179 Home Builder Best Practices for Using AI - Barrett Davis Aug 23 2023

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello, everybody, and welcome to today's episode of The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with Zonda Livabl.

Greg Bray: And we're excited today to welcome to the show, Barrett Davis. Barrett is the CEO of NterNow, and he's also the founder of a new tool called HomeScribe. Welcome, Barrett. Thanks for joining us today.

Barrett Davis: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Greg Bray: Well, Barrett, let's start off by having folks get to know you a little bit. Just give us that quick background story about you.

Barrett Davis: Sure, absolutely. I started [00:01:00] NterNow 5 or 6 years ago. I really was interested in trying to converge access technology and allow people to see houses freely. One of our largest sectors is home building where we're very successful, and we work with hundreds of builders to provide on-demand self-guided tour.

At IBS last year, AI has been a buzz for a while, but it really hit mainstream in terms of generative AI. And I heard almost unanimously that people didn't really understand it. They didn't know how to get started. They were eager to try it. They were curious. And so, as the entrepreneur that I was, I wanted to try to create sort of like a product or good experience on how people can embrace AI for the first time.

So, I built sort of like a community platform, it's free, where you can learn how to use AI. We have prompts that you can click on, you can plug in your own variables. We even have what we call recipes, which are actually videos by me and experts in the community teaching you how to use their own recipes or how to use HomeScribe and generative AI tools. [00:02:00]

Kevin Weitzel: That's pretty cool, but you know what I'm missing? I'm missing some personal junk on you. Some personal news about you that has nothing to do with the home building industry.

Barrett Davis: All right. We're headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm born and raised in Georgia here, so I'm a huge University of Georgia fan, which is the University of Georgia Bulldogs, and we've won the national title 2 years in a row. So, just super proud of that. Hopefully, we can repeat next year for the threepeat.

Kevin Weitzel: Now, when you say national title, are we talking badminton? Are we talking about, what sport?

Barrett Davis: College football.

Kevin Weitzel: Okay. Okay.

Barrett Davis: And I'm slowly getting into pickleball. I guess I'm just with all the trends these days. Most drop in the tennis racket for a little pickleball racket, but it's been quite the rage with everybody.

Greg Bray: Pickleball is awesome, but, you know, my pickleball, is it a racket or a paddle? I don't know, but whatever it has this hole in it that moves. I'll swing and the ball will go through this hole and then I look at it and it's gone. I don't know where the hole went, but it's there and then it's not there, and I don't understand how that works. So maybe that could be another conversation is [00:03:00] how they have these magical holes in rackets that come and go.

Barrett Davis: That's great.

Greg Bray: Barrett, I think NterNow is becoming pretty well known in the home building industry, and you briefly mentioned that self-tour access. But just for those who aren't familiar with it, tell us just a little bit more about NterNow before we spend some more time on HomeScribe.

Barrett Davis: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of what drives our NterNow demand and why home builders are implementing self-guided tours is that home shoppers, their behavior post-COVID has drastically changed. They really do want to tour properties on demand and without sales pressure, and NterNow provides the ability for a customer to get a one-time use code. They verify themselves and they get access into the property on demand, or they could schedule a tour into the future.

And what this does is it drives many more leads. We capture people that would traditionally drive by your homes. Or, if they're on your website, the ability to schedule and get a self-tour independent access into your homes. This is a major benefit to sales and marketing teams. [00:04:00] It is definitely a different world now where shoppers want things on demand on their own convenience.

And they understand a salesperson is present, the salesperson is part of the process. It's just the first time for their discovery, they may want to just tour independently. This is sort of a buying shift that's happening, and more and more home builders are starting to use self-guided tours, which is great.

Greg Bray: What's interesting, Barrett, is the connection between NterNow and HomeScribe from a technology development standpoint, right? I'm not sure that everybody thinks of NterNow as a high-tech development type of product, even though it really is because there's a lot of technology going on behind just this lock on the door that actually processes the access for that person and tracks it and provides data back to the sales team as far as who's been there et cetera.

And so, when we look at this pivot or this add-on, if you will, of HomeScribe, this other venture that you've gotten into, the fact that you're a technology guy is really part of the connection [00:05:00] between those. Is that a fair understanding?

