then there's just more and more popping up all over the place. They're trying to get a piece of our pie, my pie.

And I'm going to be a little opinionated here on these, because I don't really appreciate them. Now, if I was maybe a brand new contractor — a young contractor starting out who doesn't have clients — I kind of get it. You might need to do a little bit of that. But your mission as a contractor or a new designer in the world, top of my business plan, is to get off of those platforms. And I'll tell you why.

Because you get these leads, and the qualification level of these leads is just horrific. And an architect or a designer or contractor could spend just hours and hours and hours — which means money and money and money — chasing around these leads for homeowners that just aren't prepared, aren't realistic. And they end up just wasting thousands and thousands of dollars.

And even if they do end up formally engaging with a client, a homeowner, to start a project, the lack of focus that the homeowners often have, the unrealistic budgets that homeowners often have, leads to a variety of problems before the ground is broken. And that is incorrect design paths to go on, not addressing the budget early enough to make sure that the budget is considered during the design.

All the way down to, if a responsible design pro actually asks the homeowner about their budget, are they really getting the right answer, the real answer? And then is it being discussed? And it's not the most comfortable discussion — I get it. But I know that at least in my mind, and I know a lot of others, when I first see a client walk in the door and they start talking about their project, the first thing I'm thinking of is, are they realistic? Do they have the money to do this project? Even though I might get paid to design this project, is it worth my time? Am I taking my time away from other qualified clients that are waiting for me in the wings?

And again, what's happened in this industry is we're getting fewer and fewer professional resources. And that is leading to why homeowners feel like they never called me back, or they didn't seem really interested in my project, or I can't find anybody to help me with my project. And a lot of it is because you aren't prepared. You're not sharing your real budget. You haven't done your research. You don't know what style you want. You don't know what rooms you want. You may think you want them, but has it really been thought out? And are you delivering something to an architect or designer that says that I'm a focused homeowner, ready to roll, ready to rock and roll on a project?

There's nothing better than focus for both sides of this journey. A designer's mission on day one is to understand and gain focus on who you are as a customer, what you want, what your style is, what your programming is on the project, what do you really want for your new home, or maybe it's a major renovation that you're doing. Their goal — I know in the back of their mind, maybe in the front of their mind — is I want focus. I want motivation. I want to be motivated to design this project for these people.

But the only way to do that is to understand a lot of these things. And if there's this lurking thing about, hi, I want a five-thousand-square-foot home in an upscale area, and then they're reading online that they can get it built for two hundred dollars a square foot — a million bucks — we're already way off the mark. And if nobody talks about that, that's a concern of the designer or the design-build company. The motivation starts to get undermined, and the lack of the quality of the service — it's not necessarily their fault, the pros' fault, but it can be too. It just changes the whole dynamic. And that's what I'm trying to tackle here.

So these lead services are really a problem. We've got a two-sided problem here. We have homeowners who just don't know what to do, don't know where to start, don't know where to go. We've got pros that have fatigue, basically, on running around in circles with a lot of potential clientele, paying for crappy leads.

I really want to hear about this from you guys out there. If I'm off base here, you tell me, and I would love to debate that with you and talk with you about that. Or if I'm on base here, I would like to hear what your experience has been and how we can maybe solve this problem. I'm already on a mission to do that.

And there's a lot of other problems. But keep in mind here that a big part of coming up with a solution is identifying the problems. And in my case, I've lived and breathed this through the trenches. I mean, I've been in the trenches over thirty years, and I know what we're faced with. And I know that one way, and the hardest way, is to properly plan a project out.

It's so easy to say, proper planning, you've got to plan your project. Well, what does that really mean? Does that mean that I just have to have the drawings done, right? Well yeah, but what about everything before that? The planning of a project begins with the homeowner, the customer. And the more focus — again, I'm going to say it a million times probably today — but the more focus they can achieve, the more focus the designers and the contractors will achieve, depending on what type of business model each one of them have.

So my focus, my mission right now is to provide a solution to this problem. I'm just going to walk you through it real quick. In all my past episodes, I know I've talked a lot about BuildQuest, this application I'm developing, and I keep saying that over and over again for over a year. And I just got off one of my latest development meetings, and we're really, really close to launching this thing. And it's really important to me.

