Ep 029 - Home Improvement Shopping AI - Research Brands and Save Money on Any Remodel
In this episode of the Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast, co‑hosts John Bodrozic and Elizabeth (Beth) Dodson discuss the challenges homeowners face when researching and shopping for large remodel projects—such as kitchens, bathrooms, pools, and outdoor spaces—where the sheer number of materials, brands, and price points can cause decision fatigue and budget overruns. They introduce HomeZada’s new Homeowner AI suite, focusing on the Shopping AI and Product Research AI features. Through a live demo, they show how the AI can (1) generate a curated list of product options (e.g., sinks, countertops) based on natural‑language criteria like size, style, material, and budget; (2) provide comparative price data across retailers; (3) let users save and review selected options; (4) aggregate choices across multiple items into a single view; and (5) produce a budget summary that highlights high, low, and preferred costs. The hosts illustrate the workflow with real‑world anecdotes about their own pool and tile projects, emphasizing how the tool reduces the need for scattered spreadsheets, physical magazines, and memory‑based tracking. They argue that organized research improves homeowner‑contractor communication, streamlines decision‑making, and ultimately saves time and money. The episode ends with a call‑to‑action to try HomeZada’s AI tools and share the podcast with others.
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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.
Hello and welcome to Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast. I am Beth Dotson, one of your hosts, and with me is John Bedrosik, one of our other hosts and also our co-founders of HomeZada. We're going to talk about all things home. Some will involve some homes out of stuff. Some will involve just standard generic home ownership activities that everyone seems to be confused about. So we're going to talk about all that. But today we're going to continue. Excuse me. We are going to continue our journey on Homeowner AI, and I was really, really excited the last time I saw. Some homeowner AI about remodeling, and we're going to continue that journey on the remodeling task because I know John kind of teased us before. So he's going to show more about how we can manage our projects effectively and go from there. And I apologize if I give a little bit of a cough here and there. That little lingering cough just keeps with me a little bit. But stay with us, and thank you so much for joining us. And John. Let's talk about the next phase of homeowner AI as it relates to remodeling.
Yes, indeed. It kind of goes back to what I refer to as a lot of the home improvement process has to do around research and shopping. Oh yeah, for sure. And when I think we, in a previous podcast, we talked about different kinds of projects, right? There are the small projects, I just want new flooring in a room or, you know, buy a new washer dryer, relatively simple. What I wanted to do is focus more on the larger projects that require multiple materials that all have to come together. Usually 99% of these are done by hiring a contractor. And the examples are kitchen remodel, right? Lots of different products, cabinets, countertops, appliances, garbage disposals. Bathroom remodels are the same.
Yes.
You know, love outdoor projects. Like if you're going to do like a swimming pool and an outdoor kitchen and a patio, and, or you're going to completely re-landscape your front yard, backyard, lots of sort of materials that all have to come together.
Yeah.
Those are the kinds that our customers tell us that they take a little bit more time for them to determine, A, what they want, and B, trying to figure out what their budget is, and C, ultimately trying to make what product selection that they want. So that's kind of the focus of— before we get into that sort of how the AI works, maybe I wanted to just sort of dialogue with you about our experiences, either through customers or our own, etc., about how we sort of view that shopping process. Because there's— walk through a home improvement retail store, there's so many different products and brands to choose from.
Not just a retail store, everything online. Everything, uh, like I get lighting catalogs. Like, lighting was never so massive as it is today, and there's so many different choices you can make, and it just is constant. I mean, if you go to one home retail store, you'll see a variety of paint and/or tiles that you need for flooring, or even Counter surfaces, and there's a ton you can choose from, and they all have pros and cons. And then you go to a whole nother retailer and you see a completely different set of items. Same thing with like faucets. Faucets, you never think how complex it is because I don't think it used to be this complex. But man, there's a lot of choices because there's a lot of manufacturers and a lot of vendors. That are coming in from all over the world.
Yes.
And we get those choices. And I mean, don't get me wrong, these are first world problems that we have, but this can lead people to really, if they don't have a handle on how to manage this, they can really get frustrated. They can really get disappointed and they can end up getting decision exhausted. Because there's so much going on.
Mm-hmm.
