The Weekly Update Your Client Stopped Having to Ask For

It is Monday morning, 7:15 AM. Dan is a project manager for a residential custom builder in Austin. He manages four active projects simultaneously — two custom homes, a major renovation, and a garage-to-ADU conversion. His phone shows 147 unread emails from over the weekend. He starts scrolling.

Mixed in with the sub invoices, supplier confirmations, and lumber yard delivery notices are four emails from clients. He can tell from the subject lines what they are before he opens them:

“Quick question about this week’s schedule” — from the Hendersons, whose custom home is in the framing phase. They have sent some variation of this email every Monday for the past eight weeks. They are not difficult clients. They are anxious clients. This is the biggest purchase of their lives and they have not heard from Dan’s company since the previous Thursday when the superintendent texted Mrs. Henderson a photo of the roof trusses being set. Before that, silence for five days.

“Can you call me when you get a chance?” — from Mike Torres, the renovation client. Mike is a commercial real estate developer who is renovating his personal residence. He is used to getting weekly project reports on his commercial jobs. He has received exactly one formal update from Dan’s company in four months. Last week, Mike drove to the job site unannounced and found it empty — the drywall crew had finished a day early and the next trade was not starting until Wednesday. Nobody told Mike the site would be dark for two days. He assumed the project was behind schedule.

“We need to talk about the tile selection” — from Sarah Kim, the ADU client. Her tile selection was due last Friday. Dan sent her the tile options three weeks ago. She emailed back with questions about lead times two weeks ago. Dan meant to respond but it got buried under 200 other emails. Now the tile deadline has passed, the tiler is scheduled to start in 10 days, and there is no tile ordered because there was no decision because there was no follow-up.

“Invoice question” — from the Johnsons, whose custom home is nearing completion. They received this month’s draw request but do not understand why the framing line item increased by $4,200 from the original budget. There was a change order for an upgraded beam at the great room, which Dan discussed with Mr. Johnson on the phone six weeks ago. Mr. Johnson approved it verbally. There is no written record. Mr. Johnson does not remember the conversation.

It is 7:22 AM. Dan has not started his actual work for the day, and he is already behind.

The Communication Gap That Kills Referrals

The irony of construction client communication is that the people who need to communicate the most — project managers running multiple jobs — are the ones with the least time to do it. Dan is not ignoring his clients. He is managing four projects, coordinating dozens of subcontractors, processing invoices, tracking schedules, and handling the hundred small fires that erupt on every job site every week.

Client communication is important. But it is never urgent — until it is. The update that should have been sent on Friday gets pushed to Monday. Monday gets busy and it slides to Tuesday. By Wednesday, the client has called the office, and now the PM is responding reactively to an irritated client instead of proactively to a happy one.

The data on what this costs is clear. For residential builders, client satisfaction drives the business through two channels: referrals and online reviews. A five-star Google review from a happy client is worth more than any marketing spend. A one-star review from a client who felt ignored can suppress leads for months. GuildQuality’s annual surveys consistently show that communication — not quality, not price, not timeline — is the primary driver of client satisfaction in residential construction.

For commercial general contractors, the dynamic is different but the stakes are just as high. The owner’s representative who feels informed and in control of the project is an ally. The one who feels out of the loop becomes adversarial. An adversarial owner’s rep scrutinizes every pay application, questions every change order, and escalates issues to their boss. A collaborative owner’s rep approves pay apps promptly, processes change orders efficiently, and recommends you for the next project.

The difference between those two relationships is often nothing more than a weekly email.

A Day in the Life of the Communication Breakdown

Let me walk through Dan’s typical week to show where the breakdown happens:

Monday. Catch up on weekend emails. Respond to client questions that accumulated over Friday afternoon and the weekend. Try to send the weekly updates that should have gone out Friday. Get pulled into a scheduling issue on the Henderson project — the window delivery is delayed by two weeks, and the siding contractor cannot start until windows are in. Spend the rest of the morning reworking the schedule. The weekly updates never get sent.

Tuesday. Site visits. Dan is on the Henderson site in the morning and the Torres renovation in the afternoon. While at the Henderson site, he takes 12 photos on his phone. He texts three of them to Mrs. Henderson with the message “Roof framing looking great!” The other nine sit on his phone. He intends to include them in the weekly update. At the Torres site, he notices the plumber left a mess in the master bathroom. He takes a photo to send to the plumbing sub. He also notices that the paint color in the guest bedroom does not match what was specified. He calls Mike Torres to discuss it. Mike is in a meeting and does not answer.

