Kevin Brandon, Vice President of Higharc, discusses the evolution of home building technology, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and much more in this episode of the Epcon Experts Podcast.
“Higharc is unique in that it’s a connected platform, and it’s built on a living building model. Everything – the plan, the options, the pricing, the permit sets – it all flows from one source of truth on a cloud-based, modern software. You can design, you can sell, you can build homes, you can do it faster with less risk and connect to your teams in real time. And in doing so, it replaces dozens of disconnected tools and spreadsheets. I think that’s really the heart of what we do.”
Host: Kevin, welcome to the Epcon Experts Podcast.
Kevin Brandon of Higharc: Thanks Rob, it’s good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Host: Great to have you. I’d like to start out with something simple. Let’s talk about where technology is right now, especially as it relates to the home building industry. What trends are you seeing? What’s going on out there that home buyers and builders need to be paying attention to?
Kevin: Yeah, cool. There’s a lot of places to go with that, I think. It’s the simple question. Boy, you could go a lot of places with trends in home building technology right now.
Host: Yeah, I started out with something simple.
Kevin: That’s right. This is interesting because, you know, if we look at what’s historically happened, it’s prefab. And that’s what we’ve seen in home building for a long time is people really trying to lean into that. And I’m seeing a shift from hardware bets like prefabrication to streamlining.
The manual workflows that really sit at the core of home building like design, marketing and sales, estimating and pricing, permitting, this stuff that really is at the heart of the business.
And increasingly what we’re seeing is builders are looking at things that are a little bit less flashy, and they’re looking at adopting connected platforms that eliminate rework, that speed up the things that we already know that are really important to home building. Like, how do I get a community to market fast? How do I standardize the way that we scale across different communities in our plans? And so it’s really, again, less about flashy technology and these big solves to about just transforming core business operations.
Host: Coming from various industries and coming over into home building, I noticed there was a lack of adoption of technology. Homes have very much been built the same way and marketed and sold the same way for 60 years. And then virtual tours and renderings and things started to evolve. But not nearly as fast as they were happening in other industries.
I would agree with you. I see that escalation that things are speeding up and it’s starting to become more prevalent within the industry as a whole. How many years has Higharc been around?
Kevin: Higharc’s been around since 2018. So a little bit longer than I think some people realize, but not that long relative to the industry. That’s for sure.
Host: So talk to me about Higharc. Who is Higharc? What do you do? What were the motivations behind the launching of the company and the platforms that you guys have developed?
Kevin: I’ll try and tell Marc’s story a little bit if I can because I think it’s an interesting point and I’ll try and do it justice because I’m telling it on his behalf.
Our CEO, Marc Minor, came from 3D printing. And he was building his and his family’s custom home and witnessed firsthand how the process was inefficient and expensive and everything from the land surveys to the design of the home to the way that materials were procured, you name it.
He started doing research on how automation and the principles of manufacturing could be applied to home building. And through that research, he found a white paper by a guy named Michael Bergin. You know Michael, as well. He’s one of our co-founders of which there are four.
And through those conversations and the reading of that white paper, Michael led design automation research at Autodesk for many, many years, together they set out to reinvent how homes are designed and built. And ultimately to make them more affordable, more efficient to have a better experience, not just for the builder, but for the buyer as well.
Host: Having met Marc and Michael and knowing their backgrounds and the various types of businesses they’ve been in, it’s so impressive to me.
I’ve got a technology background as well, worked in software development and a lot of forward-thinking technology [companies]. And to meet the people in your company and companies like yours that are taking place in the home building industry, I think is really inspiring. The future is ahead for the entire industry.
Michael, having experience with NASA and the things that he’s done there as well, with space exploration. And I’m sitting here going, what is a home buyer thinking when they’re thinking about technology in home building? When you’ve got people who worked for NASA, helping to send modules into space and to other planets, and now they’re trying to help visualize and bring efficiencies to the home building process.
And would you agree that it’s about not only visualizing a home, but constructing it more efficiently and then bringing costs down ultimately?
Kevin: 100%. I think this is a great point. I love that you talked about the people here. We have these really smart people that have to do this complex coding and they have to think about homes. But I think what was most impressive about the way that they founded this company was the first hires were home builders, were people that come from home building.
In fact, right now, it’s not half, but there’s a large percentage of our company that comes from home building. And so our folks who thought very broadly about how this industry could be transformed sat next to people that came from the industry to think practically about how that could be built and done to, to your point, reduce costs, to make it more efficient.