And it could lead to a project that they're less than satisfied with. And that's not what we want to happen. Usually when you're doing a project, you're personalizing something, you're making it what you want, you're making change. It's like so exciting. As you can tell, I'm getting excited because I love doing that. But it's— you, you get to enjoy it, but You do need to get prepared beforehand because of the amount of choices.
So, I mean, when you look at either your own journey, your friends who have homes, their journey, and/or just customers in general, when you think about some of the larger projects that you've undertaken, where do you do the bulk of your research? Is it literally a mix of online and in-store? And sort of how have you What's the length of time that it might take you to sort of make these decisions? You know, how much, how detailed are you getting into that different brand and price point research? Maybe talk to us a little bit about how you've seen it done in the past.
Yes, well, I will say, because I love books and I love physical books. So I'm the girl that goes into the bookstore and goes straight to the back of the bookstore where the magazines are. And I'm looking at all the magazines and the shiny glossy pictures. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is beautiful. So that's the first place I get probably inspiration from. I also get inspiration online. I mean, you can go from any site you want, whether it's your favorite retailer site, whether it's your favorite home improvement type of site or magazine site online. You can even go to other solutions like Houzz and Pinterest and everything else where architects and others are sharing their design element. You can even use AI to create a photograph of what you want and go from there. So I mean, there's so many places that I start. And then if it's a particular project and it comes— push comes to shove and I don't have a lot of time, because that sometimes does happen.
Mm-hmm.
And I may not— I don't want to say care as much, but There's certain things I can kind of make decisions on very quickly. I am willing to go, I'm going to go to this specific tile store, this specific hardware store for faucets and the like. And I'm willing to go to this store for, I don't know, countertops. And I'm willing to go to those stores and look at what they have and just make a decision. And For me, it's— I have to look at a couple of other things as well. Where is this project in my house? So I'll give you a perfect example. We put some tile out back on our part of our patio. So the tile had to be extremely durable.
Mm-hmm.
It had to weather the weather materials. So that was really important. It had to be a particular color because of what already existed out there, and I wasn't changing the whole thing up. And then The other thing that I wanted was an affordable tile and the size of the tile. I wanted something larger, but I wanted something affordable because it was outside. I didn't want to put marble tile on a walkway.
Sure.
Outside when the elements were gonna just eliminate it because marble is just— you can just look in Greece and look at all the old buildings and stuff. Marble just wears, and that's the beauty of marble. It's beautiful, but I wouldn't do that outside. And then inside, maybe that's a different story. And so I look at the location of my project, where I need the project pieces, et cetera. I look at how it's going to work with weather patterns inside, or even, you Excuse me, outside or even inside. For instance, I cook a lot in my kitchen and I'm not always the neatest of cooks and there's stuff on the floors and stuff. So hardwood floors would not be good for me.
Yeah.
In my kitchen, where someone else who doesn't cook that often, it would be great. I also look at the different types of materials and solutions that I need for those spaces. And then I look at the overall picture of things. And then from there, I go, okay, what do I really want? And I'm oftentimes the person that looks at what I really want, budget accordingly, and then I can get sticker shock and go, nope, that's not what I'm really doing because I don't want to spend that much. It's funny because—
Time to reduce scope.
Exactly. And it's always funny because—
Or change to lower price points.
Yes. And it's funny because John never has to tell me to reduce scope. I'm automatically doing it myself. And he, I guess that part of a happy marriage, but he, I literally look at this, the price and I'm like, we gotta change some things. And I start making the modifications based on the price.
So question for you, it sounds like you're the type of researcher that gets it in all forms, right? You're going to the store, you're picking up a brochure, you probably have magazines where you're pulling out ads and potential pictures and putting them in a folder. You're going online. Maybe when you're in the store, you're taking a photo of an object, of a choice. How do you bring it all together?
Look at me. No, I usually don't. It's in my brain, in my brain, in my brain, in my brain.
But it's not in my brain. So there's this communication.
And so I have to do memory recall. And it's quite funny. Because if you're doing a lot of projects at once, and let's face it, some people are doing a whole house remodel, I give them credit. I probably would pull out my hair for that because if it's all in my brain for the most part, I may not be able to remember what goes where. And I'm like, this is crazy town. And there are times when I will admit that I've had to hire help, you know, a designer to help me do this because I'm like, oh my gosh, this is a little out of my wheelhouse and I need to do that. But not everybody can afford a designer.
