Why do you have a better app to track your pizza delivery than you do for the biggest purchase of your life?

It’s a simple question that our co-founder Derek Schairer asks, and one that helped lead us on the path to starting Foundation.

Homebuilding in the U.S.

Homebuilding is a major part of both the U.S. economy and U.S. culture. The Top 300 single-family homebuilders in the U.S. alone sell more than $200B worth of homes annually; they (literally) put roofs over almost half a million American families, year after year.

Despite its impact on the U.S. economy and its key role in our nation’s ability to house our population, homebuilding has been largely ignored by Silicon Valley.

Today, top homebuilders have basic websites and CRMs, and the biggest have ERP systems and construction management software. New home buyers, though, are left out in the cold — the experiences of purchasing and owning a new construction home are almost entirely offline. Similarly, homebuilder sales and marketing teams are dramatically under-supported by technology, leading to high customer acquisition cost (cost per sale), high commissions, and teams forced to rely on manual and inefficient processes.

The problem with(out) technology

The lack of a compelling digital shopping, checkout, and ownership solution has two main outcomes:

• New home buyers are often frustrated, anxious, and confused

• Homebuilder sales, marketing, and closing operations are fundamentally underserved and inefficient

Our founding team has spent our careers in homebuilding and at venture-backed, high-growth tech startups. Working at the intersection of homebuilding and technology, we’ve seen leading builders become more familiar with Silicon Valley-grade digital products — and start to wrap their heads around what modern technology can do for their buyers and for their businesses.

And that’s the rub: great products drive great business results. Think about other analog, offline-first businesses. Domino's didn’t invest in building a consumer app for no reason — and neither did Delta, Starbucks, or Home Depot.

What these businesses know is that yes, great buyer-facing products deliver improved customer satisfaction — but they also drive a better bottom line.

Foundation: for builders and for buyers

So that’s why we’re here. We’re building Foundation to help push homebuilding forward with world-class technology. Today, the Foundation buyer experience platform delivers happier buyers, more efficient builder teams, and reduced cost-per-sale. By doing so, we’re doing our small part to build more homes, faster, for more U.S. families.