Transforming Home Buying in the Digital Era

For all of time, the home buying process has been designing the home, building it, and then experiencing it at the time of closing. It has been a proven process that has worked for years and years. But as the digital era began taking over the world and accelerated in the last 4 years that has people more engaged with their digital world than ever before, utilizing digital tools for your business has become a crucial strategy to attract new buyers, while also optimizing entire parts of an organization.  

Decoding the Digital Decision-Making Process

BJ Fogg has a famous behavior modal that breaks down a person’s decision-making process. It states the following: 

B=M+A+T 

What that boils down to in its simplest form is that a behavior is equal to a motivation plus accessibility plus a trigger. In the digital world, the motivation is that a buyer is researching a new home build and came to your website because they heard you have a great reputation or saw an ad on Instagram or LinkedIn. Is your information about your communities and home plans accessible? Are you offering robust dynamic content or just static content? The reason why dynamic content like immersive tours and designers is key is because we don’t live in a 2D world so buyers can’t truly imagine themselves in a home by looking at static images, which can prevent them from getting to the trigger to visit a sales center through call to actions on your website.  

The Experience Ecosystem

With all of that in mind, it goes into what we at Aireal call the experience ecosystem. The experience ecosystem starts in the earliest days from the time that somebody is opening your website and looking at the communities that are offered all the way through the time that the people are occupying that new home. From start to finish, not only do we want to touch every point along the journey, but we also want to consolidate the number of touch points, reduce the amount of effort from the customer, and give them the highest quality output for your business and make you look like their hero. 

A Unique Aireal Experience

First and foremost, Aireal gives a unique experience that allows for everybody to not only see the entire community, the lifestyle, and amenities that it offers, but also what is available to that lifestyle outside of the property lines. they get to pick their lot, they see what builders are on the lot, they see the plans available for that lot. Buyers can select their lot, pick their plan, pick their elevation & color scheme, select structural options and all their design options for the floor, the countertop, backsplash, fixtures, etc. They get to make their house a home.  

We do this by bringing a fully immersive experience to your website and into your sales office using real-world augmented reality and immersive kiosks. With real-world augmented reality, sales reps no longer need to send buyers away to another community looking to tour a model home, they can walk out to the lot and view that home right on the lot, exactly like how it is going to look, and walk around it just as if it were built. It immerses them in their future environment, while also allows you to continue to engage that lead and help convert while they are on site. 

Unveiling Latent Needs with Technology

One of the key things that digital tools can help communicate that buyers can’t is their latent needs. Oftentimes, people will only communicate with their explicit needs out of fear of expressing their latent needs. With Aireal’s immersive technology, we track over 70 patented metrics related to human behavior and then run predictive analytics on those metrics to provide your sales reps with as much information about the potential customer before they even walk into the door.   

Bridging the Post-Signing Gap with Livvy

Lastly, once a buyer has signed and started the design process, customer sentiment usually drops because let’s face it getting a mortgage and waiting is not a fun process for anyone, but we are bridging that gap with a new subsidiary called Livvy, which is a smart interior design tool that allows people to continue to design their home with furniture and décor that is unique to them. Unlike a lot of the smart interior design tools out there, our predictive model uses real world products and styles that fit them exactly how they want.  

The Seamless Merge: Builder and Customer

The biggest takeaway is that we merged the experience between builder and customer through what’s called our experience ecosystem by reducing the number of touch points, the number locations they must go to close on their home and streamline it, all while keeping their brains on hot cognition and excitement and propelling the deal to close.