The building industry as a whole is extremely resistant to change, as new building standards come into effect most companies complain about the ramifications of the changes sighting that things are fine as they are and the changes are unnecessary. The latest H1 building code changes are a prime example of this where many building companies complained it would drive the cost of houses up despite it lifting the energy efficiency of houses and increasing the standard of living.
Even when change clearly benefits the end user they are reluctant to change if it doesn’t directly benefit themselves. A prime example of this was when I co-founded a VR company with 2 friends and we created VR software for the building industry. This was the early days of the HTC Vive where accurate 1:1 scale fully immersive VR was finally a reality unlocking the VR industry to massive potential.
Often people build a solution in search of a problem but we clearly did the inverse where we knew homeowners had trouble visualising their future homes and too often people would build their houses wrong and changing it mid-build or after the fact could cost tens of thousands of dollars. When we started the only thing you could get on VR was mostly games, CAD software was still a long way off from having integration into their software but we knew it would be a race against time because eventually the big players like Archicad & Revit would create it as a feature into their CAD software.
The software we developed was cutting edge, we adapted a computer game engine to be able to showcase custom house designs on a 1:1 scale. We could do a wide range of on-the-spot alterations including changing colours, adding furniture, moving walls, & change the size of openings. We could even put in the GPS coordinates of the house to get the local weather and show the path of the sun over the seasons so we could show people how much light would come into their house over different times of the day and predict if their house would overheat in the summer months if there was too much glazing in the wrong place.
We worked in conjunction with a couple of smaller builders and a couple of larger building companies, making sure we got feedback from them as we built out the features. We constantly had it in the hands of the end users often with the builders and sometimes with the architects there, inevitably when it came time to roll it out and get the buy-in from all stakeholders this is when it was clear just how stubborn the building industry is.
We had a solution that would save the homeowner from expensive mistakes but what stopped the uptake of the software from the building companies was ludicrous, they sighted that it “slowed the sales process down”. That’s right, adding an extra 2–4 hours to a sales process and possibly some design revisions based on the client's feedback was what ultimately stopped the uptake of the tech. Despite it being evident that it was of benefit to the client and it would save them expensive mistakes they didn’t want to change their ways, the issue wasn’t even the price of the tech as these companies were often selling house & land packages in excess of a million dollars and they said that they can pass the cost of the VR onto the build.
Now not all builders are like this, there are some great builders out there that have the best interest of the end user in mind and we worked with a few of those but the sad reality is they were the minority. In the end, we pivoted our solution to work for architects and we had a clear run for a while before the much better-funded CAD software companies came in with their solutions that outshone our bootstrapped solution.
The moral of the story is always be ready to pivot and don’t rely on most builders to change.
