Why I'm building this.

I started by asking a simple question: when a lender advances money on a construction loan, how does it know the work it is paying for is actually there? The answer, almost everywhere, is one person, one site visit a month, and one PDF.

That worked when banks did most of the lending and lent conservatively. It works less well now. In Australia, a large share of construction credit has moved to private funds, and regulators have started asking how those funds verify what they pay for. Developers have collapsed owing money to many lenders at once, and in hindsight the warning signs were in the site and in the subcontractor payments, long before they reached a monthly report.

The monthly PDF is the weak link. Not because the people writing it are careless, but because the tools behind it are a spreadsheet, a phone full of photos and a Word template. Every firm rebuilds the same reconciliation by hand, and no lender can compare one report with the next.

I have been talking to cost consultants in British Columbia, where there are not enough of them to go round, and the pattern is the same: skilled people spending their hours on matching and formatting instead of judgement. So I am building the tool that does the matching, chases the evidence and drafts the report, and leaves the decision and the signature with the professional.

I’m a civil engineering student at Queen’s University and worked as a project coordinator with EllisDon in Vancouver. Sitefact is built through Orca Jones. If you monitor construction loans, or lend against them, I would like to hear how you do it today.

bxjones.com and LinkedIn.