Builders Update CEO Bill Gaul on Fixing New-Construction Search

Shoppers can pull up nearly every resale home in a market from a single search. New construction is different, and that gap shapes what buyers and agents can actually see. Unlike resale, new-construction inventory tends to live in many separate places. Each builder generally markets its own homes on its own website, which means a buyer comparing options may need to visit a string of sites one at a time. “You don’t want to go to this builder’s site, then that builder’s site, then another,” says Bill Gaul, CEO of Builders Update and chair of the RESO Data Dictionary New Construction Subcommittee. Individual builder sites also vary in what they show, and not all of them list current pricing or availability.

Gaul compares the fix to how car shopping changed. Buyers once drove across town from one dealership to the next; then dealers clustered along a single stretch, and the search got faster. “They’re all next to each other now, and it just accelerates the process,” he says. Builders Update aims to do the same for new homes, pulling inventory from many builders into one place so a buyer can enter a few 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. A buyer sees the home that fits the criteria, not only the one with the largest marketing budget.

Pulling listings together is only useful if the information is current. New-construction details change quickly: a home moves from framing to finishing, a price updates, a status shifts from available to sold. Data that has been passed from system to system can be hard to date, a little like leftovers in a rental refrigerator that no one can quite vouch for. Builders Update takes data directly from builders and time-stamps every listing at its last update, which Gaul says is part of the company’s patent, so an agent can see exactly how recent the information is. The scale has grown alongside the approach. The platform is now used by more than 875,000 agents nationwide. For buyers and agents, the practical payoff is simple: finding new construction has long meant piecing together a picture from many sources, and bringing that inventory into one current, searchable place, Gaul argues, is what lets people compare real options and act on them with confidence.