AI in Real Estate Transforming a Veteran's Business Landscape

So, let's get right into AI. Lauren, you've been a real estate agent for how many years? Going on nine.

Nine years as an agent and you've recently dug into AI. It's upending your world in your business. I'm so excited to be talking to you because you are coming from being an agent and applying artificial intelligence as we're hearing so much about it.

What got you going into this? So, it's a really funny story. I actually got into AI because I was skeptical about it.

So, I kept hearing this buzzword. I kept hearing, you know, ChatGBT came out in 2022 and all these different things. And I was like, there's no way it's as cool as people are saying.

There's no way it's capable of doing what people are saying it's doing. So, I tried to break it. I tried to trip it up or confuse it or like get it to give me wrong information.

The more my mind was absolutely blown and I was just like, "Holy crap, this is the real deal. This is awesome. " And from there, I just got curious about it.

And everything that I started to do in my day before I would actually do it, I would try to use AI to do it faster, better, you know, and over the last 18 months, it's automated I've automated about 75% of our business and I've been able to accomplish so much more in a fraction of the time. Okay, that's incredible. How do you take that and and and apply it to other people?

cuz I know you're doing some coaching. From what my world and what what I when I'm coaching agents, it's stick to what you're good at and let it other people or other systems do the work for you as best you can. How does this apply to other agents?

Is it something that they should come to you for or can they start playing with it to build their own? Absolutely. I mean, anyone's welcome to come to me.

I've built a school community. I've spoken nationally, internationally on this at this point for real estate and AI, but I always start with chat GPT because that's what most people know best. I would say majority of people who are in real estate likely already have chat GPT downloaded on their phone or at least on their computer whether they use it or not.

So, I would start there and just do what I did. take the ideas or the tasks that you're already doing daytoday and before you do it take five minutes and you know tell chat GPT I'm doing a marketing campaign for a new listing I want you to act as a marketing strategist I'm going to create a marketing campaign for a new listing here are the steps or the the specs of the house and this is the goal that I'm trying to achieve. So, if you tell it how to act, you tell it the tasks you want it to complete, and you tell it the goal or outcome that you're looking for, it will do the whole thing for you.

And I think that's where people don't understand the power of it. Because if I go in and just say, "Make me a marketing campaign," it's going to give me something bad. And that's where people, it's the prompting of telling it exactly what you're looking for it to do.

That is a complete game changer. So, do you start thinking from the end result and then build the questions the other way around? Yeah.

So, figure out what it is that you want as the end result, figure out if you had a magic wand to have the perfect person do it for you, who would that be? And then what tasks were you going to do anyways? And you can always ask it at the end, you know, did I miss anything?

Is there anything extra that you you can think of? Do you have any clarifying questions for me? So, it's your idea.

It's just enhancing everything that you're doing at scale. Incredible. So 75% of your stuff's automated.

What was the first thing that you truly automated? Yeah. So the first thing that we automated was we call them workflows.

So there was a lot of tedious and mundane things that we were having to do throughout our day. So, I figured out a way to build out the automations through our system that I've custom built in a way that we didn't have to go through all of those steps every single time. We took the time up front to build it once and now it's a welloiled machine.

And once I saw how much that was taking off of our plate, I just took the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. So now we have such a good system that I've built where if we have Facebook, for example, we have a Facebook lead come through instead of our agents having to get a notification and then follow up and follow up. And being in real estate, you know, seven to 10 touches minimum, you get a lot of rejections.

It's a lot of time wasting. It's a lot of tire kickers. So I've automated all that.

So now a Facebook lead form comes through and I've chained a trained a chat GPT bot who will respond right away either text or email whichever the person you know whatever information they gave us and it will pre-qualify them. It will ask them questions. Are you preapproved?

What's your timeline? What are you looking for? And then it's doing all the heavy lifting for us and it's booking the appointment for us.

So by the time a human gets in front of this person, we're coming to them with solutions, not questions. We don't have to have that awkward conversation of, you know, having talked to a lender yet. We already know all that information and my agents are not the ones who are exhausted with all of that follow-up because the chat GBT bot that I've built is doing it all for us.

Okay. You make it sound so simple and you Yeah, you're you're having somebody text or send an email a thing text or email and from what I know of going into chat GPT, it just spits out text and solid text with, you know, good stuff. Now you have some dialing in, texting, calling.

Okay, there's a system that h that has to be tied to. And then if it's followup, there's got to be other prompts and systems that tied now they get notified to the agent tied to your CRM. How the heck did you figure all that out?

So there's a platform out there called GoHigh Level and it is a very base level of just that. It has automations. You can actually build chat bots within it and it's a CRM.

So, I basically took that platform and created what we needed and then juiced it up with everything else. So, my version is all of the real estate workflows that we need. It's all the real estate bots that we need.

It's the bot that's texting. There's a bot that emails there. If you call our team number, a voice AI bot picks up and will ask you, "When do you want to sell your house?

What's your address? Does it need any renovations? What do you still owe on the property?

" and things like that. Again, doing all of that heavy lifting. So, when we come to face to face with that person, it is just knocking it out of the park.

There's really no other competition. We have all of the numbers and all the solutions that they're looking for. And it did.

It took me some time to build it out, but I just hired a development team to start to give it to other agents, and all it's going to do is be a complete screenshot of what I've built, and they can just change their verbiage, and they're off to the races. No kidding. Okay, great.

So, the average agent doesn't actually have to know what a bot is. Nope. Nope.

But I'm curious, what is a bot mean? Yeah. So, a bot is basically there's there's two different versions of a bot in my opinion.

So, the chat GBT bot who's responding to, you know, Joe is looking to sell 123 Main Street. I've trained the AI to exactly what a human would be asking them. So, it knows, hey, this is Joe.