This is not a tech guy identifying one single problem, coming up with one single answer. That's pretty easy to do. This is a home builder and a contractor operating a design-build business for many years trying to come up with a solution that I've lived and breathed every day. And I really want to build an alliance with a lot of the design and construction pros out there to help the homeowners. And I want to hear from the homeowners as we get closer to launching this application.

So anyway, here's where we're going with this. This application is called BuildQuest. And what I've done is I've developed a solution that is basically a journey. So a customer may have been thinking about a project for a month, a year, ten years, and they just got stuck. They really don't know where to go, like I said, or where to start. So what happens? Lack of focus. And they make a lot of mistakes from lack of focus.

So this application takes them through a one-time journey by asking a few questions to help them develop a plan. It's not designing their project for them. In other words, it's not creating actual plans and details. I know that AI is all over the place, and for some reason AI really seems to be quote-unquote attacking the architecture trade, the architecture practice. But I've got to tell you, I'm a firm believer that it may reshape what architects and designers do, but it's not going to replace them. There is — and maybe not in our lifetime anyway — but there is a tremendous, I mean tremendous, amount of value to an architect, a residential architect that's designed custom homes in the area you want to build for decades, right?

They have a ton of experience. They know the land. They know what's under the land. They know the planning and building departments. They have a really good sense of their profession, right? And so their job is going to be to take what we develop and get them head-started, get them fast-forwarded. Let the architects and the designers do their job and not spend a whole bunch of time trying to work through all of these homeowners and clients that are just all over the place. And a big one is the budget. And that's the big elephant in the room here. The big one is the budget.

I've done a ton of work on this to try to help that. Because there's nothing worse than a budget calculator online that says you're building here, yeah, the national average is one hundred seventy-five dollars and thirty-eight cents per square foot, so yeah, you're probably going to be about that for your home — which is a bunch of BS. And this is where homeowners already, right out of the chute, are delusional because they've seen that. Okay, well, maybe I'll add another fifty dollars a square foot. They're on Facebook groups looking at all these people saying, hey, I built my home for under a hundred dollars a square foot.

Okay, let's talk. Let's dig deeper. You did all the work yourself? All of the work yourself? How much is that worth? You know, I mean, there's just — it's just all over the place. And I'll admit, this solution I'm developing is for larger-scale projects, fully custom home projects, all the way up to the high-end projects. If you're remodeling a kitchen and bathroom, it even works too. But my mindset is for clientele that want to build a custom home. I want to provide them realistic solutions so that they can start the project, or maybe they decide not to start the project or defer the project because of what we take them through.

So anyway, there's four modules to this application. And the first one is called the ProjectProfile. And really what this is, is this is the homeowner developing a project brief themselves so that an architect can intake this project brief that they've created. That's the output of this whole thing — an architect can take in this project brief and they can interpret what they see and add it to their own project brief or use it as the project brief.

So the ProjectProfile — what we do here is we just ask the homeowner where they're planning to build. It could be as simple as a zip code, or it could be the actual site address. And then we ask them what project type they're doing — are they going to be doing a new construction or a remodel project? And what I'm doing right now is I'm holding back the remodel project because I'm watching the technology out there to be able to visualize. And I'm developing a visualization tool. And I know we see them all over the place on Instagram and socials and whatever. There's a million of them, and most of them, I'm finding out, have these great demo videos, but they really don't work well in the real world.

So I'm working on developing a visualization tool and also data capture for remodel projects. So that's going to be the version 1.5 probably. But you select your project type — so in this case it would be a new build. And then what it does — I've developed this system where I've identified specific areas of the United States. And of course I've used artificial intelligence to do this. And by the way, this application isn't all AI-based. This is somebody, like I said, with deep experience leveraging the technology, right, with my experience to develop a solution. I feel strongly about that. I'm not going to just throw out some crappy AI solution just to get clicks. That's not what I'm doing here.

So anyway, the idea here is that we will deliver to the user styles and themes that are relevant to their geographic area where they're building. And they can pick different styles and different themes to curate kind of their own style. And we'll first deliver to them the themes and styles that are relevant, like I said, to their area. But they can also browse all the other architectural styles that I've developed, and they can start creating their own style.

