Buying a home that doesn’t yet exist has always required imagination. Floor plans, elevations, site maps, and design options each show part of the picture, but buyers are often left to put the pieces together themselves.
At Accelerate Summit by NewHomeSource, new AI and visualization technologies offered an early look at how that process could become more efficient for builders and more intuitive for consumers.
ZD Photo by Zonda starts with a detailed 3D model of a home that can be used to generate different views, rooms, options, and lighting conditions. ZD Community expands that concept to the neighborhood level, bringing together homes, homesites, maps, and community context to show how a future home fits into its surroundings.
The summit also explored how AI, drone imagery, and Matterport technology could bring additional context to these visual experiences. Gian Lorenzo Ferretti, imaging research and development lead at CoStar Group, demonstrated a prototype combining high-resolution drone imagery, 3D models, and geographic data to identify property conditions, model a drainage map, study solar exposure, and analyze views from different locations. The prototype also included an AI-generated guided property tour.
Together, these concepts offer an early look at where housing visualization could be headed. Instead of relying on individual images and disconnected assets, future home buying experiences could bring the home, homesite, street, and surrounding community into a more connected experience.
“It’s that perfect fusion of both the built world and unbuilt world that we think will revolutionize, not only visualization, but really the whole consumer home buying process and journey,” said Andy Reid, chief operating officer at Zonda.
For builders, the opportunity is to make what’s coming easier to show and understand, even before construction is complete. It could make the sales process more efficient by turning plans, options, homesites, and community information into a more connected experience for buyers.
For consumers, it means being able to better visualize a future home, explore how it fits within the community, and feel more informed about what they’re buying.
