Q & A Episode 16 - How Modern Technology Shapes Luxury Home Design, Construction, and Marketing
Episode #16 | Q&A with Mark D. Williams | How Modern Technology Shapes Luxury Home Design
In this Q&A episode, Mark dives into how technology has revolutionized the design, construction, and marketing of luxury homes. From the rise of 3D modeling and AI in architectural design to innovative materials and methods that improve home efficiency and air quality, Mark shares insights on how builders are adapting. Plus, there's a look at the evolving role of marketing tools like AI to keep builders ahead in the game.
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About The Curious Builder
The host of the Curious Builder Posdast is Mark D. Williams, the founder of Mark D. WIlliams Custom Homes Inc. They are an award-winning Twin Cities-based home builder, creating quality custom homes and remodels — one-of-a-kind dream homes of all styles and scopes. Whether you’re looking to reimagine your current space or start fresh with a new construction, we build homes that reflect how you live your everyday life.
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Mark D. Williams 00:00
You know, if you went 20 years ago and talked about VOCs and, you know, some of the things that you know off gassing. I mean, most those don't even know what you're talking about. Now, we talk about it all the time, and it's one of the questions that we ask our homeowners, you know, are they sensitive to, you know, different products? Do they have any allergies? Do they have any respiratory, you know, issues? And you know, because we're in our homes, and you know, in our climate, we're having HRVs and ERVs, which is cycling out our air repeatedly. Our homes are much fresher. They're much better to breathe in than they were of yesteryear. Welcome to The Curious Builder podcast. I'm Mark Williams, your host. Today's question for a Thursday Q and A is, how has the adoption of new technologies changed the way you design, construct and market luxury homes? It's a big question. I think the beginning is just that I think our industry is always changing. I think it always has been. And I think like any business, if you're not evolving, if you're not changing. I mean, you're essentially, you're dying. I mean, you've got to grow. And, you know, I look back at, you know, how we designed homes 20 years ago, when I started, compared to what we do now. I mean, we used to build up, build a house in 120 days. You know? Now it takes me nine to 12 months to build a house. Now, granted, the homes are much more complicated, but that kind of goes into all of this. And I think, you know, for me specifically, I've kind of gone where my clients have wanted me to go. You know, we always built high quality homes and and so, you know, always compared to our competition, we were just, you know, our millwork was better, our details were better, our kind of, our obsession with perfection was better, and that sort of just set us apart. The reputation sort of was that if you want really high quality, that we could do that. And I think as you start working with higher end architects, higher end designers, and your name gets out there, you evolve. And I think in terms of technology, I guess maybe we'll start first with design. I mean, think of how much design has changed just in the last couple of years. You know, we used to have, and not that you still can't do hand sketching, but the 3d modeling, what used to be a very expensive add on, is pretty much, if you don't do 3d modeling, you know, if you're kind of a dinosaur and you can farm it out, you don't have to do it individually. And I know plenty of architects, or, you know, interior designers that will, you know, send it out to overseas. I mean, we work with people anywhere from, you know, Ukraine, Serbia. I've done some with India, some in South America where, you know, maybe we have a rendering that we want done of the great room or the kitchen, and we really want the rendering to be top notch. And usually it's for a publication, or, like I said, entering a magazine for, like, an arts and home tour or parade tour. You know, you can give whoever you're working with, a lot of the details, the material selections, things like that, and then they'll make it. You know, that imagery will just be incredibly powerful. It almost sometimes it's gotten so good now you have to look at the photo twice, like, Wait, is that home already built, or is that a to be built and and so now, because people are so good at it, you know how people used to design it, it's, you've got to have full color, maybe some 3d whatever you've got going on. And it's really, really impressive. I think in terms of design, I think architecture design, we had an architect on that was just talking about how much AI is likely to change how they design as well. I mean, I think you'll still have architects and home designers that will have the final say like anything, and I think AI will just simply be a tool. But it'd be really interesting, I don't know if the technology is available yet, where you