Barrett Davis: Yeah, I mean, even to double down on that. Now that I'm CEO, I don't get to code as often as I used to. Coding and programming is like therapy for me. It's very peaceful. I do it at night for HomeScribe. I really wanted to get to know AI intimately. So, I've actually coded and built most of HomeScribe itself at nights and weekends just to provide the platform for free. What I found, definitely working at the lowest levels, is how to really understand it for our industry.

So, you know, I've been fortunate enough to spend several years in the industry with so many clients to keep us going that, you know, I definitely know how sales and marketing is functioning digitally. And then at the AI, down at the lowest level, I'm able to sort of combine them both.

HomeScribe is trying to deliver how you can use it in like a one-click experience or a training guide with videos and things like that. That way I can take some of the deep technical experience to sort of translate that to like an easy use platform. So, you can learn, you can use it for your day [00:06:00] job. It will save you a lot of time on manual tasks, like launching communities, social media, sales follow-up, things like that.

Kevin Weitzel: Wait one minute. So, you're going to stand there and tell me that at the end of a workday, instead of just vegging out in front of a TV or going to a movie or throwing darts and getting obliterated in a bar, you literally sit down and code?

Barrett Davis: Now that I'm out of my twenties, yes. I would say that, you know, used to partake in a lot of nighttime culture. Now that I've got two kids and I'm home at a decent hour, I spend a lot of my time outside of work. I still work. I'm definitely a workaholic, but things that are peaceful, no stress. Things that, you know, I can apply my creativity to.

The lowest level, you know, I heard that there was a problem. Like, everybody I talked to at IBS, it's like how that gives me drive. And so, you know, I wanted to try to build something, and the way Homescribe is growing right now, it feels like I built something that's on the verge of something that fixes people's need. [00:07:00] There's definitely a problem out there. People trying to learn how to use AI.

Kevin Weitzel: So, as a follow-up, are you worried that AI will take over your hobby of coding?

Barrett Davis: What's really interesting is how terrible I am at coding as I used to be when I started NterNow. What is wild is I actually use HomeScribe to help me code. I forgot how to write some things on my website. So, you know, to all your digital marketers, I was trying to resurface a button or make the page scroll down. So, I put it into HomeScribe. I told me how to write this and react. I need to make this page drop-down. And I pasted it in the code that I had, and it rewrote it.

And it actually worked, and I'm actually gonna make a recipe and put it on. But just as an example of HomeScribe can help with sales and marketing content, but the AI is powerful enough to actually help with code. So, it's not going to replace a programmer, but it is making me much better. I lost that knowledge, and I was able to kind of just copy and paste some stuff together and now my website works.

Greg Bray: Let's drill down a little bit, Barrett, into what you mean by the phrase generative [00:08:00] AI. I think that might be a buzzword to some, but others, it might be totally new. So, help us understand that definition, that category.

Barrett Davis: Sure, absolutely. The most common generative AI tool is OpenAI's ChatGPT, which has hundreds of millions of users. You can generate all sorts of things on it. It's much better than Google search now. If you're just looking up something and you want like a fact, it's much better. It's great for like generating new ideas. So, they call it generative AI because it's going out into the deep internet. It's been trained on lots of data sources to give you the best reasonable answer that it can come up with. It can do with text and images as the term sort of generative AI is.

HomeScribe is specifically built and trained on some of the top 200 websites, the data sources that are publicly available. It uses what's called a large language model and ChatGPT and other large language models to sort of cobble together what our industry looks like on the public facing internet and to give you [00:09:00] back the best answer for different questions or prompts that you're asking it.

Greg Bray: So, are you then competing with ChatGTP or are you leveraging it, you know, kind of layering on top of it, home builder worldview, so to speak?

Barrett Davis: Yeah, absolutely. So, recently I was looking for like a new CRM, just for HomeScribe. Instead of just going to Google search, I used ChatGPT. I was like, what are the top five? What are the five most popular? And it gave me a much better answer, not convoluted with ads. So, it's just like a different search experience. It can do math. It can code. It can do all sorts of things.

