Scaling Transparency: How Highside Reinvented Oversight with OnsiteIQ

Highside Development, in collaboration with Choice Hotels International Inc., is a forward-leaning hospitality development group operating across the United States. Known for its smart, data-driven practices and lean team structure, Highside manages a growing portfolio of Everhome and Cambria properties. With a focus on efficiency and quality, Highside seeks tools to elevate transparency and optimize construction workflows.

Highside’s strategic alignment with Choice Hotels means it often juggles concurrent developments, requiring solutions that enhance visibility, speed up decision-making, and reduce unnecessary overhead.

 

Highside’s rapid expansion was a testament to its success and ambition, but growth also brought complexity. With a growing portfolio of projects spread across remote locations, the team recognized that traditional oversight methods like periodic site visits and manually collected photos would soon fall short. “We’d probably have to hire two or three more people just to visit sites every couple of weeks if we didn’t have OnsiteIQ,” said Ellesse DesMarteau, Director of Development.

Highside understood that relying on scattered documentation and in-person site checks not only strained resources, but also introduced risk. Maintaining rigorous quality standards, controlling costs, and keeping projects on schedule became increasingly difficult without a centralized, real-time view of every site. When challenges inevitably arose, such as construction anomalies or questions around substantial completion dates, Highside needed more than anecdotal reports. It needed objective, time-stamped data to defend its interests and ensure alignment across all stakeholders.

OnsiteIQ’s weekly photo capture and AI-driven milestone tracking proved to be the perfect fit for Highside’s needs. The platform provided clear benefits:

• Real-Time Oversight: Teams accessed real-time visuals from anywhere, enabling more frequent, informed updates.

• Objective Evidence: Visual records became key assets in resolving disputes, validating pay applications, and verifying progress.

• Scalable Efficiency: Highside streamlined operations and maintained high construction standards with fewer personnel.

• Continuous Improvement: Highside remains committed to continuous improvement in its practice. As Ben noted, “We’re constantly changing design, so understanding how we’ve done it in the past with OnsiteIQ saves us time and helps new GCs get up to speed.”

Smarter Workflows and Significant Savings

The impact of OnsiteIQ on Highside’s operations has been transformational:

• • Tens of thousands of dollar saved on one project alone by providing photographic proof of substantial completion dates.

• • Enhanced dispute resolution: “It puts a line in the sand that’s hard to debate when you have all those pictures,” Cohen said.

• • Lean, high-performing team: Highside successfully reduced overhead while managing an expanding project portfolio, thanks to OnsiteIQ’s visual clarity and platform accessibility.

• • “OnsiteIQ helped the team pinpoint the source of an issue after substantial completion, to minimize time and cost in addressing the matter,” said Cohen.

The team also credited OnsiteIQ with empowering faster, better-informed conversations. “It allows us to have open communication with the GC, but to be knowledgeable going into that conversation,” one team member noted. “We’re not just hearing information, we’re verifying it.”

Highside is setting the standard for transparency and real-time visibility across all stakeholders, and by partnering with OnsiteIQ, its made that level of insight fully scalable. Together, we’re now extending the platform to deliver even more powerful, actionable insights to Highside’s teams and projects.