Wednesday. Office day. Dan needs to process three draw requests, review two sub invoices, and prepare a change order for the Henderson project. The tile deadline for the Kim ADU project passed on Friday, and the tiler is asking whether tile has been ordered. Dan realizes he never followed up on Sarah Kim’s questions about lead times. He sends her an email at 2 PM apologizing for the delay and asking her to make a selection by Thursday. Sarah reads the email at 4 PM and is frustrated that a three-week-old question went unanswered and she is now being given 24 hours to decide.

Thursday. More site visits. Dan is at the Johnson custom home for a walkthrough. The Johnsons are there. Mr. Johnson brings up the $4,200 framing increase again. Dan explains the change order for the upgraded beam. Mr. Johnson says he does not remember approving it. Dan knows they discussed it on the phone but has no written confirmation. This is now a dispute. Dan spends 45 minutes on site discussing it instead of managing the work. He will later spend another hour drafting a recap email to document the conversation — six weeks too late.

Friday. Dan sits down at 3 PM to write four weekly client updates. Each one takes 15 to 20 minutes — pull together the schedule status, summarize the work, select photos from his phone, and craft an email that sounds professional and informative. By 4:30 PM he has finished two of the four. A sub calls with an emergency on the Torres project — water leak from a shower pan test failure. Dan deals with the emergency. The other two updates do not get sent. Again.

The cycle repeats the following Monday.

What Buildertrend and CoConstruct Get Right

Buildertrend was built for residential builders and it shows in the client communication features. The client portal gives homeowners a single place to see their project schedule, view photos, approve selections, sign change orders, and make draw payments. The daily log feature allows the superintendent to post updates that clients can see in real time. For builders who commit to using Buildertrend’s full platform, it is the most comprehensive client-facing communication tool available.

The challenge is adoption — on both sides. The superintendent has to post daily logs through Buildertrend, not just text the PM. The client has to download the app, create an account, and check it regularly. For tech-savvy clients building a $1.5 million custom home, this works well. For the retired couple renovating their kitchen, asking them to download an app and navigate a portal adds friction to the relationship instead of reducing it.

CoConstruct takes a similar approach with a client portal designed specifically for custom home builders and remodelers. The strength of CoConstruct is the selection and specification workflow — clients can review and approve finishes, fixtures, and materials through the platform, with the selections feeding directly into the estimate and purchase orders. For builders whose projects involve dozens of client selections (and whose delays are frequently caused by late selections), CoConstruct addresses a real pain point.

The limitation of both platforms is the same: they work best when everyone uses them. The PM, the superintendent, the subcontractors, and the client all need to be active on the platform for the communication loop to close. In practice, the superintendent posts to the app, the client checks it intermittently, and the PM still ends up fielding phone calls because the client did not see the update.

The Friday Update That Sends Itself

Here is what a weekly client update should contain for a residential project:

Work completed this week. Three to five bullet points. Specific enough that the client feels informed, brief enough that they actually read it. “Framing crew completed second floor exterior walls and roof trusses were set on Wednesday” — not “various framing work was performed this week.”

Work planned for next week. Two to four bullet points. This is what the client looks forward to — it gives them something to watch for and reduces the anxiety that comes from not knowing what is happening. “Roofing crew will begin underlayment and shingle installation. Window delivery expected Thursday. Plumber will rough in second floor bathrooms.”

Schedule status. One sentence. Are we on schedule, ahead, or behind? If behind, by how much and why? “We are currently 3 days behind the original schedule due to the window delivery delay noted last week. We expect to recover this time during the interior rough-in phase.”

Upcoming decisions needed. Any selections, approvals, or decisions the client needs to make, with deadlines. “Tile selection is due by February 21 for the master bathroom. The tile samples we sent last week are from the three options within your allowance. Please let us know your preference so we can order with the 3-week lead time.”

Photos. Three to five current photos showing visible progress. Framing going up. Roof being installed. Mechanical rough-in. Clients love seeing their project take shape. The superintendent is already taking these photos — they just need to make it into the update instead of staying on his phone.

This update takes a project manager 15 to 20 minutes to compose manually. Multiply that by four active projects and you are looking at 60 to 80 minutes every Friday — time that competes with everything else that needs to happen at the end of the week.

Now consider that every element of this update already exists somewhere in the PM’s workflow. The work completed comes from the daily reports. The schedule comes from the project schedule. The decisions needed come from the selection tracking. The photos come from the superintendent’s daily documentation.

The PM is not creating information for the weekly update. The PM is assembling information that already exists in four different places into a single email. That is exactly the kind of task automation was made for.

