A builder's whole business, on one screen.
Esteem Constructions is a family-owned Sydney builder specialising in home extensions, renovations and bespoke homes. Their own figures tell the story of scale: more than 1,500 homes and 1,700 projects delivered across sixteen years.
KEYOB built them Builtrax, a construction project management platform made for the way they actually work, from the first discovery call to the final handover.
BUILT FOR THE WAY A BUILDER ACTUALLY RUNS A JOB
Client
Esteem Constructions
Family-owned home extension, renovation and bespoke home builder, Sydney Hills.
Scope
Custom platform
Discovery, product design, build and rollout of Builtrax.
Scale behind it
1,700+ projects
Across sixteen years, per the builder's own published figures.
Status
In daily use
Live at dashboard.builtrax.com for office and site teams.
How it began
Residential building is a coordination business.
A home extension looks like a construction job. Run one properly and you discover it is mostly coordination. A single project moves through a discovery call, a site visit, a quote, design, council approvals, construction and handover, and each stage involves different people, different documents and a client at home waiting for news.
Esteem Constructions has done this well for sixteen years, and their reputation reflects it. The published motto is simple: trust, clarity and quality. Clarity in particular is a promise about information, which makes it a promise about systems.
Generic project tools are built for generic projects. They do not know what a first-floor addition is, that approvals can stall for weeks, or that the same client will ask three times when the frame goes up. Spreadsheets fill the gaps, then quietly become the system of record.
The brief: one platform built around how this builder actually runs a job, so the whole business can be seen in one place rather than reassembled from memory each morning.
THE PICTURE EXISTED. IT WAS JUST SPREAD ACROSS TOO MANY PLACES.
What made it interesting
Construction software fails when it ignores the site.
Four realities shaped the whole design.
01
Two very different users
An office team works on a desktop with time to type. A site supervisor is on a phone, outdoors, often with one hand free. The same information has to serve both without either group feeling the software was written for the other.
02
Long projects, slow-moving stages
A residential extension can run for months, and approvals can sit still for weeks through no fault of the builder. The system had to make the current state obvious at a glance, including when nothing is moving and why.
03
The client is watching
Esteem promises clarity, and clients at home notice when updates go quiet. Keeping an accurate internal picture is the only reliable way to keep an honest external one.
04
Adoption decides everything
A platform that is harder than the spreadsheet it replaces simply will not be used. Every screen had to be faster than the habit it was asking people to give up.
How we worked
We learned the business before writing code.
Stage 01
Discovery on their terms
Time with the people doing the work: how an enquiry becomes a quote, what happens when a design changes, who needs to know when a trade cannot get on site. The aim was to map the real process rather than the tidy version drawn on a whiteboard.
Stage 02
Designing the data model
Deciding what a project is, what hangs off it, and how stages, documents, people and conversations relate. This is the least visible part of a custom platform and the part that determines whether it still fits in five years.
Stage 03
Product and interface design
Builtrax was designed as a product with its own name and identity rather than an internal tool. A team that is proud to log in uses the system; a team that tolerates it works around it.
Stage 04
Build in short cycles
Iterative development with the client in the loop throughout, so corrections happened in days rather than after a six-month reveal. Features were validated against real projects, not hypothetical ones.
Stage 05
Rollout and training
Deployment at dashboard.builtrax.com, with onboarding shaped around roles so each person learned the part of the platform they actually use.
Stage 06
Support and evolution
A custom platform is never finished, because the business keeps moving. KEYOB stays close so Builtrax keeps matching how Esteem works rather than slowly drifting away from it.
What we built
Builtrax: their process, turned into software.
A platform named and branded for Esteem, covering the journey their own website describes: dream, plan, design and construct.
Module 01
Enquiries and pipeline
Every enquiry captured in one place, from first contact through discovery call and quote, so nothing depends on who happened to answer the phone.
Module 02
Projects and stages
Each job as a single record moving through the real stages of a residential build, with the current position visible at a glance.
Module 03
Documents and approvals
Plans, quotes, variations and approval paperwork held against the project they belong to rather than in an inbox.
Module 04
Scheduling and trades
Who is on site and when, so the office and the supervisors are working from the same week rather than two versions of it.
Module 05
Site access on a phone
The parts a supervisor needs, usable outdoors on a handset in the time between two conversations.
Module 06
Reporting for the owners
A view across every active project, so leadership can see the whole business without asking six people for an update.
A product, not an internal tool.Builtrax has its own name, its own identity and its own login at dashboard.builtrax.com, carrying Esteem's branding and the quiet line that matters to us: made by Team KEYOB.
Built around their stages, not generic ones. The platform speaks the language of a residential builder, so training is mostly a matter of showing people where things live.
Designed for the phone as seriously as the desktop. If the site team cannot use it in the field, the office picture goes stale by lunchtime.
Owned by the client. This is custom software Esteem owns and can extend, not a subscription that reshapes their process to suit a product roadmap set somewhere else.
THE DATA MODEL IS THE PRODUCT
The turning point
Naming it changed how it was treated.
Internal systems usually get called “the system”. The decision to give this one a name, Builtrax, an identity and a proper login screen was not decoration. It changed how everyone spoke about it.
A named product gets used deliberately, gets feedback, gets improved. An unnamed internal tool gets tolerated until someone quietly goes back to a spreadsheet. Treating the platform as a real product was the moment it stopped being an IT project and started being part of how the company works.
Where it stands
In daily use, and still growing.
- A custom construction platform, branded as Builtrax and owned by Esteem Constructions.
- One record per project, carrying the job from first enquiry through to handover.
- A single operational picture for office and site teams instead of parallel versions.
- A platform built around a residential builder's real stages rather than a generic project template.
- Software the business owns and can extend as the way it works keeps changing.
- A partnership that continues past launch, with KEYOB supporting and evolving the platform.
Esteem promises its clients trust, clarity and quality. Clarity is the one that depends on information, and information needs somewhere to live. Builtrax is that place.
What this work taught us
Custom software earns its cost in the fit.
Off-the-shelf tools are cheaper on day one and often the right answer. They stop being the right answer when a business has a genuine operating method of its own and spends real money bending a generic product around it, or bending itself around the product.
A builder who has run 1,700 projects has learned how to run a project. Software should encode that knowledge, not override it.
“The best measure of an internal platform is whether anyone still keeps a private spreadsheet on the side. That is the real adoption metric, and everyone in the business knows the honest answer.”
KEYOB — internal reflection on the engagement
Capabilities involved
What went into building Builtrax.
Custom softwareConstruction CRMProduct designDiscovery & process mappingData modellingUI/UX designWeb application developmentMobile-ready interfacesRole-based accessDocument managementSchedulingReporting dashboardsDeploymentTraining & rolloutOngoing support
Running the business out of spreadsheets?
If your operating method lives in people's heads and a dozen files, it is worth finding out what it would take to put it somewhere better. The conversation costs nothing.