know, you could tell AI that, Hey, you want a four bedroom house, you want to be traditional, be really cool. If you could have, like, Hey, here's four other homes that I really like that are the spirit of what I'm going for. You know, create something new with some of these guiding principles. It'd be interesting to see how long before architectural design will be able to sort of morph that. I think there's some programs out there, I just don't know how. If it's only from an imagery standpoint, or if you can actually design that way from a construction standpoint. You know, we're always evolving. I think the materials we use, you know, continues to evolve. I mean, back when, in our understanding, obviously home performance and energy performance is a is a hot feel, and it's constantly changing. You know, I remember back in the 70s and 80s, you know, you'd see homes before I was building but you know, you'd put fiberglass on concrete walls, and then you put poly over it, because you thought that was a good idea. Well, all those, all those walls sweat like greenhouses create mold, and you got to rip them all out. And so, you know, then they get away with that technology and say, No, that doesn't work. And so one of the reasons why I feel like a lot of times in construction we might be slow to adopt is we've seen a lot of things that we try and then fail. But I think that's part of innovation. That's part of figuring out. I think you have to make sure you use your common sense factor too, like if something just simply doesn't make sense, don't do it just because maybe the crowd is doing it, or it's some bright, new, shiny technology. I mean, look into it. Make sure sometimes a foundational principle is probably a better one. But. You do it with a new technology. 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Only because I do a lot of stuff with Pella, and it's we post a lot of it on our our Instagram, but they have this study set GO system that they were four years in innovating. And at the International builder show this year, they had traditional window. And I think it took, like it was, three times faster with their new system versus the old system. And it was really install system that was geared towards those that would install their window. So framers in our market, actually, Pella does their own install which is great. But what's cool about it is they have these they have these clips on the inside of the window. And you know, a big part of installing Windows is a, getting the flashing right B, making sure it's leveled. And a lot of the bigger windows, you know, it's 234, person install job. These windows are pretty heavy. And on smaller windows, you know, you need someone on the outside on a ladder, or any window, actually, you need someone on the outside on a ladder or a lift, and need someone on the inside kind of leveling it and, you know, nailing it in, and then you've got your nailing flange on the outside. Well, this innovation. Check out the video on our Instagram feed if you haven't seen it yet, or head to pella.com but it's really neat. So these clips basically extend from the inside. If it's a small window, let's call it three feet wide by four feet tall. You can just install it yourself, one person from the inside of the house. It cuts ladder work down to just hardly anything. It's pretty impressive. So you can bring it into the house where you've got obviously, a much safer environment. You're not sitting up on a ladder with something heavy and risk of falling and, you know, you put the window in, and it's got these clips, you know, a couple screws. And it actually screws to the inside of of your two by four framing, which is incredible. The other thing that's amazing about it is now you have a really clear gap all the way around, you can still shim it and make sure it's level, but you don't need as many as you would on a traditional window, which is great for insulation. So if you spray foam around the inside of your window, or if you chink it with insulation, you have a much better gap, which is going to get you a lot better air sealing. I think every framer has probably seen it. For builders, seen it where, you know, there's not enough of a gap between the window and the two by four, and you can hardly really get any insulation in there. And so your thermal break just is not that great. And then on the outside of the window, you don't even have a nailing flange. It's got these little clips that you pull off, and the FL It just flaps to the outside of your sheeting, and then you tape over it, and you're done, no nails. What's going to be sort of revolutionary in our market? We're in climate zone. Think six and seven. It's a lot colder up here in Minnesota, but we're starting to do a lot more external insulation. I use a zip r6 which is a insulated to an R value of six to the outside. The foam is actually in a before bait sheet. And now let's say you did rock wool or something. We saw a home out at 45 Wyatt oak out in Boston where I think Nick Schifrin from menace builders was putting on, think he was putting on six