When the owner-CEO of a regional homebuilding powerhouse opens the hood and talks about what’s in there, what’s striking are two things. One is a Peter Drucker mantra, “you can only manage what you can measure.”
The other, amidst a whirlwind of buzzwords, truisms, and abstractions, is an utter absence of jargon, striking in its clarity, honesty, and rigor.
Listen, for a moment, to one such regional homebuilding enterprise business leader.
“In my experience, if a builder does not have real-time information, they cannot manage their business,” our owner-CEO tells us. “You have to have a benchmark to judge your decisions to see what is working.”
Buzzword-free, no abstractions. No mumbo-jumbo. No phony ring to it.
“You need to do that at the city level—not macro—for accounting,” he goes on, “No real change can be implemented if you do not have the correct reports to measure each home.”
Measure each home.
Our homebuilding company’s executive details the “basic” weekly, monthly, and quarterly reports, and the reporting framework works because it strips out jargon, avoids noise, and focuses on the data that shows whether the company is building well, selling well, and taking care of customers. Every metric has a precise definition, a clear owner, and a direct link to on-the-ground actions.
What he describes—almost off-handedly—is something deeper. It is the ground-level operationalization of data discipline, a shift taking shape among homebuilders and developers across the country. Not in talk tracks. Not in tech decks. Not in AI conference sessions.
But in the daily execution of business operations, those who have learned the hard way that, in volatile markets, clean, consistent, simple data is often the only thing preventing unforced errors, blown closings, busted budgets, missed underwriting assumptions, unhappy customers, costly rework, and tightening capital.
It has become one of the most consequential moves forward in homebuilding in 2025.
Across the industry, builders and community developers are reaching the same conclusion from different angles: data discipline is not just a software project. It is a management system. And those moving most quickly are the ones who present it in simple language rather than in technical jargon.
This is exactly the point John Cecilian, Jr. emphasizes in his work with builders and developers nationwide. Cecilian’s advice to executives reflects the homebuilding CEO’s instincts: no discipline, no results; no clarity, no improvement.
[Hit the “play” arrow below to catch our short TBD Player one-to-one conversation with Cecilian Partners co-founder and CEO John Cecilian, Jr.]
As Cecilian puts it:
“To get the most out of data, this four-letter word that I talk about all the time, it’s not about anything sexy. It is discipline.”
Instead of conceptual abstractions about “digital transformation,” Cecilian zeros in on what disciplined operators actually do—what they track, how they track it, and who is accountable.
He describes the builders and developers who advanced farthest in 2025 as the ones who treated the building life cycle as a continuous chain of decisions, each requiring its own evidence base. Not a scattershot approach. Not a “silver bullet.” Not an idle hope that software alone would save the day.
These operators share one pattern: they know exactly which data matters, where it should live, and how it flows across land, sales, construction, and warranty. And they use that discipline to compete.
Cecilian, for example, highlights Hillwood Communities and Beazer Homes as two firms demonstrating this discipline.
“You can see it with Hillwood Communities in Dallas. You can see it with Beazer Homes out of Atlanta,” he says. “This idea of really investing in every stage of the cycle, making an effort to understand what engagement looks like, how data is being collected, ensuring that data is structured and usable to make better and more informed decisions.”
Hillwood’s own president, Fred Balda, in conversation with The Builder’s Daily, recently underscored this point in practice rather than theory. Hillwood does not chase noise or hypotheticals. It measures conditions on the ground—market by market, sponsor by sponsor—before making any capital investment decision.
Balda states plainly:
“We constantly are out there benchmarking different markets, different sponsors, and this is another way to do the same.”
He views this not as an exercise in analytics vogue. Rather, this rigor is a core function of risk management and long-term value creation.
Builders and developers often assume “data strategy” means a tech stack overhaul. Cecilian pushes back hard on this. Software alone does not create discipline. Leaders do.
His starting point is almost startling in its simplicity:
“Believe it or not, and as a technologist myself, I do think it’s grabbing your proverbial notebook or legal pad and putting pen to paper. What are the outcomes you, as a builder or developer, are trying to achieve?”
From there, the discipline takes shape: understanding the actual workflows, the actual systems already in use, the actual handoffs between people, and the actual gaps between decisions and the data that supports them.
This matches perfectly with the builder-CEO’s plainspoken clarity. You don’t start with a system; you start with defining the work. You don’t start with AI; you start with clean reports. You don’t start with technology; you start with the benchmarks the team agrees to manage.
And you don’t change what you can’t see.
Cecilian emphasizes that data integrity—the daily habit of entering consistent, structured information—is where many, if not most, homebuilders fall down. He sees the consequences up close.
As he puts it:
“What you don’t want to have happen is this notion of garbage in, garbage out. It’s not that anymore. It’s really about deciding cross-departmentally…what does that look like across those stakeholders in the firm? And then how are they managing and measuring themselves every day to that?”
This is the quiet revolution happening inside the best-run builders and developers: different departments—land acquisition, development, sales, marketing, operations, warranty—getting aligned not around technology but around definitions.
- What counts as a start?
- What counts as a finished home?
- What counts as a ready lot?
- What counts as an orientation-ready house?
- What triggers a variance purchase order?
- When does a lead become a prospect?
- When does a prospect become a sale?
When the definitions are clear, the data is clean. And when the data is clean, management becomes real.
This is what the weekly–monthly–quarterly reporting model offers the regional builder-CEO. It is not an analytics philosophy; it is a simple, shared scoreboard. Variances, days under construction, quality checks, warranty calls, conversion ratios, cost-to-budget, cash flow, house-level profit, warranty anomalies, product-level sales trends—everything rooted in real-time accuracy, not narratives or impressions.
Cecilian observes the same pattern among the top performers he advises.
“You want to make sure you’re getting the most out of the investment in your software, and that within that it’s able to talk to one another,” he says. “Nothing is worse than investing in software…and those pieces don’t fit together.”
In 2025, the race is no longer who has the most systems—but who has the fewest blind spots. The firms gaining ground are the ones who see the cycle earlier and adjust faster.
This is why Cecilian’s insights on AI are so grounded. He is not selling magic. He is warning leaders to avoid self-inflicted wounds.
As he puts it:
“AI used as a sidecar by different departments…definitely changes the way in which we work without question. It creates net new efficiencies. It creates insights of your business in a way that otherwise you wouldn’t have.”
But the precondition is data discipline. Without structured inputs, AI becomes noise.
His other major warning is one many builders need to hear:
“Where people get excited…is that they start to use different kinds of AI tooling, and all of a sudden, they consider themselves a software developer or an engineer.”
If the industry learned anything from the last cycle, it is that shortcuts eventually surface as liabilities.
The real progress is on the ground: clean reports, simple language, aligned systems, shared definitions, and leaders who communicate without jargon.
Cecilian even drills down into language itself. AI, he notes, responds best when the inputs are clean—down to the sentence level. As he puts it:
“The nerdy secret in AI…is the simplicity of language. Builder websites are very colorful and very flowery. They’re not basic. When I say basic, I’m talking like Dr. Seuss—truly very simple language.”
With a nod back to Peter Drucker, he noted that good management isn’t exclusively a numbers game. As he and Dr. Seuss might agree, quantitative measures are only a necessary path to the real goal: understanding.