Then they can select a quality level. And it's based on lifestyle. Are you building your forever home, or is it just your beginner home? Do you want just kind of a middle-of-the-road custom home? And I use that in my budget formulation, right? And then they're able to curate their rooms and spaces — so the programming for the project. And we ask, at this stage of the game, kind of what size their home they want, what rooms and spaces do they want. Perhaps they want additional structures on the project. And we basically build a programming for the project.

And then we acknowledge that, and then we move into a new tool that I've developed on the same application called VisionSpec. And VisionSpec is a really interesting application because I know that people are fatigued and tired of scrolling through tons of images on Pinterest and Houzz and all these other ones out there and trying to save them and where do I save them and creating Google Sheets and files and random emails all over the place.

So what I've done is I've developed the Vision — and again I'm leveraging some technology here — where we're not looking at pictures of somebody else's house. We're looking at pictures of our own house or visualizing our own home. And then you're seeing pictures and images of all of your spaces that you've selected in the programming, the ProjectProfile aspect. And then I've developed tools in there where you can actually work in what we call the playground, where you can refine images, you can recreate images. You can ultimately create vision boards for each of your spaces or custom vision boards organized by however you want.

And with the designer in mind, what I've done is — and why I call it VisionSpec — is you're able to — let's just say, for example, a user, a homeowner, likes the tile on a particular backsplash or the entry beams or something. We can comment on that and we can tag it to different construction categories. And eventually, as you go through each of the rooms and the spaces, you can do all the tagging that you want. And then, for example, you can generate a vision board for all the tile on the project. Or you can generate a vision board for all of the cabinetry in a project by rooms and spaces.

And so that's a little bit deeper level, because keep in mind what I'm going to talk about in the next episode is how the professional can benefit from this or how they can collaborate with a homeowner. We're going to talk about that in a separate episode. But anyway, we're creating vision boards, right, so that we can ultimately share a collection of vision boards with design professionals and say, hey, we're the Smith family and we love this, and here's who we are, and this is where we are, and would you like to help?

So after you're done with the VisionSpec, you enter into your project hub, and now you're starting to see, quote-unquote, a dashboard of your project. And we call it the project hub, and you'll be able to enter, re-enter into the application there, and you'll be able to see everything that you've worked on over the months and maybe even years on your project as you continue to curate a project. And then when you're ready, you can launch it.

Now what we do is we'll ask you if you'd like to go into what we call the CostCompass. Now this is an interesting name. CostCompass is intentional, because we're not creating a construction estimate. We're not breaking it down by foundation, framing. I see other applications trying to do that. I just don't think it's accurate. But what I'm trying to do is provide a tool based on the project programming or the ProjectProfile and the quality levels and the vision ideas. And we use some technology to understand basically what you're trying to create here. And we develop a budget for the project.

lot of tools developed since: 1992

And what's really cool about the CostCompass budget feature is it's not just black and white. So once you arrive at the CostCompass feature, you're able to see a budget. And then we're going to ask you a few questions. Well, at first, actually, what we're going to do is we're going to ask you a few questions before you see the budget. We're going to ask you, how much do you think you want to invest in this project, this property? This is a big question we always ask clientele when they first come in, and a lot of people have a dollar amount in their mind, but either they don't share it, they're not confident with it. But we ask them, how much do you think you want to invest in this project?

Now keep in mind, we've already configured the project. We've already made selections. Now it's like, what were your expectations? And we ask that — what is your investment goal? Then we ask, do you have the land already? And how much have you invested in that land? What's the value of that land, and how much is your mortgage on that land? Or what's your mortgage on a property that you're planning to tear down and rebuild?

And then what we do after that, we present the project finances of the CostCompass. And it's really interesting, because what we're doing is we're comparing what people expected to what it's probably going to cost, or get really, really close to what it's going to cost. And this is kind of the big reveal, right? This is the big reveal, and this is where people go, whoa, okay. Well, now what? I don't want to spend that much money. Or, that looks great, let's move ahead. How often does that happen, right?

