A Builder Responding to a Changing Market

Signature Homes has spent more than 27 years building master-planned communities across the Southeast, with a focus on second and third move-up buyers and 55+ neighborhoods. With over 550 homes delivered annually, Signature has never competed solely on volume. Instead, the company differentiates through thoughtful design, architectural variety, and communities that feel cohesive without being repetitive.

But as market conditions shifted, Signature’s leadership knew the status quo wouldn’t hold.

Interest rates rose. Land costs increased. Buyers became more selective. Logical reasons to move gave way to emotional ones. And behind the scenes, plan complexity was quietly slowing the business down.

“You never create markets. You just respond to them,” said Dwight Sandlin, Chairman of Signature Homes. “And we knew the market was telling us that efficiency was going to matter more than ever.”

Responding meant rethinking how plans were created, managed, and delivered across the organization.

Identifying the Problem: When Plan Complexity Becomes a Bottleneck

Signature Homes is not a builder that relies on a small set of static plans. Communities are designed to be homogeneous but not redundant, and buyers expect meaningful personalization. Over time, that approach created a growing web of plan versions, options, and exceptions.

Plans lived across multiple tools. Options intersected in ways that were difficult to manage. Producing lot-specific permit sets required hours of manual effort. And while most plan issues were small, the consequences were not.

“It’s never the big mistakes that hurt you,” Sandlin explained. “It’s the small ones. A minor plan issue can cost you two weeks, and when you’ve got hundreds of homes under construction, that adds up fast.”

Those delays impacted inventory turns, strained trade relationships, and quietly eroded margins, at a time when margins were already under pressure.

Why Change Now: Efficiency as a Strategic Imperative

As interest rates climbed, Signature recognized that buyers were less likely to move for purely financial reasons. To keep demand strong, homes had to deliver a stronger emotional pull through design, livability, and community experience.

At the same time, Signature accepted a hard truth: margins were likely to tighten.

“We know margins are going to come down,” Sandlin said. “That’s just reality. So the way you win is by turning inventory faster and eliminating inefficiencies wherever you can.”

To do that, Signature needed a better system for plan management, one that could support personalization without multiplying complexity.

Replacing Static Plans with a Configurable Foundation

Signature Homes did not approach this transition as a simple tool swap. Leadership understood that changing how plans were managed would affect nearly every downstream function, from estimating to construction to sales. The decision to move forward required balancing innovation with operational risk.

“We had invested a lot in our existing processes,” Sandlin said. “So this wasn’t about chasing something new. It was about deciding whether the way we were working would hold up over the next five years.”

Rather than attempting incremental fixes, adding staff, creating more plan variants, or layering on manual checks, Signature looked for a structured solution. Higharc’s approach allowed the team to encode design intent once and let plans adapt based on rules, conditions, and selections.

“We don’t build redundant housing,” Sandlin explained. “We build similar housing. Higharc lets us treat those homes as related instead of completely separate. That distinction matters.”

By standardizing how plans were defined while preserving flexibility at the option and lot levels, Signature reduced risk rather than introducing it.

Before Higharc:

• Hundreds of plan versions to maintain and update
• 7–9 hours to produce a single lot-specific permit set
• Manual mirroring and redlining that frequently introduced errors
• Intersecting options that compounded plan complexity

With Higharc:

• One configurable plan replaces many static plans
• Lot-specific plans generated in approximately 10 minutes
• Options handled conditionally instead of duplicatively
• Plan data stays connected across drafting, estimating, visualization, and sales

“What Higharc does isn’t magic,” Sandlin said. “It’s efficiency. It gives us the ability to take multiple houses and multiple lots and condense them into one plan that can expand and contract.”

From Skepticism to Clarity: Implementing a New Way of Working

Adopting Higharc required a shift in mindset. Signature’s team had recently invested heavily in Revit, and moving to a new platform, especially one that approached drafting differently, was met with understandable skepticism.

Implementation was treated as a deliberate change-management effort, not a flip-the-switch moment. Signature’s BIM and architectural teams worked through how to translate years of institutional knowledge into a new system without losing speed or accuracy.

“There was a learning curve,” said Kyle Bear, VP of Research and Development at Signature Homes. “But the goal wasn’t to recreate our old workflows in a new tool. It was to build something more resilient.”

The team focused on defining standards early, how options should behave, how conditions should interact, and how plans should scale across communities. That upfront discipline allowed Signature to avoid recreating complexity later.

Once those standards were in place, updates became easier, not harder. Changes that once required manual coordination across teams could be made confidently, knowing the impact would be consistent everywhere.

Signature credits close collaboration with Higharc’s team as a key factor in the successful rollout, treating implementation as a partnership rather than a one-time software deployment.

What Changed for the People Doing the Work

For Signature Homes, the most immediate impact of Higharc was felt by the drafting team responsible for turning ideas into buildable plans.

David Lloyd, Sr. BIM Manager at Signature Homes, works daily in Studio to build master plans, manage options, and generate lot-specific construction documents.

“If you draw a plan 100 times, you do not want to pull dimensions 100 times,” Lloyd said. “I didn’t go to school to draw tick marks. I went to school to figure out how to build this stuff.”

Tasks like mirroring plans for different lot conditions once took hours and often required follow-up fixes. With Higharc, those workflows changed fundamentally.

“What used to take an hour, or more, to mirror a plan now takes seconds,” Lloyd explained. “And when we update a master plan, those changes cascade to every lot-specific plan instead of creating disconnected versions we have to track down later.”

Higharc shifted responsibility from managing files to managing intent.

“In the past, a lot of our time went into making sure drawings stayed in sync,” Lloyd said. “Every change created another version to manage.”

With Higharc, plan logic lives in a single model. When updates are made, they propagate automatically to lot-specific drawings, reducing the risk of mismatched documents reaching the field.

The result was not just speed, but confidence, knowing every team was working from the same, accurate plan data.

“That confidence matters,” Lloyd explained. “When construction, estimating, and sales are all pulling from the same source, you don’t spend time questioning whether the plan is right.”

Better Visualization, Stronger Buyer Confidence

While operational improvements were immediate, the impact on the buyer experience was equally meaningful.

Historically, buyers were asked to interpret 2D plans and imagine how options would change the home. That gap between intent and understanding often slowed decisions and increased uncertainty.

With Showroom, Signature could present accurate, up-to-date visual representations that reflected the buyer’s actual selections.

“When buyers can really see what they’re getting, decisions happen faster,” Bear said. “That’s especially important in a market where people need a strong reason to move.”

This clarity helped sales teams move conversations away from price sensitivity and toward livability and design value, an important shift in a higher-rate environment.

Early estimates suggest Higharc could drive a 11% increase in option revenue, driven by increased personalization and clearer buyer understanding.

Signature has always used model homes in its sales process. With Higharc Showroom, Signature sold four homes before the model home was built, sales the team believes would not have happened otherwise.

Results and Reflections

For Signature Homes, Higharc is not just a drafting tool;  it is a strategic investment in speed, accuracy, and adaptability.

By reducing plan complexity and connecting data across teams, Signature has improved inventory turns, strengthened buyer confidence, and positioned itself to scale without increasing overhead.

“The homebuilding industry over the next five years will belong to the efficient,” Sandlin said. “And efficiency is something you have to build into your foundation.” “Not because they cut corners, but because they remove friction. That’s what we’ve focused on.”

With Higharc, Signature Homes has built a system that adapts to whatever the market throws at it.