Customized Mass Housing

• 8x productivity improvement
• 52 hrs vs 416 hrs per design
• 26 unique home designs built

The Design and Build firm needed to produce 3D models and floor plans for 26 unique detached homes across one, two, and three-bedroom layouts, and share them with clients quickly enough to keep pace with a growing pipeline of requests.

Snaptrude was chosen because it lets architects build and edit mass models directly in the cloud and share each design as a link clients can open on any mobile device, review, and comment on without installing software. Because Snaptrude automatically calculates built-up area and generates material take-offs as the model changes, the team could hand clients an accurate cost estimate at every round of feedback instead of re-running calculations by hand.

That combination of fast cloud-based iteration and automated quantities was the main reason the firm adopted Snaptrude over its previous CAD-based workflow for this project.

The firm was taking on more work than its manual CAD-based process could comfortably handle. Producing 26 unique home designs across one, two, and three-bedroom layouts meant repeating the same slow sequence of floor planning, area calculation, and quantity take-off for every unit type, which left the team overloaded and struggling to meet client-facing deadlines.

Because clients typically asked for changes after seeing an initial design, each request for a revision meant redoing hours of drafting and recalculation rather than making a quick adjustment, so it was hard to turn proposals around fast enough to keep pace with incoming requests, and slow iteration risked losing clients to firms that could respond faster.

Before Snaptrude, the design team worked in traditional CAD tools where each floor plan, area calculation, and quantity estimate had to be produced as a separate manual step. Drafting a single floor plan took around 5 hours, calculating built-up area added another 2 hours, and working out material quantities for a bill of quantities took roughly 9 hours more, adding up to about 16 hours of work for one design cycle before a client even saw an updated version.

With 26 unique homes to design across three unit types, that manual process meant every round of client feedback triggered a fresh, time-consuming redraw and recalculation, making it hard for the firm to turn around revisions quickly or take on more projects at once.

Switching to Snaptrude cut the design team's time on this 26-home project from about 416 hours down to roughly 52 hours, an 8x productivity improvement over the previous CAD-based workflow. Because Snaptrude automatically recalculates built-up area and generates material take-offs whenever the model changes, the estimation team saved at least 5 weeks of work on the base designs alone, work that previously had to be redone by hand after every design change.

The cloud-based, mobile-friendly sharing also meant clients could review a design and send feedback from their phones, and the architects could push an updated version back to them within hours rather than days.

That faster turnaround let the firm respond to client requests before competitors could, and the firm reported closing multiple contracts in record time as a direct result of being able to iterate and quote accurately so much faster than before.