inches of rockwool insulation at the outside. So we're getting that air. We're getting that insulation barrier to the outside. Well, you know, a lot of times you have to buck out the windows, and you still have to be thoughtful about your details. But going back to this in a back to this innovation, you know, you've got this flap on your window that can go right over your sheeting, and it makes your flashing and your water, you know, your water plane is just a lot easier. And you know, anytime you can make something a little simpler to understand and less moving parts to mess up, you know, obviously the end result is going to be a lot better. This episode is brought to you by Alpine hardwood flooring. They've been our partner now for over a decade, installing all our wood floors on all our new homes, as well as our remodels. And on a personal level, Adam and Anthony jankola, the owners are just absolutely amazing people. They've been so supportive of my career, as well as doing anything, we need to make sure that our clients are happy, and they work so well with our other vendors and trade partners at not only protecting their product, but also ensuring everyone else's looks great. So if you're looking for a wood floor or for. You finish, I highly recommend Alpine hardwood flooring. I think, you know, insulation has come a long way, too in terms of innovation. I mean, obviously spray foam has been around for a while, but, you know, and I don't, I'm personally not a big fan of spray foaming everything, because there are, I think, just like anything, there are certain tools that are better than other tools. And, you know, for us, I like spray foaming for air barriers, you know, for kind of those really difficult places to insulate. And so we do a lot of combination of, you know, spray foam and bat insulation, blown insulation, things like that. But I really like what we're seeing in the industry with external insulation. It just makes sense. So I think that's a huge change in terms of some new technologies, and really just understanding, I mean, between our continuing education classes that we have to take as builders to keep our license current, we're constantly being inundated with these new technologies, and I think our climate has a lot to do with it. I had heard recently that Minnesota, props to Minnesota, but I think we build, or I know we build the most homes at scale of high efficiency. And I mean, the reason we have to is our climate is a lot colder, and so a lot of our building codes are more advanced than the rest of the country. That's not to say that other parts of the country don't build really good homes. It's just that a lot of the innovation comes from, you know, Canada, and from, you know, our climate zone across the country. You know Washington, you know the Dakotas, you know east coast. You know, we're getting wild changes in temperature. I was talking to an energy consultant recently, and he was down in Arizona. He's like, Yeah, it gets to be 120 degrees. And, you know, let's say you you cool your house to, let's say 70. And so, you know, that's a 50 degree. I think you call it a t delta in temperature. But Minnesota, you know, in the wintertime, you might keep your house at 70 degrees, and it's negative. Let's just call it zero. That's 70 degrees. So that's 20 degrees more extreme. And then, obviously, in our climate, we've got a ton of humidity with our summer humidity. I know Texas gets got crazy humidity, as well as all other parts. But you know, we're obviously seeing huge climate shift across the country, across the world, and so I think we are going to have to continue to keep on innovating, making our systems better, making our homes more efficient. And, you know, we had Jonathan Kramer on, I don't know, 10 episodes ago from eversphere, and he had just a, kind of a shocking stat that we spend 90% of our lives indoors. So what we breathe is super, super important. You know, if you went 20 years ago and talked about VOCs, and, you know, some of the things that you know off gassing, I mean, most those wouldn't even know what you're talking about. Now, we talk about it all the time, and it's one of the questions that we ask our homeowners, you know, are they sensitive to, you know, different products? Do they have any allergies? Do they have any respiratory, you know, issues? And, you know, because we're in our homes, and you know, in our climate, we're having HRVs and ERVs, which is cycling out our air repeatedly, our homes are much fresher. They're much better to breathe in than they were of yesteryear. So that's some definitely innovations and new technologies that we're seeing. I think, really, I think the best way to stay abreast of all this stuff is asking your trade partners. You know, I'm not an HVAC expert, so, you know, I'm asking my HVAC team, you know, what are some emerging technologies, or what are you seeing that we could, you know, what can we tell our clients about? You know, if they're interested in more purified air? We had one client during covid that he was extremely at risk for any sort of respiratory