Elizabeth Dodson shows how to estimate home addition costs using HomeZada's Zada AI. Enter dimensions and fixture quality, and the tool calculates materials and labor for a 750-square-foot space, ranging from $23k to $33k depending on upgrades like bathrooms and high-end fixtures.
Many people who have a small home oftentimes consider a home addition to expand the size of their home, but they have no idea how much it's going to cost or how to budget for it. Let's look at how AI can make this really simple for homeowners. One is, why is it important to establish a budget? You're going to invest in your home, so how much are you going to invest is a huge part of your consideration. How are you going to pay for it? Do you have the upfront cash, credit, home equity loan? Probably the most important thing is way before you even go out and engage contractors, you want to be able to start to identify the scope and budgets for these things because it will give you a much better opportunity to evaluate different contractors, have a good discussion with the one you ultimately select, and ultimately you're much more likely not to overspend. How can AI at this early stage of planning actually help? It's going to help you list out all the items, help you gather the dimensions, high level of the project, and even determine what types of products that you might be considering for your AI— sorry, Home Edition. So here's HomeZada. It's a digital home management platform. It manages all kinds of different data about your house. Let's focus in on the projects piece here. It goes to its dashboard. We're going to click on New Project, and here's a gallery of 50 common home improvement projects. So let's just do a quick search and search for the addition template. And here's the Home Edition. We're going to hit Create Project, and now we're on the— on the left-hand side, we're going to create a swag between high, moderate, and low as it relates to, let's say, products choices that we're going to choose. We're going to hit Low Estimate and hit Create Project. The first part of the magic automatically happens with the template in the fact that it's identified all of the typical materials that are going to be required for your project. Drywall, electrical, flooring, foundations, framing, grading, potentially new HVAC equipment. All these items are identified. If you know of more, you can certainly add them. You can either delete them, but notice the current column of budget is at zero. Here is where you can initiate Zada AI. So you initiate Zada AI, and it is essentially going to try and create a detailed budget for all of these things. But as we know, the size is going to determine the quantities over how much materials are required. So here is where you can put in a swag that says, I think it will be 30 feet by 25 feet. And 9 feet single-story house. You click on that, and now again, this, uh, the, the magic of Zada AI. It's actually calculating the geometry that you've given it to determine the quantities of materials that are potentially required for your project at a very, very high level. Right, and it's determining a unit rate for each individual item as well as showing you assumptions in that last column. And it's basically giving you both, again, a quantity, a unit price, and a total price for every single item that it's assuming there. As you can see on the bottom item, it's assuming you might have 5 windows and they're going to be double-hung vinyl windows. Well, certainly you can sort of add, edit, or change or delete those. As you would like. But again, think about how much time you've actually saved and how much more knowledgeable you are about a potential home addition, because literally in less than a minute you got a detailed budget based on some high-level parameters over the major things that are going to be required. Now the benefit of Zada AI is you can continue to provide it more information and have a dialogue with, with it. The space Will include a master bathroom, master closet, and master bedroom. Please re-budget. Even it will ignore my spelling mistake. And now basically you're giving it more data, right? It's it's going to basically start to incorporate. some of those things as it relates to the data on your project. And again, I'll imagine that it's— notice the power here of essentially, it's basically increased your budget because it says, oh, you're going to need a whole bunch of plumbing fixtures. And now it's gone from a, you know, $23,000 budget to a $30,000 budget right now. You can say, I want high-end Kohler plumbing or fixtures, bathroom fixtures. The power of Zada AI is the ongoing conversation that you can have with it by basically adding, editing, deleting scope, changing quantities. Maybe you don't have 5, you know, windows, but you may only have, you know, 3 if you know more details about it, and you're basically going in here and you can see here that with the plumbing fixtures, it's upgraded to high-end Kohler and now it thinks you're going to basically up to be about $33,000. So you can do this, you know, basically an unlimited times to basically triangulate what you want for your budget for your home addition. When you decide this is a good one that you want to save, you just go to that cloud button and hit I want to save the estimates. You can again make changes. We encourage you obviously to verify the quantities. It is an AI tool. You're still responsible for these things, but it's done a lot of these calculations for you. And now you can save all that information. And now you go back to that original budget that we created and all those items are automatically filled in. Now you're at a much better place to engage with contractors to start to understand what they're going to come back to you as a bid and make those comparisons. It's not all going to be match— One-to-one, but you're certainly at a much smarter level over how much you're going to be able to spend. Like, can you afford $37,000 for your home addition, or do you need to go back to that, you know, $20,000 budget? And you've been able to do this in literally less than a few minutes. And think about how much time you've actually saved versus trying to do all of this individual research for all these items on the internet, or going into a home improvement retailer to have these discussions. You're now much more farther along in the process to figuring out how and if you want to move forward. So if you want to learn more information, just go to homezada.com. You can read up about Zada AI and the project remodel features and how it helps you managing not only a new addition, but you could also sign up to actually manage any of your home improvement projects and understand the importance of being able to create good budgets before you engage in hiring contractors or even doing the projects yourselves.
