Building a connected system for scale with Procore

The Challenge

When Senior Contract Administrator Peter Antoniou joined in 2019, Better Living Group was a rapidly growing family builder and developer. The family business had built strong working relationships with clients and subcontractors over decades, but the technology supporting that work was under strain.

“The first thing I noticed was just how well the team looked after both clients and subcontractors alike,” Peter says. “The culture is defined by really positive and long-lasting working relationships. However a lot was based on conversations, phone calls, site meetings and handshake agreements. And to be honest, it worked really well in the past.”

But Better Living Group was set to triple in size, and for Peter, the reliance on informal processes posed increasing operational pressures. Finding the latest drawings or accurate project information was often a challenge, with much of the knowledge residing within individual team members rather than in a central system.

“When I started, I was given a blank canvas and the freedom to set everything up as I thought it should be,” Peter says. “We had two key priorities: financial control and visibility. We needed budgets, reporting and confidence in our numbers, but we also needed a single place for all our documents, reports and drawings so everyone was working from the latest information. Procore ticked all the boxes. Everything we needed and more was right there. I think it took me a day and a half to set it all up, and from there it just took off.”

The Solution

Better Living Group had an opportunity to build on the company’s strong relationships with a connected system to manage budgets, reporting, drawings, documents, consultant reports, contracts, correspondence, safety and financial workflows in one place.

“When I started, I was given a blank canvas and the freedom to set everything up as I thought it should be, and that’s where Procore came in. Procore ticked all the boxes. Everything we needed and more was right there. I think it took me a day and a half to set it all up, and from there it just took off. 

“I had two main priorities,” Peter says. “First, it was essential to have financials in terms of budgets, being able to export those budgets and having reporting functionality. If my director called me up, I needed the confidence and the data to be able to say, ‘Yep, this is what we spent on this project.’”

“Second, we needed control and visibility of all our documents, reports and drawings — for me that was huge. Having confidence that everyone is working off the latest drawings was essential. Procore ticked all the boxes. Everything we needed and more was right there.”

“From day one of setting everything up in Procore, I saw the difference straight away,” Peter says. “It wasn’t just internally. A lot of our subbies were saying how good it was to have software where they knew they were working off updated sets of documents.”

“We have all our consultants on Procore now as well, so they actually upload their drawings, meeting minutes and defects,” Peter says. “That saves us time and takes that responsibility away from us, because what they’ve uploaded is always the most up-to-date version. It solves the problem of missing an email or missing a Dropbox link.”

“In our tenders when we go for new projects, we actually include that we use Procore and offer the client full access for free, with no charges on top of that,” Peter says. “They love it. To be honest, we find the whole team and our clients are really into it.”

The Results

• Reduced monthly reporting time by 96%, from 1.5 days to 30 minutes
• Connected 90–95% of construction workflows on a single platform
• Enabled company-wide visibility across budgets, forecasts and project performance
• Accelerated defect resolution with real-time collaborative workflows, delivering efficiency gains and project transparency for clients

QR codes for a complex project: how the right tools make a difference

For Peter, a complex apartment upgrade in Melbourne’s inner north quickly showed the practical value of having the right tools, accessible documentation and one connected system. 

“This project involved extensive internal works, upgrades and balcony rectification on a seven-storey complex of 35 apartments,” he says. “The client wouldn’t know what to expect until we ripped up floors or ceilings or walls, but each apartment typically had about 60 defects. There were a lot of issues with fire compliance as well and residents were moving in and out. There was a lot going on.”

Better Living Group used Procore’s locations and defects tools to simplify and manage the two-year project.

“Having the ability to log a defect on each apartment, go through the whole project, export a report and send it to the client really, really helped us,” Peter says. “To be honest, I don’t know how we could have done it if we didn’t have Procore in place by then.”

“We put QR codes next to each apartment door so subcontractors who might have been working on 10 apartments that day could scan in and say, okay, these are the defects for me, and they just jumped straight into it,” Peter says.

“Beforehand it probably would have been a lot of mess between a lot of emails saying, ‘What’s this?’ or ‘What’s that?’ But now with variations, we could jump on and see the whole thread of what that variation was all about, what the client said, what you’ve said, and it was all tracked really nicely.”

