Mosaic
Bringing the Efficiency of Coding to BTR Construction
by Carole VanSickle Ellis
When Salman Ahmad and Sep Kamvar founded their technology construction company, Mosaic, in 2017, the two computer scientists envisioned “transforming construction through the precision and efficiency of coding.”
Ahmad, who has served as the CEO of the company since its founding and has a background in software engineering and computer science, “grew up in a construction household” in Phoenix, where his father’s company took on a diverse array of projects ranging from commercial custom homes to defense contracting. “When I started graduate school, my focus was on how to build better software that could better coordinate physical-world processes instead of just digital processes,” he recalled. Later, he would refine that focus toward residential construction.
After completing his master’s degree at Stanford and a Ph.D. at MIT in computer science, Ahmad could see that, for him, his path lay in entrepreneurship and real estate. He soon teamed up with Kamvar to pursue that passion.
“It was at that time we originated Mosaic’s mission statement, which is that we want to create places that people love and make those places widely available,” Ahmad said. He continued, “The build-to-rent [BTR] space was emerging during that time period, and it was ripe for innovation.”
In the late 2010s, BTR was still emerging as the vast industry it has become today. In the wake of the national housing crash in the mid-2000s and subsequent financial meltdown and Great Recession, institutional investors began buying existing properties to assemble large portfolios of rental homes. Today, the number of homes owned and run by these large firms is still dwarfed by the number of properties owned and operated by individual investors, but institutional ownership volume is significant enough to affect industry trends, stabilize markets, and rennervate economic growth in struggling markets.
However, as the national economy and housing market have rebounded and the entire world has faced the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, it is no longer enough to simply buy existing inventory. Instead, it has become necessary to build that inventory and, thus, the BTR sector is gaining prominence as households who choose not to buy or cannot afford to do so demand single-family residential options over more common and “traditional” multifamily rental dwellings.
When Ahmad looked at the construction side of BTR, he saw an area where an engineering and computer science background could truly make a difference.
“We knew we wanted to create the most robust construction service powered by technology to be scalable and flexible while allowing real estate developers to create very vibrant neighborhoods,” Ahmad said. “That is how we got started on what is now Mosaic.”
“The scalability of build-to-rent is a really fertile sandbox to develop and deploy technology solutions,” observed Alex Pollack, Mosaic’s vice president of partnerships. Before joining Mosaic, Pollack had been working with national homebuilders on land acquisition and strategy, which made him an ideal fit for the company as it entered the BTR sector.
“To undertake this kind of project, you have to understand a lot about your subcontractors and vendors and what they are doing in the construction process,” Pollack said. “It can be a battle to get the 35-plus subcontractors that touch a job site to all align correctly, and our solutions are best fit for BTR construction operations.” He continued, “At Mosaic, we support what is effectively a large-scale change management process in the field and use our software as a controlled environment. This allows us to manage interactions between every subcontractor, ensuring they are all marching to the beat of the same drum.”
Finding Shared Passion to Power Growth
Around the time Mosaic was pivoting to enter what managing director of development Jake Miller refers to as “the general-contractor (GC) space,” Miller, previously a landscape architect, joined the team.
“My role has been in large part to influence and help create our pre-construction services, helping owners and developers maximize value in their projects through efforts like value engineering in order to ensure projects are teed up for success in the field,” he explained. “Today, my role is to oversee construction operations throughout Arizona.” Mosaic also has operations in Texas, and the company believes its custom-built technology, which is designed to provide a full suite of residential construction services covering both horizontal and vertical construction management, is applicable for builders nationwide.
“One thing we learned early on in our growth as a company was that to best serve our clients, we needed to be able to scale up and down with market forces and market cycles,” Ahmad said. “Furthermore, we also knew we did not want to require a third-party behavior change on the part of our trades. Instead, we created software solutions that allowed us to get better at working with the supply chain.”
He continued, “Construction does not have a physics problem. It has an information problem. When a project is not operating at its highest capacity, it is not because the different trades are not doing their jobs; it is because there are discrepancies in coordination or that materials are not being scheduled or procured in the best manner.”
Once Mosaic realized that its role in BTR would be as much about driving innovation as in new construction, the company took off.
“Our trades are our most valuable resources. We honor and enhance existing supply chains and trade partners while making it easier for them to bid, get scheduled, and get paid on the jobs,” Ahmad explained.
To achieve this, Mosaic created Mosaic Hub (see sidebar), an integrated platform that streamlines contracting, scheduling, payments, and AI-powered insights for BTR projects.
“Mosaic Hub is designed to optimize every aspect of the construction process, ensuring efficiency and removing communication gaps from start to finish,” Ahmad said.
As the company began to hit its stride, like-minded customers began to emerge in an organic and exciting way. For example, Mosaic’s first major customer, whose partnership resulted in the construction of roughly 500 homes, met Ahmad at a conference and struck up a conversation about an ongoing passion for building zero-energy homes. The developer had built more of these homes than any other company in the United States, but believed he had reached “pinnacle of product” and was hoping to evaluate his processes in order to continue to improve and grow.
“I said, ‘You know what? I’m product agnostic and solely process-focused. Maybe we should be friends,’” Ahmad recalled. “That kicked off an amazing partnership.”
The company continued to grow and build rapport with customers and its trade network, and the team found their novel approach struck a chord with customers who shared a passion for optimizing their processes as a way to improve performance and stay on track and on budget.
“The kindred-spirit element of working with our customers never goes to zero even as your track record and your history of successes grows,” Pollack said. “Real estate/construction/development partnerships require transparency and alignment because that relationship ultimately boils down to needing to trust one another. Everyone’s risk factors and hurdles are different, and our customers have to be able to trust us to help them reach their goals.”
