Ep 019 - Homeowner AI The Future of Smarter Living Starts Here
In this episode of the Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast, co‑founders John Bodrozic and Beth (Elizabeth) Dodson introduce “Homeowner AI,” a suite of generative‑AI features built into the HomeZada digital home‑management platform. They begin by segmenting homeowners into four archetypes—first‑time buyers, growing families, downsizers, and investors—highlighting how each group faces distinct pain points across the home‑ownership journey (buying, financing, maintenance, remodeling, insurance, resale). The hosts explain why generic web search and off‑the‑shelf generative AI fall short for homeowners: they lack property‑specific context, cannot retain prior interactions, and do not integrate with a homeowner’s personal data. Homeowner AI, by contrast, leverages the homeowner’s location, age, size, maintenance calendar, manuals, and inventory to deliver personalized, long‑form Q&A, predictive budgeting, climate‑specific insights, and automated photo‑based inventory. They walk through concrete use cases—identifying a broken shower‑wand part, getting a hot‑water‑heater maintenance guide, forecasting future repair costs, and instantly cataloguing room contents via image recognition. Privacy is emphasized: all chat histories and data stay within the HomeZada platform. The episode ends with a call to action for listeners to explore the upcoming AI series and to use HomeZada to save time, money, and stress.
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Welcome to Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast, where you'll discover strategies to save money, save time, and be better organized in managing your largest financial asset and biggest expense, your home. Your hosts, John Bodrozic and Beth Dodson, who are co-founders of HomeZada, have been supporting homeowners for over 20 years. They are here to share with you their tips and suggestions, as well as interviews with industry experts. With the goal of helping you become a smarter homeowner. Now here's your hosts, John and Beth.
Well, welcome, uh, to Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast, and I am one of your hosts, Beth Dodson, and I'm with my other host and co-founder of HomeZada, John Bedrosik.
Hello everyone.
I know, it's exciting. So John, today I'm kind of excited about the topic we're going to talk about today because I have been such a longtime user of HomeZada that I have so much information in the system, and I have so much information inside HomeZada that I haven't really needed to use the new features that we've come out with regarding AI. And so I'm hearing from a lot of customers They are loving, loving, loving, loving the new features in AI. So I want to start this podcast by talking a little bit more about AI, what it means to homeowners, and a little bit about how we see AI and make this kind of a series on the specifics of AI. And we'll be talking about this throughout the year on different elements of specifically how AI can make a difference. And so with that said, tell me what you define as AI and homeowner AI specifically with regards to our platform, HomeZada.
Well, Elizabeth, first and foremost, if you think you're excited about this, I'm even more excited about it because I've been rolling up the sleeves and sort of implementing homeowner AI for going on about 12 months now and Seeing the results are just absolutely amazing, and I'm quite excited about sharing the concepts because I think a lot of people may never experience something like this. Clearly, we've got you know homeowners that fit into all different age brackets. You know, in terms of generations of you know the Zers and the millennials who are buying their first home to everybody all the way to seniors, and they all have a different sort of experience on homeowners, and they all probably have a different experience on using AI tools. So being able to share this. is absolutely fantastic. And so before we jump into the what is Homeowner AI, I want to maybe share a quick slide here and talk about what I refer to as the fact that homeowners are different.
Oh yeah, totally. So for those of you who are listening, you can always come back and see some of these slides a little later.
So, when we think of homeowners, right, it's the— it's a single term that anybody who owns a home can identify with, right? It's like, I own a home, you own a home, our friends own a home, family owns a home. But what we've done is tried to segment, obviously, lots of different, what I call, types of homeowners.
Sure.
Right? So, here's just an example of trying to break that down into, you know, what we call use case scenarios or different types of customer segments. So the first one on the left is Allison, and she's a first-time home buyer. Usually it's Gen Z or millennials, but you obviously have people that are in their 40s buying their first home, right? Then you have sort of, you know, married couples or partners or people deciding to buy a home together. They're a little bit older, maybe they're starting to have kids. They're basically maybe on their second or third home and looking for larger homes. Then you got, you know, people that have been homeowners for 20, 30, 40 years, and maybe they're looking on downsizing and moving into a smaller home. And then the last segment is you've got people who are like investors in homes, right? They own a primary residence, but they're actually buying and flipping and renting other homes. And so there's so many different types of homeowners. We have to take that into account when we start talking about the value of homeowner AI. And I think you've seen a lot of this with our own customer base.
