ProQuest: Connecting Homeowners with Design & Build Pros

Okay, everybody, I'm back after our previous episode, where I really started to dig in deep into the BuildQuest application that I'm in the middle of developing. Just a real quick recap — the idea here was to share a little bit more details with you about what's happening with this application because it's really turning into something special. The past episode I talked about what this application really is.

It's designed to help homeowners build what's called a project brief, which is what a lot of architects and designers and sometimes even contractors that offer design-build are looking for from a client. They're looking for a focused client that understands their overall goals and styles and even the budget.

The last module of this application is called ProQuest. By the time a client gets to ProQuest, they've gone through the project profile, which is the project programming that a lot of designers depend on, then the vision spec feature, which is where a lot of the visualization and library building a homeowner can do to create their own unique style of all the rooms that they plan to have in their home. And then we went through the cost compass feature, which is probably the keystone of this entire application, which is where the budget gets addressed, which is probably one of the biggest hurdles any of us deal with in dealing with homeowners.

All you homeowners out there, I want you to listen to this episode too, because this is really geared to the design and construction professionals. Because this is where the value really closes the loop. This last step in the process that you as a homeowner will take is called ProQuest. And what this is, is a way for you to be able to easily share your story, your journey that you've taken on BuildQuest to design and construction professionals so they can really get a quick understanding of who you are.

By the time you get to this point, the idea is for you to be a focused, intelligent, informed, educated homeowner that has a solid set of expectations, at least in your mind, and then the professionals can help you. So I'm going to review a little bit of the ProQuest on the homeowner side, and then we're going to talk about what the professionals see on their side.

Once you enter the ProQuest feature, you have two ways that you're going to be able to start looking for professionals for your project. One of the ways you're going to be able to do this is use deep search tools that are based on your project brief, based on your project programming, your style, the quality level you think you're wanting to achieve. And we serve up what we think are the relevant design and construction professionals in your specific region that you're building in. And then the other option you have is you can invite someone that you know. You'll have two ways to look at this. You'll be served up a list of builders and designers that are on the platform or are going to be invited to the platform. And then you can also just enter in your own contractor or own designer that you would like to join.

For the construction and design pros out there, this is a little bit different than what you've been used to and probably tired of, which is this isn't a lead service. This isn't you paying for leads being fed to you and all this stuff. We at BuildQuest stay out of the middle of that, and that's because I come from the world of design and construction. And I'm frankly quite tired of those type of services. So the idea here is this is for serious homeowners, and they're actually paying for this service, which equates to a very negligible amount of their project and provides a heck of a lot of value.

Once a homeowner, you as the homeowner, taps on explore your professionals, then I'll have a little intro there to tell you about the options that you have. And you have the options to either hire a designer, hire a builder, contractor, or hire a design-build company, and there's a difference between all of those. So there's a little bit of educational information if you're not aware, and that's called the navigator panel in the application that slides in and talks to you a little bit. And you can also ask Quinn, which is an agent that I've built with all of the knowledge base that I have and that others have, so you can ask some questions there too if you'd like.

You can select your designers and let's say you save a couple designers and you now look at your brief. Over the course of the previous few minutes, you've gone through those previous modules. And you now review your brief. And this is called the project brief. And what it is, think about yourself creating a report. You've created an assembly of all the information that a design professional is going to see on the other end. And this is going to include of course you and your name, your property information if you've decided to share it, you have your family information, which is the occupants basically of your new home. And this is important because a lot of design pros really want to understand who they're designing for — not just you, but all of the occupants now and maybe even into the future.

And then we also have a personal profile that we've already generated for you from the things we've learned about you, but you have to go in there if you'd like and revise that information so that you can share your lifestyle, your personal profile, I call it. You don't have to get too personal, but the idea is you're going to be sharing information like, we both work at home, Johnny and Lisa play soccer and we have big holiday events, we entertain with business, et cetera, et cetera. So you're trying to share as much as you can because what you're trying to do here is get off to a rock solid start with your design professional and they will really appreciate it. And of course they have their own processes too. This could just be a project brief that they use completely or they'll use it just to get them started because they all have their own methods and their own questions that they like to ask. But the idea here is to get a really good start.