So they have options within the cost, the project finances area of the CostCompass, and they can look at their budget. And I'm actually working on the application right now — it's not live yet — and they can actually look at the breakdown by the land cost, the construction budget, the design fees, permits, a summary, and then even a provision allocation there.

So everybody talks about a hundred dollars a square foot, two hundred dollars a square foot. Does that include the land? Does that include all the design fees? Does that — what does that include? Does that include all the site work? I mean, what are we talking about here when everybody's blabbering all over the Internet about what they're spending?

So what's cool about this feature is you can go into the budget builder and you can break it open. You can see what I've allocated for your primary home, what I've allocated for — maybe you selected you wanted a basement, maybe you selected you wanted an ADU on the property. There's all kinds of things that you're going to be able to play with and see just right behind what we're doing, how we're coming up with the calculations.

And then what's really cool is you can either yourself or work with your design professional or construction professional — they can look at this and go, okay, let me look at what you think your budget is. Yeah, let's just work on this. You can create a new version. And what you do is you go in and you can tweak this thing to your heart's desire by changing the structure of the project, by the valuations of certain components that are calculating the budget. The two of you can work together to come up with a realistic budget before one pencil is put to paper, before one mouse is clicked on the software, before even one meeting — or maybe this one meeting — but before any more meetings and running around the valley trying to figure this out, we've got some kind of data to go off of, right? And have intelligent conversations about the project before anybody's wasting any time.

So you can create versions, which is a really cool feature, where you could adjust the scope of the project or the valuations or both, and try to basically kind of refine this. And then what's really cool is I have a feature on here that is what a CMA is — comparative market analysis. So what we do is we build in a tool for you as the homeowner, because this is what everybody asks me: is this worth investing in my neighborhood? Am I over-investing? Am I under-investing? What's my return on investment?

So we have a tool called Comparable Homes, and we have some technology built in which has a lot to do with what appraisers do. And again, it's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than people guessing. And what we do is we come up with an anticipated valuation of your project using standard appraisal principles with what's called the CMA feature, comparative market analysis feature. So this helps you make informed decisions.

And some people don't care. Some people say, I don't really care, this is my forever home. Or some people do care. They say, well, I want to sell this place in two years or five years after the kids are out of high school or whatever. And they can make informed decisions financially.

Then you move over to the financing tab, and you take a look at some typical construction loan calculations to understand what maybe your payments would be for a project and your monthly payments, your closing costs, all that kind of stuff. And it's pretty close to what eventually you're going to want to talk to a construction loan company to be able to really zero in. But it's enough to make informed decisions. So that's the financing tab.

And then at the end of that CostCompass feature, it's what we call the affordability tab. And you can just look at a summary of, am I over or under market? How much of value am I recovering? What is my monthly payment going to be if you're worried about that? And how much cash do I need to be able to build this project if you are financing?

So this is a piece — again, going from experience — people come in thinking they know what they want to spend. They have a vision and ideas, or sort of. They think they know what they want to spend. But now we're telling them what it's probably really going to cost and probably what the valuation of your home will be afterwards. So that now you can make informed decisions before you start designing the five thousand — maybe you only need to be a four-thousand-square-foot house. Maybe it's a single story, not a two-story. Maybe you won't have a basement, because you don't want to spend three million. You want to spend one million, two million, whatever it is. So that's the CostCompass feature. And of course it's a lot more involved than that. But this is what I think everybody cares about.

And then the last feature is called ProQuest. And ProQuest is really cool. ProQuest is where you as the homeowner are basically developing a project brief. And those on the other end of that will understand what that is. But you're sharing who you are, you're sharing your project details, you're creating your own design statement. And it literally takes a minute to go through because we've already populated a lot of this for you from all the previous input. And then we're going to provide options for you to start engaging with professionals.

So that's the idea of BuildQuest. And then a couple other things involved in this is in the application there's a navigator, a little compass symbol everywhere. And if you get stuck or confused or want more information, you'll be able to tap on the compass and either I will be there, or I'll have one of my articles there where you could learn about certain aspects of it or get direction from me. So we'll have links and files and that kind of stuff.

So what we're going to talk about in the next episode is when you actually tap the button to ask if a design or construction professional might be interested in the project, we're going to talk about what they see on the other end when that pops into their email. And why that's so important.

