Professional Builder magazine has been exploring the promise held by an approach called building information modeling. B.I.M. is a bid to reduce the guesswork that goes into designing, costing and building homes.

If just getting a better handle on the process and its costs were not incentive enough, Contributing Editor Scott Sedam appeals to pride. The homebuilding industry in the U.S. has seen perhaps a 33 percent gain in efficiency over the past three decades while industry generally has improved its process by about 300 percent, he found.

"By automating critical design, costing, and build functions that now require remarkable talent and/or burdensome amounts of time, home builders could attain the kind of productivity improvements seen in almost every other industry over the past 30 years – except our own," Sedam writes.