Ep 024 - Home Maintenance AI - A Homeowner's Best Friend

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.

Hello and welcome to Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast. I'm Beth Dodson, and with me is John Bedrosik. We are going to talk about homeowner AI again. Yep. We're going to add more to this because I'm so curious about it, and I think it's cutting edge, and I don't know much about it within our team. And so John's here to share all of this information. And today specifically, we're going to talk about homeowner AI as it relates to home maintenance—one of my favorite, favorite topics. Not always John's, but I love managing my maintenance calendar really specifically because. I like keeping my house in perfect working order. I don't like wasting money and I don't— I like things nice and fresh and clean. So with that said, John, I'm excited. Let's talk Homeowner AI with regards to home maintenance.

Yes. Before we go there, maybe the journey of what I call Elizabeth, maybe recall a story of like when you first became a homeowner and how did you learn what you needed to do and when you needed to do it? And, and, and in the different homes that you've been in.

Yes.

How do you go about acquiring that knowledge?

So it's ironic. So one, my parents happened to own some homes when I was a teenager and a young adult. And so I would watch some of the things that they would do. So that's the first thing. Or—

You actually paid attention to your parents?

Well, hold on a second. I paid attention because I pay attention to a lot of things. But they needed us to do all the tasks.

Ah.

So they had kids, you know, that did a lot of the tasks. So, smart move in parenting, I think. It taught us hard work and what have you. So that's one first thing. I did buy a house when I was very young. I think I was 25 when I bought my first house and I had to figure it out. So I asked friends, I asked neighbors, I, looked around the house and said, okay, what does need to get done? What doesn't need to get done? Sometimes when you're a new homeowner, you're actually making the mistake of not doing something, and that causes a different problem. And you're like, seriously, this is like cost me what money? So some of that stuff happens. And then, um, when I had to move from Maryland to California That was a whole nother ballgame. I mean, the materials in both places are completely different on the exterior of the house and on the interior. Believe it or not, a lot of people will say, oh no, it's not drywall, it's drywall. I'm like, whatever. The climate, the weather are different. Oh, totally different. Like in Maryland, you still have some humidity, but you got snow. You got snow, you got ice, you got sleet, you got below freezing temperatures. Those types of things. Um, weather's a little milder in Maryland compared to Massachusetts because people confuse the two, just FYI. But there still is weather patterns versus when I moved to Northern California. Well, my opinion, it's Central California. It's my personal opinion, but Central California, there wasn't snow. I think I've seen snow like a flurry, like a Light dusting of snow once in the 25 years I've been here. Once. And so there's really no snow. There's not like below zero temperatures like there can be on the East Coast. And there's no basements. There's different products on the outside. Like on the East Coast, I don't know most people that would even put stucco on the outside of their home. They put brick or siding or some other material. But on the West Coast, stucco is a popular element that you would use. And they're totally different climates. Like, the heat in our area is super, super hot. It can sometimes get Arizona hot heat, and it gets that dry heat, which has a different impact on your home than if you lived at the beach, if you lived in super humid area, if you lived in an area where it got below freezing temperatures. Like, you just have all these different elements. And to your question, I had to learn as I went. And sometimes, believe it or not, my maintenance contractors, when something did break, would tell me what I needed to do. And that was a surprise. And I would get super frustrated at the fact that there wasn't things online. And at the time, the internet was still coming about, but there wasn't tools and documents that could help us Manage all this. And so as a first-time homeowner and someone who moves from one place to the other, that's where I just got really frustrated because I believe when you can prepare your house and take good home maintenance, you actually can save money on a lot of the other areas of running the house.

Spot on.

And you have less fix-its, like less repairs, like it's big expenses.

So safe to say, of all the homes that you bought and moved into, did any one of them come with a comprehensive maintenance schedule that told you what to do and when to do it and how to do it?

Does my face say it all? Like, no, no, not a single solitary one. The owners didn't leave me anything. When I had a previously owned house, I built a house and my contractor didn't leave me anything. Nada. Zippo. Zilch, which led to most of my frustration.