Because one thing I want you to understand is this BuildQuest application is for serious homeowners that are so serious that they're the ones paying for this service. You are the one as a homeowner paying for this service. How much is it? I'm still working on that. But let's put it this way — it'll probably be point zero zero zero one percent, whatever, of what you're going to invest in this property. And I'm willing to bet a lot that it'll save you a ton of money by having a focused direction on a project so that your design team's not running all over, going crazy, spending your money trying to figure things out. And the pros on their side are going to feel really motivated and be the most effective and productive in the creation of your home.

It's almost like the cost of this thing is sort of irrelevant for people planning a project. And also think about this — everything I talked about, you could probably go through in a couple minutes, right? Maybe five minutes. If you really enjoy the VisionSpec and the playground with your images, you'll spend longer. But you can always go back to those and start working on that. And once you start working with a professional linked to the system, you'll be able to work with them too.

So that's the idea here, is that you, the homeowner, are going to subscribe to this for the duration of your project. And quite frankly, the professionals don't pay for this. It's for them to be able to — how can I say it? They're tired. They're tired of a lot of things, but they're tired of those crappy lead services. They're tired of homeowners that are just unrealistic. And I want the pros to know I've got your back on this too. I've got both backs. Isn't that great? So I've got both backs here. And at least that's what I'm trying to do. And the more feedback I can get, the better for it, because that's really my mission here, is to develop an application that it's almost like a big leapfrog application where we just get over all those humps and just start fresh.

And for the pros out there, I mean, this could be the kind of thing, I think, where you could use it as an onboarding tool. Where you could just say, if somebody calls in and says, hey, I think I want to build a five-thousand-square-foot house, I'm in Austin, Texas, and can you help me? And you're like, well, tell me more. And you start feeling everybody out and you say, I'll tell you what — let me just send you a link over to BuildQuest. You guys go through that process and you'll find me on there. And then when you're ready, tap on me and let's talk about it. That'll give me a much better idea what you're looking for, and let's talk about it before we dig in deep. I think that would be the best thing to do.

So start everybody, start thinking about this, because I really want to hear from everybody. And you can do that through the email in the show notes. And I think what I'm probably going to do after I get some of this more information out is set up maybe a little demo of what I'm doing. But I also want you to know that at buildquest.co there's a little form there that you can fill out. You can check a box whether you're a homeowner or a designer or construction pro, and you can send it in. And I'm just starting to collect — and I've got a lot already, probably too many, but I've got a lot of names of people that may want to be one of my early advanced users to give me feedback. So that'll be what's called a private invite.

And it will be the kind of thing where you guys can look at it and provide me feedback and use the tool. And I'm going to pick maybe twenty to fifty people across the nation and all different levels — homeowners, architects, designers, interior designers, contractors, home builders. And then I'm going to be building a community after we launch. I'm going to be building a community, a private community, so we can all talk. We're not going to be in Facebook groups. That's the last, absolute last thing I will ever do. But we'll have a private community so both on the pro side and the homeowner side, us as pros can talk about things and the homeowners can talk about things, and then everybody can talk about things together through a crossover between the communities.

But that's coming next. So anyway, that's what I have for you today. I'm really excited about it. I would love to hear from you. You can see my email in the show notes, like I said. You can fill out the form. And even at the beginning of this episode, you probably heard a phone number that you could even call and leave me a message. And then I would love to hear from everybody about the topics they want to talk about, maybe even what they think about what I'm talking about in this application, and what they think I should add or subtract.

And then like I said, the next episode is going to be specifically for the professionals. But it's okay that the homeowners hear this, because I want full transparency here so they can understand the back end, the inner workings of what these guys do, these guys and gals do, whether you're a designer or contractor or whatever. And then there's going to be more appreciation for what goes on behind the scenes.

So that's what I have, everybody, for you today. A little off the rails from my normal curriculum of everything I've been trying to teach, but I just felt compelled to let you know, because I keep blabbering on about this BuildQuest application and I wanted to share a little bit more. So that's what I have for you today. I'm Bill Reid, your home building coach. And remember, I'm here to enlighten, empower, and protect you. Let's go make it happen.