Construction project finance plays a crucial, time-sensitive role in residential construction, helping contractors, remodelers, and builders access funding draws throughout a project’s lifecycle.
Historically, however, the process has been inefficient, requiring lengthy review and approval timelines that cause delays and take attention and manpower away from other important tasks.
“It’s just one of the most inundated, labor-intensive, inefficient processes that exists in construction,” said Thomas Schlegel, VP of Engineering at Built Technologies.
While many companies have worked to improve the efficiency of construction draws, Built Technologies believes it has achieved a meaningful breakthrough in recent months with the full rollout of its Draw Agent.
How technology and AI can improve construction draw times
In residential construction, construction draw timelines typically run about seven business days. However, this process is gradually becoming much faster as companies leverage artificial intelligence to automate much of the end-to-end build-cycle data. Built Technologies, for example, now achieves an average construction draw timeline of three business days.
The company shortened the construction draw process by replacing fragmented communication and workflows, such as emails, spreadsheets, PDFs, and hundreds of required documents, with a centralized platform that grants both lenders and borrowers access.
This centralized system organizes essential documents such as invoices, lien waivers, inspections, photos, plans and budgets into one place. It also enables users to communicate directly with lenders, see outstanding requirements, submit draw requests and schedule third-party inspections.
However, the biggest breakthrough for Built Technologies is its new Draw Agent, which the company announced in 2025 and fully rolled out earlier this year. The Draw Agent allows users to access simple construction draws within minutes.
The Draw Agent activates when it detects a new draw and fully automates the draw review process in three modes. One of the Draw Agent’s biggest impacts is its automatic review times. According to Schlegel, it can often take 20 to 40 hours for a human to review a construction draw request.
While most users are open to using AI in the review process, not everyone fully trusts the technology yet. As a result, the Draw Agent system rolls out to users in stages, gradually expanding its level of responsibility to encourage adoption and ease the transition from manual review to full automation.
During the first stage, audit mode, the AI tool conducts a read-only analysis of the draw package, ensuring that all information is correct and consistent.
As users become more confident in the Draw Agent’s abilities, they can transition to assist mode. Using assist mode, one can leverage the AI agent to complete select tasks like scheduling inspections or sending borrower communications, while still maintaining approval control.
The most advanced stage is automate mode, in which the Draw Agent independently completes and the full review and approval process, ultimately requiring very little user involvement other than complex cases. This tool ultimately enables approval within minutes.
The Draw Agent technology was a major breakthrough, Schlegel said. He has been with Built Technologies for eight years, and has seen firsthand how quickly AI transformed the construction draw process.
“Over that eight-year process, we’ve been making incremental improvements, roughly, say, every month or every quarter. Last year was a watershed moment for the capabilities of these models. They have gotten so good that now we are starting to trust them with more and more things,” he said.
Benefits to contractors, builders and lenders
In April, Built Technologies announced that it partnered with U.S. Bank to offer construction loans. Other banks, like Citi, also utilize Built. Lenders, Schlegel said, have responded well to the use of AI in construction draws.
“For the bank, that money, once those construction loans are originated, goes into a state that’s known as committed, but it is not funded. When the money is committed to a customer, you cannot use it for anything else, but until it’s funded, you’re also not collecting interest, and that’s part of why construction is considered so risky for a financial institution. If a lender can disperse money faster, they’re typically making more money,” Schlegel explained.
According to Schlegel, nearly 185,000 contractors use the Built Technologies platform. For builders and contractors, the benefits of quick construction draw timelines are apparent, as it can speed up the overall construction process.
“It’s a very cash flow driven industry, and the biggest risk to any project is that your builder has to go to another project to get paid. And very frequently, builders are using money from Peter to pay Paul, and that’s when things come sideways,” he said.