Yeah, so completely agree. And I think you've also been a big spreadsheet person. Totally. But even the spread— creating the spreadsheet, because you've got the source data as a ripped out ad from a magazine, a brochure from an in-store, some online bookmark Do you save your bookmarks on your browser?
No, I hate that. I'm not that person. And the reason being, because if I did that, I would have 3,000 bookmarks. And I just don't do it.
Well, I do know that our customers have 3,000 bookmarks.
I know, but I don't. I just, I once again, if I have to save a bookmark, then I'm like, for me, then it really wasn't that important. But I get it. I still have folders of things ripped out of magazines, so it's no different. I just got sometimes paper. And yeah, I will sometimes save links though of something I like in a spreadsheet. That's not always good.
Yeah, saving the links in the spreadsheet is just another way of doing the bookmark thing.
Correct.
I mean, it sounds to me like you're just like every other homeowner in America, which is when you're embarking on these larger projects, you're identifying each piece of material, but then you're You're kind of evaluating it based on 4 or 5 different criteria. Like, what's the type? What are the pros and cons? Your sort of marble versus porcelain tile. What's the size? What's the color? What's the price point? What's the long-term maintenance? What are the different brands that I could choose from? What are the different retail outlets that I could buy from? All of this is sort of intuitively, I think, what you and most Consumers go through when it comes to sort of evaluating all these different products for their larger projects. And therein lies what I'm trying to incorporate into— oftentimes we use the word shopping to mean immediately buy, like, oh, I need to buy air filters, let's just go shop for them and buy them. This is shopping not necessarily to buy, but to sort of aggregate all these sort of parameters over what you want on your projects.
Just so you know, John, most women are familiar with that. It's like touching and feeling inside the store. So we're familiar with that. Like, we're not always shopping to buy. We're shopping to look and to gather our data. Yes.
One, one. I'm going to sort of put you on the spot because I know that it was like a long time ago. We actually put in a pool in our backyard. It's kind of a mundane thing, right? People think, oh, I'm just going to put in a pool. But I want you to recall. the different price points for what I call the pool surface, the pool tile, the edge of the decking of the pool. Is it going to be concrete or pavers and all these other things?
Yeah.
And sort of maybe sort of remind us, you know, even what seems like, oh, it's just going to be, you know, a hole in the ground with water in it. There's still a lot of price point decision making as it relates to those different types of products on even something like a pool.
Yeah, well, I don't think I really wanted the pool as much as you did, but that's a whole nother story. Um, I do remember we had to make a decision about the style and size of the pool.
Yeah.
And I remember, because we have— living in California, we see a lot of very unique pool styles and stuff. And we have a friend who built, um, and he's a contractor, he built this pool that looked like You were in Hawaii. I mean, it had the slide, had all these crazy things, and it was rounded and all this other good stuff. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is beautiful. But I realized that that was going to take a lot of time and that was going to cost a lot. And I was like, I don't think I want something to that. I wanted something simple. And so I— we negotiated for a simple rectangular style pool where people could swim some level of laps, a little bit deeper because there was a diving board. Some people don't like diving boards, some people do. Personally, I don't know that I would put a diving board in a pool ever again. That's just my personal opinion. But it has served its purpose because a lot of people have had a boatload of fun on it. I do remember initially we had I'm not a dark bottom pool fan. I think it's kind of creepy. That's just me.
Yes, plaster.
I know. So I had to put a different material on the bottom and then tiles around the side, which also had some challenges going forward. And then we had like one small water feature, which is basically a light in the pool and a little waterfall, but kept it really simple. But You do have to figure out your, your patio component. So you're not just figuring out your pool, you're figuring out your patio component as well around the pool and how you're going to use your backyard. And I know our pool took up a significant portion of our— of the lower level of our backyard because we have a terraced yard. And so we had to manage that concept.
Mm-hmm.
with retaining walls, with steps for patio areas, which also required a level of detail in terms of a little tile between the steps.
Sure.
And then also determining— I remember, oh my gosh, concrete was such a crazy thing to discuss. Like, I just love concrete. I don't know why, I just love concrete. And I just like white concrete, like plain white concrete. And everybody, the pool guys, you, everybody was like, we are not putting plain white concrete in the back. And I'm like, I just don't understand. It's like, it's just plain and white. Well, it's not aesthetically pleasing because actually concrete isn't pure white. It's like kind of grayish.
