Real Estate
Personal Data Assistants Speed Up Home Building
By
Sep 25, 2005, 20:53

(NUI) - Sales of new homes this August increased 3.4 percent since July, according to figures released in late August by the Department of Commerce. Even as mortgage rates have risen from a 40-year low, the housing sector has remained the economy's standout performer, with the demand for new homes reaching record levels.

As a growing number of buyers anxiously wait to take possession of their new homes, local area builders are making room on their tool belt for one more tool: a Personal Data Assistant or PDA.

In the home building business, schedule changes are a fact of life. Workers and materials show up at the wrong time or not at all. Weather delays make painstakingly typed project charts and spreadsheets go haywire. Builders and trades people spend hours on the phone, leaving messages and relaying information.

To get around this, Amberwood Homes of Phoenix uses PDAs. Through an IBM software-based scheduling program called Airwavz, Amberwood cuts 15 days out of its total building schedule on a 2,000 square foot home. For large homes that traditionally take six months to build, the 180 unit per year company can get buyers into their new homes 30 days ahead of schedule.

Chase-Pitkin Home and Garden is another growing business using PDAs to help new homes get built faster. Sales reps in the Rochester, N.Y.-based company's commercial division use PDAs to meet with builders at residential construction sites. IBM software running on the PDAs lets the builders choose from more than 75,000 products, confirm that the material is in stock and place an order immediately.

It has also made the process of creating orders 55 percent more accurate, which avoids building delays caused by receiving incorrect orders.

These two companies represent a trend among growing businesses that are using wireless technology and PDAs to improve their efficiency and deliver improved customer satisfaction. IBM has been working with small and medium size businesses for many years and sees this as a definite trend.

For more information about IBM's solutions for businesses, go to www.ibm.com/business center.

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