Digital Dirt: How Data is Reshaping Construction's Foundation

PLAINVIEW, NY – June 16, 2026 – In the world of construction, steel, concrete, and glass often steal the spotlight. But beneath every skyscraper and subdivision lies a more fundamental challenge: the dirt. Moving earth is a multi-billion dollar segment of the industry, yet it has remained stubbornly analog, governed by handshakes, phone calls, and fragmented local knowledge. That legacy of inefficiency is now being systematically dismantled.

Soil Connect, the largest construction dirt marketplace in the United States, has announced the launch of its Dirt Quotes Hub, a Request for Quote (RFQ) platform designed to bring pricing transparency and efficiency to the earthwork market. The launch is amplified by a new strategic partnership with TraceAir, a leader in drone-based site intelligence, signaling a major leap forward in how the industry plans, prices, and executes its most foundational task.

Shoveling Away Opacity

For decades, the process of sourcing or disposing of soil has been a source of frustration and financial risk for developers and contractors. Earthwork can account for a staggering 5% to 15% of a typical site development budget, yet estimating that cost has been more art than science. Pricing is hyper-local, wildly variable, and dependent on a closed network of personal relationships. This opacity leaves even the most experienced builders struggling to find a fair-market reference point.

"Whenever I had dirt, nobody needed it. Whenever I needed dirt, nobody had it. I felt like I was always paying more than what was fair for dirt," said Cliff Fetner, the founder of Soil Connect and a third-generation builder who created the platform to solve the very problems he faced in the field. His experience encapsulates the core inefficiency: a chronic mismatch between supply and demand, exacerbated by a lack of centralized information.

This traditional model forces project managers into a time-consuming cycle of manual outreach, with no guarantee of securing a competitive price or an efficient logistics partner. The financial repercussions are significant, from inflated hauling costs due to unnecessarily long routes to project delays caused by unreliable supply or disposal options.

A Marketplace Built from the Ground Up

Soil Connect's Dirt Quotes Hub directly confronts these challenges by creating a centralized, data-driven ecosystem. The platform allows developers, builders, and contractors to submit RFQs for their soil import and export needs. These requests are then broadcast across Soil Connect's national network of over 13,000 contractors, suppliers, brokers, and haulers.

The impact is a dramatic shift from scarcity to abundance—not of dirt itself, but of information. Users can quickly collect multiple competitive quotes, providing them with the visibility needed to benchmark market rates and de-risk their preconstruction budgets. According to the company, the results are tangible: customers using the platform save an average of 34% on dirt and hauling costs versus traditional methods. Since its inception in 2019, Soil Connect has facilitated the movement of over 30 million cubic yards of dirt, saving its customers a reported $100 million on their budgets.

The platform's traction with industry leaders underscores its value. It is now used by 80% of the top US home builders and 30% of the top general contractors and industrial developers. By aggregating quote activity and pricing data, the hub empowers users to identify regional supply-demand imbalances and confidently determine fair pricing for everything from clean fill dirt to topsoil and disposal.

Fusing Site and Market Intelligence

Perhaps the most forward-looking aspect of today's announcement is the new partnership with TraceAir. While Soil Connect provides market intelligence—the 'what' and 'how much' of dirt pricing and availability—TraceAir provides precision site intelligence. Using drone data and AI-powered analytics, TraceAir gives developers an exact, three-dimensional understanding of their job sites, calculating earthwork volumes with a high degree of accuracy.

This collaboration creates a powerful, end-to-end solution for earthwork management. A developer can use TraceAir's platform to determine they have an excess of 50,000 cubic yards of soil. They can then seamlessly leverage Soil Connect's Dirt Quotes Hub to find the most cost-effective and logistically efficient home for that material. The synergy works in reverse for sites that have a deficit of fill material.

By combining TraceAir's precise cut/fill data with Soil Connect's real-time market pricing, customers can align what they physically have (or need) with what it should actually cost. This integration of site-level data with market-level data moves budgeting from a high-stakes estimate to a data-validated forecast.

"Our customers rely on accurate site data to make critical earthwork decisions," said Alena Petrova, Vice President of Product at TraceAir. "We're aligned with Soil Connect's vision of bringing transparency to earthwork pricing -- especially in today's economic environment where cost control is paramount. We see real potential in connecting our precise volume data with their marketplace intelligence to help mutual clients optimize their earthwork spending and execute more efficiently."

The New Blueprint for Earthwork

The dual launch of Dirt Quotes Hub and the TraceAir partnership is more than just a new product release; it represents a new operational blueprint for a foundational part of the construction industry. In a sector crowded with point solutions for estimating or project management, this integrated approach—connecting digital twins of the physical site to a live financial marketplace—offers a uniquely comprehensive value proposition.

With a recent influx of venture funding and the appointment of a new CEO, Jonathan Alvarado, in early 2025, Soil Connect is poised to accelerate its mission. The company is not just building a marketplace; it is creating the data infrastructure for a more efficient, predictable, and sustainable construction ecosystem. By bringing the opaque, multi-billion-dollar dirt trade into the digital age, Soil Connect and its partners are proving that the industry's most significant innovations may come from the ground up.