Oh my goodness, have I ever. I mean, like, I totally appreciate this slide because it shows 4 segments, and when it shows 4 segments, it gives us some idea of where people fit. But from what I've seen with speaking to our customers and talking to potential customers and prospects who want to use something like Homesada, I think this just is icing on the cake. There's so many different use cases of homeowners and how they see their journey within their home, and that leads to not only the type of home they have and where it's located, in which state, city, county, town, etc., but also the structure of their family unit inside, whether it's a single individual, whether it's someone with roommates, whether it's, um, married couples, not married couples, children, grown children, young children, you know, maybe supporting other family members and having them in. We know that there's a lot of multi-generational families living in homes. As well as the contents within the home. Like, not one home is exactly the same because of what I just described. But also, everyone has a different design style. Everyone has different finishings. Everyone has different furniture. They have different items and tchotchkes that they like all over their house. And so, because of that, what you need to know about your home is. Individually, uniquely yours.
Correct.
And that goes for your one— your first home, your second home, your rental properties, everything, if you decide you want to own multiple homes. But every solitary home is completely different. And that's why I find this so fascinating, because I think, um, with AI, we're going to take the next step to helping homeowners manage these homes, because the homes are so complex and we want to make it so easy.
Absolutely. And that's a great segue into essentially when you think about homeowner AI, you have who are the occupants of the home and what's their knowledge of being a homeowner and being a homeowner of that specific home, right? But it's a great segue into the next slide, which is what we refer to as the homeowner journey, right? It's the journey of, there's a lot of pain and chaos of people that talk about—
Pain and sometimes, yeah.
The money pit of the house or whatever, lots of sort of terms that people use about it. But clearly, most consumers go through a process of buying a home. On average in the United States, I think people own a home about 7 years and then they sell it and then the whole journey starts all over again. And obviously, some people, right, in the perhaps military, they may be moving and buying homes 10, 15 times. Other people, maybe it's only 1 or 2 homes in their life. So, it's obviously lots of sort of differences.
Right.
But that's sort of the homeowner journey. And then, the real part is when you think about being a homeowner, think about all the different people that you have to interact with during that journey, right? So, it usually starts—
I mean, it's so much bigger than this. Yeah.
I mean, this is just— I mean, if you look at just the maintenance piece, that 4th bullet there, well, maintenance could be like, oh, I need to find somebody to pressure wash my driveway versus I need to find a plumber to fix my leaky faucet.
Oh, yeah.
So many different categories here. What we tried to do is just try to explain this at a broad brush stroke of people obviously having to choose real estate agents, whether you're buying a house or selling a house, getting a loan, getting insurance, finding the vast majority of people that you want to sort of service your home. Remodeling is even different because it's a different skill set. You've got people who are going to do it DIY, other people who want to hire a contractor, and then a whole bunch of other what I call services that are connected to your house. And these are everything from like utilities, energy, water, gas, sewer, to, you know, people that you're asking to come, you know, mow your lawn or do your pool or whatever the case may be.
I got a guy for everything. I think it's amazing. And it's all stored in HomeZada, by the way.
Right. So, A, there's the journey, right? B, now, if you look at the lower left of this slide, think about all the different homes in America. I think there's like 100 million homes, maybe even 120 million homes. Yeah, right. And so the first column is like, well, how old is the home? Is it brand new? Did you buy it from a brand new builder? Or is the home 30, 40, 50 years old? And where is it?
You know, 100 years old. You know, some parts of the East Coast have homes that are 100 years old.
Absolutely. And then what's the condition of your home, right? You would Pretty much assume if you bought a brand new home from a builder, it's brand new, but you could have a home that's 30 years old, one that's been completely renovated, so it's essentially updated, and the other one hasn't been renovated at all. Completely different context, right?