Right. So it, it gets into what I kind of say, it's the, it's the journey of discovery of A, what it takes to be a homeowner. And then B, the journey of discovery of every time you move into a new home that you just bought over what is that specific home given the climate and the materials and all those things that are required to in order to do the maintenance. And you've sort of expressed the pain of, if I don't do this, things break and it frustrates me and it costs more money. Maybe my utility bills are even going up because the house is not operating efficiently. And then maybe I need to replace it, not just fix it, but replace the whole darn thing. That also costs money. So essentially, when we think about maintenance, there's the preventative side What are the things that I need to do to stay on top of to prevent things from breaking and going bad and reducing utility expenses? Unfortunately, homes do age. They get older as—

Yeah, yeah.

You know, from the time they were built. So things do break. So then there's what I call the fix-it and repair aspects of maintenance. And we're going to talk about both of those in terms of how Homes Audit helps, as well as specifically about how Homeowner AI, if the users choose to do it, Makes it a massive reduction in what I call the learning curve of the basic questions. What do I do? When do I do it? How do I do it? How much is it going to cost me? And what do I need to do to prevent this from happening again?

Yes. And can I just voice one other concern that I had in all my homes? Critters. Like, there are different insects, different animals in every part of where I've had a house and I'm like, I had to learn even the critter communication. Yes, communication, because I certainly don't want to kill every critter, but I just need it on the outside of my house, not on the inside.

Yes, I couldn't agree more. I mean, it's the insects that could create, you know, rot in your foundation to the squirrels that get into your attic that chew your water pipes and create a water leak and/or an electrical fire. We've heard friends have issues with electrical fires caused by rodents in the attic.

Can't make this up.

Foundation problems with termites. Pest control is a huge aspect of preventative maintenance because it can create such a big issue for homeowners. And again, nobody tells you these things when you first buy your home.

Yeah, you need to befriend your real estate agent and ask everything about every critter. I'll tell you that right now.

So is it safe to say that your journey of discovering what it takes to maintain your home has been a combination of parents, friends and family, kind of the anecdotal, what should I be doing? Obviously the internet, doing some web searching and this, that, and the other. Oftentimes finding out you should be doing maintenance when something breaks, which irritates you of like, why didn't somebody tell me to do this beforehand?

Yeah.

Is that how you've gone about learning what you know today?

All the above. And because of some of those frustrations, because you don't know what you don't know until you experience it, a lot of it forced me to get in front of some of these preventative aspects and just do more due diligence about the region, do more due diligence about, okay, What do I need to be prepared for? And a good example of that— perfect example, because we were talking about critters— is, um, they don't usually get in your house, but where we live there's rattlesnakes. Where I grew up there was not rattlesnakes. There's different kind of snakes, but there were not rattlesnakes. And you need to be observant, if not anything else, about rattlesnakes. And you need to be observant about some areas of your outside. to prevent them because your dogs and pets may get bit by them, which happened to us, which can also be costly. And a good example of that is if you've got a lot of these beautiful rock retaining walls in Central Northern California, whatever you want to call it, then your likelihood of having rattlesnakes is high. So you might not want to put A stone fire wall, even though it looks beautiful, you might want to put, um, a stucco-based wall rather than stones where all these rattlesnakes can hide. And so little things like that. Yes, you learn from experience. You learn from just being preventative, paying attention, talking to people, and getting frustrated because You didn't know and you didn't do the due diligence prior to.

So to summarize our discussion so far, because I want to segue into one other thing real quick, is the value of staying on top of maintenance is preventing those things from breaking. So you're saving costs, making your home operate more efficiently to keep the utilities down, um, also preventing long-term damage of like pest control and/or the insurance aspect of When something does— critter gets into the attic and causes a water leak, there's all those downstream issues that you want to avoid. What about what I call the health and safety aspect of home maintenance?

Totally. You bring up water leaks. If there's, let's say, a pinhole leak, because there's been some of those in our region, if there's a pinhole leak in your home, and it's been going on and you don't really notice it, Because it's behind walls, then you could develop mold in your home, and that literally makes you physically sick or anyone in your home sick. It could make your pets sick, your children sick, your spouses, etc. It could just make people sick. That's one area. The other area is if you're not paying attention to things in your home, it could cause not only damage to the home, like big damage to the home, but it could injure someone. And that's things like. Fires, kitchen fires, which are big fires by your grills. Like, a lot of this is actually preventable, and you don't have to have this kind of damage, but you need to do tasks in order to prevent that. And you don't want someone getting injured because you forgot to clean your fume hood and what have you, and your grates inside your stove. Which are full of grease, and it drips down and it causes someone to get burned in your home. And the burn can be something small like a hand, or it could be something big like, you know, a face or a body. And you just want to avoid all that. And I am a big fan of preventative everything, only because you do want to keep your home healthy and safe for the people that live in it, or even your guests that come and visit you in it. And you know that's everything from replacing stairs, you know, making sure stairs are doable and they're safe to walk on.