Mm-hmm.
And I was like, I still don't get it. And so then I had to pick colors. What do you mean?
Colored concrete.
Oh goodness gracious.
Or is it sealed after the concrete or is it embedded in the concrete? There's so many choices.
So many choices. And I was getting so frustrated. I'm like, I just want concrete. And I think the concrete was more challenging for me than the actual pool itself. And I'm like, you can't make this up. And so it also had to do with coming outside of our house. So there's a small deck that came outside of our house and then down again. And as anything would happen, you know, anything, because I incorporate the pool with the getting access to the pool from the backyard, from the house. We invariably made choices. I don't think they were mistakes. I think they were choices that we didn't— we were unfamiliar with and we needed to update those choices. For instance, we had plain decking On our, uh, immediately off of our, um, doorways to get to our pool. And apparently, I think it was like an elastomeric paint, and that started bubbling up. And it— because of the heat of the sun and everything else, and it really wasn't a great place for that. Elastomeric paint on a decking could work if you had probably a shadier area.
Mm-hmm.
But we had to replace that. And I think we did it like 2 or 3 times because we couldn't figure out what would work. We even tried putting some lemon trees, but they didn't like the location either. So it was like, all right, which went back to replacing it with tile on that area. And then the same thing held true when it came to the pool. We chose a wonderful mosaic tile, but it was really tiny and they kept popping off. And that required us to resurface the whole pull. And I was a bit frustrated because that's really expensive. And of course, this was prior to Hamzatta, and my inventory— my, um, warranty period, I just missed it. Oh, you can't make this up. I mean, that cost me an arm and a leg, which, if nothing more, Hamzatta has helped me with just warranty periods of making updates because that was just so expensive. But we had to update The pool itself in terms of resurfacing it, which also costs a lot of money because you gotta drain the pool and then refill it. It's like you can't make it up.
So the, the moral of the story is every single thing has price implications. And everything from the— I remember you went on some vacation and you're like, oh, I want to put tile on the bottom of the pool. And then you're like, oh my God, that's going to cost me an arm and a leg. I can't afford that. And then there was the Pebble-Tek, you know, marble stuff. And then there was the plaster and then there was the edge tile and the concrete and the colored concrete and all of these sorts of things. At the end of the day, what this really— what this is a great story, which is why is shopping all these different products and materials important? They have a huge implication in terms of your overall price for your pool project.
Totally. Yes. And you went back to saying that I wanted mosaic tile on the entire pool.
Yeah.
From top to bottom, because I saw it at a, at this resort that I thought was amazing, who has a professional pool care person probably on hand that goes to it every day. I do not have that, nor do I want that. And yeah, I realized that that was way out of price range. And sometimes our aspirations, however beautiful they may be, may not be in our price range, and we need to adjust accordingly.
Correct. Yes. So, so many implications on all these processes, from determining your materials to shopping for different product types to understanding different price points to comparing it all together, because you could go with the, you know, high-end tile but low-end concrete. Or high-end tile or reverse, whatever, high-end concrete, low-end tile, whatever. All these sort of things have sort of— you can imagine when you've got a materials list of 10 items or 20 items and some of them are like really high and some of them are really low, then you could come up with different sort of summaries. And this is the part that our home improvement shopping AI is really trying to facilitate and help consumers with this. So I'm excited to kind of talk a little bit about that and share that with you and get your feedback as well as, you know, with our audience as well. So any questions?
I'm excited to see this.
Are there any questions for me before I jump in?
No, I'm excited to see this shopping AI because I think it could make my life a little easier with other projects. And I can, I still use HomeZada to manage the pricing of the projects, but I still use Excel sometimes for some of the links and stuff. So I'm like, I'm using different systems to manage different portions.
Yep. All right, let me, uh, share my screen.
So for everybody who's on audio, we are showing a bit of a demo of the Shopping AI, so you can always come back to this timestamp and, um, figure it out and watch it for yourself.
Okay, can you see my screen, Elizabeth?
Yes, I can.
