AI Is Unlocking A Smarter, Faster Housing To Solve The Crisis

At a few events in the past month, every AI-enhanced solution in the construction and housing space shared stories on its ability to expedite permitting, zoning, design, sales, financing, management, product selection, and the list goes on and on.

These technologies are amazing. They represent a dynamic shift that the industry needs as it struggles to deliver value in an efficient and productive way.

AI Applications For Housing Today

Manus.ai is an agentic tool, but Michael Anschel, principal at OA Design Build Architecture, says it can resemble working with a design build firm.

“You want a kitchen remodel, you describe it, and your design build firm will ask probing questions to better understand what you want out of it, the look, feel, function,” he explains. “It will make some suggestions of things you could include, and other functions to consider. Then, it builds your project for you, presents it to you in draft form for your approval, suggests some additional tweaks, and gives you the opportunity to make edits of your own, and when you are comfortable with it, you publish it. Turnkey.”

The AI will build this hypothetical project in real time, sharing the code, creating all the folders for the code of each component and working just as a design build firm would.

Anschel has been creating prompt projects to understand it better as a tool and to discover where it can be useful for his own design build firm.

“Tools like this allow small companies with limited resources to level up fast and give big company vibes,” he said. “Sure, the same opportunity for poorly designed stuff exists, just as desktop publishing produced painful design permeated with clip art, but there is far more opportunity to improve efficiency and effectiveness.”

He has built a tool to read documents and provide help for the tedious tasks that are involved with the spec review. He built a tool to create presentations for customers and events that will scrape pictures from his project gallery online and prepare it in a presentable way. He built another tool to improve his business, one to create a family holiday card, to launch a new product, to build the company’s brand, and several others.

“Working with a tool like this requires that you think of it as a collaborator, like a team of employees working together under one project manager,” Anschel said. “To make the work product excellent, your human brain still needs to look over the work and give specific instructions for revisions, and understand which features would be beneficial to other human users and which would be annoying or unnecessary.”

Buildxact, a construction project management tool, also leverages AI to draw together multiple collaborators on a project. It’s AI features make communication and the transfer of critical project details seamless, and reduce the time and resources needed to do those tasks by more than a third with 97% accuracy.

“Winning work is about speed, but it’s also about making sure it’s well detailed and well itemized,” said Dustin Elliott, director of product operations at Buildxact. “That transparency is important to all the stakeholders on the project as well as the client. The more that the supplier, the subs, the contractor know, the better they can coordinate, and the better the project outcome.”

Russell Goldman is the founder of Buildable Engine, a platform that delivers code-compliant, build-ready plans in the pre-permit stage.

The system validates against explicit rules, interpreting plans as patterns, to identify issues that are tied to specific codes, jurisdictions or requirements. Then it helps the user understand what is required and what the gap is, creating reviews that can be understood in context.

AI applications also are easing the long time challenging home remodeling experience. Dozens of AI-powered solutions are helping the pro and easing the process for the homeowner.

But what about the future of AI in housing?

AI Applications For Housing Tomorrow

Chris Matthieu is the vice president of developer ecosystem at RealSense, a company that builds camera technology for robots and facial recognition. He talks about how this technology will influence the smart home.

“The facial recognition technology could replace keys for doors,” he said. “In a quarter of a second, it will know who you are and then know where and when you are in areas of the home. Then, in five years, we’ll be able to rent robots. A $20,000 robot will rent for $500 per month to do dishes, mow, laundry, pool cleaning.”

At this year’s SXSW, RealSense launched a “reasoning” capability. Robots are armed with five or more cameras that act as a brain to process the environment and make decisions based off of that process. Basically, the cameras act like the eyes of a human and create real time contextual understanding of a scene.

RealSense-enabled robots will specialize in human tasks that are dirty, dangerous or drudgery. Specific to construction, robots can take the jobs that are dangerous or unsafe, like job site inspections. With reasoning, the robots will be able to move around quickly and safely through a combination of different spaces, where there are forklifts spinning around, where it’s necessary to have collaboration between people doing things and robots doing dangerous things.

Then, in warehouses where building products are sorted and shipped or where they are manufactured, robots can perform the tedious and repetitive tasks, or the drudgery.

“We are seeing a lot of uptake for aging in place,” said Mike Nielsen, RealSense’s CMO. “They will be able to offer domestic services, like laundry. There also will be a push for more general purpose, task specific robots in the house, like robots for general security.”

There are now fully automated factories that operate lights off, completely with robotics.

“We will be taking that environment outside to a construction site with open holes, pits, things being dropped off, trucks in and out, and that is where the reasoning is so important,” Nielsen said. “They have to be able to think similar to a person and know how a person operates.”

While this is the future, it will be arriving soon. It also will rely on smart data analytics that AI will be able to support.

AI For Housing Data Analytics

Accurate and timely data has always been an issue for housing. So, stakeholders struggle to access data that allows them to make informed decisions in a timely manner. AI is helping speed the process, and helping create more accurate conclusions.

At this year’s National Housing Supply Summit, speakers shared AI-powered innovations that are changing finance, policy, and regulatory processes to mitigate the resources that builders have to commit to these rising costs.