You hit the nail on the head. And one more thing I'll ask you about, which is what's the value of home maintenance if you decide to sell your home?

Huge, especially nowadays. So as I understand it from all of our real estate friends that are in this business. they are actually saying nobody wants deferred maintenance.

Yeah.

Meaning they— the price of your home can actually go down. And because at least currently interest rates are a little higher, um, pricing of homes is a little bit higher, and so people are being more discerning as it relates to, listen, I'm willing to wait. I've waited this long. I'm willing to wait to get a home that not only is somewhat turnkey for some people, but that you've actually cared for it. If you haven't cared for it, then I'm not interested in it. And in fact, I had a friend who was selling her home, and I don't know her maintenance schedule. I just didn't know. And she had 7 people offer— make offers on this home because it was in a particular neighborhood and they really wanted to be there. And I mean, that's amazing. So they all wrote letters, and this is why I deserve it, this, that, the other. She read all the letters, and then she gave the— she accepted the offer from the one party that, um, had the best letter, she thought, in her opinion. And she did that, and then they, they came in and they did a home inspection before they accepted and moved forward. They did a home inspection. Well, the home inspection came back with the gutters basically had not been cleaned. And it didn't mean they were clogged or backed up. They just hadn't been cleaned. And they— I don't know her schedule of gutter cleaning or whatever, but they had not been cleaned. And the, the people that had the offer in retracted the offer because they were concerned that if the gutters aren't clean, what else had not been managed properly? in this house. And if we move into this house without proper maintenance, then I'm probably stuck with a house that I've got to replace, you know, HVAC equipment, I got to replace a hot water heater, a new stove, a new this, a new that. I've got to replace— I got to get all these maintenance contractors in, and I'm going to spend thousands of dollars just getting all the maintenance done before I even get into the house. Now, my personal opinion is those Individuals could have negotiated that down and saying, well, I'm gonna negotiate the price down because I've got to bring in maintenance contractors to get all this organized. But they literally just said, we don't want it. And so this could actually impact the sale of your home.

So—

Or the value of your home if you've taken care of it. I'm just a firm believer, if you've taken care of your home, I think it should be worth more. That's a personal opinion of mine. It's not what happens in the market conditions, but that's just my personal opinion.

It's so huge. Essentially what we've done here is identify homeowners, consumers owning a home. They don't— it doesn't come with an owner's manual, or it doesn't come with a schedule. There's the energy, there's the fix-it, there's the safety, there's the value of the home, there's not knowing what to do. Home maintenance is such a big aspect of being a good homeowner, has so much financial implications, insurance, everything. Now let's get into how does actually Homeowner AI help with all this stuff? Because essentially the goal here for us was how do we collapse the 10 years it takes you to learn what it takes to manage your home to 10 minutes, right?

Yes.

And instead of like, I've never done this task before, how do I do it? How much is it going to cost me? Blah, blah, blah. All these sort of questions. Can we collapse that learning curve down to a few minutes no matter what home you own in whatever location in America you own it? whatever age it is, to basically make you much better and smarter about what it takes to manage it. And so if you're okay with that, I'd like to share a screen and start to talk to you about the aspect of home maintenance as it relates to homeowner AI.

And you know I love home maintenance.

So, uh, I think you can see my screen here.

Yes.

Okay, so here we are. HomeZada has a dashboard. This is the—

So I'm gonna stop you right there. So for anyone who's listening to this podcast, you can also review it. Just remember this timeframe, and then we have some screenshots available for you. So we're going to do some demos.

So, right, yes. And I will try to talk through it for the audio listeners, um, uh, for those who don't see the screen. So I'm on a screen that's the maintenance dashboard. It basically is the summary place where the user can go to, to start accessing all the different maintenance features. The most common place is the icon that says, what's my task list?

Yes.

