Look, I want to tell you about something that caught my attention over at HousingWire. Brandon Sharp, who's the Chief Information Officer at Brookfield Residential, has been talking about how his company spent roughly eight years getting their data house in order before they even started thinking seriously about artificial intelligence. According to the reporting, this wasn't just some IT department pet project. Brookfield invested over a quarter million internal hours across twenty different business groups and implemented seven major business systems, much of it while people were working from home during the pandemic.
Here's what Sharp says was essential to making this work: conviction from leadership that the effort mattered even when things got tough, clarity about where the organization was headed and why, and the capital to back it up. But honestly, the money was probably the easier part. The harder part was getting finance professionals, operators, division presidents, and regional leaders to commit their time and energy to this transformation while they were still trying to manage their regular business, sell homes, and keep their customers happy.
The payoff started pretty unsexy, frankly. Brookfield began with basic reports on lot inventory and weekly sales numbers. But here's what shifted things: as people started trusting those numbers, they wanted more of them. More importantly, accountability shifted to the people actually closest to the transactions, not back to IT. When a home sale processes through their data warehouse, information about pricing, margins, brokers, and delivery timing flows to leaders and local teams almost instantly. If something looks off, the people who handled that transaction own the problem.
Sharp points out that this matters enormously in a tough market like what we've seen. When you've got fat margins and strong sales, you can hide sloppy data and disconnected systems. But when margins compress and every sale matters, you need accurate information fast. A decision based on numbers that are two or three months old can look completely different from one based on what's actually happening today.
The other big win for Brookfield was that once they trusted their internal data, they could confidently share that same information with customers. Their customer-facing systems now display available lots, pricing, options, inventory homes, and realistic move-in timing. That's trust-building right there.
What I'm seeing locally in the Bay Area and East Bay is that builders who have this kind of data infrastructure are going to have a real advantage as the market continues to sort itself out. When you can trust your numbers, make decisions faster, and eventually leverage AI tools effectively, you're not just managing better during difficult times, you're setting yourself up to move quicker when conditions improve. The builders who are still working with fragmented systems and outdated information are going to feel that gap widening.