So we're sharing the property, the age of the property, if it's a remodel project, and the criteria that you selected when you were in the project profile and vision spec steps, which is the size of the home you like, the room configurations that you like, which is also called programming, and how many square feet and the style that you've picked, because if you listened to the previous episode, we've recommended certain architectural styles to you based on the region that you're building in. You've picked one of those, or you've picked any style you want. You could build a colonial house in the mountains if you want, but that's not usually the case.

And then you get into the property profile, and then you get into what is driving the project. What are some of your primary goals? Why you're doing this, what are some of the problems you're trying to solve. And this is all pre-generated for you that you can then edit. We talk about the design direction and what's happened here is we've learned a little bit about your style and we have two columns here. One of them is all the things that you really love and some of the things that you didn't like when you were creating your vision spec studio of your rooms. For example, you may have downvoted the gloss white cabinets or you may have upvoted the white oak style cabinets or something to that effect. And we start to learn and what you're doing during the vision spec process is you're building your own unique style DNA.

And then during the vision spec process, you've created vision boards for each of your rooms and you're sharing your vision boards with your potential designers and contractors so they can get a really good sense of your style for each individual room. And then you talk a little bit about your timing and when you're planning to do the project. And then you have the ability to upload documents. And this is a big one.

Your budget that you've created in cost compass is right there in front of you. And what you can do is you can share a budget range with your potential prospective design professionals. And you have the option to share it or not. And I recommend you share it because this is where the rubber really hits the road. There's always a lot of big aspirations for a project. And it's not uncommon for homeowners to have unrealistic budgets for projects. In fact, I'm going to say it's pretty common. So you can share your budget range. You've built a budget in Cost Compass in a lot more detail. And then you can share the budget range and you'll be able to have the option to share all the details if you'd like, but at least the people on the other end are seeing some kind of investment goal budget range that you're thinking about. So that is a big part of what you're doing.

And then as a homeowner, you just review your project brief and you type a letter to your prospects that have already been generated for you and you can edit it. Otherwise, let's say you've selected two architectural designers that you want to invite to the project. You send those two letters to them and they receive on their end, they receive an email notification with a link to your project brief and they can make a decision whether they want to accept your invitation and look at the project or they can decline it and we monitor that to see what professionals are interested in our application.

And just keep in mind that the design and construction pros aren't paying for this service. This is a bridge building application for you as the homeowner because you are the ones in need of these services. And I'm a firm believer that the best quality companies out there don't pay for lead services. So we don't want to get in the middle of that.

Once a professional responds to you, you get a notification in the application and they can message you and ask further questions. They could ask to meet with you either in your home or your office, or they could even review your budget or they could even create their own budget based on the criteria that you've provided them. So visualize yourself getting a message — we'll just use an example, Alvarez Building Company, for example. Let's say you already had your plans from a previous experience with an architect or designer and you sent the plans to get estimates. They can take a look at your plans and your budget, and then they can if they like, they can open up the cost budgeting tool.

And they can review yours and they can review theirs, and you can open up what they've sent you, and you can take a look at what they think your project should budget out at. Now remember, this is not a construction estimating tool. That comes way later once all of the final plans and details are done. This is an interaction between homeowner and professional to make sure that we're on the same page or at least close with budgeting before either party spends all kinds of time and money generating actual construction estimates.

So in this case, Alvarez Building sent back what they think you should be budgeting for the project before they did any construction estimating. It's important for a homeowner to know that in order for a construction company to provide an accurate, dependable estimate, they need to spend anywhere from 40 to 400 hours — I'm not kidding — on generating a proposal for a custom home project. So it's in their best interest to make sure that you're on the right track. It's in your best interest to make sure you're on the right track. Otherwise you could spend a lot of time and money and get nowhere.

So anyway, you as the homeowner can tap on their notification and take a look at their budgets. If a designer has sent in their cost, you can see their cost too if you've been inquiring about architectural designers. So usually you're searching for designers first and then you're searching for builders second. But sometimes people originate their searches through builders but ultimately you end up circling back to architects or designers to get you started.