The Commercial Side: Owner’s Rep Management

For commercial general contractors, client communication operates differently. The “client” is usually an owner’s representative — a professional who manages construction projects for a living. They do not need hand-holding. They need information.

The owner’s rep cares about four things: schedule, budget, quality, and risk. Their weekly update should address all four, concisely:

Schedule. Current status against the baseline schedule. Milestones achieved this week. Milestones planned for next two weeks. Any critical path activities at risk.

Budget. Current contract value including approved change orders. Billing to date as a percentage of completion. Any pending change orders and their status.

Quality. Inspection results. Any deficiency items identified and corrective actions. Testing results (concrete breaks, compaction tests, air infiltration).

Risk. Anything that could affect schedule, budget, or quality in the coming weeks. Material lead times at risk. Subcontractor performance issues. Weather forecasts that could impact critical activities.

An informed owner’s rep is a PM’s best ally. They have the authority to make decisions quickly — approve change orders, accept schedule adjustments, resolve design conflicts. But they can only exercise that authority when they have the information to act on. The GC who provides that information proactively earns trust. The one who delivers bad news late loses it.

I worked with a commercial GC who automated their weekly owner’s report. It pulled schedule data from their project schedule, budget data from their cost tracking system, and field information from the daily reports. The PM reviewed and approved it every Friday morning. It went to the owner’s rep by noon.

The owner’s rep told me, unprompted, that this GC was the best contractor he had worked with in 20 years. The work quality was comparable to other firms. The pricing was competitive but not the lowest. The difference was that he never had to ask for information. It arrived, consistently, every Friday, in a format he could forward to his client without modification.

That GC was awarded three additional projects from the same owner over the next two years without competitive bidding. The value of those negotiated projects: $14.2 million.

The Selection Deadline Problem

There is a specific client communication failure that deserves its own section because it causes more residential construction delays than almost any other administrative issue: late client selections.

The typical custom home has 40 to 80 individual client selections: flooring, tile, countertops, cabinetry, paint colors, light fixtures, plumbing fixtures, hardware, appliances, and specialty items. Each selection has a lead time — the time between ordering and delivery. Tile might be 3 weeks. Custom cabinetry might be 8 to 12 weeks. Specialty light fixtures might be 6 weeks.

The selection needs to be made far enough in advance that the product arrives before the trade is scheduled to install it. If the client has not selected tile by the time the tiler is ready to start, the tiler either waits (and you pay for a delay you did not cause) or moves to another job (and you wait weeks for him to come back).

The communication failure happens like this: the PM sends the client tile options at the beginning of the project. The client looks at them once, feels overwhelmed by the choices, and sets it aside. Three weeks pass. The PM is busy with four other projects and forgets to follow up. Five weeks pass. The tiler calls and asks if tile has been ordered. The PM realizes the selection was never made. Now there is a 3-week lead time on a product that should have been ordered 2 weeks ago, and the project schedule just slipped by 5 weeks because of an email that was never sent.

Automated selection reminders — at 21 days, 14 days, 7 days, and 3 days before the ordering deadline — would have prevented this entirely. Not because the automation is sophisticated. Because it is consistent. It does not forget. It does not get busy with another project. It does not decide that the follow-up can wait until tomorrow.

What Dan’s Monday Looks Like Now

Let me rewrite Dan’s Monday.

7:15 AM. Dan checks his email. His four weekly client updates went out automatically on Friday at 3 PM. Mrs. Henderson replied with a smiley face emoji and a question about when they can visit the site to see the roof trusses. Mike Torres forwarded the update to his wife with the note “see, it’s going fine.” Sarah Kim clicked the link in the selection reminder and chose her tile on Saturday morning — the auto-reminder went out at the 7-day mark. The Johnsons received their draw request with an accompanying progress summary that showed the framing line item increase tied to the approved change order (which was documented via email approval, not a phone call, because the change order communication is now automated too).

Dan has zero urgent client emails. Zero missed selection deadlines. Zero unpleasant Monday morning conversations.

He spends his Monday morning on what project managers should spend their time on: reviewing the schedule, coordinating subcontractors, solving problems, and moving four projects forward.

He did not write a single weekly update. He did not send a single selection reminder. He did not craft a single milestone notification. The system did all of that using information that already existed in his daily reports, schedules, and tracking sheets.

Dan still calls his clients. He still visits their homes. He still builds the personal relationship that makes residential construction a referral business. But he does it on his terms, when he has something meaningful to discuss — not in a panic on Monday morning because he went silent for a week and the client is anxious.

The weekly update is not a burden anymore. It is a tool that runs in the background, keeping four clients informed and satisfied, so Dan can focus on building their homes.