“I don’t like any of them,” a California builder wrote when asked what was his favorite business-related app on a mobile device. “I do not like viewing my work day on a smart phone, but I guess that is where we are headed.”
Indeed, a significant chunk of survey participants, predominantly builders who closed 10 homes or less annually, do not use apps, smart phones, or tablets nor provide them to employees. Yet the mobile devices are becoming the home builder’s standby for connecting the office to the field, the super to the trades, and builder to clients. Most respondents to Professional Builder’s 2015 Technology/Social Media survey indicated they rely on standard software like Excel, Office, Outlook, FaceTime, Google Calendar, QuickBooks, texts, and instant messaging for communicating, scheduling, and preparing estimates. Dropbox gained ground this year as a popular app for document sharing.
Builders, designers, and architects, as the results that follow show, have been industrious in finding a favorite app or a combination of tools that are producing benefits for their operations.