“Honestly, considering the difficulty of the project, I’ve probably never had a more easy administration side of managing a project. It was really well run.”

Reporting and full project visibility, minus the paper chase

For Peter and the growing contract administration team, reporting has been one of the biggest day-to-day gains.

“I use Procore to export our reports every month and present that to our directors to show the status of all projects across the board, which we couldn’t have done in the past,” Peter says. “Timewise the savings are pretty massive. To develop a report, it probably takes me no more than 30 minutes, whereas in the past it would have taken me around a day and a half.”

Better Living Group also uses Procore’s forecasting tools to track costs to date, budgets and forward-looking commercial performance.

“Before, you had to work out what’s through and what’s not and what’s left,” Peter says. “Whereas now it’s all there for you in one central place. Invoice and approval workflows give us contract administrators more confidence that nothing has been missed, and it gives our accounts guys confidence that they captured everything as well,” Peter says.

For the Better Living Group team, stronger documentation is about more than visibility and efficiency. It also helps protect the relationships the business is built on. On the client side, Procore provides a clear record of variations, approvals and correspondence. On the subcontractor side, it helps make scope, drawings and revisions clearer from day one of a project.

“To be honest, we wouldn’t be here without the subbies,” Peter says. “Making sure they’re looked after and that we’re fair is really important to us. As long as things are black and white, which they are in Procore, there won’t be any blurry areas causing issues. Everything is super clear cut because it’s all on the system. Subbies can go back into drawings or documents and read everything because it’s all there. It’s not, ‘Hold on, I better search and make sure I sent something on this date.’ It’s just there. You know it’s there and you know it’s the latest version.”

“We’ve shaped how we run things for everyone around Procore because it has everything for us,” he says. “From a contract administration perspective, honestly I don’t think there’s anything there that I’m thinking, ‘oh, I wish they had that’. It’s got everything we need.”

Set to scale up with modular, analytics and AI

With the right systems in place, Better Living Group is all set to take on larger projects and branch into other sectors while holding onto the values that have shaped the business from the beginning.

“With the way we use Procore now, we could facilitate projects up to $50 million comfortably, because we’ve got these systems in place,” Peter says. “Going forward, as long as we keep the same values we’ve always had — making sure our clients are happy, looking after our subbies and protecting our reputation — we’re in a really strong position.”

That growth is already taking shape in modular housing. Better Living Group is part of a tender panel for modular homes across Victoria and has built a dedicated second team to manage the growing pipeline. Procore’s flexibility means the same core system can support very different project types and timeframes.

“Whether it’s a project that goes for a week or one that goes for 10 years, it’s the same system,” Peter says. “Everything the clients need from the government side is all there. Modular just leans more heavily on the programming side, because you might get the contract today and that module needs to be on site, landed, in six weeks.”

As the portfolio grows, Better Living Group has begun using Procore Analytics to move from project-by-project reporting to a company-wide view across budgets, RFIs, defects, subcontract packages and user activity.

“It gives us a snapshot of reporting across all our projects, and it’s changing the way we report — not at a project level, but at a company-wide level,” Peter says. “You can drill right down too. If a project is running over budget, you can click in and see exactly where. We can even compare a single package — say concrete — across all our projects to see where we sit over and under budget.”

With around 90 to 95 per cent of Better Living Group’s construction workflows now running through Procore, Peter also sees the business as well placed for what comes next, including AI.

“Some of our contracts are 500 or 600 pages,” Peter says. “Rather than sitting there searching through it all, you could search it and go straight to the page you need. And being able to search across different parts of Procore, instead of clicking through seven times, will help our team with managing multiple projects at once.”

To Better Living Group, the important thing is that technology supports construction knowledge rather than replacing it, and that it’s easy enough for a growing team to pick up quickly.

“Everyone who’s started with us in the last two years, I haven’t had to give them a real demo at all — maybe an hour or so to show them how we do things and they pick it up so easily,” he says. “For anyone considering using Procore, it’s not as daunting as it might seem at first. The moment you do it, you’ll never look back.”