Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing at lightning speed, ushering in innovations almost daily that have the potential to revolutionize entire industries. The new home building and sales sector is no exception. Recent developments in AI pose to greatly impact the buyer experience, home designs, marketing strategies, and more. This post explores the impending shifts on the horizon and how builders can harness AI’s capabilities to drive sales now, and into the future.
The launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI in late 2022 introduced conversational AI to the mainstream. ChatGPT can understand questions posed in natural language and provide reasoned responses also in ordinary speech. This human-like back and forth is a game changer for how consumers seek out and interact with information online.
Democratizing AI Through the GPT Store
OpenAI’s introduction of the GPT Store a year later, stands to democratize AI in profound ways. Similar to an app store, the GPT Store allows anyone to create their own personalized AI assistant known as a GPT. Users can train GPTs based on their own knowledge and spheres of expertise, then monetize them through the store.
By enabling amateur developers to profit from their AI creations, the GPT Store essentially ushers in an age of influencer GPTs. Much like social media influencers of today, experts in every domain imaginable will be incentivized to produce AI assistants that emulate their distinctive style, advice, and persona. Fans and followers will then pay for one-on-one access to their idols in AI form. As just one example, an AI Tony Robbins could hypothetically coach people on self-improvement 24/7. Famed personas need only supply OpenAI with their trove of existing content to create a personalized AI avatar.
Our Director of Sales, Sara Williams, created her own specialized GPT. Meet SarAi (subsciption to Chat GPT Plus required), your dedicated AI companion for the new home industry. SarAi is designed to address all your queries related to sales, marketing, and technology within the realm of new home construction. This personalized GPT represents a fusion of industry expertise and cutting-edge technology, offering new home sales and marketing professionals a valuable resource to navigate the dynamic world of home sales with creativity and precision. The democratization of AI through the GPT Store not only opens doors for amateur developers but positions industry experts like Sara to influence the realm of AI-driven marketing for new home builders.
For businesses, custom AI apps promise to revolutionize customer service and marketing. Home builders could craft AI assistants to guide home shoppers through their entire journey – understanding needs, matching inventory, providing pricing and comparisons, and more.
For new home buyers, this means gaining guidance from a curated GPT based on their preferences and needs. Seeking an eco-friendly house? There may soon be a GPT specializing in sustainable tiny homes ready to search listings on your behalf. Or perhaps a minimalist GPT will suggest interior finishes to match one’s aesthetic. The possibilities span far and wide.
The GPT Store likewise presents builders an avenue to create branded sales assistants. Home shoppers could consult a builder’s proprietary GPT to overview floorplans, select options, compare properties, negotiate offers, and more. With the GPT Store making AI creation accessible to all (open to Chat GPT Plus subscribers).
The revenue opportunities for AI store creators and OpenAI itself are immense. OpenAI can monetize consumer subscriptions for broad access to AI tools and custom AI apps. There is also huge potential for businesses to foot the bill for specialized lead generation via custom AI assistants purpose-built to engage and convert their target demographics.
The Rise of Virtual Shopping Assistants
While the GPT Store decentralizes AI development, big tech firms like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are steadily gaining ground in AI-driven search. Instead of users piecing together answers by bouncing between sites, emerging virtual shopping assistants can digest content from across the web then synthesize requested information.
This evolution from keyword-based queries to actual conversations with the search engine carries meaningful implications for customer acquisition. As buyers increasingly engage intelligent assistants to find and evaluate options on their behalf, brands must ensure their online properties and content are AI-ready. Materials will require tags, annotations, alt text, transcripts, and metadata so assistants can accurately scan and comprehend listings at scale.
Unlike today’s predominant anonymous web traffic, users of AI search tools identify themselves by creating profiles. Their queries, comments, browsing, and purchases all get linked to unique zero-party data with consent. AI search allows for enhanced personalization, anticipation of needs based on past behavior, and completed sales without handoff, enabling brands to provide unmatched digital experiences.
The Rise of AI Search: Implications for Homebuilders
The emergence of virtual shopping assistants has profound implications for home builders’ digital marketing strategies. As AI services gain adoption, home shoppers will increasingly enlist chatbots to research neighborhoods, find floorplans matching specified criteria, set up tours, and more.
To capitalize on these conversational interactions, builders must optimize online assets for machine comprehension. Static PDF brochures and generic home photos won’t cut it. AI requires diverse, multidimensional materials like 3D tours, augmented reality walkthroughs, dynamic floorplan customization tools, advanced search filters, and interactive design tools.
