HistoryMaker Homes’ crawl-walk-run approach to AI adoption

Although homebuilders have not always fully developed AI strategies yet, the homebuilding industry at large is quickly recognizing and embracing it as a business game-changer. 

Builders that fail to adapt risk falling behind, with the pressure particularly acute for private builders competing against larger public operators with greater scale and resources.

This is one of the main takeaways from Tuesday’s HousingWire AI Summit and pre-Summit AI homebuilder roundtable on Monday in Dallas. 

During a Tuesday session at the AI Summit, HistoryMaker Homes CEO Zac Thompson candidly shared his company’s experience implementing AI. As a regional homebuilder, HistoryMaker Homes doesn’t have millions of dollars to pour into AI initiatives or the ability to take on everything all at once. 

As a result, the builder is taking a gradual approach to adopting AI. 

“We subscribe to a crawl-walk-run strategy with this. We may be standing up for the first time over the last couple of months, getting into our walk phase,” Thompson said during the session. 

Differentiating amid heightened competition

The 77-year-old private homebuilding firm, based in Dallas-Fort Worth, operates a core homebuilding business, along with commercial land development, build-to-rent, and a financial services business. 

In 2023, as the company reached its 75th anniversary, leadership explored whether the strategies that had driven its historical growth would continue to ensure success in a future defined by increasing consolidation and competition. 

Their conclusion: it was time for a change. Historically, HistoryMaker Homes competed as a low-cost provider focused on affordable, first-time housing. However, rising capital costs and growing competition from large public builders made competing primarily on price increasingly difficult.

“There was no way that a regional private, family-owned home builder was going to duke it out with D.R. Horton and Lennar in the Texas market as a low-cost provider, so we pivoted,” Thompson explained. 

Rather than go to market with the lowest price, the company would instead put its homebuying customers at the center of its team members’ focus, concentrating on customer value and experience over all else.

In 2024, the company, amid this heightened competition, announced a strategic pivot requiring a fundamental change in its operating model. As part of this transformation, the company began partnering with technology firms to leverage AI, rather than building proprietary capabilities internally.

How HistoryMaker Homes is implementing AI

Amid this strategic shift, product innovation was one of the key opportunities that HistoryMaker Homes identified. In 2024, the company was closing homes with floor plans that were designed in the late 1990s. Competing in today’s cutthroat market required a modernized 

As a result, HistoryMaker Homes, as part of its technology rollout, partnered with Higharc to transform how it develops home designs. This partnership enabled the builder to quickly generate designs, allowing the firm to launch about 60 new floor plans over an 18-month period. 

Of course, the floorplans and elevations were not all that changed. Purchasing, ERP, construction documentation, even land positions and sales and marketing functions – the entire company’s building lifecycle – underwent a wholesale makeover.

This is a feat that wouldn’t have been possible for a team of their size several years ago. Now, with the advent of AI, regional builders like HistoryMaker Homes can achieve this level of productivity while maintaining current staffing levels. 

HistoryMaker Homes’ other technology efforts have primarily focused on customer experience and using technology to improve lead generation, website and community interactions and homeowner communication through portals. The company has not yet significantly applied technology to land acquisition, but that will likely be the next area of focus. 

Thompson emphasized that adopting AI, especially for regional builders with limited funds and staffing, is a gradual process. Transforming systems and adopting the latest technology organization-wide doesn’t happen overnight. 

HistoryMaker Homes also recognized that, rather than building AI capabilities in-house, it made more sense to partner with technology firms that had already invested the capital and expertise to develop them.

“We’re definitely in learning mode, in prototype mode. But in a lot of ways, we’ve kind of stumbled into things. We’ve identified really good partners, which is a lesson learned. For a builder like us…I can’t go raise the capital to spend 2 million bucks this year on AI building my own proprietary tool,” Thompson explained. “One of the strategic things that we identified is, we need to partner with technology firms that have raised the capital to do this really well.”