So if you look at this screen, what you're seeing on the screen here, Beth, is you're seeing a table with 3 different columns: a due date— when do I need to do this task— a description of the task, as well as a sort of thumbnail photo of like, hey, the first task is remove lint from the dryer exhaust duct. The second task says flush water in the hot water heaters. The third task says replace central air conditioning filters. And then over on the right-hand side, because it's a task management list, it's sort of the actions of like, oh, I want to snooze this because I'm going to do it next weekend, or I'm going to mark it as complete, or I already did it and I want to sort of mark it as delete. But essentially, here's the value of Homesatta, which is when you sign up for a home And a property, a maintenance calendar gets created for you.

Yes.

You didn't have to create any of these tasks. And again, this goes back to the— if you're a first-time homeowner, most people don't even know that the back of your dryer is connected to a duct that has to be cleaned because it gets full of lint, which creates A, a fire hazard, and B, sucks more energy because you start to wonder why does it take your clothes so long to dry.

And by the way, some of the most experienced homeowners who've been homeowners for a long time have made this mistake and didn't realize that it was there. And it's— it doesn't mean we're bad at what we do. It just means we've got learning curves all over the place.

So it is an entire list. It basically keeps a year's worth of maintenance tasks, and it also lays them out by season, because season and climate, right, going back to what you said before, If you live in a cold climate, drops below freezing, there are certain maintenance tasks that you need to do. It also has to do with, let's face it, gutters need to be cleaned in fall when it's full of leaves kind of mentality. Springtime may be a better time to do getting your HVAC serviced because you want to get it serviced before the hot summers. We lay out the entire maintenance calendar for you of what, when you need to do it, what you need to do, and it's laid out on season. And we certainly realize that we allow you to personalize it. Meaning you can add and delete things that either A, are not important to you, or maybe you have some unique, you know, whole house, whole house water filter system that needs to be, you know, maintained. You can certainly add your own recurring tasks to it, but it then becomes the very simple proactive reminders over what do I need to do and when do I need to do it?

Mm-hmm.

Which is amazing step number 1.

Yep.

But if I want to focus now on some of the generative AI functionality here is if you look at that first task where it says remove lint from dryer Exhaust duct.

Yes.

Imagine if you were a first-time homeowner and you don't really understand what that means.

Yes.

Or how to do it. The very first text, uh, string underneath it with the little Zada AI icon says, ask Zada how-to. You click on that, it passes it to the chat window, and it's basically doing 4 different things all with one click. Pretty amazing stuff. The very first thing it did is it created a table that identified step-by-step instructions over how to clean your dryer exhaust duct. Turn off the dryer, locate the exhaust duct, disconnect the duct, use a lint removal tool, inspect for blockages, reattach the duct, and test the dryer. But the AI tool went beyond that. The next section, it says, give me an estimate because what if I need some specialized tools to do this? Think back to the days of when you went into your house and how many tools did you have? Most people may have a hammer or some screwdrivers, some pliers, et cetera.

Yep.

But do you have a vent dry cleaning brush?

Right.

You probably— most people don't, but it's automatically telling you that if you're going to DIY this, you probably need to go buy a specialized tool and it's going to cost you about $15 to $30.

Yep, so you can budget for it.

So you can budget for it. The fourth— the third item below that is going back to maintenance. Some percentage of homeowners in America like doing these things and want to do it on their own in a DIY. Others want to hire somebody to do this for them.

Yes.

The AI tools automatically identified saying, hey, if you want to hire somebody to clean your dryer duct for you, it may cost you about $100 to $150 depending on where you live in the country. So it's even giving you an estimate over if you were to have to hire somebody. And the 4th item says, hey, oftentimes those ducts, because they're flexible, they get damaged. Where they're not actually connected to the, you know, the dryer or the wall. And so you may need to buy a brand new duct and actually replace it.

Yes.

What do you think of that amazing sort of one single click about a maintenance task that if you were a first-time or even experienced homeowner and you've never done, you've got all this information right in front of you.

So I think it's brilliant. And by the way, I've done this DIY and I've done this with service providers and the costs are on point. And that's what's so exciting. And so all of this is correct. And I was like, this is amazing. And it gives you the options, which is what I also like, is you can either choose to do it yourself or you can choose to hire somebody.