Okay, so here I am, HomeZada. This is all of your projects. So this is the place where if you're contemplating doing a bunch of different projects, you can track them all at once, which is very helpful for people who have, you know, fixer-uppers or whatever, and just lots of different projects. I'm going to focus in on the kitchen remodel. I'm going to jump straight to the Items tab. We saw in a previous Episode we talked about how the AI tool can create these individual budgets. So for the audio listeners here, I'm looking at a material list of all the items that you see that you're typically required for your kitchen remodel, and essentially a budget has been established for each one of those. Now I'm going to choose, for instance, the main sink. If I drill into the main sink, there's a yellow bar here in the middle of the page that says Zada AI, and the second AI action says. Shopping Search. So if I click on that, essentially what the tool is now doing is it knows that you are planning a kitchen remodel and it knows you're on the main sink. And essentially it is using AI technology as well as web search technology working together to come up with basically a list of potential sinks for you to consider. So what you see on screen here is a table where essentially it's picked out about 5 different sinks with the product name, the brand, the unit price, as well as an image, as well as a link where you can go in and look for more information. So real quickly here, you can see that it— even because the, the search was pretty high level, you can see the bottom here, it's like the bottom image, it's a sink with 2— what's called 2 tubs, versus the one above it is kind of a farmhouse-style sink with a single tub. So essentially, the search tool doesn't really know exactly enough data about what kind of sink you're looking for. So this first search is really designed to kind of show you, hey, this is the realm of possibility, and then you can click on these different links to basically go to another site to actually look at more information about that particular sink. And you're essentially starting that shopping process.
That's actually really good because if people have never done these kinds of projects before, that's the one thing I notice is that every sink is completely different in different colors as well and different materials, which helps people understand what is available to them. And they may not have thought about a black sink versus a white sink versus a stainless steel. Now they can go And really think about what they want in detail. That's brilliant.
Yes, but now the real benefit even continues because of AI, the user can enter in additional criteria. So I'm just going to say I want an undermount sink. I want it 36 inches. This is assuming you know these things, let's say, because you've already measured your existing sink. You want stainless steel and you want what's called a workstation sink, which is one of those that has all those organizing units on top of it, like a cutting board and a strainer and those kinds of things.
Got it.
So now essentially what I've done with the shopping AI is used basically normal language search of like, hey, I know I want some things.
Correct.
I could have even specified a certain brand if I wanted a certain brand, or I could have specified a budget range if I wanted a specific budget range. So now you can see it's now taking more information, and now notice all of the results are undermount sinks that are stainless steel, that are 36 inches, and have essentially, uh, what's called an organizing sink. Right, which is, like I said, if you look at all these pictures, that it's the cutting board and all the strainers on top of that. So pretty amazing stuff to be able to take natural language to be able to identify the different types of sinks that you want. And the same—
You can look at all of this as well, and the varying of the prices is pretty interesting, even from the same brand.
Correct, yeah.
And there's 2 in there that is the same brand, and it just shows you that you may wanna look at the same brand different ways.
Correct. Now, even when I click on this, now this link takes us to essentially what we refer to as the Google has a shopping AI. So that's where you're seeing that sink. If you look over on the right-hand side, you can even see that that sink is carried by different retailers, Lowe's, Amazon, Wayfair, et cetera. And you can even see perhaps even different price points. For the same sink from different retailers. Now, the benefit even goes beyond that because you can now say, okay, I've looked at all these sinks, and just for the sake of time, I'm going to go to the bottom of the chat, and I want to hit Save Shopping Choices. So going back to that process, Elizabeth, when you were like looking at magazines, you were ripping out sinks that you were interested in.
Yeah.
Or you were going online, or you went to the plumbing fixture store and taking pictures. Now you're like, okay, I really don't like that black one, but I do like these 4 stainless steel ones. I just want to save this. You hit save, and now it tells you, I want to review your shopping choices. And now all of 4 of those choices are saved for you.
That's brilliant.
And, and the reason why I think it's brilliant— I'd love to hear your version— is that now you can go out and do shopping on all the other products on your kitchen, the countertops, the appliances, the refrigerator, this, that, and the other. And now you're aggregating all of the shopping research for all of the products all in one spot. So remember that challenge we talked about it like, Beth, how do you bring it all together? You're like, it's in my head. Well, now it's actually here for you. And let's face it, a lot of this research is not done in one day. You might be doing this over a couple of weeks or even months. Oh yeah.
