AI’s move beyond talk, hype and possibility, to where it’s powering business operations and results was a constant theme at HousingWire’s AI Summit, held on Tuesday, in Dallas.
For homebuilders, the conversation is no longer about whether teams should adopt AI, but where it can make the biggest impact and how to best implement it.
For Century Communities, ranked 13th in the HousingWire Homebuilder Rankings, putting AI to work is no longer an option. Rather, it’s a necessity, fused into the complex, paper-work and tedious-research-filled workflows that surface potential land acquisition targets for the company’s Century Complete entry-level communities. During a Tuesday morning session at the HousingWire AI Summit, Chris Coakley, the builder’s corporate director of land, affordable product division, argued that leveraging AI in land acquisition has become a crucial capability for his company.
This is because Century Communities operates through a hub-and-spoke model with lean, lightly staffed local land acquisition teams working across its 45 markets in 16 states. This model, Coakley said, allows the builder to operate a leaner organization, but it also puts a greater workload on a relatively small number of local team members.
“Those teams are very lightly staffed,” Coakley said suring the session. “They do all their due diligence themselves, and they do all their underwriting themselves. Maybe the big deals get to corporate, but it’s at a point where it’s already been significantly vetted.”
That’s where AI comes into the picture.
“AI empowers a lightly staffed organization to better own the deal,” Coakley added.
How AI can boost land teams
Many homebuilders, Century Communities included, have already been using AI to improve the early-stage land due diligence process. Platforms such as Acres and Prophetic, for example, enable land teams to quickly evaluate whether a property is likely to be suitable for development before they commit significant resources and time into any specific deal.
Land teams can use these kinds of AI platforms to recognize environmental constraints, site characteristics, and overall development feasibility as necessary early steps in the site selection workflow. This allows land acquisition teams to quickly determine a property’s development viability before contracting, engineering or formal due diligence begins.
According to Coakley, Century Communities also uses AI tools that are much more widely accessible to generate market knowledge, allowing land teams to quickly analyze comparable sales, pricing, bedrooms, bathrooms, geography and other market data. Tools such as Copilot and Claude can generate detailed market reports and even presentations within minutes, helping acquisition teams make informed decisions and negotiate with sellers more effectively.
Ultimately, AI helps land teams, who are tasked with creating an ongoing lot pipeline, evaluate a large volume of potential development sites in a short period of time.
“As a land person, when you don’t know what deal is going to come through, the only solution you have is to have a lot of deals on the hook. Using AI…I can go through them really quick,” Coakley said.
“We can quickly run searches within those technologies that give us a decent idea of if the land is actually usable for our intended uses, and we can do that before contracting, before engineering looks at it, before any of that stuff. We can run three or four different queries, and we can have like a decent idea of whether or not that land is going to work for us,” Coakley added.
How to get employee buy-in
Many organizations that integrate AI into their workflows acknowledge that getting employees to fully embrace the technology can be a major challenge.
Coakley argued that homebuilders should put pressure on team members to adopt AI, even if those are small steps at first.
“You’ve got to get them to take the first step, and then you’ll just be shocked at what comes back,” he said.
Recruiting leaders from within the organization to talk about AI and educate and train employees can also be very effective.
“Within your organizations, you have top performers. They’re top performers generally because they execute the best. Make those top performers your champions, and then use those champions to train the rest of your organization. Don’t do it yourself. Get the folks that your salespeople respect, or your operations people, your acquisitions people respect. Try to get their buy-in, and for them to preach it to their team members,” Coakley advised.
Ultimately, land acquisition team members who don’t begin to take advantage of AI will fall behind.
AI: the new competitive necessity
From Coakley’s vantage point, the rise of AI could weed out unmotivated employees while shining a spotlight on the top performers.
“What I really think AI does for us, and is really going to differentiate competitors in the future, is it…highlights people with motivation and execution. There’s no excuse not to have the information very quickly to be able to make a decent decision at the point of sale or the point of contact, and if you have team members that aren’t utilizing similar resources to make the decisions, their goals are going to be missed because your competitors are going to be using those,” Coakley said.
This same dynamic could apply to homebuilders at large. As more and more homebuilders roll out and refine their AI strategies to enhance land acquisitions, leveraging the latest technology will, increasingly, become a necessity.
“If you’re not using it in the next year for maximizing your ability to execute, I think you’re going to fall behind pretty quickly. It just empowers our people at the point of sale to have a lot more intelligent conversations a lot quicker, and to make decisions in such a manner that we can be more nimble as a company,” Coakley said.
