HomeSphere: A Powerful Digital Platform for the Residential Building Industry

Overview | Selected Company Profiles

HomeSphere: A Powerful Digital Platform for the Residential Building Industry

Since its founding in 1999, HomeSphere has been evolving continuously to create a powerful digital community of builders and product manufacturers that simplify construction processes and improve ROI. Through its digital platform, the Lakewood, Colorado-based firm connects building product manufacturers and local home builders opening up new markets for manufacturers and delivering substantial cost savings and swift product availability to builders. “We host a digital community of 55 building product manufacturers representing 80 brands, and nearly 1,900 local and regional home builders,” says HomeSphere President and CEO Glenn Renner.

The firm’s digitized platform assists companies to overcome insufficient sales force coverage, information gaps in the supply chain, inadequate data analytics and manual rebate processing through a portfolio of solutions. From a builder’s standpoint, the digital platform opens up a direct relationship with national product manufacturers, enabling them to access rebate incentives, negotiate local pricing, and learn about high quality and trendy products without requiring the manpower to search for the best deals. As a result, local builders stay ahead of the competition by offering the latest products with the best prices.

For product manufacturing brands, the company’s large database of local market data and information identifies new customers and trade areas for marketing their products. “Our solution actively stores and utilizes brand and product usage information across the construction industry, delivering valuable information to product manufacturers on our platform,” adds Renner. Besides its niche in offering web-based digital solution platforms to manufacturers and builders, the firm also offers a distributor solution that increases sales. The platform offers a forum for distributors to promote wholesale pricing to HomeSphere builders and to add an additional rebate incentive on the back end. In addition, HomeSphere’s experienced team of sales managers work alongside the manufacturers local reps tobuild even stronger connections between builders and contractors and product brands and distributors.

We host a digital community of 55 building product manufacturers representing 80 brands, and nearly 1,900 local and regional home builders

HomeSphere’s unique methodologies and techniques have helped many organizations clear major business roadblocks. A winning example is Lennox Industries, a 125-year-old HVAC company with 60 products and more than 6,000 full-service dealers. During the housing bust, Lennox recognized a noteworthy shift in its customer base as large national builders closed their operations, leaving only smaller local and regional builders in the market. With a sales team previously dedicated to large national builders, they needed better ways to get connected to the small builders as a core customer. Lennox turned to HomeSphere because of its deep relationships with the builder community and its digital tools, which allowed Lennox to extend its sales and marketing efforts and gain a larger percentage of the local builder market share.

Over the past years, HomeSphere has successfully served the construction landscape and continues to innovate, developing improved solutions that will allow customers to access product usage data more easily and increase efficiencies and sales. Forging ahead, HomeSphere is planning to launch a new mobile user interface which will allow its customers to input and track product information, home closings and product rebates directly from the job site, helping the builder manage its supply chain more easily, and giving product manufacturers up-to-the-minute information about product usage.