Local Contractor vs Brick&Bolt: Why Tech-Driven Construction is the Smarter Choice.

Basis

Local Contractor

Brick&Bolt

Money Safety

It is difficult for most local contractors to ensure money safety to customers, mainly due to a lack of standardised practices and variability in the construction industry.

Apart from this, the local contractors may also find it difficult,

• To provide a structured payment plan.

• May rely on traditional methods of payment, and

• May find it difficult to access adequate quality control over the entire construction process.

At Brick&Bolt, we ensure money safety via our ‘ESCROW MODEL’ to safeguard our client’s interests.

Here is how the model works:

• Based on the construction stage, the customer transfers the project amount to the ‘ESCROW Account’.

• Once the stage is completed and approved by our in-house project management team, the money deposited by the client is released to the contractors.

• The transactions here, are facilitated in a such a way that ‘No Advance Payment’ is made to the contractor during the construction stages. 

This model helps facilitate a money safety mechanism for the clients.

Assured Quality Control

It is difficult for local construction contractors to maintain an assured level of quality throughout the construction process.

They may lack the level of resources required for construction, find it challenging to perform the required quality checks, integrate technology, etc.  resulting in potential variations in quality across projects.

Therefore, when it comes to quality assurance, homeowners must evaluate all the viable options available to ensure their home is durable and built to last.

At Brick&Bolt, we offer a high level of assurance and consistency in the quality of the materials used in construction and the quality of the actual project after its completion.

This we ensure via our trademarked quality assessment system QASCON – (Quality & Assessment System for Construction by Brick&Bolt), which performs 470+ unique quality checks. 

QASCON is implemented through our in-house tech-based platforms and applications. 

This quality assessment system drives Brick&Bolt’s commitment towards assured quality control, thereby providing clients with greater confidence in the outcome of their home construction projects.

Supply of Building Materials

In the construction industry, selecting tech-driven companies over local contractors does have a significant impact on the quality and supply of of the right building materials.

It's not just a convenience or personal preference decision. It's critical to take into account the difficulties that local building contractors frequently face in order to clarify this distinction.

These difficulties include widespread sourcing,  vendor relationships, inventory control, and open pricing.

These variations can lead to flaws in building material quality, pricing, and delivery.

Furthermore, local contractors frequently have restricted resources when conducting quality checks, establishing favourable vendor connections, negotiating favourable terms with suppliers, and maintaining control over material supplies.

Moreover, they may need help in preserving transparency, as well as warranties and guarantees on the building materials utilised.

As a full-stack company, we at Brick&Bolt  proudly supply building materials to our sites.

By doing so, we ensure the timely delivery of quality materials to facilitate execution. 

This is possible as we have strong and trusted connections with manufacturers and downstream supply chain systems to help us provide cost benefits to our clients.

The features of our supply chain solutions are as follows:

• Better material costs due to the scale of business operations

• Adequate supply of building materials both for structural and non-structural materials.

• An in-house supply chain platform that tracks and delivers the building materials to the construction site on-time. 

• A System-driven mechanism to assess the supply of materials based on the buyer’s creditworthiness.

Absolute Transparency

Local contractors may experience difficulties in preserving complete transparency in their construction process as compared to technology-driven companies for numerous reasons that include: 

Limited Technological Integration: Many local contractors usually do not adequately integrate technology into their procedures. This might make tracking and documenting every stage of the construction job challenging.

Lack of Communication: Because local contractors rely on traditional communication techniques such as phone calls or in-person meetings, communication might become fragmented. Clients may not have real-time access to project changes, making transparency more difficult. 

Limited Data Access: Local contractors may lack the infrastructure necessary to offer clients simple access to project data and records.

Paper-Based Documentation: Some local contractors may use paper-based documentation, making it difficult to share real-time project updates.

At Brick&Bolt, we ensure absolute transparency to our clients through a centralised platform that uses artificial intelligence to allow clients, contractors, and the project management team to interact in real-time.

Transparency is achieved through:

• Detailed contracts and specifications to list every item, leaving no grey areas.

• Workflow automation to ensure that all the quality checks are done every time to facilitate real-time customer updates.

• Technology used in preparation, presentation and identification of schedules, designs, snags, etc.

Regular Audit System

Maintaining quality throughout the construction process is a very crucial aspect that has to be considered in order to deliver excellent project results.

But during this process, local contractors may face many challenges, especially when it comes to conducting regular site audits, and the two main challenges they may face include

Limited material and labour: Local contractors, especially those operating on a smaller scale, may have limited material, labour, technical, and financial resources, which are of utmost importance in site audits.

Delays: Construction projects are usually characterised by tight deadlines. Conducting site audits is a time-consuming process. Thereby, in such scenarios, project delays may arise.

At Brick&Bolt, we ensure that all our projects are delivered on time and with top quality by establishing a “3 Level Audit System”.

This auditing is conducted as follows:

First, the construction partner conducts the first level of quality checks using the partner app.

Second, the site engineer conducts the second level of checks using the inspection app.