Below that, as we know in previous episodes, Elizabeth, the AI is a conversation. So you can see that there's 4 additional questions that you could just click on to basically ask it more questions. Like, what are the signs of a clogged dryer vent? Are there any safety risks if I skip this task? The user could easily click on these and essentially continue the discussion where essentially you're learning more about the task and the reasons why it's important.

Why it's necessary. Yeah, why it's necessary. Oh my gosh, brilliant.

Right, so I put down for the audio listeners, are there any safety risks if I skip this task?

Yep.

Beth, why don't you read quickly what are the— oh my gosh, 5 different risks?

Well, there's a fire hazard because I don't know if people know this, but lint is highly flammable. There's reduced efficiency, which we talked about before, so that could increase your utility costs but also shorten the lifespan of your dryer, which leads into that. So you got to make a purchase sooner rather than later of a dryer, which nobody really wants to do that. You could have carbon monoxide risk if you have gas dryers, and that is serious because carbon monoxide is Literally that hidden killer. I'm not joking when I say this. It's really important. If you don't have carbon monoxide detectors, please add them. And then mold and mildew growth. Ugh, disgusting. Yes. It not only grows inside your dryer, but it goes on your clothes, which you then have to wear. And that mold is in your laundry room, which are sometimes like enclosed areas in your home, which don't have any ventilation necessarily, like windows or what have you. And that could cause even more problems and more health risks.

So pretty amazing stuff. Think back to when you bought your first home with one click. If you had that schedule and be able to have this interactive discussion with the AI tool, how much learning have you accelerated and avoided all those discussions with family and friends and contractors and doing endless web searches all at your fingertips?

Oh my gosh, like this is huge, huge.

So the other benefit of homeowner AI, like we talked about, is there's different categories of maintenance. So removing the lint from the dryer exhaust. is a preventative task. You can see others down here point this one out for Beth, spray for pest control around the home, right?

Oh my gosh.

That's another reminder. But you can also take pictures of invariably things end up breaking.

Yes.

So let's say your garbage disposal stopped working. You can create fix it and repair tasks where you essentially take a picture of under the under sink of your garbage disposal. And very similar to how we do photo AI when we do an inventory, you can do photo AI on fix-it tasks.

Okay.

So you— did you have a question there, Beth?

No, no, keep going.

Okay, so I basically picked the photo of my garbage disposal and now the AI tool has it. But what we've done here in terms of how we've designed this is we haven't defaulted a specific question yet, but we gave you 4 specific questions that are most common, which is some people don't even know what that thing is. Identify and provide a short phrase description around the objects that are found under there. Or somebody could say something is broken, provide suggestions how to fix it, or assess any maintenance tasks that I should do on it, or provide an estimate to replace the main item. You can essentially pick any one of these as a default as your discussion point on that particular individual photo. So it's basically looking at here saying, I clicked on, for the audio listeners, something is broken, provide suggestions on how to fix it. So it's essentially trying to do troubleshooting for you based on the photo.

Oh yeah.

The very first item in the table says rust corrosion because in the photo, for the audio listener, you can't see it, the top of my Garbage disposal has a ring where it's connected to the sink and it started to rust. And it basically says the rust indicates water leakage. Inspecting the mounting ring and the flange where the disposal connects to the sink, tighten the mounting screws or replace the flange if necessary. It's telling you that it could be potential leak or a seal damage or general maintenance. So again, think about oftentimes things break in your house and you don't even know how to troubleshoot it or what the issue is.

Yes.

Most people will try to pick up the phone and call somebody, but think about how long it takes in today's society to get somebody to talk to.

Yeah, and not to mention, you know, we're in a bit of a contractor shortage in some areas, and so they're just busy.

Correct. And so think about all those different sort of things that break. You instantly get this troubleshooting sort of piece. That helps you determine that and again have additional questions for you. It's saying, how do I know if I need the garbage disposal replaced? Can you just— can you recommend a specific model for me? What are the tools that I need? Again, all of that is done very interactively for you. So you can see how Homeowner AI not only helps for the preventative tasks, but it allows you to take any photo of anything— gutters, Roof, HVAC, landscaping, how do I prune a tree, right?

Yes.

