The question every housebuilder eventually asks
At some point, every housebuilder outgrows spreadsheets and general-purpose sales tools for tracking leads, reservations and choices. For most regional UK housebuilders, the real choice isn’t between five or six generic CRM vendors, it’s between two options built for exactly this business: adopting Housebuilder Pro as it stands, or commissioning a fully custom CRM built around your specific process.
We cover the broader case for custom software in our piece on custom software for construction and housebuilding. This post goes one level deeper, specifically on the CRM decision, because it’s usually the first system a growing housebuilder has to get right.
The wider market, briefly
If you’re searching around this topic you’ll come across products like Lasso CRM, Constellation HomeBuilder Systems / HomebuilderONE, ContactBuilder and TopBuilder. Worth knowing they exist, and what they’re built for:
- Lasso CRM and Constellation / HomebuilderONE are built primarily around the high-volume, standardised new-home sales funnel common among larger North American production builders.
- ContactBuilder is UK-focused, closer to home in terms of market fit than the North American-built alternatives.
- TopBuilder and similar tools suit builders taking their first step up from manual spreadsheets.
These are capable products for the housebuilder they’re built for. But for a UK regional housebuilder managing sales, choices and a 10-year NHBC aftercare period across a handful of developments, the fit is rarely exact, and generic platforms bring pricing and complexity built for a different scale of business. That’s the gap the two options below are built to close.
Option one: Housebuilder Pro
Housebuilder Pro started life as a bespoke build for Shropshire housebuilder Shingler Homes and is now used by other regional housebuilders too, including Macbryde Homes. It’s the fastest route to software built specifically for this market, because the groundwork is already done.
It covers the full cycle in one platform: sales leads and reservations, dynamic pricing and choices, an inspection tracker running through the 10-year NHBC warranty, and paperless documentation from smart forms to handover.
Jeremy Shingler, Managing Director of Shingler Homes:
“They really took time learning how our business works to ensure the system they were building would actually work for us.”
Macbryde Homes’ Sales Manager, Caryl Russell, compared it against the wider market before choosing it:
“We have had time to compare many products on the market. When we saw Housebuilder Pro, we knew we had found the right software for our business.”
Housebuilder Pro is the right call when your sales, choices and aftercare process is a close match to what most regional UK housebuilders already do, and you want proven software live fast rather than a ground-up build.
Option two: a fully custom CRM
Some housebuilders have a genuinely different process: a non-standard reservation model, an unusual choices workflow, multi-development management that doesn’t fit a single generic pipeline, or ambitions (multi-region growth, a shift toward modular) that a fixed platform won’t flex to meet.
For those businesses, we build a CRM from scratch around the process you actually run, not the one the market assumes. It’s the same team and the same approach that built Housebuilder Pro in the first place, just pointed at your specific business rather than the regional-housebuilder template.
Read more on how we approach that kind of build.
How to tell which one is right for you
Work through these before you commit to either:
- Map your actual sales process, choices workflow and aftercare process. Write down every step, not the idealised version.
- Compare it against Housebuilder Pro’s workflow. Where does it match closely, and where would you have to change how you work to fit it?
- Count the gaps. One or two minor differences are normal and easily configured. Several genuine mismatches, or a process built around a real competitive advantage, points toward a custom build instead.
- Weigh speed against fit. Housebuilder Pro gets you proven software live in weeks. A custom CRM takes longer to build but removes every workaround, because it was never built for anyone else.
Either way, the next step is the same: talk to us before you decide, and we’ll help you work out honestly which of the two fits.
Talk to us about your CRM
Whether that’s rolling out Housebuilder Pro or scoping a fully custom CRM, get in touch and we’ll help you work out which is the right fit for how your business actually runs.