Yeah.
The third column there is obviously home types are very different, right? Do you have an urban condo? Do you live in a single-family home in sort of suburban America? Do you own a little bit, Do you live a little bit outside of, you know, a city or a suburb and it's more bigger rural land or a large estate? And you mentioned this before. It's a very— Location is such a huge issue as it relates to where your home is in the United States because you got temperature, weather, all kinds of sort of issues. At the end of the day, when you consider all these dynamics, essentially, Every homeowner has a million different questions about their house, and where do they go to get the answers to those questions?
All kinds of places.
Okay, can you see the slide? Can you walk us through the 4 different categories that you as a homeowner, Beth, can you get answers to all the questions that you've had as a homeowner?
Yeah, so definitely I would reach out to family and friends and neighbors if I, If I needed certain things that were locally driven, I definitely do that. You know, one of my little places is small, so I sometimes ping my property manager. So that's also kind of in that neighborly aspect. I would also ping experts. So I'm fortunate that I know how to have conversations with a lot of maintenance contractors and remodel contractors. But I would call them and ask experts, or as another way of calling an expert, I had this issue just recently come up. I have to replace a faucet piece in my, one of my shower wands. And fortunately, I know where I purchased it and I know the model number and the serial number and et cetera. So I pinged directly the manufacturer on their website to do all that.
Yeah.
But if I don't have that answer, then yeah, I have to go to the web search, whatever your favorite you know, internet provider connection is, I would have to go there and I would have to literally type in what I'm looking for. And one of the things I notice is that a lot of people don't type in a thorough explanation. And while I'm typing in this thorough explanation, I think the web pages grab what other people have said. And my explanation usually is not met because I'm super detailed. Versus everyone else is like, oh, I'm just typing in a key— few keywords, and it's just not meeting my needs. And so I'm constantly searching and searching and searching and searching if I can't seem to find something with family, friends, neighbors, and even some sort of expert.
Yeah.
And it becomes cumbersome, and it becomes, in my opinion, an absolute waste of time, even sometimes calling family and friends and neighbors, because they don't always have a great reference available to them. And it doesn't mean anything. It just means sometimes they just don't have a good reference. And they'll tell you if they, for instance, if they've got somebody they've worked with, and they're like, yeah, I wouldn't work with them. Or yeah, I would. But it's, you don't really, they don't even always have all the answers either, especially if it's something unique.
Correct. And so this is the fantastic segue, because we've laid that foundation over what exactly is homeowner AI. Which is, before we jump into defining what homeowner AI is, I want to talk a little bit about a term called a specific type of AI, which is called generative AI.
Okay.
And there's been a lot of talk about lots of different sort of companies that have developed— obviously a lot of the big players have developed this generative AI technology. And I'm also going to kind of apply it to what most people are used to now is web search.
Right.
And so when you think about how the web works, right, you've got all the big web companies crawling websites all around the world and basically storing all that data so that when you go to a web browser and enter in, you know, a short phrase of, you know, how do I do something, that you end up with a bunch of search results, right, that are basically prioritized lots of different ways depending on which search engine you're doing. And then the user can click on those and go to those other source sites. So generative AI kind of works the same way, but it's way more advanced than— what my personal opinion is— than just a web search because it's basically gone off and created a chat box where instead of entering in a 2 or 3-word phrase into a search bar, you can enter in an entire detailed sentence where you're giving the generative AI tool a whole bunch of other data. And then the generative AI tool has been sort of trained to maybe understand all the words and data that you've given it and compare it against all this large information that it's indexed for you. And then instead of producing a list of links that you could go to, it actually tries to produce it in like a conversation where it basically produces texts— text. that you can actually read. And so it's essentially generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that's based on what I call a vast amount of data. And that data can now mimic human language because you can talk to it in a text box and then it's going to respond to you in a text box. And it makes it conversational because it's gonna remember the previous chat and question As you ask it subsequent questions, which is way different than a typical web search, because if you do one web search, then you have to essentially do a second web search, but the second web search doesn't really remember what you did in the first web search versus generative AI tools allow you to kind of iterate and have essentially like a conversation with an expert, whatever kind of expert you need as it relates to being So that's kind of it in terms of defining generative AI. Any questions on that?