Yeah, and then your memory is definitely working, you know, harder than ever. And for people who don't have a strong memory, well, guess what? It becomes very challenging. This is amazing.
Correct. And you can see the prices. There's a $750 price versus the $549 price. And now you can get the same links to go back. So we, we looked at that previous one with the organizing thing. You can look at this Krause unit, hit product link, it goes back to that same link. And now you're Again, 3 weeks later, capable of going back and looking at the more details and trying to make the decision over which sink do you want to go forward with.
That's a big deal. I mean, that just— you just created so much efficiency that I could do all of this quickly online. And not that I'm a huge proponent that everybody stays online all day long, I'm not that, but you just made it a lot easier where I don't have to store all these magazines because I do have a little box for all these magazines. It's pretty pathetic. And then It's easy to access when you're out and about and on the road. And I'm assuming you can also add photographs of things you've seen along the road, just add them up there anyway.
Absolutely.
It gives you inspiration.
Absolutely. You can, you can, you can. This is just shopping AI from when you're doing it online. But with Homesada, you could walk into the, into the store and, and add manually, add a choice because you just walked by a sink that you happened to see when you were walking through the, you know, home improvement store. You take a photo of it and basically save that, and now you're aggregating all that information. It— what it really does is it replaces even your, your spreadsheets, because spreadsheets may be great for storing the make, model, serial number, and brand, but they really don't show you the pictures and they don't store the links. So it's kind of combining photos and brochures with spreadsheets, but it's doing it all in one. And now you can do that across multiple products.
It makes it so easy. And I will be a I will say this. Going back to the the tile we had outside that project, I actually used HomeZada's project details to manage that project, to update it and what have you. And I happened to be in the tile store, and I took pictures of all the different options for tiles, and I stored them in the shopping choices in HomeZada. Which actually helped me because I had to go and get an idea. Then it was, I think, several weeks before we had to go order everything based on the contractors and stuff. And so then I went back. Well, invariably, this is a tile store and they wanna showcase new tile products. They completely changed their showroom before 3 weeks later. I was like, no! And I need to find the tiles. And I was like, I didn't have time because I was heading to another appointment. I was literally going to pick up samples. And I was like, oh my gosh, they're not here. They're not here. They're not in the places they were. And then I remembered I put them in HomeZada, the shopping sections. I walked right up to the counter and I showed them all 3 that I wanted to test. And she goes, oh yeah, we got those in the back.
Yep.
And no joke, it took me like 10 minutes to show them everything, them to get the tiles from the back, me to log everything in, and for me to walk out of there and make it to my next appointment in order to do that. It was brilliant.
Correct. So it's the— it's really trying to organize people in this multi-week, multi-month shopping research process. Because if everything is stored in one spot, you're now capable of having much more intelligent discussions with contractors or suppliers. And is this model still around? And all these other kinds of things. But I wanted to show you yet another way that the shopping AI can actually be engaged for the user, right? So now, for our audio listeners, I'm back on a different item on my kitchen remodel called countertops. And there's another AI interaction on the right-hand side, which is called product research.
Okay.
Not shopping search, but product research. And we saw this in one of our other podcasts, but I'm gonna show it again. So if I click on countertops and click on product research, what is this AI interaction designed to do? Think about people who've never done a kitchen remodel before. Well, what type of material do you want to use for your countertops?
Oh yes, that's a huge one. It's, it's, there's way more that is offered to us today. than ever before.
Correct. And maybe, Beth, real quick, why don't you tell us the story about walking through the Home Builders Show in Las Vegas and how many different table types there are to choose from for countertops?
So first of all, for anyone who's never been to the Builders Show in Vegas, it is gargantuan. It's the entire Vegas Convention Center. And I always go 'cause I'm always curious about what the trends are and what's going on. And it's a fascinating show, but we've been in this industry for a long time and we've done other shows similar. And when you're walking around, you're not only getting a lot of different products for every aspect of your house, but when you walk in the sections where there is countertops, it is crazy how many vendors there are and they're showcasing their products. So they are bringing out and building counters, you know, on site, or they are hanging their materials from walls. So almost like it's on a wall, but they're— how do I describe it? You're like shopping. I can think of like rugs in a Lowe's where you're literally, you've got them on these giant hanger things and you're swiping them. It's kind of the same thing with these big giant slabs of whatever countertop you can possibly imagine. And then at the same time, there's also Just different materials, and they're explaining why they chose the material they chose and where it came from and how you order it, how you ship it. And it's crazy town in terms of the quantity of items you can get just for counters, and that then goes into flooring and everything else. It's it's easy to get decision confused and decision exhausted.