Finally, the project manager verifies the completion of the quality checks via the project management platform.

This audit process is conducted regularly to ensure the issues are identified, reported, and corrected within the required time frame. 

Contactless Construction

Facilitating ‘Contactless Construction’ may be difficult for local contractors for a number of reasons.

First of all, on the construction site, workers, subcontractors, and suppliers frequently engage in a great deal of physical interaction and coordination as part of traditional construction processes. This might make it challenging to keep a social distance and limit physical touch, particularly when several people are working on a project together.

Furthermore, it's possible that a large number of local contractors haven't made investments in automation and digital technologies that would allow for real-time communication and remote project management to do tasks that call for physical presence. These kinds of technology are critical to lowering in-person contacts.

At Brick&Bolt, we provide “Contactless Construction” services to our clients to help them build their dream homes within the comfort of their homes.

This is how we do it:

• Schedule meetings online and provide digitalised quotations to our clients.

• Collaborate with architects to make house plan designs available.

• Access to project dashboards, designs, contracts, and other collaterals on the customer app.

• Access to site images and videos at your fingertips via our app.

The goal here is to provide a safer and more convenient way to build their dream home.

Home Warranty

A home warranty is a type of insurance that covers the repair or replacement of specific home systems and equipment in the case of a malfunction. It protects homeowners from unexpected costs and gives them peace of mind.

Local contractors frequently find it difficult to provide a "home warranty" since providing a home warranty necessitates a financial commitment to cover potential faults or concerns that may arise after the building is completed.

Furthermore, because local contractors may have limited financial resources, setting aside monies for warranty claims may be challenging. 

As a result, offering and honouring a 'home warranty' is extremely difficult for local contractors because they lack standardised quality assurance, comprehensive documentation, and dispute resolution mechanisms, making it less feasible for them to offer home warranties.

A home warranty is one of the most important aspects to consider as it provides homeowners with protection against any natural disaster or unforeseen events.

In order to provide our clients with such protection, we at Brick&Bolt offer our clients a ten-year home warranty, money refunds on delays, and most importantly, peace of mind.

Dedicated Tech Support

Local contractors may struggle to provide tech support to their clients for a variety of reasons, including

• Many local contractors may lack the essential experience and resources to provide good tech support. 

• They may not have the infrastructure or processes in place to provide continuous technical help.

• They may not have incorporated digital project management tools or customer support platforms, making it difficult to provide clients with quick assistance.

• Finally, providing technical support needs continual investment in technology, training, and infrastructure, which can be costly for many small local contractors. 

At Brick&Bolt, we strongly believe that construction operations can only scale with technology.

To ensure that the construction process is predictable and of top-most quality, we have developed a ‘State-of-the-Art’ technology consisting of ‘16+ Applications’ to manage our projects and clientele base.

Following are the systems that we use in order to make construction predictable:

• Design Platform: Parameterized plans that the client can access from anywhere and everywhere.

• Contractor Management Platform: This platform enables us to qualify, rate and allocate projects to contractors.

• Inspection App: This app enables ‘Workflow Automation’ to ensure that our site engineers check and inspect sites in a uniform manner every time.

• Supply Chain Platform: This platform enables us to supply building materials to the site as and when required.

• Contractor and Customer Apps: These apps provide the client with a 360-degree view of their project, and that too at their fingertips.

Reimbursement for Delay

Local contractors may not typically reimburse their clients for project delays because:

• Local contractors may consider such delays to be unforeseeable and hence may be unwilling to accept financial responsibility for conditions beyond their control.

• Construction contracts frequently include measures addressing risk allocation and responsibility for delays. Clients may have consented to these limitations throughout the contract negotiation process if local contractors arrange their contracts to limit their exposure to financial penalties for delays.

• Furthermore, local contractors may lack the financial reserves to absorb the expenses of delays. 

As per industry reports, more than half of the real estate and construction projects are delayed in India.

At Brick&Bolt, we follow a ‘Zero Tolerance’ approach towards any delays.

This is how our system functions:

• Our project management app tracks the project on a daily basis against the work schedule and raises an alarm when necessary.

• The automated task management feature creates tasks for the team to ensure corrective actions are taken if snags are present.

• If a client faces a delay, we ensure that the client is provided with adequate refunds, as per our “Strict Penalty Clauses”.

On-time Project Delivery

Construction projects are subject to a wide range of uncertainties and variables, including weather conditions, permitting delays, unforeseen site issues, and supply chain disruptions.

These external factors can have a substantial impact on project timelines, and local contractors may not have complete control over them.

Furthermore, local contractors may work on many projects at the same time, which might lead to resource restrictions. As a result, it is difficult for these contractors to execute the tasks within the time range specified.

At Brick&Bolt, we ensure on-time project delivery with no cost overruns by providing our clients with access to “Online Project Tracking” to understand the timelines of every project stage.

Additionally, we also have in-house tech-based platforms that track and mitigate delays through corrective actions and tasks that are undertaken regularly to ensure an enjoyable customer experience.