Competing Where Others Won't

Most Kansas City homebuilders can't build below $450,000. Ashlar Homes builds below $350,000. That's not an accident. It's a production mindset Shawn Woods has refined over 25 years, built around efficiency and set options. As land costs and construction prices pushed competitors upmarket, Ashlar held the line and found a price point where demand is deep and competition is thin.

That changed when national builders like D.R. Horton and Lennar entered Kansas City at similar price points. They brought volume but no personalization. Ashlar saw the gap and leaned in. Ashlar saw the gap and leaned in. By 2023, they were building approximately 150 homes per year with a target of 250 to 300+. But that kind of growth doesn't happen by doing more of the same. It requires the kind of operational infrastructure that lets a company scale without multiplying its problems.

That's when Warren Brenner joined the company as COO. After 18 years in enterprise technology consulting, Warren arrived at Ashlar and saw an industry running on institutional knowledge, disconnected spreadsheets, and manual processes with enormous amounts of valuable data going unused.

"There's a vast amount of data in this business: product, pricing, plans, sales materials and a very apparent lack of technology to manage it. I saw an opportunity to apply what I knew and separate ourselves from the competition."

— Warren Brenner, COO, Ashlar Homes

When the Systems Can't Keep Up with the Vision

Ashlar's plans were handled by an outside architect. Any change: a layout update, a new option, a response to buyer feedback, meant a phone call, revision cycles, and months of waiting.

Plans That Nobody Owned

Ashlar's plans were handled by an outside architect; they didn't control the CAD files. When Shawn wanted to update a layout, respond to buyer feedback, or add a new option, the process started with a phone call, ran through revision cycles, and arrived months later.

"I'd give it to the architect, wait for a first draft, mark it up, go back. That cycle took 3 to 4 months. That kind of lag doesn't work when you're trying to grow."

— Shawn Woods, President & Owner

Confusion In The Field

In the field, master plan sets showed every option regardless of what a lot could support or what a buyer had selected, confusing project managers, banks, and trades alike. When something changed in the office, it rarely reached the field. When a plan lost a closet, the brochure kept showing it.

"We'd change a plan and eliminate a closet. It'd go up as a spec home, and a buyer would say, 'Where's my closet?' We'd pull the marketing material and there it was, still on there. Those are the mistakes that cost you customer trust."

— Shawn Woods, President & Owner

Options Left on the Table

On the sales floor, salespeople worked from a multi-tab Excel price book, no visuals, no structure, no guardrails. Options often got skipped. Buyers closed on homes and later discovered features they didn't know existed. And because plan tiers were grouped in series, a buyer who wanted one upgrade had to pay for a full tier jump to get it or go without.

A Platform Built for Where They're Going, Not Where They Are

When Ashlar started evaluating solutions, they weren't trying to digitize their existing process. They were trying to build the infrastructure for a company two to three times their current size.

Ashlar needed a modern, open-API hub that could serve as the source of record for plan data and feed every downstream function: sales, marketing, estimating, and construction documents, while integrating cleanly with the CRM, ERP, and other tools they already used.

"It's the gold source. All the data our sales team needs: pricing, product information, plans, and options comes out of Higharc. Many of our other data systems flow from it."

— Warren Brenner, COO

From Excel to an Elevated Homebuying Experience

Every Ashlar model home is equipped with a large touch screen running Higharc Showroom. Buyers stand in front of a live 3D model of their home and configure it in real time, selecting foundation options, changing elevations, adding kitchen upgrades and watching the exterior palette change on the actual house. What salespeople once described with words, buyers now see.

The process is also protected. Lot-specific constraints are enforced programmatically: if a three-car garage won't fit the lot, it simply doesn't appear as a selectable option. Salespeople can't accidentally sell a configuration that has to be walked back later.

"Most builders send their buyers to ten different locations to make selections. Now we have all of that inside Higharc, in the sales center, step by step. And if a customer truly wants to come to the showroom and go deeper, they can. But the base experience is already there."

— Shawn Woods, President & Owner

Leads That Already Know What They Want

Ashlar Homes embedded Higharc Showroom on their website, allowing prospects to configure and save a home plan before ever contacting the company. When a saved plan is submitted, it flows directly into HubSpot as a lead, with the floor plan, options, and configuration already attached.

Nate Rosales, Ashlar's Online Sales Consultant, describes the difference in lead quality plainly: standard leads come in cold. Higharc leads come in prepared.

"When I see a lead from Higharc, I'm jumping on it within two minutes. Instead of asking 'what kind of bedrooms are you looking for? What price range?' I can say, 'I saw you were looking at this floor plan — what caught your eye about it?' It skips the whole qualifying process."

— Nate Rosales, Online Sales Consultant

Options That Are Actually Presented

With Higharc Showroom, the rigid series structure is gone. Buyers now have access to the full options catalog from any base plan, so buyers can select the options they want without jumping an entire tier. The early financial impact is directional but real. For homes that previously had almost no options available at the entry tier, Shawn estimates a margin increases of 10 to 15%. Across the portfolio, he's expecting a 3 to 4% improvement per home as the data accumulates.

"Since Higharc, we've had quite a few people pick a slab foundation but put the more expensive front elevation on it, which helps the neighborhood aesthetics, and we make more margin. That was never happening before."

— Shawn Woods, President & Owner

Plans They Control

David Martinez joined Ashlar as BIM Manager with an architecture degree and a master's in BIM management, having worked across AutoCAD, Revit, ArchiCAD, and Bentley Systems. He describes every previous workflow as painful for homebuilding, too much manual coordination, too many tools, too many ways for information to get lost in translation.

"I had never seen something like this before, everything integrated into one simple space. In my first week, with no prior knowledge of Higharc, I built a complete house in three days. That's how easy it is."

— David Martinez Lopez, BIM Manager

Higharc's Central Data Model, a single master file that holds all the rules, settings, and options shared across every plan, means a change happens once and propagates everywhere. A code update, a discontinued product, a new standard: update it in one place and every plan reflects it automatically. What would have taken weeks of manual updates across dozens of files now takes minutes.

Task	Before Higharc	With Higharc
New plan concept → 3D model	3–4 months (architect cycle)	3–4 days
Apply a change across all plans	Weeks of manual work	10–15 minutes
Lot-specific plan set	10–15 days (architect submission)	Days (target: same week as purchase)

Built for the Next Phase

Ashlar's growth target is 25% per year. To get there, they're expanding into townhomes and duplexes, product types that will push their attainable price point even lower. With Higharc, Shawn describes that expansion as tractable in a way it wasn't before. Adding 8 new plans to the library doesn't require 8 separate architect engagements and 8 separate months of revision cycles.

"I'm excited for the growth, not just in revenue, but in the maturity of our organization. I want to standardize how we do things so we can pump out high-quality homes, happy customers, wash-rinse-repeat. Higharc is the platform that's going to let us do that."

— Warren Brenner, COO

Shawn's advice to others is simple.

"We didn't buy Higharc to maintain the status quo. We bought it because we know we want to be 3 to 5 times bigger. If somebody asked me whether they should do this, I'd ask them one question: what are your goals? If the answer is growth, absolutely do it."

— Shawn Woods, President & Owner