Correct. And so essentially what you see here for our audio listeners is the product research has basically come up with a table that listed. Probably 8 or 9 different material types that you can choose for your countertops. Granite, quartz, marble, laminate, butcher block, concrete, solid surface, soapstone. But even more beneficial than that, it's given you what's the average price per square foot for those material types.
Yeah.
Again, we're trying to combine what do I want versus price point, and it's even given you a description over kind of like the pros and cons over each one, as well as individual links to the different manufacturers so that if you wanted to, you could go out and search and And understand even more about what these different product types. So all of that research done in 30 seconds entirely for basically countertops, but I could do that for every single product. We talked about faucets and how many different faucets there are. You could do this and it really starts to create that education. But now let's, let's link the product research because though you can see the last column over here says from here I can choose the shopping search.
Mm-hmm.
So I'm a fan of granite, so I'm just going to choose the top item. Let's go shopping search. So now I'm going to kind of compare the previous search when we did the sink. The first set of results really didn't— it kind of gave me a wide range of sinks, right?
Right.
Different colors and styles and this, that, and the other. But because I did product research AI before the shopping search, now it knows more about what my initial results that I'm looking for is actually striving for. Right? Because it knows that I'm looking for granite materials in a price point that's about, you know, $75 a square foot, right? And so again, now you can see it's come back with some different results as it relates to those different countertops. You can even type in color. I want gray with blue streaks.
Oh my gosh, what's gonna happen?
Well, we're gonna test it now. As we all know, AI is not perfect, but it is a huge, massive time saver. time saver, an organizing aspect to be able to organize different options over what you want and how you want these things to kind of look at. So again, it takes a little bit of time. It's actually processing. For those on, on screen, what it does is it gathers all the research, and now you can see it's predominantly listened to what I was asking for in terms of I wanted light gray with some blue streaks.
Yeah.
And it's actually giving you different Pictures of those tiles, and again, you can then click on these links and go out and look at these things from different places.
Correct. And you know, the one thing that I think this also helps with is we've had the the great opportunity and fortune to be able to go to the builder show and what have you. But even so, the builder show does require money, and it does require your time, which is something that it has value. And One of the things that's really good is that at the builder show, and I'm not trying to knock the builder show because it's I think it's amazing, but you could get lost in so many details, and you if you're not somebody who's good at decision making or you're easily swayed from a different look and feel, you will constantly change your mind over and over and over and over and over and over again at the builder show. Versus this streamlines that process. And it reminded me, we went to the Builders Show with some friends. And if you recall correctly, the wife decided not to go this past year. And she said specifically, she goes, I don't want to go and go back and look at things that require me to change my existing remodel that I just did.
Yep.
And so this shortens that process and streamlines people's ability to make decisions, but more importantly, excuse me, it helps them narrow down their focus and they won't get lost.
Correct.
In everything.
Correct. And so now as part of the last part of my demo, you could hit save shopping choices. Let's say you only wanted these 2. So I picked the, the, you know, 2 and I hit save. Same sort of dynamic, hit review shopping choices, and now it's— I've created 2 more choices. But again, you could go back and you could come in here and do a second shopping search because you want to compare granite to quartz or butcher block.
Sure.
And now you're sort of gathering multiple shopping choices for different sort of products, which is again a great sort of organizing tool. And the last bit I would just wanted to show at the end where you hit compare choices. Now you've got your kitchen remodel here, and granted this is a brand new thing. I can see all my items here on the left. I can go to my main sink here and see here are all my main sink items. I could come in here and say this Ruvari is my preferred one. So I clicked on that as the preferred one. I go back to compare choices. I go to countertops. I pick this colored one here as my preferred one. I go back to compare choices. Now I hit preferred choices and I'm starting to build my detailed list over the things that I prefer.
Yep.
