Collaborative construction: what BuildBuddy says about Australia's next proptech frontier

Australian proptech has done its most visible work at the transaction end of property — portals, CRMs, payments, forms and access. The building of the asset itself remains stubbornly analogue. As Kylie Davis observed in closing her Proptech Podcast conversation with Danny Assabgy, founder of BuildBuddy and chief executive of home building company Hudson Homes, construction is one of the least efficient sectors in Australia: productivity has gone backwards over the past ten years, and twenty years of digital transformation across manufacturing and logistics has, in her words, "hit a brick wall when it comes to construction".

BuildBuddy is a case study in what happens when that wall is approached from the inside — not by outsiders, but by an operator running one of the country's larger residential builders who set out to compete with his own business model.

Disruption from inside the industry

Assabgy's background is not in construction. He studied accounting and law and ran a financial planning company before entering home building to offer investment clients owner-occupier quality product. He now leads Hudson Homes, which builds in New South Wales and Queensland and was named Australian Builder of the Year in 2023.

The origin story is a phone call. Around four years ago a customer rang the number Assabgy prints on every Hudson Homes brochure and told him: "Mate, I can do a better job building my house than what you can." His first reaction was that he had 550 homes in construction and the customer had one. His second was to ask what a builder actually does, narrowing it to three things: a workflow repeated on every project, from excavation to slab to frames and trusses; a trade base and negotiated supply arrangements; and expertise, embodied in the site supervisors making sure work is done properly.

Could those three things be flowcharted and handed to a consumer? Assabgy mapped the process across nine A1 sheets of paper — some 4,000 boxes and 20,000 arrows — then folded it away as too hard. It re-emerged when school friend and software engineer Vince Marciano, now his co-founder, suggested at the start of the COVID lockdowns that they begin.

A third method of construction

Assabgy frames BuildBuddy as a third method of construction. Australians currently have two options: engage a traditional builder, or become an owner builder. BuildBuddy calls its alternative collaborative construction — the homeowner contracting directly with trades and suppliers, with no middleman, and the platform as connective tissue. The team studied what the best builders do and built algorithms that generate an ideal workflow for each project, then connect the owner to a curated marketplace of suppliers, trades and consultants: three genuinely good plumbers in a region rather than a thousand, in contrast to the race to the bottom on price Assabgy sees on some trade-listing websites.

The scheduling logic is where the product thinking shows. Workflows are sequenced not only by predecessor and successor tasks but by time — the task to order windows appears eight weeks ahead of need, and a bricklayer cannot be booked until the bricks are on site. Assabgy argues scheduling is the most valuable thing a site supervisor does, a point Davis endorsed given the cost of time to owners paying rent.

Decisions are sequenced too, under a philosophy Assabgy summarises as "plan slowly so you can build quickly": full construction drawings rather than approval sketches, and selections locked in early — down to shower taps, which dictate the pipe spacing set behind waterproofing and tiles.

The construction buddy

The element Davis singled out as her favourite is what Assabgy calls the platform's secret sauce: the construction buddy, a licensed building professional with at least ten years' experience who reports directly to the homeowner, much as Uber created the category of Uber driver. Several Hudson Homes site supervisors have come aboard as construction buddies.

The significance is structural rather than technological. A site supervisor employed by a builder acts in the company's interest; a construction buddy is paid a set fee by the homeowner and owes a duty of care to them. Assabgy believes that paradigm shift has the greatest bearing on whether the platform succeeds, and Davis noted it also expands career pathways within construction.

Accountability runs the other way too. BuildBuddy operates a net promoter score style review system, and every customer must review the trades and suppliers they used. The motivation is a familiar grievance: Hudson Homes once received a one-star review over paintwork and a missed appointment the painter explained with "surf was up". The builder wears the reputational damage for third-party work. A transparent review system, Assabgy argues, lets trades who turn up be rewarded financially rather than undercut on price.

Proof, runway and the long cycle

BuildBuddy's development path is instructive for proptech investors. Rather than an MVP, Assabgy funded a complete build — fourteen software engineers over roughly 18 months, on an initial $5 million commitment — because empowering a police officer and a school teacher, his stated ideal customer profile, to build a home carries a responsibility a partial product cannot discharge. Boeing, as he puts it, cannot build an MVP of an aeroplane. The decision followed launch at the Sydney Home Show in April last year, where twelve people signed up against a planned pilot of ten.

Davis drew out the sector-specific challenge: an Uber customer cycle is 20 minutes, a home building cycle 18 months to two years, so proof points accumulate slowly and funding runways must absorb delays outside the technology's control, such as council approvals and land registration. Over the past twelve months around 150 people have come onto the platform, 26 are in construction, 120 in pre-construction and two families are living in completed BuildBuddy homes, with around $160 million of construction work in the pipeline — achieved in a quiet market with almost no paid marketing.

The value proposition is a saving of 20 per cent or more, from the absence of a builder's margin and supply rates negotiated on the back of Hudson Homes' volumes. The first customer, Greg Lurie, quoted $1.35 million for a 48-square home and preparing to sell the block, poured his slab in May and moved in the following February at $860,000. Assabgy frames this as better value rather than cheap building: some customers are building $3 million homes, drawn by the unlimited choice of finishes.

Where it goes next

Artificial intelligence is being applied narrowly. AI interns are working on the early price guide, which aims to take an uploaded set of plans, derive dimensions, apply regional rates and produce an estimate accurate to within 5 per cent — against the several thousand dollars a full bill of quantities costs. It is not working yet, Assabgy was careful to say. Beyond that, and a concept to nudge trades who have not quoted, the platform runs on intelligent workflows rather than AI. Customers can bring their own design, use an architectural designer, or select from more than 200 floor plans adapted from Hudson Homes' library, walkable in a virtual display village at buildbuddyworld.com.

Assabgy's ambition is that within five years more homes will be built in Australia by BuildBuddy than by any other home building company, tempered with arithmetic: Australia's largest builder, Metricon, holds around 2 per cent of the market, so even one in twenty consumers choosing this route would be 5 per cent — roughly the size of the top ten builders combined. He is equally quick to say BuildBuddy is not for everybody.

For the wider proptech community the lesson runs beyond one company. Construction technology carries a longer proof cycle, higher consumer stakes and more third-party dependencies than most proptech categories, which changes what good product development and sensible investment look like. As Davis put it, if Australia is to solve its affordability and housing supply crisis it needs more construction solutions and options — and BuildBuddy, recognised at the 2025 Proptech Awards, is one strong example of what that can look like.