Buyers searching for a new-construction home face a fundamentally different experience than those shopping for resale properties. While resale listings are aggregated in centralized databases, new-construction inventory is scattered across individual builder websites, forcing buyers to visit multiple sites one at a time. This fragmentation limits comparison shopping and can obscure available options, according to Bill Gaul, CEO of Builders Update and chair of the RESO Data Dictionary New Construction Subcommittee.
“You don’t want to go to this builder’s site, then that builder’s site, then another,” Gaul said. Individual builder sites also vary in what they display, and not all list current pricing or availability. The result is a market where buyers may miss homes that fit their criteria simply because those homes are listed on a site they didn’t visit.
Gaul compares the solution to how car shopping evolved. Buyers once drove from one dealership to another across town; then dealers clustered along a single stretch, accelerating the search. “They’re all next to each other now, and it just accelerates the process,” he said. Builders Update aims to do the same for new homes by pulling inventory from many builders into one searchable platform. A buyer can enter parameters such as a three-bedroom, two-bath home in a given zip code and price range and see matches across builders at once. One effect, Gaul notes, is that a small builder putting up ten homes a year can appear alongside a large national builder for the same search, giving buyers access to homes that fit their criteria rather than only those with the largest marketing budgets.
Aggregation alone is insufficient without current data. New-construction details change quickly: a home moves from framing to finishing, a price updates, or a status shifts from available to sold. Data passed from system to system can be hard to date. Builders Update takes data directly from builders and time-stamps every listing at its last update—a feature Gaul says is part of the company’s patent—so agents can see exactly how recent the information is.
The platform is now used by more than 875,000 agents nationwide. For buyers and agents, the practical payoff is significant: finding new construction has long meant piecing together a picture from many sources. Bringing that inventory into one current, searchable place, Gaul argues, lets people compare real options and act with confidence. As the housing market continues to grapple with tight inventory, tools that make new-construction data more accessible and transparent could play a critical role in helping buyers navigate an otherwise opaque segment. For more information, visit www.buildersupdate.com.