We see people get a little bit far sometimes off the rails and start designing something that is not really practical for the application. And I think we’ve done a good job of balancing those two.
Host: I think that’s one of the things that appealed to me the most when I first saw what you do. Having been with Epcon for as many years as I have, I noticed there was disjointed technology solutions. That there were things that helped with marketing and there were things that helped with maybe sales and construction. But there was nothing that bridged the gap, that took you from first introduction of a product or home to a buyer and then took them until the fact that they actually owned the home.
It was kind of what I call the single source of truth. And so you’re always dealing with the same platform from beginning to end. That’s something that I would like to help our company bring to our buyers. I’d love to hear from you, walk me through what your platform does, how the technology works and the motivations behind it.
Kevin: I appreciate that. I mean, in particular, Epcon has been a fantastic partner for us. You guys embody what it is to be forward thinking and be innovative and to look for technology that helps to move the industry forward.
I’ll take a little bit of liberty with your question. It’s interesting, we follow these stats. You can go back and look really around 1950. And you can see trends in productivity, per employee, productivity across an industry. And things like manufacturing and automotive, you see as technology and software really started being adopted in those industries, their productivity has increased pretty meaningfully over time.
And unfortunately in home building, you actually see the opposite where productivity, by and large, has actually decreased since the ‘50s. And it’s not to say that this is the only reason, but it’s an interesting parallel that in this space, on average, home builders invest like one one thousandth of one percent of revenue into software and technology where in these other comparable spaces it’s more like three to five percent but the productivity gains have been very considerable.
You’re right to say that there is technology out there. Most of it is what we call “point solutions.” It points at a specific problem or issue or department. Autodesk is the big giant that’s out there that points at mostly design, architecture and drafting. And there’s different technologies for sales, marketing, purchasing, estimating, you name it.
Higharc is unique in that it’s a connected platform, and it’s built on a living building model. Everything – the plan, the options, the pricing, the permit sets – it all flows from one source of truth on a cloud-based, modern software. You can design, you can sell, you can build homes, you can do it faster with less risk and connect to your teams in real time. And in doing so, it replaces dozens of disconnected tools and spreadsheets. I think that’s really the heart of what we do.
Host: There’s a lot of advantages that come from that. There’s the accuracy of the construction, that you know what pieces and parts are going into it and you know it’s being built correctly. There’s the efficiency that you can get it done faster. And probably the most effective thing from a consumer standpoint is they can see, make their selections, visualize what the home’s going to look like and know exactly what they’re going to get in the end.
I think that, from a consumer standpoint, they can have more confidence in the things that they’re selecting are going to be done well and done right ultimately when the home’s built.
Kevin: I go to a lot of conferences and events in the home building space. There’s one thing that often rubs me wrong, if you will. I sit in the audience and I hear people on stage say, the next generation is going to demand the ability to shop online or to see things online or to be able to experience home buying on the web.
And it’s not to say that everything will be moved to the web. Certainly there’s a digital-physical connection in home building that I think is very necessary. But my challenge with that is, my father shops online today. It’s not the next generation. It is already here.
And I think that folks that are not looking at how to provide buyers an experience online to shop and look at the homes are not going to miss out, they are already missing out.
Host: I remember I was doing a presentation in 2017 about how car manufacturers were allowing you to go online, make all of your selections, color and detailing, and then were able to deliver on that product in the end. And that was years ago. And it just has taken a while for home building to get to that same level of personalization. So that what you want, you can visualize and then you can see it when you get to the end product. I’m curious as to why you think it’s taken as long as it has to get to this point within this industry?
Kevin: There’s a technical component to that. I’m going to go [in] a different angle to some extent. I mean, cars are certainly complex, but I would argue that homes are even more complex than vehicles. More variables, certainly more regulations, more local nuance. And of course, it’s built outdoors, not in a controlled environment every single time.
But what’s most impressive to this point is that no company had actually built a platform that connects what you design to what you estimate, sell and build. And so the ability to have this real-time connectivity of making a change, visualizing it, like a car configurator to grab the home, spin it around, change the trim package. Change, like you said, the colors, the options, the configurations and see the pricing, had really not been feasible.
And this is a bit solicitous, but Higharc did the hard work of creating a new authoring tool. And that’s the real distinction between our product and others that are out there. It’s not a point solution. And so when you author a home in Higharc, it’s all geometry.
We know the area, the square footage, the lines, the counts, all the measurements of the home. And so we can then take that information and cascade that across the business.
