4 Advanced AI Strategies for Builders That Are Ready to Stand Out

Many home builders are dabbling in artificial intelligence (AI) with simple prompts and generic use cases, especially for marketing-related activities.

But with experienced AI users and the right prompts, AI can do much more than create copy or generate images. Advanced AI strategies can help builders improve efficiency, gain a competitive edge, and ultimately sell more homes. If your team is ready to move beyond the basics, here are four advanced ways to use AI in home building.

1. Go deeper with AI in marketing

Content creation is often the first way builders leverage AI. Blog outlines and social media captions are great entry-level ways, but that’s just the beginning.

To get more out of your marketing, train AI on your brand voice. The copy AI provides has an obvious default tone, and the best practice is to edit what you get from AI so that your end product reflects your branding and creates an emotional connection to the reader.

To reduce the amount of human editing you’ll need to do on AI-generated marketing copy, you can train the app by uploading your brand guidelines, past campaigns, buyer personas, and examples of final drafts. You’ll still need to edit the marketing copy generated, but those prompts should save you time.

AI can also do more for marketing, such as providing topic ideas for your blog, suggesting names for streets and communities, creating editorial calendars, recommending PR pitch ideas, and auditing your website.

As always, the more detailed your prompts, the better your results will be. For website audit, include links to your website and your competitors’ websites and instruct the AI engine to give feedback on your blog topics, meta descriptions, UX flow, SEO performance and overall clarity and tone of the copy.  You’ll get much better results than if you just provide your website and instructions to audit it.

2. Analyze your competition

You never want to copy your competitors, but it’s good to be aware of what they’re doing. AI can speed up the process by scanning and summarizing competitor websites on the topics you want to compare like features, floor plans, upgrades, and price points. It can also create a side-by-side chart comparing your competitors using their public-facing materials. 

This kind of insight isn’t just for your marketing team. The whole organization can incorporate AI findings into a competitive analysis.

But don’t forget to have an experienced team member review the materials first. AI is meant to save time, not replace human knowledge.

3. Get the sales team involved 

The end goal of any new technology or tool for builders is always going to be to sell more homes, which means the sales team should be using AI, too.

AI can provide personalized scripts for your sales team based on the different buyer personas you develop. If you feed AI your customer demographic data, along with details about the homes you offer and important differentiators, it can create nuanced messaging for your team to use in emails and conversations with buyers.

AI also can help the sales team save time by providing drafts for follow-up emails based on conversation transcripts or CRM notes, and creating appointment agendas based on those conversations and interactions with the potential buyer.

In addition, AI can be used to tweak support materials as needed. For example, consider editing your elevation images to reflect each season. You can feed the existing image into an AI app and prompt it to add snow for holiday promotions, autumn-colored leaves for fall incentives, or flowers for spring campaigns.

If you usually outsource image creation, this approach can save money by empowering your in-house team to make small changes that personalize images to better fit campaigns. If you do this kind of work in-house, it speeds up the process without sacrificing quality.

4. Don’t be afraid to use it operationally

If you’re well-versed in AI, you’re probably already using it to take notes in meetings. But it can provide even more value operationally.

Want to speed up the floor plan creation process? Feed AI pencil sketches and have it create 3D elevations of the home to use as inspiration.

Need to choose a new supplier? Insert the websites of your top contenders and have it provide a chart comparing their differences.

You can also generate punch list checklists, summarize job site meeting notes and assign follow-up tasks and forecast material needs.

Home building is not traditionally the most technologically advanced industry, but AI is already being used by many builders on a daily basis. We will quickly see a gap between builders who are using it and those who are not.

At this point, your team should already be efficiently utilizing AI as a tool, but don’t forget the importance of strategy and customer knowledge that makes your employees invaluable.

AI is not meant to replace your employees. It’s a tool they can use to improve their work and help them be more efficient. Leaders who actively encourage exploration and experimentation with AI will see returns not just in marketing and sales, but across every department.