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Fresh off being named the Women's Leadership Circle Woman of the Year at the Jeff Shore Sales and Marketing Leadership Summit, Kristin Peck - Director of Sales and Marketing at Tuskes Homes - joins Anya Chrisanthon for a conversation about value, transparency, and working for your seat at the table.

The award moment
Kristin was scanning the room trying to figure out who was winning - until Amy O'Connor dropped the Zumba hint. For women navigating an industry where their voice doesn't always carry the same weight, the WLC award is about leading while supporting other women.

Value purity - the Summit panel takeaway
When builders lead with incentives, buyers focus on the number instead of the home. They interpret the incentive as the value. Kristin's advice: audit how your homes present value - online, in person, all the way through follow-up - before you discount anything. Because once you lead with the discount, you have to backtrack and restart when they walk through the door.

From flight attendant to sales leader
Kristin was flying for United out of Newark when 9/11 happened. As a young mom of three, she made a pivot - got her real estate license, landed with a large builder, and built a 20+ year career across sales, regional training, and leadership by continually raising her hand for the hard things.

Today's buyer isn't harder - they're overloaded
Buyers aren't more difficult. They're more educated, they've done the research, and they're drowning in information - some of it wrong. Your job is to help them navigate it. That means a "front page" - website, Zillow, MLS - that's clear, concise, attractive, and accurate. And someone who actually responds fast when they have questions, because a distracted buyer moves to the next website that will talk to them.

Why Tuskes doesn't advertise incentives
The price is the price. Tuskes prices homes to market value and leads with transparency - and buyers appreciate it. Confused prospects don't come in. Transparent ones do.

On the Anewgo Marketing App
Full transparency: Tuskes is an Anewgo client. Kristin's take on how the interactive design experience fits the buyer journey: financing and paperwork aren't fun - the app is. It lets buyers bring their vision to life, solves the "what does saddleback even look like" color-name problem, and prepares them for design decisions while having fun doing it.

Kristin's tech filter
Show me how this solves a problem, gets more sales, or enhances the buyer experience. If it can't do at least one, it's not a product for her. And on AI: general AI is great for admin, but homebuilding needs specialized AI grounded in accurate facts - not three-sink kitchens from a generic image generator.

Advice for future leaders
You're not entitled to anything you didn't work for. If you want a seat at the table, start working for it - take the hard tasks, push out of your comfort zone, and surround yourself with people who make you better.

Connect with Kristin on LinkedIn and learn more about Tuskes Homes at tuskeshomes.com. Explore Shore Consulting programs including the Women's Leadership Circle at jeffshore.com.

About Anewgo
Anewgo is an all-in-one new home sales and marketing platform. We equip builders with AI-ready homebuilder websites, interactive design tools, floorplans, sitemaps, AI Sales Assistants, and data analytics to create personalized buyer journeys. Learn more at anewgo.com or find every episode at anewgo.com/podcast.

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/anewgo-of-new-home-sales/id1602564768

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Before you blame the market, look at how your homes show up online. Chad Davies - founder of Davies Imaging Group (DIG), serving builders doing 500+ units a year across 28 markets - joins Anya Chrisanthon fresh off the Jeff Shore Sales and Marketing Leadership Summit, where his team captured the entire event from behind the camera.

The view from the Summit
Every conversation - on stage and at the bar - came back to the same theme: stop negotiating. Selling homes is no longer a price battle. Builders have cut as much as they can, and the differentiator now is how you capture buyer attention.

The DIG story
Chad photographed his first $2 million home at 17. Sixteen years later, DIG is a specialized team - photographers who only photograph, dedicated editors in Guadalajara ripping through post-production, virtual staging artists, and a separate video production discipline. Why? Because one person can't carry the whole weight, and the friction in builder photography lives at the front and back end: scheduling, communication, and turnaround time.

What 28 markets reveal
Some regions are ripping, others are slow - and the trends are shifting. California, which invented the twilight photography craze, now wants daytime shots. Lifestyle and amenity video is surging while standalone model video fades. And in competitive markets like Texas, builders are suddenly finding photography budget - because when you can't compete on price, location, or product, presentation is the only lever left.