So, HomeScribe uses ChatGPT. It uses other AIs, and it uses other data sources as well. ChatGPT is a generative, open ecosystem. It's trying to troll all of the internet and things like that. HomeScribe is just scoped for what we do in our industry. It actually has filters and blinders on it for other segments like commercial real estate and others. It's [00:10:00] drilling down to specifically what we do in home building, and we even opened it up to sort of build to rent and some of those. So, we're able to sort of point it to some of the context specifically for HomeScribe to give you better results for our industry.

Greg Bray: Tell us then a little bit more about these recipes that you mentioned. What are they and how do they fit into the overall product?

Barrett Davis: Absolutely. So, on homescribe.ai, you can sign up. It's free. We have a tab just called recipes. So, at the top, it's sort of like a YouTube catalog. We've got videos and like a header. So, for instance, the first one is SEO property descriptions. So, a recipe will have a description of what it does, what it can do, who created it. So, I created that one. There are others on the platform from like Carol Morgan and Kimberly Mackey that are coming soon. Greg, we'll have you create some, and Kevin, you too, just to promote your own services.

Kevin Weitzel: Whoa, you sure you want that? Because I'll create some crazy stuff.

Barrett Davis: Okay, perfect. Well, part of the recipe has a [00:11:00] command and sort of like an example result. So, the video shows you a description. So, you're explaining what you're doing. There is a command, so you can click it once and it will run it. So, you can watch the video, then you can actually run the recipe, and then you'll just plug in your builder variables. So, there'll be like a variable called like builder name or community name. And then for a property description, it will have a variable for the actual property description, and it can rewrite it for SEO-enhanced stuff.

HomeScribe uses a lot of the Google tools and the publicly available information on the Internet. So ChatGPT was trained in 2021. HomeScribe is actually only using real data now. So, what happened this year and things like that, and that's been a huge benefit to the platform. So, if you want to do like an SEO property description, you know, one of the common examples that I had someone do yesterday is that they're a Texas builder. So, they enhanced their property description to make it more SEO friendly, and then they turned it into Spanish right away in the same sort of prompt [00:12:00] because it rewrote it all.

You can even change it to Chinese real quickly. On your website, you can have a toggle between English, Spanish, and now Chinese just by clicking a button inside of one of our recipes. You just plug in your builder name, property description. We have a multilingual template where you can even put in Spanish or Chinese or Korean or something like that, and it'll actually spit out real characters that are validated.

Greg Bray: So, could one of these recipes that Kevin creates help him take LinkedIn photos and add sideburns?

Barrett Davis: It could, it could. We don't do anything with video or imagery yet, but we probably will in the future. Right now, we're just trying to create, I've got sort of a mandate where we're trying to create a hundred prompts or what we call sort of like our templates. So, some of the categories that we have are community launch plan, property descriptions, OSC toolkits, social media, things like that. Kevin, you could even build a recipe on your car, you know, how to fix your car. [00:13:00] You can look up different ways on that specific model and brand and things like that.

Kevin Weitzel: That's cool.

Greg Bray: Hey everybody, this is Greg from Blue Tangerine and I just wanted to take a quick break to make sure you know about the upcoming Home Builder Digital Marketing Summit that Blue Tangerine is hosting together with OutHouse, October 18th and 19th in Denver, Colorado.

This is gonna be an amazing event full of digital marketing insights, knowledge, best practices, and most importantly, some fun. So, be sure that you get registered today and come hang out with us, an amazing team of speakers and presenters that are gonna be together. Again, that's October 18th and 19th in Denver, and you can learn more and get registered at buildermarketingsummit.com. We'll see you there.

So, Barrett, you talked about the SEO example. Who do you kind of see as the typical user for this tool today? Is it a marketing person at a home builder? Is that really the target or is it a little broader than that?

Barrett Davis: Judging by the users signing up, we have sales and marketing professionals. We've got even, you know, SVPs. You can do brainstorming, product planning, community launch planning. It solves what's called the white canvas problem, or the blank canvas problem, where you need to do something, it can give you ideas and inspiration to sort of jumpstart it. We also have a lot of users that own marketing firms and things like that, and they're just trying to automate PR, other things like that.