All these sort of things. It might even identify the type of tree 'cause it may require a specific kind of pruning. All of that is just amazing, amazing, amazing amount of sort of knowledge that you can gain because it's specific to your photo. Most of the searching that we do online in web search is generic. Yes, you might provide some data, but it's not specific around the photo, around the specific nature of the item that's in your house and in the condition and the climate and the location of where you're located.

Yeah. And I think too, based on this aspect, one of the other savings that you can do with using Homeowner AI is, especially when it comes to maintenance, is you can avoid overbuying tools. And one of the reasons I say that is maybe you need specific items to help repair or fix or maintain something. But you don't need 20 things, you need 2. And I think people get overzealous saying, oh, I don't have all these things, I need all these things. And you don't usually need it all, especially at once. Maybe a professional does because they have very unique situations, but maybe you just need a couple of tools to solve your problem. And that also saves you space in wherever you store your tools.

Right.

2, you know what you have. And then 3, it saves you money. So like this, like just makes saving money all like full circle all the way around super, super big.

Absolutely agree. And if, if you know, many of those fix it and repair costs, tasks have some additional costs because you had either had to buy tools or you had to buy some materials, or perhaps you hired somebody. If you mark them as complete, HomeZada even tracks all of your completed tasks. Oh yes, you can see in this column it shows the date you completed it, what the task was, you had Fix something with your sump pump, fix some broken circuit breakers, hired somebody to clean your wood-burning fireplace, and you're tracking all those costs. Now you can easily get a report over how much is it costing me to maintain my home that I'm currently living in.

Yes, which is one of my biggest criteria for managing my own home is I need to learn how to budget annually for my expenses.

Perfect segue. I don't know if you planned this, Elizabeth.

No.

This is the last thing that I wanted to show as it relates to the, AI on maintenance. Over in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, there's a section here called Actions and Discovery. The very first item under there is a text link that says Forecast Future Maintenance Costs.

Huge.

Now before I do that, again, think about how many homeowners are living in a home that's 5 years old or 10 years old, or they're a first-time homeowner and they have no idea how to budget for what the maintenance is because they haven't gone through that learning curve and that journey that took you and I, you know, 5, 10, 15 years to learn. That's right. One click of the button.

And by the way, in this particular instance, the age and details of the house are already in there because it's sample data.

100% correct. Okay, right. All right, so with this property, this gets what I consider property-specific.

Mm-hmm.

Right? So at the bottom of this AI chat, you can see here it knows that when I signed up for Homes.com, I entered in my address. Therefore, it knows that this house is 3,150 square feet. It's located in Wilmington, North Carolina, and it knows the size of the square footage and the age of the home. So look at the— what it did in the table. Yep.

Oh, look at that. As the home gets a little older, it increases slightly.

Right. So we're currently recording this in the year 2025. Maybe somebody's going to be watching this 2 or 3 years from now. But anyway, you get the sense of, okay, it's already budgeting for the current year of 2025, but it's given you a 5-year forecast. Yep. And it's broken out what is the preventative maintenance task, because let's face it, there are preventative things that are still going to cost you some money. But then there's those repair costs. And like Beth said, and then it totals it, and it's basically giving you a 5-year budget over if we were to stay into this house, how much should we typically be budgeting for this thing? Which is now connecting all those value propositions that we talked about at the beginning of the podcast.

Yes.

It's now connecting it to your finance and your financial situation. How many homeowners feel like their home is a money pit because they're not prepared for all the maintenance and all the costs associated with it.

Well, and I think it's not just the maintenance. I think they wait for things to break. And as we indicated for that example with the dryer, if you're not cleaning your dryer vent, it's something you can do yourself or pay a very low rate each year to get done. You could end up having to replace it. And dryers aren't super, super expensive, but they're not super cheap either. And so if you're spending, you know, $50 to $100 a year, it could save you hundreds or even thousands of dollars to replace it before you need to do that.

Yes. Now again, I'm going to try something here on the fly. Give me a 10-year forecast. So the default that we programmed in the tool was to give you a 5-year forecast. But now notice all I did was type in, give me a 10-year forecast, and it's basically now created not through the next 5 years through 2029, it's given me a 10-year forecast through 2034.

Yep.

On the fly, you the homeowner are asking the AI tool specific questions about maintenance. Now getting back to the why do people decide to sell their home, this provides what I believe is huge financial visibility of like, hey, if we decide to stay in this home, Because the home is already 15 years old, it's going to be 25 years old over the next 10 years. This is what we need to be budgeting for.