And at the last tab is the budget summary, which is, hey, I, I, my countertop budget was $6,300, but I've got a high and low of like $5,000 or $4,000. If I go down to my, my main sink, you can see my choices. The high was $750, the low was $414, but my preferred choice was $479. My budget was $900. You could repeat this process in the next 20 minutes with all these other items, and you have all of your budget summary basically in front of you.
This part is brilliant. It's like, this will serve me well. And if I recall correctly, if you end up freeing up some money, like we're saying, if you really wanted to change a preferred choice, you can still go back and do that.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
And you're basically toggling back and forth of like, okay, well, we really want to keep this at whatever, $50,000, but maybe we should go with the, you know, lower-end sink because we want to spend more money on the countertops.
Yeah, or vice versa.
Or vice versa, absolutely.
Or some other component. Yes, that's brilliant. You just streamlined everything. And I was even thinking about what if I did a kitchen remodel today? I don't know why I thought about that, but that— and that would be a big endeavor. It's a big endeavor.
It's, it's, yeah, it's as we've talked about in this episode, it's such a huge thing in terms of All the processes that people go through to combine all these things. I kind of try to summarize it over why this kind of AI shopping research is so important. It's kind of like, one, there's such a huge difference in price points.
In all products.
Exactly. But 2, doing this before you even reach out to potential contractors. Makes you in a much better position to review quotes and have a better relationship with a contractor.
Oh my gosh.
Because the contractor doesn't want to babysit you through helping you all make all these decisions. Now granted, some of them will absolutely do it. They will walk you through all your different choices. But all of this is so significant to sort of having a streamlined process when it comes time to actually going out and getting quotes.
Well, yeah, but even so, from a contractor perspective, so your working relationship with your contractor gets better. But here's the deal. If a contractor can get your job done quickly and efficiently, but still well managed, then they can go to the next job. So they can go make money on the next job. And they want to work with people like that who know what they want, Who are not wishy-washy and and are indecisive about things. And if you come to the table with more of what you want, that's great. Now don't get me wrong; we've been in this position before where we've made all of our selections, and then the manufacturer discontinues something. So you got to scramble to find the next thing. And I don't stress about those types of things because it is, in my opinion. just a house and it's not life or death, but I can still find things that I want. And it may only be 1 or 2 things versus now I'm completely prepared.
Yep.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm so excited about this. I know some of our initial customers have already started using it and expressed some, some massive sort of wins on this. It's very early for us on this, but you can see what a massive time saver, organization help, Setting up a better budget, dealing with contractors, you know, not being overwhelmed with all the different choices and having a structured way of kind of saving these things. We think it's going to be just an awesome, awesome extension of essentially our homeowner AI and how it's so powerful.
Yeah. I can just see, like, like the budget management upfront. Like, that, that's, to me, that's just Absolutely wonderful, and it and I'm a pretty good budget manager when it comes to projects. But this just made it even easier for me.
Yes, and you're an experienced homeowner that's kind of been through at least you know more than one sort of these types of larger projects. Think about the first-time homeowner who's embarking on their first one, and then they've never done one before.
Yeah, and I can see this eliminating a lot of that stress. Because I mean, let's face it, for whatever reason, money can be a stressor for a lot of people. And projects can be a stressor because you're out of commission sometimes, especially if like you're doing a kitchen remodel like we showed, then you don't have a kitchen to eat in. So do that remodel in the summer when you can go outside and barbecue, FYI.
It's the old adage of what you want versus what you can afford are oftentimes in conflict with each other. You need to go through this process to basically shop for all these things using home improvement shopping AI, and you're going to be much more better organized around making those trade-off decisions.
Yeah, which is why I didn't get that mosaic pool that I initially wanted, and I'm glad I didn't because I got something better.
All right, I, I got nothing else for today's episode.
This is a good one. Thank you so much for sharing this information. Um, for anyone out there who you think might benefit from this, Please share this with those individuals, and like and share this anyway with anyone you think are could be in need of project management details as it relates to the remodel projects. And if you want to learn more about us, please visit us at homezada.com. That's H O M E Z A D A dot com. And thank you so much for joining us on another episode of Be a Smarter Homeowner Podcast, and we're going to continue. to help you be the best, smartest homeowner you can possibly be. Join us again for our next episode, and thank you so much for listening and viewing.
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