We’ve talked about marketing and sales and purchasing and estimating, but here to this point, to a configurator, a car light configurator for a home in real time. It’s pretty cool.
Host: You guys thought bigger. I can’t put it any other way. You were like, we’re not just going to solve one thing. We’re going to solve the thing. And that was how do we bridge all these various aspects of the business? You were talking about homes are built on site. And I know there’s movements towards having precision engineered homes that the main components are built in factories and shipped out on site which goes back to the Lustron homes back in the ‘20s and ‘30s.
It’s kind of harking back to that, where things can be precision engineered in a controlled environment and then brought back out on site but you know all of that is evolving. 3D printing and robotics. There’s a lot of advances happening in this industry and it’s just a matter of how long until it becomes at a point where you can do it at scale and overall efficiency. You’re a part of that movement.
All of these things are in alignment to where the industry is going. You guys are just at the forefront of being able to push it forward.
Kevin: Thank you.
Host: Let’s talk about your involvement at the company. When did you join? Why did you join? What’s your role there?
Kevin: I serve as a vice president here at Higharc, and I joined the company in January of 2022. I came in with the goal of helping to scale our go-to-market and customer success functions. So I cover our sales and customer success teams, and my job here is to help builders not just evaluate, but also adopt the platform.
What’s most important to us, this is a tight-knit industry, is that it drives measurable impact. That we ensure that we’re actually solving real pain in the day-to-day workflows.
My background is in mostly go-to-market and product functions. I come from the commercial space, for 15 years, where I worked for a multinational hardware and software provider.
Host: That’s why it’s a really impressive group of people that you all have brought together within your company. What always impresses me is your focus. It’s not technology for technology’s sake. It’s solving real business problems. And ultimately by doing so, you’re really having a positive impact on the home buyer.
I was hoping you might be able to talk a little bit about how you believe you guys are impacting the home buying experience more anything?
Kevin: When we hire new employees, we encourage all of them to actually go shop a home because not everyone is from the home building space. And even home builders sometimes, depending on what side of the aisle you’re on, don’t really know what it’s like to go experience it as a buyer.
I myself, my wife and I have purchased five homes now. We did corporate relocations for many years with my previous job, and so we’ve been through this a few times. We’ve not done a new build, but we have looked at it every time. And this is an interesting point because we’ve not actually gone through with it even though it’s what we would prefer.
I think I can visualize the experience pretty well. I’ve been in construction, I can look at a set of prints and it comes to life in my mind. That is not true for most people.
When you’re walking into a design center or a construction site and it’s a dirt lot, and the sales agent has a black and white 2D and is taking a pen and drawing bump outs or options onto it and saying, “Visualize this” and writing notes on the paper. I know my wife remembers one time we were in a design center and she actually picked up the paper and turned it upside down. She was like, “Which way is the front door?”
It has been really impressive on my mind, that experience, because this is not a great shopping experience. That’s why we have so many “be-backs” – people that come walk in and say, “Oh thanks, I’ve shopped, I’ll be back.” And they don’t come back. They go buy an existing home, a used home that’s on the market.
What we bring is the ability to bring that plan to life in three dimensions and experience it and walk through it. I mean, you all have done an amazing job with the streetscapes. We show the streetscapes that Epcon has built in the homes where you can literally take what is a dirt lot or a forested lot, and in a photo-realistic environment show the entire Epcon community down the street with trees and nice yards.
You can actually click on the front door and walk into the home and tour the home and see turning the front sunroom on or the den on and see the actual construction of the home change. Turn on the sitting area or the patio in the back, I believe in your Portico home, beautiful design.
And you can change the different series across to see the way the different floor styles would look. This helps the buyer to visualize it, to really fall in love with the unbuilt home and go forward with that choice. And that’s what I think is really most powerful.
Host: As an industry, in the new home construction part of the industry, we make it so hard sometimes. It’s just easier to buy an existing home that’s already sitting there. You can see it, you can touch it, you can walk through it. But if you’re going to market with this “imagine if you will” mentality and you’re forcing the home buyer to do all the visualization in their head, it’s just easier. It’s just easier to go buy something they can see, feel and touch.
The visualization aspect I know our company was very much on the forefront [of]. It was like 2008, and we were generating 3D renderings of homes that you could look inside. But the magic that I could see when Higharc was brought forward to us is that yours is then tied to updates and changes and the construction process.