So, Carol Morgan, as an example, helped a little bit, gave me some context around PR for HomeScribe. So, just to give you an example. AI is never going to replace Carol. She's an expert at it. But it [00:14:00] will give you a draft copy that's like 80% accurate for your new community that you can hand her instead of handing her four or five bullet points. It can actually write most of the press release, even in the right press release format, and then you can hand it to a professional.

And some of these things are changing the way different parts are done. It's supposed to reduce your manual tedious work. The AI is there to help you. It's not perfect. It's only like 80% strong. Some other things that we see are like people in advertising that do a lot in digital marketing. So, we have three or four categories around, like, content, SEO, and paid ads.

The generative of AI, especially in HomeScribe is really good at just coming up with, like, funny taglines for ads. It will actually give it in, like, the Google format. There's even, like, a TikTok script generator. There's a lot of people that are new home sales professionals that are trying to grow their audience on TikTok. So, it can generate, like, a lot of funny scripts for new home professionals. So, it's all over the place, but I've been trying to [00:15:00] add, through suggestions and things like that. Do you want to hear a new suggestion someone just gave me this morning? It's actually relevant to your podcast.

Greg Bray: Sure. This is totally current, fresh off the press today. So, what do you got?

Barrett Davis: Yeah, perfect. So, we get weekly feedback, or everybody who signs up for HomeScribe asks for suggestions or like what was missing. And then I literally go in, program it, add it, whether it's a recipe or a template. One of the things that somebody wanted was a Zoom speaking bio. So, like, the Zoom speaking bio I gave you, actually, is gonna be a recipe when it launches on Monday.

So, if you need a 1000 speaker bio, you just put in your first name. The point of view is third person, and you can add some descriptions about yourself and it will actually generate you a Zoom bio for less than 1000. And then I'm also doing some other speaker bios. So, that way, as people roll into IBS or some of the summits like, for your podcast, you can have everybody's HomeScribe to generate some of their bio just to get it started. It needs editorial review, almost like all AI tools.

Greg Bray: So, one of [00:16:00] the concerns out there with some of the AI tools, like ChatGPT is privacy. If I'm putting my company information in here, what's happening to it? Where does it go? Is that something that is an issue with HomeScribe as well? Or is that something where it's not quite the focus of the tool, so it's not as applicable?

Barrett Davis: Yeah, absolutely. I'm not an expert in that sort of realm of advanced privacy and where the legal things are, but those things are going to becoming much more serious. And definitely for ChatGPT, even the FTC is looking at how they train their data, how they got some of their most in-depth data. I know, like, somebody at Samsung was putting in, like, their own company information and then it opened up to everybody.

So, HomeScribe itself doesn't use any of the information that you type into it. We actually just use what's out there already on the internet. You know, what's great about the vertical or the industry that we're in is that home builders put all their data out publicly because they want that. You know, your property descriptions, [00:17:00] your communities, your properties, they're all available publicly on the internet. Most of these live in existing Google tools.

So, for instance, when HomeScribe is trying to make an SEO reference to enhancing that for property description, we can look at the Google SEO keywords, right? Because those are public. We can look at the rankings. We can look at your website. These are all public. These are all, like, real time. I can just look right now if I were just to Google search all these things. The only difference is ours just takes what's already available publicly and just looks at it.

We don't use any of what you type into us about, like, your internal data. That doesn't compute to us. That doesn't matter. That's not what we sort of train, or what we focus the data sources on. Hopefully, that makes sense. We benefit a lot because of how public and open home builders are to drive traffic to their business, and that's sort of how it all pieces together. So, we just have a secret sauce that cobbles together a lot of things that are already available.

Greg Bray: That helps a lot because I think there's a lot of legal issues still to be determined to some of the AI-related to privacy related to [00:18:00] copyright and ownership of the end product, you know, and some of those kinds of things. And I'm not an attorney either. I think Kevin thought about going to law school once.

Kevin Weitzel: No, I just like to argue with people.

Greg Bray: Oh, okay. That's it. So, but I think it's something that people need to be paying attention to, right? As you start to get into some of these tools and things there. Just to recognize that you don't necessarily want to dump all your personal stuff out there into a ChatGPT because you just never quite know where it's going to end up at some point.