The spec home rant
If your home exists, it needs real professional photos - not a rendering, not construction team phone pics. And if it's not selling within a month, stage the pictures. Chad's team is seeing homes that sat for a year sell in weeks after virtual staging. Buyers aren't buying a shell - they're buying a new lifestyle, and you can't show them that with an empty room. Your job as a marketer is to remove the imagination, not demand it.

The virtual staging surprise
The biggest fans of virtual staging aren't marketing teams - they're sales teams. When a stale listing gets staged, it renews the sales team's excitement to sell it. If you want to empower your salespeople, stage the sitting inventory.

Where AI fits
AI-generated video is a variation of a photo, not a replacement for video production. Use it to fill social channels and supplement your media strategy - but it's an "and," not an "or."

The biggest untapped opportunity in builder content
Mic up your construction team. The first big builder that embraces behind-the-scenes content from their superintendents - showing culture and quality instead of talking about it - is going to have a great year. As Chad puts it: you're not telling people your culture, you're showing them.

Connect with Chad on LinkedIn or on Instagram (Chad Davies), and learn more at daviesimaging.com.

About Anewgo
Anewgo is an all-in-one new home sales and marketing platform. We equip builders with AI-ready homebuilder websites, interactive design tools, floorplans, sitemaps, AI Sales Assistants, and data analytics to create personalized buyer journeys. Learn more at anewgo.com or find every episode at anewgo.com/podcast.

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/anewgo-of-new-home-sales/id1602564768

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93.2%. That is the Google AI Overview citation rate for the builder Anewgo has been working with on its AEO initiative - meaning when buyers ask Google's AI real questions about communities, floor plans, features, and pricing in that builder's market, the AI cites that builder's website as a source 93% of the time. In this July State of AI episode, Anya Chrisanthon - CCO at Anewgo - walks through the newest data from Anewgo CTO Keng Lim's follow-up study and rounds out the month's biggest AI news for home builders.

Finding one: the builder became part of more buyer conversations - on every platform
ChatGPT surged early (16% to 72%), gave back some ground, and finished at 61%. Gemini climbed steadily to a new high of 75%. Google AI Overview climbed at every single measurement and finished at 93.2%. Three platforms, three different trajectories, all moving up. The lesson: buyers ask the same question in different AI tools and get different answers. If you're only measuring one platform - or not measuring at all - you have an incomplete picture.

Finding two: being cited is not the same as being recommended
Google cited the builder's website 93% of the time but ranked them number one only 43% of the time - a 50-point gap. Getting found and trusted by AI is step one. Step two is making the case: clear community details, plan options, included features, real points of difference. That's what converts a citation into a recommendation.

Finding three: AEO creates value before the website visit
While AI visibility went up, website sessions dropped about 47%. The study can't attribute the traffic change to AEO - but the opposing trends prove that sessions alone can no longer measure AEO progress. A buyer can have a meaningful brand encounter with your business inside an AI answer, and your analytics never see them. The new scorecard: are AI tools citing you, are they recommending you, and are the visits you do get more engaged and qualified?

The rest of July in AI
The model race kept sprinting - GPT-5.6 shipped as a full lineup and the industry theme shifted from "best model wins" to "best fit wins." The European Commission ordered Google to open Android to rival AI assistants - one more sign that the AI on your buyer's phone is becoming a choice, not a default, and your digital presence has to work for all of them. And agent frameworks went from theoretical to shipping - moving AI from answering questions to completing work.

📊 Read Keng Lim's full article with all the charts: Case Study Update: 93% Google AI Overview Citation Rate
📖 The original case study: How a Builder's ChatGPT Citation Rate Rose from 16% to 72%
🔍 Free AEO Assessment: email your website URL to beth@anewgo.com, subject "AEO Assessment" - free, no obligation, specific to home building.

About Anewgo
Anewgo is an all-in-one new home sales and marketing platform. We equip builders with AI-ready homebuilder websites, interactive design tools, floorplans, sitemaps, AI Sales Assistants, and data analytics to create personalized buyer journeys. Learn more at anewgo.com or find every episode at anewgo.com/podcast.

Listen on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/anewgo-of-new-home-sales/id1602564768