Yes.

And take that into consideration in all of the other life decisions of whether to stay in the current home or to move is giving you future forecasts about your house, which is again the power of Homeowner AI—

future forecasts specific to your home About maintenance and repair budgets, and you know this made me think about this made me think about we've been talking a lot about first-time homeowners, but this makes me think about older homeowners. So what most people don't know is seventy to eighty percent of homeowners as they age want to stay in their homes. They don't want to go into retirement community or whatever else, but this kind of information is necessary for them to know. How to plan their budgets, especially because most of them are on fixed incomes. So this is also really important for those older individuals, and maybe their kids are helping them do this, but older adult kids, but this is really important for them as well to understand, is it time for me to keep my existing house, or is it so— is it much older, and do I need to go into something smaller because My, my maintenance costs will go down, and I don't have extended funds to actually afford all this maintenance increases as time goes on.

Beth, you're spot on. Yes, it does apply to home— first-time homeowners because they're learning, but seniors— but it even applies to people who own vacation or rental properties. Yep, especially vacation homes, right? They tend to be at the beach or in the mountains, subject to more harsher weather climates. Therefore, probably gonna have higher maintenance and repair costs. So the AI tool will even discern where your location is and probably adjust it based on what that is.

Yeah.

And it's the, okay, we bought the vacation home 5 years ago. Do we wanna keep it or do we wanna sell it and get a different one or move our allocation of money somewhere else? So just about every, I mean, I've been a homeowner for what, going on 20, 30 years? This is amazing information even to me who sort of intuitively knows this.

Yes.

But never sits down to actually try to figure out how to calculate it.

Yep. Yeah, no, I, I— this is one of my biggest, like, not being able to budget for maintenance and fix it and stuff was one of my biggest pet peeves. And it was always, I've gotta fix it and I gotta spend money. And I'm like, this doesn't make any sense to me because this doesn't need to happen. What do I need to do to prevent this? And I look at other homeowners who are not as fortunate, meaning they don't have all this expendable money to just replace everything they've got. And that's a downward stream that could cause problems. Well, nobody wants that. Our homes are, are kind of like, they're our castles. They're our personalized castles. Yes. And we get to do whatever we want in them. And I think that maintenance allows us To maintain our castles to the best of their ability to support us and be part of our families. Yes, I think a home is like a family member. That's just me personally, but they can be a family member and help support us.

Couldn't agree more. And, you know, I know we talked, you know, in the first segment of our podcast about all the pain and learning journeys that people go under. And we've really only spent maybe 10, 15 minutes kind of talking about HomeZada and maintenance and AI as it relates to that. But just recall the power of what you've seen. A maintenance calendar created for you, instant how-tos. How do I replace it? Tools that I need to use. Pictures of the things that I need fixed. Budgeting for all that stuff. And we did that in 10 minutes. We gave you 10 years worth of learning in 10 minutes.

It's amazing. It is amazing. I mean, that is amazing. I wish I would've had this as a first-time homeowner. It would've sped up this journey, even from moving from one state to the other. It would have sped this up so much quicker.

I mean, if, if nothing else, it really dovetails to the name of our podcast.

Oh, Be a Smarter Homeowner. Of course.

Be a Smarter Homeowner. Homeowner AI helps you be a smarter homeowner, no matter whether you're the experienced homeowner or the first-time homeowner, or no matter what kind of home you own. All of that power is there at your fingertips 24/7. Essentially giving you access to amazing amount of expertise about your specific home.

Yeah, no, I think that's awesome. I do. So with that said, is there anything else?

I'm sort of talking about it.

I think you closed it out really well. So with that said, we want to thank you for joining us for Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast. And if you like this, please share it. Please engage with it. Like it, please. And then also, if you think someone else could benefit, you could introduce them to our website at www.homezada.com, H-O-M-E-Z-A-D-A.com, or visit us on any of the major podcast platforms. And we look forward to seeing you in another Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast. Have a wonderful day.

Thank you for listening to the Be a Smarter Homeowner podcast. Visit beasmarterhomeowner.com to sign up for our newsletter and find out more about software to help you save time, save money, and manage your home.