So it basically takes my ability to create a complete sentence on a web search and get real information that meets my specific criteria because I'm giving it full detail.
Correct. And it, and it, I'll give you an example because I know you're, you're, you're passionate. I'll give you a generic example of generative AI because I know you're passionate about, you know, diet and nutrition. nutrition. You can ask it complex questions. Provide a list of fruits and vegetables and compare them as it relates to the amount of sugar and fiber in them because I have this certain medical condition. And you could put whatever in there.
Yeah.
So, you can see that my question was much more long-form. It was more than just a simple, like, you know, find me a list of fruits, you know, grown in Georgia. It was a complex question.
Yep.
And the generative AI tool can break down that question and actually provide you all of that in a response. And then once you see the response, you can have an ongoing conversation with it.
Yeah, no, that's great. I love that. I'm glad we have that.
Absolutely. So now, Homeowner AI, essentially, why is it a step above what I call generic generative AI tools? It starts with back to the whole journey that we've been talking about, which is every home in America is unique, right? You could be in a 2,000-square-foot home that's 20 years old in San Diego, and you have a question about what maintenance should I do, and you have a 5,000-square-foot home in Minnesota and ask it, what maintenance should I do? The Homeowner AI takes that property-specific information and it tailors the message to your house based on your location, age, and size.
Huge.
Because it needs to be different. Because as we all know, and you're a big proponent of this, where you live has a huge impact on how you maintain your house.
Correct. Correct. Without question. And I think a lot of people forget about that. And they forget, even if they are multi-homeowners or if they move from one place to the next. I moved from the East Coast to the West Coast, completely different, completely different materials, completely different critters in some cases. Just everything's completely different and you need to be prepared for that. And a good example is going from the East Coast where it has humidity, coming to the West Coast where it's dry. And I hear this all the time.
Yeah.
It's 100 and some degrees and everyone's like, but it's a dry heat. It doesn't matter. It's 100 and some degrees and the sun will bake everything in your house and literally destroy everything and fade everything, including wood and everything else if you are not careful. And so I hear that all the time. But yes, it's— it is definitely a big deal where you live matters.
Correct. And that's, that's the power of Homeowner AI is it's making it property-specific advice. About pretty much anything in those blue boxes that we saw up there and the green boxes about your specific house. And it's also what I call a lot of, I'm gonna compare it, if you, some of our audience I know has used like generic generative AI tools where they basically enter in questions and ask it and they can start that dialogue. But what's different about our Homeowner AI is it's embedded into a digital home management platform. platform. And one of the examples of that is most of the AI tools, they don't necessarily aggregate all those responses and make them searchable for you later on down the way, down the way. And it's basically not storing all that data because we also want to store all that data to be private and secure for you as the homeowner.
Totally.
So storing all your previous chats and integrating it with a maintenance calendar and knowing how much your home is worth and Knowing where you live, all of that makes homeowner AI integrated within a digital home management platform extremely more powerful than just using a basic generative AI tool. And that's a huge aspect over what makes it different as well. And maybe I should kind of show people a little bit about what I was talking about here in terms of the visual on the screen, which is we've kind of talked about the first 2 aspects of what homeowner AI is. We've talked about the fact that it needs to be property-specific, and then we talked about the need to integrate it within a greater context of a digital home and sort of storing all the data about your home, whether it's owner's manuals or paint colors or, you know, how much equity you have. Hopefully those 2 points come across. Maybe I'll ask you, Beth, because you're kind of new to this. Does that make sense to you?