So that is the idea from the homeowner side. And once you engage with the professional and you make a decision, then you just simply declare that they're your professional and everybody else gets archived away. And then you're on your own to work with them. So BuildQuest doesn't get in the middle of all of your relationships and all your things. We back out and then during some of the coming versions of BuildQuest we'll be able to help you manage the budgeting process and the costing process and whatnot. But that's going to come down in probably version two and three.

So that's the idea — to have a homeowner focused, to set realistic expectations, to be able to see their project at least visually so they can have some solid inspiration. We're not designing a project for a homeowner. Architects and designers will always be there to do that. But we're going to get everybody collected together on a solid foundation to start the project. And if the budgets don't align, that's your time. That's your time to revise the budget, revise the scope, do whatever you need to do to collaborate with the people that you're talking to to help you with your project before you actually dive in. And ideally you do a little bit of this before you go out and buy that piece of property or you buy that house that you want to demolish and tear down. This is something that you should go through before you make any large financial commitments. A lot of mistakes are being made out there by homeowners with false hopes. So that's the idea behind the homeowner side.

Now, what we're going to do next is we're going to go onto the pro side, and I'll be talking directly to the professionals so you can get a little bit of a sense of what it looks like on your end. And then I would love to hear some feedback. So let's go ahead and move into that side.

Okay, now from the pro side. When a homeowner works through their journey through BuildQuest and they tap on the ProQuest and they find you, and they decide to save you and invite you, you're going to get an email through BuildQuest. And this is what I'm a little nervous about because I don't want the pros out there to be thinking that this is just another lead service that you have to pay for. Like I've said a few times, we're trying to empower the homeowner. The homeowner is serious enough to actually be subscribing to the service.

So it's going to be an email that comes from the homeowner that's an introductory message and then a link to their project brief that you can then look at and then make a decision on your own. And then we talk about what BuildQuest is. If you want to learn more about BuildQuest, you can tap on that and I talk a little bit about what BuildQuest is. But keep in mind my background is design and construction in the residential world in Silicon Valley. And I'm trying to have both backs here — trying to provide this great tool for homeowners that you as the professional can benefit from. And both sides can benefit from it because there's so much more focus that's accomplished. There's so much realistic expectations that are accomplished is my goal to just weed out and just get rid of all of that baloney that happens that stems from an uninformed homeowner. And it's not their fault. They don't necessarily know where to start, what to do, who to call.

And then on the pro side, there's a lot of the stuff that's worked out so that just intelligent conversations can just immediately take place about the scope of the project, the style of the project, and the ultimate budget of the project. And these conversations can happen right then and there before anything starts happening. And hopefully the homeowner's done this before they've actually invested in any kind of property, or if they already have a property, then so be it. But that's something that I'm trying to encourage homeowners to do.

So what happens is you just get this — it just looks like an email coming in from a homeowner because that's what it is. It just happens to be sent through BuildQuest because that's the platform that they're on. And then what you can do is you can either accept their invitation and view the project or you can decline it. It's up to you. There's no obligation for you to accept and view the project. And then when you accept it, you'll be able to see the homeowner's project brief and they'll be notified that you've accepted the invitation so that they know that you're interested or they'll be notified if you've declined. And that's fine either way, if you decide to decline, at least the homeowner knows that they don't need to continue trying to hunt you down.

So anyway, you're looking at the same brief that they generated on their end, and you scroll through it and you read about them. You can investigate the property right there. We have a property map location with some of the zoning regulations and the lot area and the parcel number and the description of the existing property. You get to learn a little bit about what their requirements are, the owner's style, the design direction. You can learn about the occupants of the home, just like I talked about on the homeowner side. You can see all of their vision boards that they've created.

And in the vision board tool, they've either curated images of their own. So just real quick in the vision spec application, we're generating images specific to the style, location, and criteria that they've entered. So these aren't just random pictures. These are images that are generated. And then they've curated them. They've gone in and edited them and adjusted them. They've even uploaded maybe some of their own images. They've also connected their Pinterest boards if they have Pinterest boards for each of their rooms or their project or whatever. So you're going to get a sense of their style, you'll get a sense of their quality level because they've been asked that question during the journey of the project profile. You should have a really good sense of who these people are, what they want, and how much they want to spend.

