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Interview by Nicholas Tsontakis of DwellBoldy with Adam Katz of Craydl
Designing and building a custom hillside home can be a challenging yet rewarding endeavor. To shed light on this complex process, we spoke with Adam Katz, the founder of Craydl, a company dedicated to making the custom home-building experience transparent, collaborative, and efficient. Here, Adam shares his insights and expertise.
Tell us a little about Craydl, its mission, and its purpose.
I’ve been buying, designing, building, developing, and selling custom homes for thirty years. Originally, Craydl was going to be a full-service design-build company, but after doing a lot of market research, I learned two things:
Phoenix didn’t need another design-build firm; we have excellent architecture and construction organizations with deep talent.
The technology and processes needed to make designing and building more transparent and streamlined are available and utilized all around the world. Unfortunately, the adoption among homebuilders in the US has been slow, especially among custom homebuilders. Embracing building information modeling (BIM), information management, and effective program management has been even slower.
I quickly became interested in why there was a lack of interest, and what I learned was that putting out fires takes priority over installing systems for process improvements. Everyone’s working in their own systems (CAD, ArchiCAD, Chief Architect, drawings by hand), and making an accurate and inclusive BIM model for a project seems like a great idea but seems to wind up in the bin of things that ‘should be someone else’s problem’. Today, Craydl bridges that gap by taking each participant's work and adding it to a digital twin the BIM in Revit. Doing this allows us to offer key insights, transparency, and controls into the design/build process.
In short, Craydl exists to make the journey of creating a custom home understandable, transparent, collaborative, auditable, efficient, and fun for ALL stakeholders in the process by creating a unified version of the truth. We do this by building a unique program for and a digital twin of the project.
What is your background in the building industry? How does your background relate to what you are creating with Craydl?
I went to school for architecture and business management. My career has included being a general contractor, design lead, project manager, procurement officer, and more. I don’t know of a part of designing and building a home that I have not been involved with. The process of finding, synthesizing, reconciling, and communicating all of the information from all of the stakeholders was frustrating at best.
Notably, my experience outside of real estate involved a lot of software and IT systems work, specifically the analysis and implementation of software through enterprise programs to drive automation and cleaner data. That data offers business intelligence and provides actionable insights for an enterprise. In the design-build business, it felt like I’d spend my time reacting to problems constantly, and that’s understandable. As I’m often told, that’s just the way this business works. As one executive from a home-building company once told me, ‘if you aren’t getting sued, you aren’t building houses.’ But my background in consulting and technology taught me otherwise and left me asking questions like: how does the accumulation of that knowledge benefit future projects? And, how do we continuously improve? My two worlds collided for me when I began to see the issues not as construction management problems, but as information management problems.
Building information modeling is not new to architecture, especially at the commercial and institutional levels. Why is it important in custom residential?
Custom residential is constantly increasing in complexity with changes in codes and standards, the introduction of new building materials, and new technologies. Furthermore, and often misunderstood by homeowners, it takes work and information from many more resources than just your homeowner, architect, and builder. There are another 17 roles that go into the planning of a home. There are approximately 100 subcontractors that will work on your project. The number of decisions that need to get made is in the tens of thousands. Not only do the decisions need to get captured, but they need to be incorporated into the plan set AND they must be modified when there are conflicts or updated decisions made.
This is a tremendous amount of work for a single entity or party to do using traditional methods, and this will create many risks to a project, including ordering extra materials, not enough materials, untimely value engineering, delays, mistakes, and more. So many of the issues, pain points, and frankly, unforced errors that people associate with projects gone wrong can be solved with strong BIM and program management.
How much more important is it when dealing with complicated builds like hillside homes?
Hillside projects have more complexity and more moving parts. The greater the complexity, the greater the need to model and measure. One immediate example that comes to mind is the optimization of cut/fill. In other words, how much dirt do we need to remove or add to the job site after excavation at $85 per cubic yard? Being able to measure that upfront can often provide enough cost savings to pay for the BIM services alone.
I understand that you are passionate about information modeling. How does this help someone at the beginning stages of designing a custom hillside home?
I’m passionate about information management, which starts before we even get to start using building information modeling. Before BIM can start, we flush out the program-level questions first and help establish a reasonable budget using some other tools we’ve created. We also assemble the program, which means if you have your architect, builder, and interior designer, we are going to also make sure that civil, stormwater and drainage, landscape, structural, MEP, IECC, and the rest of the village required to drive a successful outcome are known, selected, and on board with the program and schedule to mitigate risk and drive more successful outcomes. This often gets overlooked or regarded as not necessary upfront; an incorrect notion to be sure. You would not want to listen to a symphony orchestra play if some of the horn players were going to show up and start playing in the middle of the concert, never having read the sheet music or met the conductor.
Give us an idea of how this cost estimator works? And also how it gets refined throughout the process.
I look at budgeting and estimating as two distinctly different activities. Budgeting happens before plans are created and establishes budget categories that align with the desired scope and objectives of the homeowner. We do have a budgeting calculator that allows us to pick a program (i.e., New Home) and answer approximately 60 questions that homeowners typically understand how to answer. At the end of it, based on the answers to the questions, the calculator provides a line-item budget in conjunction with the answers to the questions to memorialize the scope that drove the budget. If the budget is not desirable, the answers to the questions can be modified to align the scope with the desired budget. Estimating is an activity to be conducted by the contractor once all design decisions are made, finalized, documented, and approved.
Want to learn more about what Craydl has to offer? Check out our other blogs!
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