Yeah. So clearly when it comes to Like the example I just explained, moving from the East Coast to the West Coast, things are just different. And having the understanding of weather patterns, the specific property— I mean, the fact that I don't have a basement in the West Coast but I did on the East Coast, that is completely different. Completely. And so I need to be able to understand all the specifics, especially for those people who are moving all over the place. And then understanding when I ask it specific questions, retaining that information also is important. And the reason why I say that is going back to my example earlier, I had a shower wand that broke because there's a piece in it that broke. And maybe the manufacturer just didn't make a really good piece because it's the second time this has broken in 20 years. But I was fortunate that I kept the information inside HomeZada to reference that when I did place a query to the home— the manufacturer.
Mm-hmm.
And so by the Homeowner AI keeping that information, it gives me the benefit that if this should happen again, then that data is already in there as well. So that's really important so that it makes, I believe, the context of maintenance easier, repairs easier, and replacements easier because it's clear and I don't have to go hunt for something brand new. I can get exactly what I had before, make it simple, give myself time back, as well as be really efficient.
Absolutely. So wanted to kind of continue on because I think these bullets on the screen here, Really, the sum of all of them is what really defines homeowner AI. So we've talked about the first two. I've kind of talked a little bit about the third one, which is it's essentially a long-form Q&A with text with what I call generic home experts. But what does that actually mean for the people that are you know just listening to us? I've got also a screenshot of a hot water heater, right? So let's say you're a first-time homeowner. And you get reminded that it's time to drain your hot water heater, and you're like, what does that actually mean, right? How do I actually do that? So essentially, your expert that you're searching for is somebody with a plumber's knowledge or, you know, how to actually service a hot water heater. Well, you could then open up the Homeowner AI and ask that question, like, how do I actually maintain this? What should I be looking for? And so one AI chat is, how do I maintain my, you know, hot water heater? You know, 2 months from now, it may be, hey, I'm contemplating doing a kitchen remodel. How much is this going to cost me? Or what products should I use? 6 months from now, it's a, hey, I'm thinking about selling my house. How much equity do I have? What's my estimated closing costs for my specific house given all these other things? So if you remember that homeowner journey, there's so many different people that homeowners sort of interact with, whether it's on the maintenance side, on the remodel side, on the, you know, I want to get a loan, I want to buy a new house. The insurance is such a huge issue in America with obviously lots of climate and weather disasters. So many different sort of what I call experts. And essentially, Homeowner AI allows you to have access to all this information specific to your house.
Mm-hmm.
24/7.
It's brilliant.
You could, you could work during the day and go like, oh, I've got insomnia and I want to, want to answer all these questions, right? You're getting that, all that feedback at your time and at your disposal. And having these sort of long-form discussions makes it super, super powerful to help homeowners essentially be better at managing their house.
I hope nobody has insomnia, but that's a whole different story.
Okay, maybe that was a bad example. Maybe they work the day— maybe they work during the day, uh, and they end up sort of— sorry, work at night, um, and whatever. They're gonna move on, John.
Yes, move on.
Ah, okay. One of the other big things about homeowner AI is the 4th bullet on that screen, which is most people think of AI in a chat box where you're actually typing in a long-form question. Well, our Homeowner AI tool allows you to actually take a picture of a room in your house, and you basically submit that to the Homeowner AI, and you ask it, like, for instance, to identify the objects that are in that picture. So it's essentially processing your photos, identifying the things that it finds in those photos, and now you can obviously get data where it's essentially creating a new dataset. And this is obviously very important in sort of what I call the the home inventory piece of managing your house in terms of documenting all the fixed assets and personal property. Think about how quickly you can do that and the level of accuracy that you can get when you could walk through, you know, the 10 rooms of your house. And you can see on the screen, for those who are watching, a broad view of sort of a house, a room. It's going to identify all those things, and you do that in 10 seconds and you hit save, which is a massive, massive, massive time saver. I'm so excited about that.
Yeah, I mean, like, home inventory just got easy to do. So everybody who complains about, oh, I got to take a home inventory, it just got easy to do. Now, I know we've actually been doing some of this AI for years in HomeZada, meaning taking video AI and recognizing the items in the space. Like, we've been, we've been, we've been experts at this for a while, and, and now all of a sudden we've— we're in a place where we've upped that game. Tell me a little bit about the difference about, you know, we did the video recognition, which is amazing, and then now we've taken it to the next level.
