Coval Homes builds exceptional customer experiences with Adobe Acrobat Pro

Building a home is a highly personal experience. Every part of the process, from picking a floor plan and lot to build on, to finding just the right interior and exterior colors, requires a major investment in a space where homeowners will make lasting memories.

Semi-custom homebuilder Coval Homes is in the business of making dream homes a reality. The Tacoma, Washington-based company’s small teams need a big reach to collaborate with the contractors, architects, suppliers, and trade partners they depend on to bring those homes to life.

Knowing how important each home is to their customers, Coval Homes takes a customer-centric approach in order to make the home-building process go as quickly and smoothly as possible, with the motto, “You’ll be proud of what we build together.”

Planning a build involves volumes of paperwork capturing every step of the process, and traditionally, that meant meeting in person with everyone involved to review and sign off. However, COVID-19 closed the door on in-person meetings and general construction itself in Washington, making it difficult for the Coval Homes team to carry out their home order process, especially those requiring physical signatures.

To keep business running, Coval Homes needed a fast, effective way to collaborate digitally with their teams working across many disciplines. The same was needed for their clients moving forward with plans for their dream homes. Signing and returning documents swiftly was essential to ensuring that each family’s home build kept progress moving in the right direction.

Constructing a digital workflow

From wooden framing to finishes, the Coval Homes team knows how to recognize the right materials to complete a job. Challenged to bridge the gap between their in-person and remote collaboration, the team turned to Adobe Acrobat Pro to create, manage, and share a large range of documents through one versatile application, while collecting e-signatures that are highly secure and accepted legally.

“Our customers are excited about building a new home but don’t always love the process. That’s why we’re here! They put their trust in us to make everything as stress-free as possible,” says Joey Harman, project consultant and assistant sales manager, at Coval Homes. “With Adobe Acrobat Pro, we make it easier to create and navigate large volumes of documents, which has improved productivity for all members of a build, whether they’re in the office or on a site.”

Organizing documents with efficiency and ease

Building a new Coval Home involves many moving parts. Every project has hundreds of documents that include lists of materials and contractors, lending and financial information, home plans, site plans, pre-construction and permitting documents, change orders, floor selections and cabinet designs, and much more.

Assembling all those documents into a cohesive package is no small task, especially when the builder’s teams had to shift to remote work. Using Acrobat Pro, the team can quickly and easily compile large volumes of information — including a list of trade partners that alone can include dozens of framers, electricians, plumbers, roofers, and HVAC crews. Having one organized and updated location for the important information benefited Coval’s teams throughout the many build areas in Washington State they proudly serve.

Using Acrobat Pro, the Coval Homes team can also seamlessly pull individual documents and send them for review and approval to contractors, project managers, and customers alike. As teams organize, track, and send documents through one application, they streamline workflows and allow all collaborators on a build to be more productive. Through the fill and sign feature in Acrobat Pro, document recipients can autofill fields with saved data, making review and approvals faster and easier. To speed collaborations, Coval Homes can send documents for signature directly from popular, commonly used applications like Microsoft 365, Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox.

Standardizing on Acrobat Pro helps Coval Homes keep better track of documents throughout the complex home building process with a traceable, digital paper trail.

Customized material, updated at a moment’s notice

Every home-buying journey comes with a lot of excitement and changes. Price updates, issues with material availability, possible inspection delays, weather challenges, and other things can happen at moment’s notice.

Instead of manually navigating through every page of a customer’s home-building package to implement changes, the Coval Homes team can use Acrobat Pro to keep standard pages in while easily replacing ones that need updating, saving time for Coval and its customers alike. Also, if forms are required, they can be generated and circulated across teams for faster review and signing.

“Given the volume of documents and frequency of changes, having streamlined processes is critical,” says Harman. “Certain parts of custom homebuilding are often in flux, so having a tool like Acrobat Pro allows us to respond immediately to changes.”

Opening the door to marketing materials as unique as every customer

As the team relied on Acrobat Pro to stay productive and enhance collaborations during COVID-19 lockdowns, they also explored the potential of Acrobat Pro to help develop and deliver creative assets that distinguish Coval Homes from its competitors.

While other builders might create lower-quality marketing materials and home concepts for photocopied forms that can be blurred and grainy, the Coval Homes team uses Acrobat Pro to present visually attractive, well-organized home orders and layouts. By assembling pages personalized to each project, the team strengthens customer trust with every interaction.

“In home building, every detail matters to us and our clients. Acrobat Pro gave us many useful tools to effectively deliver polished, easily accessible information that conveys the quality of our homes,” says Harman.

A blueprint for customer collaboration

Adopting Acrobat Pro enables Coval Homes to draft a lasting blueprint for guiding new customers along their home buying journey.

“Coval Homes might receive inquiries from 1,000 families each year. Whether people are shopping or buying, managing that volume and delivering the highest-quality service at each and every stage is so important to us,” says Harman. “The Coval Home building process is always improving as our teams work hard on every new project. We’re very grateful for the tools and support that Acrobat Pro gave us, especially when the COVID pandemic started.”