Homes are always changing, they’re always evolving. Buyer preferences change. The first time you build it, it’s not going to be the same as the hundredth time you’ve built a home. Because buyer sentiment’s going to come and say, “You know what I’d prefer instead of that window, I’d rather it be a door” or “I’d prefer that the opening into this room was such a way.”
So, home plans are always constantly evolving. And what your technology allows is for that real-time change. If something happens during construction where something changes, the visualization that the buyer sees will adjust as well. And that to me was really the secret sauce between what you do versus what a number of other vendors do.
Kevin: Well, and to be able to do it rapidly, I think is really important too. This is a distinction is that we, as we’ve talked about, built the model, the authoring tool. And that allows us to actually increase first-time accuracy, speed and drive down cost over time because it’s a connected platform.
And these other tools out there are amazing, but there’s a lot of manpower behind the scenes that you don’t see when you’re interpreting a CAD file, for example, to do that work.
Host: Changing subjects a little bit on you.
Kevin: Sure.
Host: So, AI. How can we have a podcast at this point in time and not just mention artificial intelligence and AI? It’s a buzzword. It’s out there. It’s everywhere. I was curious what your thoughts are on AI technology and where that sits within what Higharc is doing?
Kevin: I am sort of an AI nerd. I think about it a lot. We have people at our company, certainly, who work on this topic. But let’s think more about it in terms of our business today. And so does Higharc have an AI component? Yes.
I think it’s a term that gets thrown around a lot. What we do is very practical. The core of our business is actually parametric design and generative design, but certainly AI is a big part of it. We are emphasizing practicality. While Higharc uses AI, it is really to speed up plan generation. It’s to assist with things like code compliance and a power AI training agent, like really, really powerful stuff that is practical in its use and to help builders ramp up faster.
The goal is to not focus on sort of gimmicky stuff, but to have real efficiency gains that reduce manual effort and shortened cycles.
Host: Get out the crystal ball and tell me where you think the industry is going. There [have] been a lot of advances and I think it’s not just talking about advances, but it’s actually implementation. I think builders got away from just hearing about it and thinking about it to actually applying advances in technology. But where’s the industry going and what should home buyers be looking out for? And what type of builders should they be working with?
Kevin: I’m going to try to keep it as practical as possible because here, I can go a lot of directions. I mean, you’ve got economic climate, you’ve got tech signal, and you’ve got building and buyer expectations, and market trends with affordability, and moves from urban to ex-urban. But let’s just try and think more near-term.
I think that the reality that homes are more like products than projects is something that people are becoming more and more attuned to. And what that means is that as you think about creating a product, you systematize it. You find ways to automate manual processes. Buyers themselves expect speed, customization and transparency.
If your website takes five seconds to load, they are gone. This is what they expect from other industries. This is what they’re getting in other shopping experiences. They expect that here as well. What that means then for the near-term is that builders who digitize their operations and deliver that kind of experience are going to win.
There is an opportunity in the midst of chaos, like we’re seeing right now. Where there’s uncertainty in the market, you can translate that into leverage. I think everyone else is going to struggle to keep up if they don’t make that jump.
Host: I think that the home builders that are moving forward with technology in the right ways, are building a better product, a more efficient product and a more affordable product in the end. And one that the buyers will ultimately be happier with. Anything else that’s just top of mind for you? Anything else that you’re paying attention to that you’d like to share?
Kevin: There’s a lot we’re looking at. We’re watching obviously, just as I’m sure everyone out there is in this space, how local governments are evolving permitting requirements and regulations very near to this space.
We talked about it, how AI adoption is playing out. Not just in our industry, but in other spaces and how leading builders are moving towards platform thinking.
I think one thing that is really on my mind is interoperability. That as we adopt more technology, builders want a seamless workflow across their systems and the interoperability of those systems is a topic that is really important. I think it’s really lagging in this space.
And so, how we find partners and partnerships in this industry and how we converge with adjacent industries and technologies is going to be really interesting in the future. Because rates are up, economic climate is challenging and we’re going to have to look outside the traditional ways of working to protect margins and keep this industry moving forward and keep up with the demands.
Host: Yeah, it is an extremely complex industry. It’s not easy to get a community approved, zoned, developed and then have homes built on it. Something we’re always, as a collective, trying to figure out how to do more efficiently.
Kevin, thank you. Thank you for your time today, and appreciate you sharing your thoughts with us and our audience and our podcast.
Kevin: This was great, thank you so much for the time. I look forward to seeing you at the next event.