Yeah, absolutely. It kind of goes back to the fact that AI, or artificial intelligence, Um, is a broad term, and there's different kinds of AI, right? And so yeah, Homesada has been working on various kinds of AI tools. A lot of that has been what I call us doing the processing on the back end, and the user basically sees something created for them.
Okay.
The big new difference of all of this is this concept of generative AI, because it's essentially now the user can input what they want. It's like a freeform. Instead of us just doing it and showing them the results, they may not actually know that AI was involved in producing the results. Now it goes back to all those millions of questions that homeowners ask that are specific to their home. That allows the generative AI piece to work with your specific data about your house, where it's located, all the maintenance calendar that you've already got, all this other information. Mm-hmm. And it allows that ongoing interaction. That's the huge difference there.
So definitely, sorry to cut you off, but definitely personalization, as we discussed about the fact that every home and every homeowner runs their home completely differently.
Correct. I mean, I can't stress that enough. The top bullet is probably the most important one because it's property-specific expertise. So when you engage homeowner AI, it's going to answer the questions about you and your particular home and location and age, which is, I mean, for me, I'm a tech guy, this is just mind-blowing. I'm still amazed at how amazing this is 'cause you cannot get that from a web search.
Yes.
You can't even get that from using a generic generative AI tool, but you can definitely get that, you know, inside of a digital home management platform like HomeZada. And the last 3 sort of bullets also all come together, which is it's not just photo inputs. but it's going to give you like analysis of your home. And like an example of that is, well, I just moved to, you know, Little Rock, Arkansas. Well, what climate issues should I be aware of for my, you know, because there, there's different weather patterns, right?
Yeah.
Or there's what I call the insights and trends, which is, um, give me an idea over what types of additional insurance that I should be considering.
Yeah.
Because I live now in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Correct.
And then the, the last bullet is even more amazing. And I know we're running on the end of time here, but we're going to talk a lot more and have a full series on Homeowner AI and talking about this. But it's actually like future forecasts of like, hey, if I stay in my house, how much am I going to have to maintain— spend to maintain my house moving forward? Or what projects do I need to be thinking about budgeting and prioritizing?
Prioritizing.
Exactly.
Prioritizing. People automatically go into homes and they're like, oh my gosh, I want to personalize it. I want to make it all mine. I want to redo everything when they may need new HVAC, hot water heaters, equipment, roofs, which are super more important than personalizing it right away.
Exactly. So I'm essentially done, Elizabeth, in terms of trying to define what homeowner AI is. You know, kind of went through the— every homeowner is different, every home is different, the whole journey, so many people that you talk to. And now hopefully people get at least a baseline understanding over what specifically homeowner AI is and how important it is.
Yeah, this sounds like it's going to be amazing. I'm excited to see, um, when we get in and we dive in a little deeper into some of the specifics that we offer inside HomeZada, because I think These are important. And just FYI, I've— we've got new customers telling us how important this is in various scenarios, and not one scenario is the same. It's crazy.
Correct.
And so we learn from our customers as much as we learn from ourselves using the products and what have you. But, um, no, this has been a great frame of understanding AI, generative AI, Home Runner AI, how it plays a role in, um, people's lives and how it can make their lives easy in so many ways, like unbelievably easy. And I'm excited to see what's next. But, uh, I'm glad we had this conversation. Any last thoughts before we go?
Nope, all good.
Oh, perfect. So for everyone else who's listening or watching, if you are listening, you can come back to the video and see some of the slides. Uh, there are 3 slides. Slides to give you some context if that helps you. But for those of you who came, thank you so much for listening to Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast. We hope you, hope you liked everything we're talking about. We're excited about the series on AI, and we'll keep touching base on other topics as it relates to homeownership and how we can help. And if you like this, please like it, share it, subscribe, etc. We love making sure as many people know about how to manage their home more effectively. And that's why we're here. So have a wonderful day, and we will see you in the next Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast.
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