Another paradigm shift is the prevalence of zero-party data in AI search. Rather than chasing anonymous footprints as with traditional web analytics, identified lead profiles attached to actual home seekers via AI provider accounts contain unprecedented transparency into each buyer’s intentions and behaviors across devices.
Integrating CRM and marketing systems to incorporate enriched visitor insights is crucial for crafting personalized sales journeys that resonate deeply with individuals who have shown interest in purchasing. This approach not only streamlines communication but also plays a pivotal role in breaking down data silos. By consolidating information across platforms, businesses can create a more unified and comprehensive understanding of customer behavior and preferences, leading to more effective and targeted sales strategies.
Constructing AI-friendly touchpoints requires accompanying processes allowing humans, bots, systems, and data to seamlessly interoperate. But brands willing to undertake this digital transformation will thrive as AI redefines how consumers discover, evaluate and buy homes online on their own terms.
The New Shopping Journey
While AI capabilities stand to significantly impact discovery and research stages, its role may expand to envelop the entire buyer’s journey. As virtual shopping assistants become more advanced, they could one day guide homebuyers from initial budget questions straight through to submitting an offer selected with their customized criteria.
By combining strengths—the comprehensiveness of machine learning with emotional appeal and negotiation skills of the human agent—AI stands to reshape the customer experience. Rather than buyers piecing together information from various sources, their personal AI advisor offers a single guided tour from curiosity to confirmed sale.
This end-to-end support means homebuilders must prepare to meet buyers wherever they connect with the brand, whether researching online, touring model homes, encountering a billboard, or chatting with an on-site agent. Creating cohesive omnichannel experiences allows AI tools to pick up where users left off as they navigate touchpoints. AI likewise facilitates behind-the-scenes lead and opportunity routing to ensure continuity.
With seamless handoffs between channels, matched with anticipatory recommendations to progress buyers along, AI shopping assistants of the future may condense what is for many, months of effort into a streamlined self-guided purchasing journey.
ChatGPT Facilitates the Quest for Dream Homes
One of ChatGPT’s most remarkable strengths with implications for the housing sector is its capacity to accurately comprehend photographic images. Homebuyers can literally show ChatGPT pictures of their perfect home and the AI will understand the desired architecture, style elements, neighborhood features and other attributes that speak to them.
Armed with these visual examples of a buyer’s ideal new home, ChatGPT can get to work hunting down available listings that closely match their dream home vision. This represents an unprecedented shift in how consumers search for just the right house to call home. No longer are they limited to sifting through properties that happen to be on market; now they start by articulating aspirations and let AI match possibilities.
Home builders can get ahead here by ensuring online inventory displays visual diversity representing various home types, floorplans, amenities, color schemes and styling options. The more real-world images fed into machine learning models, the better they become at accurately suggesting the closest fit from a builder’s catalog for a given individual’s needs and tastes.
As conversational AI permeates home shopping, brands must remember that pictures speak louder than any words. Builders should showcase the full scope of what they offer through rich media. This allows ChatGPT and other emerging search tools to unlock possibilities otherwise obscured when prospects rely solely on ineffective keywords that fail to captures the spirit of what makes a house a home.
Content Implications of AI Expansion
The ascendency of AI has resounding effects on the nature of marketing required to capture buyer attention. The days of creating static, generic renderings to merely attract eyeballs are fading. Every asset must provide value and serve users’ self-education.
As decisions increasingly get made by AI, content requires meticulous tagging, annotations, and alt text so details show up in search results. Content should focus on geotags, captions, dimensions and contextual descriptions the AI can reference.
Compelling write-ups, lifestyle imagery, interactive floorplans, personalized videos, and other sales materials will continue convincing buyers. But presentation must be punctuated by machine-readable data that lends relevance and substance. If assets appear devoid of information, AI will fail to match seekers with fitting listings or it could misrepresent inventory availability.
Adapting to Welcome AI Adoption
The meteoric advancement of artificial intelligence, ushered in by chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude and Bard, will leave no industry unaffected. Within new home building and sales, core facets of attracting buyers, designing homes, and guiding purchases stand to transform through AI capabilities in coming years.
Builders able to embrace this shift by optimizing to enhance rather than replace human connections will lead the pack. Those who take the time to learn about how AI helps consumers can get over their fear of this change. Studying up on the technology’s advantages allows builders to ready themselves instead of dreading AI. Committing now to evolve processes with the times equips teams to seamlessly welcome AI adoption as the new status quo.
To gain strategic direction tailored to new home sales on capitalizing on AI and how Anewgo is preparing for this change with its product offerings, schedule a consultation with our Director of Sales Sara Williams.
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