And then you can just continue on through there and then you can respond. So if you're interested, you can respond, and by responding, you just tap respond and then what we're going to ask you to do is just claim your profile because what we do is we just auto-generate a profile for you based on the publicly available information such as your website, maybe your socials, and then we just create a profile for you. And the reason I did that is because when you have other applications out there that are trying to get you sucked in, they want you to spend hours creating your profile and uploading your portfolio and doing all these things. And I got tired of that as a builder. And so I quit doing it.

So the idea here is it gets you started at least. You can go in and create and embellish on your profile and you probably should. But if you're not already in the family, the BuildQuest family, you just check a few boxes of the services you provide, the areas that you work, the zip codes that you work in. And then you have two options here.

So what happens is you're offered the foundation package we call it or the foundation subscription and it's free to you and this is really all you really need in order to engage with clientele and communicate back and forth and talk with them about budgets and everything. And so you can just claim that as your package. Now we will have an option called the Pro Studio option where you can actually use the entire application yourself with your own projects. That's not a necessity. You don't need to do that.

This would be for design studios, architectural studios, design-build companies that want to use it almost like an onboarding tool by taking a homeowner through the journey. Or back in the foundation model, you just say, hey, why don't you go to BuildQuest first, fill out the information, tap on my name, and I'll get a notification and I'll be glad to review your project.

So keep in mind, again, coming from experience, people call in and they say, hey, I want to build a five thousand square foot home and I want to start tomorrow and I know everything I want and I want the best for the least amount of price and yeah, you just get all these crazy questions, right? And as you know, you can waste a ton of time as a professional and homeowners you need to know that asking a design or construction person to spend hours and hours and hours of their time with you when you don't have realistic expectations, that's just not fair. This is what I'm trying to solve, right?

So for you as a pro on that side, if you have a client that calls in and has a lot of aspirations and they're not familiar with BuildQuest, you can actually send them a link to the application. They can sign up for it and you as the homeowner pay for it. And that right there is a qualifier to find out how serious a client is. And then they can go ahead and go through the journey within minutes, and then they can send you the link. Sometimes it will take longer than minutes if they really want to play around in the Vision Spec playground and create images and a lot of images and whatnot. But regardless, they can send it back to you and say, okay, here's who we are.

And one of those steps, like I've mentioned, is a budgeting aspect, which is through the cost compass module. So after a user has created the criteria for the project, it generates a budget. And it's based on a lot of different factors. A lot of it's based on my own personal experience and all the databases of projects that I have factored in with a lot of other components out there to create a much more realistic budget than some of these crazy numbers you hear out there online, like a hundred dollars a square foot, even two hundred dollars a square foot to build a new custom home.

So that's the idea. You claim what package you want to be on. You can try the Pro Studio for a 30-day trial, and that's where you can have full use of the application. You could eventually have multiple projects in the application. You can create your own styles within each project, and you can apply that style to different projects. So if you have a design studio or design-build and you have a particular product that you want to build in the system, you can then get that as a head start to onboard a new client with some of the same styles and configurations that you're known for, you're famous for.

So that's the idea. You claim your package and then you go into what's called the response environment. And this is where you have the option as a pro to say, well, I want to ask them some more questions. Or I want to suggest a call or a visit. A lot of pros like to make sure they can engage personally with the owner of the project first, maybe even a site visit or a video call or a phone call and get to know them a little bit. Or you can basically say, no, this project isn't for me, I'm sorry. And you can message them at that point and at least they know you can do that.

And as you scroll down to this response environment here you can see their budget range that they've shared and then you have two options here. You can open up the budget builder tool that they used. It slides in, and you can see the tool I built for you to at least come up with a budget that you think would be reasonable for all the criteria. So the criteria that is in there is what the homeowner created, the primary home with the amount of square footage, the accessory structures that they wanted. There's all of the design fees and how they're calculated. And you as the pro can go in and adjust all of these numbers.

Like right now, for example, I have it defaulted as architectural design fees are commonly around six percent of the anticipated budget. It can range all the way up to ten and twelve percent of the budget depending on the nature of the project. So you as a design professional in that example can go and adjust that percentage. Even though you may provide proposals in a different way, such as hourly or fixed price, this is at least a way for you to be able to convey back to them that your architectural fees will be X amount. Your consultant's fees will probably be around this much. Your interior design fees are X amount. You should expect this much for the permits. You should expect this much as a provision or a contingency for your project to make sure that you're thinking about the budget accurately.