For instance, Exygy has developed Bloom Housing and CiviForm to help governments better understand the housing needs that communities have.

“With one centralized place for data, we can tell a clearer story for what housing needs actually exist,” said Isabelle Hirschy-Reyes, senior product manager Exygy. “There is still such a thing as product market fit even when there is a high level of crisis. You can provide a more well intentioned housing project. Governments should be able to understand what that is for their community and build incentives to provide those solutions at a larger scale.”

Similarly, developers and investors need accurate information to identify opportunities and how to make them the right fit for the residents.

“In 2015, eight million people were in a remote work or hybrid model,” said Michael Broder, CEO at real estate intelligence platform RckrBx. “Today, 80 million are remote or hybrid. Only 50% of one bedroom renters will stay one bedroom renters tomorrow. The space needs that renters have because of teleworking and affordability are creating gaps.”

Knowing and understanding that is just step one. Then the architecture, design and development teams need to create projects that respond to those changes.

“Real estate is one of the only industries where you don’t spend a lot of time on who you are building the product for,” he added. “There will be a sea change that will make the industry far more cost efficient.”

That focus on the user will take a culture shift, but also a new focus on collaboration.

“What if we thought of housing as a multi-agent system,” Ben Miller, CEO of Fundrise and co-founder at Real AI. “That would allow a developer to make AI agents to invite the architect, finance lender, GC on to the platform working collaboratively in a generative AI workflow.”

Helix is another AI-powered platform to lower the cost of real estate development by leveraging development and finance data history, and is able to create models that can be scaled across different portfolios and markets.

Aaron Holm, co-founder at Helix writes, “The work feels urgent and necessary. Every integrated system we deploy represents hundreds of families gaining access to better, more affordable housing built faster than ever before. When you intelligently connect zoning analysis, financing structures, factory scheduling, and construction logistics, the compound effect is extraordinary.”

That urgency is another catalyst for adopting these technologies.

Solving Housing’s Human Replacement Fear

Companies value and pay employees for their human intelligence. In housing, we are seeing legacy knowledge retire out faster than it can be replaced. We’re also seeing rising costs for labor in all dimensions. AI will help solve some of those challenges.

“We are creating AI to serve humanity versus it controlling us and our future,” said David Stout, founder and CEO of webAI. “Any system we build should be making humans better versus extracting from them. We are trying to build a future where AI is exciting and meaningful, and can become a revenue source for individuals.”

With the webAI app, users can create personas based off their individual skills, like legal, marketing, coding. The persona lives on the user’s device with automated workflows and can perform agentic tasks, learning and improving constantly, and it stays private even when agentic models collaborate. WebAI users are sandboxed, meaning everything stays on their machine. The app learns to interface only with their model, creating a custom model that only the user owns, doing everything as they would.

“The unit economics are great—there are no data center costs,” Stout said. “We don’t want to build a lot of AI without being able to own the IP. Enterprises need context, they need AI that understands them in their life, versus operating within. The only way they will if it is private and safe.”

WebAI has worked with older manufacturing facilities, much like building product manufacturing and distribution, that do not have internet, but where webAI works because it can operate without internet. So, it’s a technology that even the most antiquated industries and facilities can adopt.

Stout argues that humanity shouldn’t be lost in the interactions.

“When there is a challenge, you should be able to reach out to an individual not a general place,” he said. “You need a custom solution to your unique issue. Personas are learned, discreet, and follow a similar mental model.”

WebAI personas present in three ways – the resident persona, portable, and connected. The resident lives on a personal device and learns from the user. In this case, WebAI sees nothing and there is no central server. Second the portable personas can be hosted on a remote server, offering intelligence on a network that can be downloaded to run locally. The portable are accessible to everyone and also run on individual devices. The third persona is connected, which is hosted and accessed through the network and run on WebAI infrastructure.

Each of these would have valuable roles in housing projects, being able to save time and costs and draw on a more collaborative approach.

“The future of pensions is owning your own model,” Stout said. “If you are an expert at something, someone will license and buy your software if you are offering value.”

Creating personas may help solve the knowledge legacy that is lost when someone is in the industry for a long time and then retires. It also could help drive more innovation into the housing ecosystem that is starving for new solutions. It would catalyze a creator community that also could support small business activity and break up the large companies that are slowing down housing innovation.

The Future Is Housing And AI

In the future, adopting AI will be inescapable. While it’s already embedded in so many functions and applications, it will be evolving so fast with new applications that it has the runway to reimagine every process that we use in housing today.

“Today 10% of real estate decisions are made by AI, and in 5 years, it will be 80%,” predicted Real AI’s Ben Miller at the summit. “AI will be better at policy than anyone else in this room in 24 months. We will have much better intelligence. It will be such a radical change. If you aren’t every day trying to adopt this and trying to learn, it will make you less and less relevant.”

As these technologies evolve in other industries, prove their value, and go mainstream, housing will have the confidence to adopt as well. Starting with the private sector, housing will be able to influence the public stakeholders, evolving collaboratively for a brand new housing industry.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com