Barrett Davis: Yeah, I think what's going to happen a little bit, and it's already, you know, the development community, the programmers using some of this technology. They're becoming more aware of let's build things the correct way this time, instead of building things and asking for forgiveness later across the government, et cetera.

So, Google has sort of free reigns to crawl everybody's website, right? There's the robots. txt. There's things like that, that guide some of the automation on the public internet on how to crawl your website. These things are allowed. These things aren't. I think that will [00:19:00] happen for the LLMs, the large language models, sort of the AI, the ChatGPTs of the world, especially as these bake into Google, and they're already baked into Microsoft.

For me, as a I wouldn't even say technologist. My wife does it. She's just a nurse. She uses ChatGPT just as much as I do to search for things. So, it's definitely going to impact digital marketing and home building. I know Zillow has their plugin and things like that. But if you're just trying to do some research on this new city that you're going to move to, it would behoove a home builder to really understand how their website, their digital marketing initiatives, how that plays a part in some of the new AI tools.

Greg Bray: So, Barrett, HomeScribe is still pretty new, right? You've just been a couple of months, I think really people playing with it. How's the response? How is the user growth and what kind of feedback have you been getting?

Barrett Davis: Absolutely. Yeah. Our user growth is exponential. It's definitely growing organically. I'm just trying to keep up [00:20:00] with a lot of the marketing things. Our LinkedIn's behind, you know, we're trying to make some posts. I've been reaching out to most people that sign up personally to get some feedback. It's totally a sort of a starter entrepreneurship sort of project.

So, all the raw feedback comes in and we're prioritizing and rebuilding a lot of things. So, people like the tool. They're, you know, asking for things like property feeds. So, instead of like typing in your community name or your builder name, we can just ingest that for you, so you can click a few buttons and generate some new content or some new property descriptions and things like that.

Greg Bray: If somebody wants to contribute and grow some of these recipes or things like that, what is the process for setting up the account and getting involved that way?

Barrett Davis: Great question. HomeScribe is free to set up. So, free as a user just to play around with the prompts to generate data. On the recipes tab, we have a way of creating a new recipe. And so far I'm the only one and then we've got some other experts that are sort of creating them now, where I'm helping them record and they're coming out with[00:21:00] their commands over the next few weeks. So, there is a new recipe button at the top right where you can just click new and you add the URL to like a YouTube video. So, this is just where you're talking about the command that you're writing, the description, how to use it.

So, the interesting part about AI and using generative tools is that you'll get a response back. It might not be the one that you want. We're sort of pattern trained, or like Google results. It's like, the first one's not right, I'll just keep scrolling down. I don't necessarily retype anything right away. But with Chat and what we're doing, it's sort of like a toddler.

Like, if you get a bad response, you need to be direct. You need to tell it exactly what's wrong. It's like, no, you generated me a bad description. I want it in less words, not 400, but 300. It will rewrite it better or funnier or more professional, however, you tell it, and with your qualifiers, like a hundred or 200 words to sort of better it. And that explanation is in the video and the recipe and helps people click to run the command. And then once they get the results, they know what to do with it as well. [00:22:00] So, that's the benefit of like the AI sort of workbench and the videos and sort of the how-to training nature of the platform.

Greg Bray: Given that you're still in the kind of first version phase, what are some of the things on your roadmap that you want to add in the future, on the wish list, so to speak, that aren't there yet?

Barrett Davis: Great question again. We've had a lot of people ask for the ability, so instead of like logging into HomeScribe and using the little chat or the prompt library that we're creating that's growing quickly, they want to bring this into some of the other tools that they use. We're looking at building what's called sort of like a Chrome extension or an assistant.

So, as you're on other web pages, say, you're on your own website, or you're trying to respond to an email, you can use some of our library prompts to generate inside of Gmail, as an example, or even inside of your website. So, we have a sales category where it can take your typical model home sales follow-up [00:23:00] email and it can rerun it, rewrite it in a funnier, more entertaining way.

And it can actually, if you give it a property link, it can even dive into your property detail on your website and rewrite your follow up email, just as an example. So, instead of doing that inside of HomeScribe, an assistant or this Chrome extension that we're building, can actually be in your sort of email client. So, you can just kind of click a button and run it.

