Painted Tree is a 1,100-acre community in McKinney, Texas designed and developed by Oxland. The community will contain four distinct districts, each with exceptional access to trails. In total, Painted Tree will have about 3,000 homesites with a variety of home choices including detached townhomes, cottages, large family homes, and semi-custom homesites.

The Challenge

A $20 million road is set to be built by the city on the Painted Tree property. The contractor for the road project was in need of a substantial amount of dirt to build the road. Rather than spend a lot of time and money outsourcing and delivering this dirt to the job site, the contractor asked if Oxland had any extra dirt from the Painted Tree project. The challenge was that no one really knew for sure if they had extra dirt to spare. A risky decision, if Oxland parted with the dirt and then needed it later on, they could have major costs in importing dirt back to the job site. On the other hand, if they had extra dirt at the end of the job they would have to pay to have it removed.

The TraceAir Solution

Dirt Decisions, Backed by Data

While the engineers and contractors were going back and forth about how much, if any, dirt would be left at the end of the job, Oxland pulled up TraceAir and was able to quickly, easily, and confidently determine that they would have an extra 60,000 yards of dirt at the end of the job. “At the end of the project, we could have had a huge pile of dirt we would have to move. This could have easily cost us a couple hundred thousand dollars”, shared Tom Woliver, Co-President of Oxland. With the information they obtained from TraceAir, they decided to give the dirt to the road contractor making it a win for everyone — Oxland did not have to pay to haul off the excess dirt and the end of the job, and the road contractor did not have to pay to import dirt.

Without TraceAir, we could have gone back and forth on this for another month and at that point they would have been done with the job and we would have been stuck with that dirt.”

— Tom Woliver, Co-President, Oxland

Get Started

Ready to start making better decisions? TraceAir’s state-of-the-art site development acceleration system is used by the top home builders to track progress, manage dirt balance, and improve communication. Request a demo to learn more.