It’s midway through 2023 and also you’re reading yet one other blog post about Generative AI. By now you’ve probably already used, seen, or heard about Generative AI through OpenAI’s ChatGPT or viral images like Pope Francis wearing an oversized puffer jacket. At Homebound, one in every of our core values is “To Construct Higher” by rethinking every step of the house construction process and defining the long run of homebuilding. That’s why we began exploring how AI could improve our existing processes and be used to raised communicate with our customers in the long run. From designing homes to generating personalized content, we consider there are a lot of ways Generative AI will disrupt the real-estate industry.

The primary, and doubtless most evident way we see image generation changing the industry is thru design. Using designer input and domain knowledge, homes might be designed end-to-end from making a floor plan, to manufacturing an exterior, and ultimately an interior.

Below, we prompted (the strategy of using text to guide AI to output what you wish) Midjourney to design a whole home inspired by Homebound’s product line. The relevant prompts used to generate each image are positioned of their respective captions.

Floor plan

Starting with the ground plan, we desired to create a single story home containing a couple of bedrooms, a lounge, a kitchen, and a garage. While the ground plans generated didn’t deliver on every thing we wanted, we loosely followed the generated floor plan below to design our interior and exterior.

We then sketched this floor plan out to have a clearer picture of what we wanted our house to appear like when designing it.

Exterior

Once we were completely satisfied with our floor plan, we created an exterior modeled after Homebound’s Modern Farmhouse product line.

Interior

Lastly, we generated the inside of our imaginary home. Starting with the kitchen, we created communal spaces with tons of natural light and modern finishings that bled into the lounge.

For the first suite, we elected to go along with earth tones and green accents for each the bedroom and bath.

The opposite two rooms were filled by adding a secondary bedroom and office. Each room got its own unique twist following the core design of the remaining of the house.

While we used Midjourney above to design entire rooms, it may well even be leveraged for smaller pieces throughout the process. Even when explicitly prompting for what you wish, generative models will ultimately take creative liberties on certain points of a picture. Below are two examples of a mood board and color palette generated for kitchen (left) and toilet (right) fixtures.

A method Homebound is already improving the house buying process is thru our personalized property checkout workflow. This enables customers to view Homebound properties under construction and personalize them to their liking. Exteriors, materials, layouts, and more are all configurable through our checkout process.

Using Generative AI, we are able to imagine an infinite variety of variations of the identical home, design, etc. that may encourage each customers and designers within the construct process. Taking our generated home exterior for instance, we’ve created quite a few looks as similar or dissimilar to the unique design as we wanted.

These models will be even be used to switch existing renderings and pictures. Using an open-sourced model hosted on Hugging Face, InstructPix2Pix, we modified a Homebound home’s kitchen rendering, turning the unique navy blue kitchen cabinets (left) to dark brown (right). Using prompts just like the one within the caption below, customers could quickly visualize homes in any color, material, or style they dream up. Moreover, designers could use these models to rapidly test looks they’ve imagined. Swapping out furniture, virtually staging rooms, etc. are all possible with these kinds of models.

As we’ve demonstrated above, generative AI is usually a powerful design tool for the house constructing process and higher bridge the gap between customer and builder interaction. While we’ve highlighted a couple of use cases through Midjourney and other open-source models, we consider these models will begin to grow to be integrated in existing tools reminiscent of with Adobe Photoshop’s generative fill and likewise create recent ones.

Firms like Oda Studio are using AI to virtually stage rooms to permit potential home buyers to see what an area would appear like with furniture. Engineering start-ups reminiscent of Hypar are creating generative Text-to-BIM (Constructing Information Modeling) platforms to permit engineers to quickly design and develop projects. Even real-estate firms like Redfin are integrating ChatGPT plugins into their platforms to assist people find homes quicker. While generative AI continues to be evolving at a rapid pace, it’ll be interesting to look at how this technology will improve the development and real-estate industry within the years to return!