Cutting Edge Capabilities Aligned with Customer Products
One of the sectors about which Mosaic is particularly passionate is the sustainable construction facet of the BTR industry. Calling the challenge of building sustainable, environmentally high-performance homes an “intellectually exciting challenge from a purely technical standpoint” alone, Ahmad said energy efficient homes are an ideal fit for Mosaic’s strengths of efficiency and optimal project management.
“We are always pushing the boundaries in terms of our own capabilities, so to have the opportunity to engage in conversations around value engineering from an efficiency perspective is very exciting,” he said.
Because one of the company’s earliest major partners was focused on Zero-Energy Ready Homes (ZERH), the team had some background that gave them an advantage as they moved into this challenging space. Zero-energy homes are defined by the U.S. Department of Energy as homes that “produce as much renewable energy as they consume over the course of the year, leaving the occupants with a net-zero energy bill and a carbon-free home.” ZERH homes are a special classification that are not zero-energy today, but could be easily converted if current technology trends hold.
Ahmad observed many people naively believe the way to achieve zero-energy in a home is to “max out the amount of solar panels on the roof.” However, the expense associated with this strategy can be prohibitive for developers and retail buyers, he said.
“The goal is to get to net-zero in the most cost-efficient manner, which means having a home that is energy efficient on its own so you need less solar to completely offset the energy footprint,” Ahmad explained. “You have to look at construction methods, materials, and installation techniques as well.” This examination extends far beyond the walls of a single home. For example, Mosaic is excited about techniques referred to as “grid-aware,” meaning they factor in the local electricity grid and how to align other systems and structural elements with the grid’s operations.
In Mosaic’s current markets, Arizona and Texas, there is a great deal of solar on the ground already. Developments in these markets could leverage access to excess solar power by allowing homeowners to store that power using smart DC battery packs installed in individual garages. This would align the entire neighborhood with rate plans for local utility companies.
“This strategy enables us to create economically viable options for projects that allow the client to hit the financial performance they need on their projects and also offer zero-energy homes,” Ahmad said.
Pollack noted the company is leveraging its experience with sustainable construction to help provide insights like these to the entire BTR industry. “We put our heads together on how to introduce more energy efficient and sustainable specifications into the communities and homes that we build,” he said.
Pragmatically, Pollack observed a big challenge for sustainable builders is making sure that these types of specifications work from a financial perspective.
“If it makes sense to the bank, then you will usually be able to include these important elements, but they are often the first things targeted when someone is trying to ‘value engineer’ the cost of a project downward,” he said. “Our cutting-edge thinking and deep experience building ZERH homes enables us to support developers who want to implement sustainable features into their homes. Typically, we find the developers building to high levels of energy efficiency and sustainability have a personal conviction about the need for this in our industry rather than being driven by external forces like higher rents or increased occupancy rates.”
Leveraging Advancements with Customer Success in Mind
As the BTR sector continues to grow and mature, Mosaic expects to find itself at the forefront of innovation in the coming years. “The exciting and maddening thing about real estate is that you are always going to be facing something new,” Ahmad observed. “Every project will have a new and slightly different rate-limiting step, meaning that crucial element that is going to affect efficiency and success. It could be entitlement issues, subcontractor availability, or material availability, and these are all things we are seeing that create vulnerabilities for our customers.”
“There is a lot of opportunity ahead for our customers, especially as we near the end of 2025 and more participants in the industry are going to be betting that supply is going to get absorbed and BTR communities are going to be in a really favorable environment,” Pollack added. “We are working today with a lot of investors and developers who share this belief and are working to move their projects forward now, so they are ready when the supply/demand balance tips in favor of landlords in the next 12-18 months.”
Ahmad concluded, “The BTR asset class will continue to be a desirable asset class in which to invest, operate, develop, and work. There are opportunities everywhere.”
SIDEBAR 1
By the Numbers
12 — Number of active projects
1,654 — Number of homes Mosaic has under active construction
1,500 — Trades currently in the Mosaic network
4.94 million — Square feet of land Mosaic developed in 2024 alone
3,000 — Mosaic has more than 3,000 pipeline units
5 million — Mosaic has developed more than 5 million square feet of land
7 — Number of completed Mosaic communities
2.15 million — Mosaic has developed more than 2 million square feet of homes
SIDEBAR 2
What is Mosaic Hub?
Mosaic describes itself as a “construction-technology company.” This means that the company is involved both in the physical construction of homes and in building software to improve the home-building process. The platform that enables this conjunction, Mosaic Hub, is designed to “augment the existing supply chain and labor force (instead of trying to replace them) to create more productivity through better approaches to contracting, scheduling, and payments,” the company website states.
There are four primary elements involved in the use of Mosaic Hub (descriptions provided by Mosaic):
Contracting
Mosaic Hub simplifies the contracting process through a unified platform that manages all aspects from bidding to execution. This ensures clarity, consistency, and efficiency.
Scheduling
Effective scheduling is at the heart of successful construction projects, [and] Mosaic Hub’s advanced scheduling tools provide precise timelines and predictability.
Payments
Efficient and timely payments are crucial for maintaining the flow of any construction project…. [The Mosaic Hub] platform automates the payment process, allowing developers and contractors to focus on delivering quality without financial delays disrupting progress.”
AI
Mosaic Hub leverages artificial intelligence to provide predictive analytics and data-driven recommendations…to optimize every phase of construction, from design to completion, by identifying potential issues early and suggesting efficient solutions.
Learn more about Mosaic and Mosaic Hub at Mosaic.us.
