Built for Builders: Real Estate Reporting That Puts Customers in Control

Built is a platform transforming the end-to-end real estate ecosystem, helping customers through the whole real estate lifecycle—from moving financial payments faster to leveraging data to improve their business operations. But before Sigma, that momentum hit a wall. Built’s customer success team was spending hours creating custom reports for every client, delaying onboarding, and limiting access to the insights that mattered most. For a platform committed to transparency and efficiency at scale, that friction wasn’t sustainable.

Erin Benotti, Principal Product Manager, and Austin Poynter, Senior Data Engineer, are part of the team responsible for changing that. By embedding Sigma's self-service reporting directly into Built’s product, their team has helped give customers faster access to their own data, and the speed and scale it needed to deliver on its promise.

Real estate moves fast, but Built moves faster

Ten years ago, Built set out to solve a specific challenge: to move money from banks into construction more efficiently. Since then, the company has evolved into something much bigger. 

“We’re connecting all of the different stakeholders in a way that’s created this holistic environment for people to build and manage real estate that’s intensely unique and effective,” says Poynter. 

Poynter sits on the data platform team, focusing on exposing data back to users and driving insight through self-service reporting. But before Sigma, that vision was hard to execute. Built’s legacy reporting tools made it difficult to embed reporting directly into the platform. That limitation forced teams to manage reporting in a disconnected, manual way. And without a means to give customers flexible access to their own metrics, the data couldn’t drive decisions at the speed the industry demands.

Speed is foundational to how we operate at Built, and the speed of information is a huge part of what Sigma offers to our customers.
_{Erin Benotti, Principal Product Manager @ Built}

“Our client success team was spending hours and hours building reports for customers,” explains Benotti, “Speed is foundational to how we operate at Built. And the speed of information is a huge part of what Sigma offers to our customers.”

Reporting that feels like part of the product

So, Built started looking for a solution that felt native to its product, could scale with user demand, and offered the flexibility to serve a wide range of stakeholders across a complex ecosystem. Sigma checked every box.

“ Sigma is really unique in the fact that we can embed this product within our entire application and then enable customers to build their own reports,” explains Poynter. And because Sigma mirrors the familiar spreadsheet interface of Excel, customers could start building reports immediately. 

“It’s really powerful meeting our users where they are, as most come from an Excel background,” Poynter says. “Since Sigma is built on this Excel interface, the spin-up time was very low.” 

We’re really focused on how we can leverage data with our clients and make it something that’s core to how they think about decision intelligence.
_{Erin Benotti, Principal Product Manager @ Built}

But the shift didn’t just change access—it changed ownership. Customers are now able to create and iterate on reports that reflect their specific workflows. Benotti points to portfolio risk ratings as a prime example. 

“With Sigma, we allow customers to build more bespoke reports—and that comes into play with things like portfolio risk ratings. They’re the experts in how they think about their portfolio risk: what metrics they want to use, what components go into it. With self-service reporting, they can build the ratings themselves in a way that’s unique to their situation.” 

That kind of flexibility ties directly to Built’s broader platform vision. 

“We’re really focused on how we can leverage data with our clients and make it something that’s core to how they think about decision intelligence,” Benotti says. Sigma enabled both.

Sigma Tenants: The quiet engine behind Built’s system of action

For Built, Sigma Tenants is the foundation of how reporting fits into their enterprise application. It ensures every customer’s data is isolated and secure, while giving Built the flexibility to mirror Sigma across complex enterprise environments. With Tenants, the team can spin up new environments for testing, maintain clean integrations, and apply the same rigor to reporting that they bring to every part of application development.

Sigma Tenants allows us to build really strong walls. The data is only ever accessible within that single tenant.
‍_{Austin Poynter, Senior Data Engineer @ Built}

“Tenants allows us to build really strong walls. The data is only ever accessible within that single tenant,” says Poynter. “Best-in-class reporting means we approach it with the same discipline we apply to all areas of application development. The capacity to spin up a brand new environment to test through Sigma Tenants allows us to make sure all of the features we’re working on play nicely with our reporting platform.”

‍For Benotti, the consistency Tenants creates is just as important as the security. 

‍“We’re creating a chain all the way from our data warehouse through our platform with Sigma Tenants in the middle,” she explains. “That allows us to ensure our environments are consistent, clean, and integrated in the ways our customers expect.”

With Tenants as the quiet engine, Built can deliver reporting that is secure, scalable, and seamlessly woven into its platform.

From manual builds to meaningful work

The introduction of Sigma marked a turning point in how Built delivered insights to customers and within its own team. Instead of managing a reporting platform end-to-end, the data team could redirect its focus toward integration, modeling, and performance. Sigma handled the infrastructure, while Built pushed the strategy forward.

“That enabled our team to focus more on the integration between our application and Sigma—and more importantly, on shaping the data model in a way that’s really accessible to our customers,” Poynter says. 

For the rollout, Built used a combination of Sigma’s white-labeled onboarding content and their own customer-facing materials, but the product experience did most of the heavy lifting. Customers were able to self-serve, exploring, building, and adapting reports without getting stuck in support loops. 

Built for what comes next

Going forward, the team at Built is leaning into Sigma’s product roadmap, with a clear focus on generative AI. Benotti points to features like chart interpretation, formula generation, and faster onboarding, all tools that map directly to the kind of customer experience Built wants to deliver. 

“We're very excited about the features that will allow customers to understand things like their charts faster, or how to build formulas and self-serve in a way that is really unique to the Sigma space,” she says.

What’s really exciting is Ask Sigma—having a generative model already trained on our data model.
‍_{Austin Poynter, Senior Data Engineer @ Built}

Poynter sees those capabilities as a competitive advantage. “What’s really exciting is Ask Sigma—having a generative model already trained on our data model, right inside the reporting platform. That’s going to be intensely valuable for our customers.”

Sigma is just one example of how the company is weaving AI into its broader platform vision. By embedding tools like this, Built is creating a future where every stakeholder—from lenders to owners to contractors—can finance, build, and manage real estate with greater transparency, efficiency, and trust.

Built’s long-term focus is clear: speed, clarity, and impact. Not just for their internal teams, but for the customers navigating complex construction and finance decisions every day.

Read more about Ask Sigma here.