illness, obviously, covid, he used to wear double masks everywhere, and we actually installed it was the first one I've ever done, but it was a UV light on top of a HEPA filter in his house. And the UV light, I think, killed like 99% of bacteria. And it was just, you know, obviously a UV light that was, you know, set in a different chamber of the furnace. So as air was filtering through, that UV light was obviously hitting all the air movement and killing whatever sort of particles, you know, that was there. But that was really because the homeowner asked for it. He wanted to know, like, Hey, I'm, you know, I care about my life. I want to stay alive. You know, this is definitely a life and death kind of situation. And so we had to take some, some steps that we normally wouldn't take. And so sometimes now we'll, we'll pitch this to clients with small kids, you know, people that are more health conscious, they're, you know, they're looking to us as guides, saying, you know what's out there? What? What do we know that we that we might want, and sometimes clients don't want to do it, but really, our job is just simply to educate them. You music. This episode is brought to you by Hellmuth and Johnson, a top Minnesota law firm representing clients ranging from individuals to emerging startups and multinational fortune 500 companies focusing on transactional law, litigation and appeals. Helmuth and Johnson attorneys are leaders in their field. David Hellmuth and Chad Johnson joined forces 30 years ago in 1994 with the goal of creating a premier law firm capable of handling complex and challenging cases efficiently and effectively. Today, Helmuth and Johnson ranked among the top 15 largest law firms in Minnesota, with more than 70 Twin City lawyers serving clients in more than 30 legal practice areas. They offer a full suite of legal services to clients without. Sacrificing their original commitment to providing responsible and affordable legal representation. To learn more, head to our website, thecure pillarpodcast.com, or to their website@www.hj law firm.com, so I think in terms of marketing, we've seen a huge shift in technologies. Obviously, AI is probably at the forefront of that, you know, if you're not using, you know, chatgpt or Jasper, or something, you know, to help you write, you know, your newsletters and blogs and, you know, just to get started, a lot of people, their number one barrier to entry, it to starting something is just some sort of an outline, or just like getting off go. And, you know, what's kind of cool about it is that, you know, and I've just recently, I'm pretty slow to it myself, but just, I know, like my blogging team, you know, I'll give them a lot of, you know, I'll just record myself talking about a particular topic, then I send to them, I believe they transcribe it. We use a program called otter, and so it'll take notes, it'll summarize, in fact, every Zoom meeting that I have, and now I'm using it every time I have a client meeting, I just turn on the Note Taker on my phone, leave it on the center of the table, and it'll record the entire conversation, and then it'll send us an email after with the highlights, the summary, the calls to action. It's very professional, and so it's a great way for the whole team to stay accountable, but it's also a great way to let your clients know that, you know, you're picking up the details. And also it's a really great way to make sure that you never have any sort of, he said, she said, types of situations, you know, I've had situations in the past where, you know, I had a client say, Well, this is what you actually said. It would be nice to actually have a record of what we actually said. Obviously, as the world gets more and more litigious things like that, having a record of what was shared and what was conveyed, could could keep you out of a lawsuit. And so there's a number of reasons why this would be helpful that's probably lower on the list, because, you know, none of us are trying to get sued, and we're all, I would assume, trying to do good work. So it's really just about doing better work. But you can do more than one thing at one time with these technologies. In terms of marketing, think of like what Morgan Maud and Katie Cath do here in our market. They have phenomenal blogs that they're doing, and their whole goal is to get people their website, capture their emails. They have a bunch of brand deals that they're doing, and so the bigger their audience and the bigger they're following, the more clout that they have in the industry. But on top of that, there's a lot of people that just want information. You know, the home sphere is so big in terms of, you know, people buying things, what people want. And so I think what's really nice about what chat, GPT or other programs like that can do is you could say, you know, I want to write an article, what are the top 10, you know, trending, you know, home designs, or what are the top 10? I don't know why we are fascinated with top 10, but, you know, what are the top 10 kitchen innovations? And it'll spit it right out for