How Burke & Herbert Bank Scaled Construction Lending Through Four Acquisitions With Built
A community bank founded in 1852 grew a mostly-commercial construction portfolio across four acquisitions, all on a single source of truth.
- Industry: community banking and construction lending.
- Headquarters: Alexandria, Virginia.
- Founded: 1852. Burke & Herbert Bank is Virginia’s oldest bank, with nearly 100 branches across six states (Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia).
- Construction portfolio: commercial real estate (CRE), homebuilder lines, and one-to-four-family residential construction.
Bank mergers and acquisitions (M&A) expose construction lending operations. When two banks combine, so do two ways of tracking draws, budgets, inspections, and documents. Inherited portfolios often arrive on spreadsheets and shared drives, piecemeal, managed by different administrators.
Consulting firm West Monroe notes that bank M&A technology integration carries real risk. One botched conversion weekend can trigger deposit runoff that takes years to recover. Construction loans are frequently left on manual tools, which makes each conversion slower and harder to trust. Built’s own commentary puts it plainly: sorting through spreadsheets and emails for data migration is tedious, time-consuming, and risky.
Burke & Herbert Bank knows this firsthand. Since 2020, the bank has completed four M&A integrations and grown its construction portfolio while protecting data integrity. Jennifer Green, its Construction Loan Administration (CLA) Lead, has led every one. Green joined the bank through an acquisition, then became part of the acquiring side. She has integrated construction portfolios both with and without a single source of truth, and she can speak to the difference. Built has served as that system of record, and as a hands-on partner, across all four events.
In this industry, it’s important to have a single source of truth. Our number one goal is always going to be mitigating risk, and having all the data in one place helps us do that and scale the way we want to.
The challenge: integrating portfolios without a single source of truth
Without a shared system, integrating an acquired portfolio is manual work. Green describes spreadsheets, shared drives, and data that arrives piecemeal across different administrators. It can take a couple of weeks or more just to get eyes on an inherited portfolio. Vital information can go missing along the way. Other lenders have described the same starting point, including Stock Yards Bank, which ran construction draws on spreadsheets and paper files before moving to Built.
That risk compounds with each deal. Per Green, Burke & Herbert’s construction book grew from about 100 loans, mostly one-to-four-family residential, to roughly 160 loans today, about 90% commercial. “We’re definitely a more commercial driven bank at this time,” she says.
Green has seen the other side of that math. She joined the bank through an acquisition, so she knows what it feels like to hand off a portfolio and hope nothing slips. That dual vantage point shapes how she runs every integration now. The goal is to bring processes together without losing the detail that protects borrowers and the bank.
One system of record across every acquisition
Built gave the team one platform for construction loan administration across all four integrations. For the current acquisition, Green’s team is bringing more than 80 loans onto the platform. Weekly calls with a dedicated implementation manager keep it on track, with set agendas, budget build-out, and balancing handled in a repeatable process.
A dedicated implementation manager, a client success manager, and a help center back the work between calls. Green says that support, plus extra one-on-one training hours, made the fourth integration the smoothest yet. It also scales beyond one bank. Built now supports 300+ lender clients, including 14 of the top 25 U.S. lenders, with more than $400 billion in active real estate finance managed on the platform.
Visibility, documentation, and audit readiness
Built keeps files, folders, and comments in one place. Anyone can open an appraisal, budget, or construction loan agreement with a click. Comments stay in-platform and land in an exportable compliance file that auditors can review. That same shift cut loan administration turnaround from days to hours at The Village Bank.
Construction draw management gets more focused too. Draw desk assignment lets an administrator see about 10 assigned loans instead of 50, so the team is more confident it isn’t missing incoming items. Draw inspections and disbursements sit alongside those loans in the same system. The AI budget upload cuts budget setup from more than 30 minutes to about 3 minutes, per Green, which frees the team for other work.
For Green, the payoff is proactive visibility. When every appraisal, budget, and draw lives in one place, the team can answer questions in real time instead of chasing files across systems. That matters most during a conversion, when an acquired portfolio and its history all have to land somewhere the team can trust.
Four integrations in, the process keeps getting smoother. Green credits preparation, weekly calls, and a support team that moved administrators from uncertain to confident. Extra one-on-one training hours helped onboard new team members, and borrowers have called the platform straightforward and user friendly.
The through-line is risk. A single source of truth lets the team make informed decisions, protect data, and scale through each deal. Green expects construction lending to keep moving toward greater automation, better reporting, and more connected data. She wants a technology partner that keeps investing alongside the bank.