Greg Bray: That sounds pretty cool. Now you've said it out publicly. So, you're committed to making that happen.

Barrett Davis: We've been building it slowly. And then we're also looking at adding some community people, like outside of just me and my developer friend that are building it. People that are in the home building sales and marketing community that want to better learn AI, where they can sort of moderate or help create some of these prompts in the library and these recipes. I think over the next year, it'll probably be one of the largest resources to have some of the most accurate information for our industry, almost like a Wikipedia or sort of like a common library that people could kind of [00:24:00] look at.

I've already gotten feedback like, hey, some of these things you put together are terrible, like terrible. Like, I've gotten negative feedback, which is great. So, ask them how to make it better. And they actually sent back how to make it better, and I updated it that day. It is definitely in its infancy stage, but it's really quick to change it. It's really quick to update it. We definitely would love community involvement as well.

Greg Bray: I agree with you that candid feedback is powerful and helpful, but there's a polite way to do it when somebody's put themselves out there and they're not charging you to use it. You don't have to use the word terrible to say, hey, I have some suggestions of how you could make this a little better. I'm just saying people. Come on. Let's be nice to Barrett. All right.

Kevin Weitzel: I find that if you just put, hey, bud, don't be a jive turkey as your subject line. Then they'll read it and go, Oh, I don't want to be a jive turkey. So, then they go through and they fix the suggestions that you have.

Greg Bray: Well, Barrett, do you have any last thoughts or advice for marketers out there? Whether it's, you know, HomeScribe specific or [00:25:00] just more general that you want to share today?

Barrett Davis: Yeah. Outside of just sort of the platform itself, I've been dedicating about two hours a month to just sort of free weekly trainings. There's reoccurring Zoom trainings that you can sign up for. So, these are highly conversational. They're kind of like live fail sessions. I'll take live Q and A, try to plug it into HomeScribe. We'll get pretty decent results most of the time, and then we'll kind of play with it together live. So, I had a pretty large audience the last one we did.

I think it was nice and refreshing for some people as they could see that this wasn't pre-scripted. This is live. This is the world of AI that we live in. It is ever-changing at the moment, and we're sort of in the first inning as you described. It is going to be a major impact to home building because most of our information lives publicly on the internet. So, there'll be lots of changes and new innovations coming quickly, definitely from HomeScribe and just ChatGPT and other things in general.

Greg Bray: So, Barrett, again, if somebody wants to create that account, [00:26:00] they want to try it out, or they want to sign up for one of these training webinars, what's the best way for them to go about getting that information?

Barrett Davis: You can go to homescribe.ai. You can sign up for free right there and you can sign back in, log in. There's a tab at the top for weekly trainings. We also do consulting. There's a few large home builders that reach out to me that wanted to talk with their corporate teams. You know, what can they look at? How might we be able to build our own tool internally when people are looking at building their own chatbots?

Some people want some AI sort of interface for their own data operations for, like, their permits and start schemes. It's just, hey, we've got all this data around. Is there an easy way to query this? And there is from a HomeScribe in terms of how we're going to monetize, keep the platform in general, we just do weekly free trainings.

We also have sort of like a pro track where we could get in front of your corporate team and talk about it for a really small dollar amount. Just kind of keeps the lights on. It's sort of like a Wikipedia. It needs like a small amount of money to keep going. Doesn't need to be some [00:27:00] large, fancy enterprise product.

Greg Bray: Well, Barrett, just on behalf of the industry, thank you for taking the initiative to put something like this together and to try to create something and make it readily available to help all of us, especially on the marketing side of home building. We appreciate that. So, thank you.

Barrett Davis: Yeah, no problem. It's been super fun to build. It's been super fun to work with the community too. People are like, excited about it. They were curious. They didn't know what to do and this gives them like sort of a first step into it. It's like training wheels.

Greg Bray: Well, thanks again, Barrett, for sharing with us today. And thank you everybody for listening to The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine.

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with Zonda Livabl. Thank you.

Barrett Davis: All right. Thanks for having me, guys. Barrett Davis with NterNow and HomeScribe. [00:28:00]