This week on The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast, Mike Bills of AtlasRTX joins Greg and Kevin to discuss home builder customer engagement AI tools that answer customer questions immediately, schedule appointments, and help sell homes faster.
Selling homes can be intensely competitive and home builders must be available to home buyers around the clock. Mike says,
“If you don’t do things almost immediately, you’re going to lose to your competition. Human beings are great at a lot of things, but they are not great at being immediately responsive, being available 24 hours a day, speaking a hundred languages, and always giving the right answer when it understands the question and that’s the hard part.”
Most home buyers no longer need or want to be closely directed through every stage of the home buying process. Mike explains,
“But that being guided by somebody there to help you out all the time, that used to be what the best types of service are. That is not the way it is now. We want stealth service empowerment, and we want to be able to do things immediately. Buying a home, I would contend, is no different. Yet I run into opposition to that all the time where I hear back from home builder people, well, yeah, everything else that we buy we want like that, but homes are special. They’re different, so we want to do it like we did in 1988. I don’t think that that’s the way most consumers expect to be.”
Tech-forward home builders will differentiate themselves from their competitors. Mike says,
“Everybody that comes to your website is going to five other builders’ websites. Everybody that goes to your model home, they leave your model home and they go to another builder’s model home. They’re spending the weekend doing that. So, if you’re not connecting with them immediately your competitors are. And I hate to use scare tactics, et cetera, but that’s just a good one to get people’s attention.”
Listen to this week’s episode to learn more about AI technology that helps home builders connect with customers instantly.
About the Guest:
Mike Bills is the president of AtlasRTX, which helps organizations create a customer experience that sets them apart by using AI chatbots alongside human teams to engage customers at every stage of the buying cycle.
Prior to taking the helm of AtlasRTX, Mike was President of ConexED, the leading SaaS platform for virtual student services in higher education. From 2004-2014, Mike led a series of acquisitions of three underperforming businesses in widely different industries. As CEO, he led the turnarounds and negotiated and executed the sale of all three businesses – two to strategic buyers and the other to private equity.
Mike is a graduate of Westminster University in Salt Lake City, UT, and served on the Westminster board of trustees for sixteen years, where he was the founding Chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee. As a board member, Mike has been a passionate advocate for first-generation and underrepresented minority students. Mike completed his PhD at Antioch University’s Graduate School of Leadership Change, where his research focused on higher education governance. Mike joined the Antioch University board of governors in 2024.
A former nationally ranked triathlete, Mike now focuses on being fit rather than fast and spends his free time mountain biking, road cycling, and alpine and backcountry skiing.
