Burkentine delivers 750 homes a year. BuildPass runs the field.

A Family Business Built to Last

There are photos of the Burkentine brothers as kids on job sites. Pulling weeds, digging ditches, getting in the way of equipment before they could drive. Their father Paul started the company in 1989 in South Central Pennsylvania with a straightforward idea: build good homes for families to live in. That idea has scaled considerably.

Thirty-five years on, Burkentine Builders is one of the most active multifamily developers on the East Coast. Over 750 homes a year across five states. More than 4,000 rental properties. The brothers who grew up on those sites now run the business, and the thing Paul cared about hasn't changed: that a home is more than a structure, it's where a community begins.

For a long time, the software the industry offered them couldn't keep up.

"People Stop Using It When They Stop Trusting It"

When Joel Patterson joined as Director of Construction four years ago, Burkentine was delivering 318 homes a year and that number was climbing. The scheduling software they were running wasn't built for a team moving at that pace. It asked field superintendents to work through dependency logic and predecessor programming every time they needed to adjust a task. Most of them stopped bothering. Schedules stopped getting updated. The office lost visibility.

"Far and away the number one challenge we had was scheduling software," Patterson says. "We'd put a focus in, do some training. And then it would slip again."

Everything else ran the same way. Punch lists handwritten on paper and taped to cabinet doors inside units. Environmental inspections done on a phone, downloaded later, annotated by hand. Getting a subcontractor's work signed off meant physically finding the right superintendent somewhere on a 400-unit site. Good people doing their jobs the hard way because the tools hadn't caught up. Burkentine kept looking for something better.

The Same Job Site. Two Different Days.

Bobby Shear runs Cambria Place in Carlisle, Pennsylvania — 396 units across seven buildings, currently in phase three. Before BuildPass, walking a 16-unit floor to document punch items took most of the morning. He reckons he got through three units before his crew was standing around with nothing to work from.

Now he walks the same floor and just talks. BuildPass logs it as he goes — voice-to-text with photos attached — and by the time he's done the list is already in everyone's hands. The subcontractor who needed a sign-off had submitted it digitally an hour before Bobby even got there. Back at the office, Amanda Laughman has 100-plus active schedules on her screen, all built from templates she set up once and pulls for every new community they open. Brian Bricker's inspection form is filled out in the field, timestamped, and submitted, and the regulatory district accepts it without any back and forth.

Same site. Same people. A completely different day.

They Came for Scheduling. They Stayed for Everything Else.

Patterson found BuildPass at a trade conference, stopped at the booth for ten minutes, and came back to ownership saying they needed it. The scheduling was drag-and-drop, with three different views so people could look at a project however made sense to them. It worked on a phone in the middle of a job site. And it connected directly to their accounting platform — which no other software they'd looked at had been able to do.

Once they rolled it out across 15 communities, it kept growing into more of the operation:

• Punch lists running on voice-to-text — walk, talk, photo, next
• Work verifications with a full digital photo trail so there's never a dispute about what was signed off and when
• Compliance forms that regulatory districts now accept without issue
• Live drawings accessible to every subcontractor on every site
• An asset register with QR codes on every vehicle and piece of equipment, tracking mileage and maintenance

"That was one of those 'oh, you can do that?' moments," Patterson says. "It was just in the tool bag."

A Company That Leans In. A Partner That Does Too.

There's a phrase that comes up a lot at Burkentine: lean in. It means showing up fully, doing the work, asking the right questions. It's the standard the ownership holds their team to, and it's what they look for in the companies they work with.

When Burkentine asked BuildPass for a calendar view in the scheduling tool, it was live in a week and a half. Every time Amanda Laughman has raised something, it's been taken care of. The BuildPass team checks in regularly to make sure they're actually getting value from the platform, not just using it.

"The hallmark of our partnership is the customer service," Patterson says. "I've never dealt with someone so involved in making sure we're satisfied."

Amanda Laughman is more direct about it. "There has not yet been one thing I've asked that they have not done."

"Whether you're a local builder doing a handful of houses a year, or you're pushing for four or five digits, there's a solution here. And BuildPass can handle it."

— Joel Patterson, Director of Construction, Burkentine Builders