According to HousingWire, HistoryMaker Homes, a Fort Worth-based builder with over 75 years in business, recently went through a major transformation that wasn't driven by technology trends but by a fundamental question about its future. When the company hit its 75th anniversary in 2023, leadership realized that the strategies that got them there wouldn't carry them forward another 25 years. They recognized they couldn't compete on price alone against much larger national builders, so they made a bold decision to shift from being a low-cost provider to centering everything around customer obsession.
That shift required the company to rebuild its entire technology foundation. For years, HistoryMaker had treated its ERP system purely as a back-office tool for managing purchase orders and scheduling. Under the new customer-focused approach, they needed systems that could share information across departments and connect their operations to customer experience seamlessly. According to the reporting, this meant investing in a new ERP environment, connecting customer and operating systems, building a data warehouse, and upgrading their design capabilities through partnerships.
The interesting part, according to HousingWire, is that AI came later in this sequence, not at the beginning. Once HistoryMaker had laid the groundwork with better data and connected systems, they could actually think clearly about where artificial intelligence might help them operate better. The company partnered with design partners like Higharc to refresh their product offering, rolling out roughly 60 new floor plans in about 18 months instead of doing that work internally.
What strikes me about this story is HistoryMaker's honesty about being a learner rather than a technology pioneer. President Zac Thompson openly describes the company's approach as "crawl-walk-run," acknowledging they're still figuring out how to extract real value from AI. Rather than trying to build proprietary tools themselves, they're partnering with technology companies that have the resources to invest in these capabilities.
The timing here is worth noting. According to HousingWire, HistoryMaker started this transformation around mid-2023, right before the market became significantly more challenging. That meant they were implementing major operational changes while managing tighter margins and dealing with housing headwinds, which Thompson describes as difficult but necessary since, as he put it, the plane was already off the ground.
What I am seeing locally here in the Bay Area is that builders at every size are wrestling with the same fundamental choice HistoryMaker faced. You can't win purely on price anymore, whether you're in Fremont, Oakland, or anywhere in the East Bay. The builders and companies that are going to thrive are those who figure out what they genuinely do differently and then build the systems and data foundations to deliver on that promise consistently. HistoryMaker's experience suggests that the technology is less important than the clarity about who you want to be.