And then like I said before, you can go in and modify the values of the structure costs from a construction budget standpoint. So whether you're a builder or you're a design professional, you can go in and modify these numbers to create a budget yourself. And then you have the option to actually tap it and share with them so they can see what your perspective of the budget is. And as you know, if you've been doing this a while, there's usually a gap there between what the homeowner expected and what the reality is. And again, keep in mind, this is just a budgetary exercise. This is not a construction estimate.

Or if you'd like, you have the option just to drop in a dollar amount. So you can work on the budget yourself, or you could just type in a dollar amount because you think a five thousand square foot home is going to cost them three million dollars. You can just type that in, depending how much time you want to invest in the project. So that's how this works — you go through this response and once you tap and send it, they actually receive it on their end and they can see your responses with questions, with declining it, or with your actual budgets, or you may have asked for an invite to a meeting. And after your meeting, you can actually return back to the application and then refine the budget.

So you could go meet with them, talk with them, get a really good sense of them and their goals, maybe walk the site. Because as you know, we'll never be able to pin everything down, especially site work, utility work, civil work, all that stuff. It just depends on the site. So you can get a little bit more sense of what you need to do in order to provide them a refined budget. And in the budgeting tool, you have the ability to add your own line items. So for example, you might want to add the demolition costs specifically to demolish the entire structure, or the three hundred foot underground utilities that have to be run. You could provide an estimate, a budget number for them for that, because these are all things that people don't think about.

So that is the idea. We're not trying to replace your processes and your systems. We're just trying to create this tool so that when you are doing that, you're not wasting your time. So that is the idea. So from the homeowner's perspective, you need to understand that the professional really needs to be motivated. And if they're going to be motivated, their goal is to understand who you are, what you want to spend, what style you like, so they can feel motivated to accept the invitation and invest the time it takes to work with you on your project.

So then you as a pro have a very simple dashboard. You just have all of your clients that are on there and you have the different states that they're in, whether you've accepted their invitation, whether you've responded to their invitation, whether you've sent a budget. And then what happens is on the homeowner side they receive your notifications and just depending on the dynamic of the relationship, they have the option to select you as their architect or their builder to work with. And then you start working with them formally within your own process.

So we're not trying to be a construction management system. We're not trying to design homes here because that's what you guys do as pros. We're just protecting both of you, the homeowners and the pros. We're trying to protect everybody so that when you actually do formally engage with them, you've just got a lot of that foundation built and a lot of that stuff behind you so that you can then start working with them closely.

So that is the high-level look at the ProQuest module of the BuildQuest application I'm developing. Right now we've developed the project profile, the vision spec, and the cost compass modules of BuildQuest. We're right now developing the ProQuest. And if there is anybody out there in the world that is a design and construction pro listening or even a homeowner listening of other things I've said today, and you see an opportunity for us to improve even what we're already doing, things to add, things to subtract, I would really enjoy any kind of feedback and my email address would be in the show notes of the podcast episode but I'll give it to you here anyway. It's wwreid at the awakened homeowner dot com.

And you could email me or even better if you're a person who'd love to join on the podcast and become a guest and talk about this stuff. I've already got a nice group of people coming up that we're going to be talking with in the next upcoming episodes. I have an architect online. I have a builder in the Northwest coming in to talk about a lot of this stuff. And I have another company that's doing something similar to what I'm doing. There's a lot of people out there on the same mission that I am on to help people. And it's interesting because a lot of where this is coming from is it's coming from people like home builders and contractors and architects and designers. It's coming from them because they are the ones that have to deal with these situations and want to help people because if they help homeowners gain more focus, become more educated, it just helps them too because when they're building the homes, when they're designing the homes, the experience is just so much better.

So that's what's going on here. And I'm not the only one doing it. But I feel like I've got a really good grip on it and we're so close. So anyway, everybody, I'm Bill Reid, your home building coach, and I hope you enjoyed this two episode series of BuildQuest. And we're just getting going here. But as you know, I'm always here to enlighten, empower, and protect you. Let's go make it happen.