you, and then you could basically rewrite, rewrite it, you know, that's the outline, but you could rewrite the article based on, you know, what you what your little nuance is. It could be also, it helps with creating SLPs, you know, we actually just, we're looking to hire someone, not immediately, but, you know, within the next six months. And so I just wrote into chat GPT, what was the criteria, what we were looking for, and then it wrote a job description which was way better, and it was, you know, 95 99% accurate. So you edit a few small things, and then, boom, that's what you send to your, you know, your potential applicant pool, and now they actually know what they're interviewing for, especially for small companies. I think this is going to be a game changer, because it allows you to out punch your weight if you have this kind of availability to I think the biggest problem us small businesses have, myself included. I'm a business of four or five people. It's the mundane stuff, it's a lot of the paperwork, it's a lot of the writing, and it still needs, I think the biggest concern that most of us have would be that it does, it lacks our voice. It lacks our, you know, who we are. But one thing that's sort of interesting, I've just played around with a little bit, but like Jasper AI, you can actually set different profiles or different personalities. So let's just say, obviously the curious builders what you're listening to right now. But, you know, I could write. I could have Jasper learn my curious builder nature. And so maybe it has certain nuances, certain playfulness, or whatever, and that's kind of the way it writes. And let's say Mark Williams Custom Homes, Well, I'm obviously the same person, you know, maybe it's a little bit more professional, a little bit more buttoned up, not sure that's the case, but let's just say, you know, and I could actually create a profile that Jasper would follow for that to be a little bit more professional, a little bit more dialed up, and so that the nuance of the voicing will be more in line with what your brand strategy is. And so I think that's really cool. I know Morgan mollery uses that a lot for her different companies, and how she tries to differentiate between the two. You know, back to this question, what are the new technologies and innovations? Pretty much every year I go out to the international builder show, you know, big part of it is relationships and brand building and seeing, you know, meeting representatives from different companies around the country, around the world. A lot of it is meeting other builders, talking to them. But, you know, I love going. Seeing some of the new technologies that are being developed. I mean, you're going to see it probably first at the International builder show, for the very reason that the exposure is so large. And, you know, a lot of times you can't get what they're showing you, but within a year or two, you know, they're hitting the floor. And so if you want to stay, you know, up on what's coming out, you know, I'd highly recommend going to the builder show if you've never been before. I mean, it's a little overwhelming in terms of, like, the amount of square footage in Vegas. It's enormous. I don't even know the stats and the number of people that are that are going in, the number of exhibits, but it's mind blowing. You know, in three, four days, you can never see it all. My best advice is, you know, bring a couple of bottles of water and really comfy shoes because and set your expectations that you're not going to see everything, and just, you know, go out and explore. And, you know, bring some of your team members with you. I think it's a great opportunity for some team building. And, you know, bring your Pm, you know, bring some of your designers with you, because you're going to learn so much, and a lot of it is the world gets smaller and smaller, especially with social media. You know, you're going to meet so many brands. You know, I've met a number of people that I that I work with now, you know, weekly, and I've met them at the builder show. And you know, the brands that we work with, we put them in our homes, and a lot of that relationship starts with their key people who you meet at the builder show. And so, you know, they're investing a lot of time and money to be there, and you're investing a lot of time, probably more so than money to visit. And so, you know, you're both putting a lot of time in there, and the goal is that you can help each other long term. So I think that's it's very valuable. So anyway, that was my answer to how has the adoption of new technologies changed the way you design, construct and market luxury homes. See you next week. You Steve, thanks for listening to the curious builder podcast. If you like what you listen to, please give us a five star rating and write us a review. It really means a lot. It's a great way for us to just understand what you like about the podcast and what we can keep doing. So like and review and please share with your friends and family. Find out more at curious builder podcast.com you.