He wants to sell 123 East Main Street. And then it says, "Okay, Joe, that's great. Do you need any renovations?

What do you still owe? What do you think the property might be worth? What's your timeline?

Why are you moving? " And so, it's everything that we were asking anyway. I just trained this AI bot to do.

So, that's one one version of it. And the more advanced version of it then is you can create bots who pull different platforms together to go through an entire task flow. So for example, if I wanted to, you know, if that lead came through and the chatbot started talking to it, if I wanted another bot to then put it into a spreadsheet, create an email for me to that person, like there's two different kinds.

One is it's actually doing the task and one it's just a conversational piece of the the process. Okay. Should the average agent be tackling this kind of work?

Tackling it? No. Because I've spent about $60,000 in 18 months.

Okay. A lot of late nights, a lot of frustration, a lot of pull my hair out. But for me, this is my creative outlet, right?

I love tackling like, okay, here's this huge, mundane, complex thing. How can I make it digestible first of all and then get something automated so it's something we don't no longer have to do. Exactly.

So should you tackle it? No. Should be utilizing it.

Absolutely. And that's where a lot of agents who are spinning their wheels and you know door knocking and cold calling and pushing and pushing and pushing. They could free up a lot of their time energy and they could scale at a greater pace because they're not getting rejected over and over.

They're not running on fumes come Thursday afternoon and you know all these different things that just take it out of you. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So I know you have the luxury of the time and the finances to do all this and we've been hearing for so long AI is going to rock your system. If you're not using it, you're going to be left behind.

This is what they're talking about, right? Yes. This is the stuff.

Absolutely. Abs. Absolutely.

And like this this what I'm speaking on right now is very doable for very little amount of dollars as far as Chad GPT and a couple of other uh platforms I can recommend to at least get started to at least get your toes wet. Then when you actually start to free up that time and scale your business with those tools, that's when I would open the door to if you are interested, get into a coaching program, get into a community. I've kept my community very affordable in my opinion.

It's $97 a month or $9. 97 for the full year. And I've done that because I want people to see the opportunity because it's that life-changing.

I know from interviewing your partner, Jennifer, that you guys have a specific clientele and that's your target market. Now are you using all this automation to enhance that the experience with the people that you already know and or are you using it also for attracting them? Yes.

So I have built out bots who they know our brand voice. They know our ideal customer. They know how we speak, our tonality.

They know what likes and dislikes, what pain points, pleasure points. They know all of this stuff about not only us and our business, but also who we're trying to attract. So, when I train this bot on all of those things, by the time I have to go in and write an Instagram caption or, you know, a newsletter headline or anything like that, it already knows what I'm looking for.

So, I've built it one time and it'll work for me for forever. But the cool part is is if our brand ever does change, which I highly doubt will ever happen, but if it does, all I have to do is go in there and tweak a few words, change a few things, add a sentence here, take a sentence away there, and it's still doing the same thing, but it's getting an update on what we're looking for. That's outstanding.

On the lead generating side, if that's what what kind of shift has that made in the amount of incoming calls that you're getting? Yeah. So, we one thing that I think was very helpful for us is I used AI to create a lead magnet, which is something of value that people opt in for.

So, I could create, you know, the five best neighborhoods in Columbus or the top five mistakes to avoid when buying your first home. I use AI to enhance my thoughts and what I wanted to create. Then what you can do, and you could do that in the free version of Canva, a Google document, anything.

Then what I would do is take that link or that PDF and I would automate it through social media platforms. So Many Chat is a platform that I pay $15 a month for, but there is a free version where you create a piece of content and say comment the word home. And as people comment the word home, you have a bot that's responding to their comment and sending them a DM with whatever it is that you are giving away of value.

So you start to attract people to your ecosystem instead of forcing and and trying to go find people to work with. So the bot that $15 gadget, whatever it is that you just mentioned, what is it again? What's it called?

It's called Okay. My chat. One more time on that.

Many M A Y chat. C H A T. And that is monitoring your social media.

Yeah. It'll it'll actually comment for you. It will DM for you.

It will then, you know, pull those people into a conversation tab kind of like yourself. And then you can make it do other things. You could make it that happens while you're sleeping and while you're at the grocery store and while you're with clients.

Yeah. And it looks like it's you. It happens 24/7.

And it it it looks and feels like you because you're the one that's writing it. You're the one that's telling it what you want it to do. The only feel of it maybe being automated is how quickly it all happens.

Outstanding. Yeah. Outstanding.

So, what what other ahas and like big shifts have has this afforded you? Where do I start? So, I've actually created things where I'll take comparables for a listing and I'll dump everything into just use chat GPT for ease.

Dump it all in there and I will have it find me patterns, pull days on market, price reductions, you know, common agents in the area. So, I can call them and say, "Hey, you do a lot of business here. Do you have any buyers in the area?

" I just had a student of mine, this is phenomenal, by the way. It's the lending side of things, but still, I was very proud of her for this. She's on the lending side and based off of what I taught her, she pulled the last four years of all of her closings.

She had it pull their loan balance, amortization, interest rate, and then we built or she built a bot who compared a 6. 5 versus a 5. 75 and did a whole breakdown analysis of if they should refinance yet or not off four years of documentation.

Wow. So, how do you All right, let's go back to listings because I can relate to that. Yeah.

When you say you take all your comparables and dumping it in, are you linking it to MLS? Are you taking PDFs and throwing it up? Like how how does that look like?

Yeah, it's gotten so good that you could do either. So, Open Chat GPT now has open search, which they didn't have before. So, it can go crawl the internet for you and look at Zillow or Redf Fin or, you know, it can't do the MLS yet because you have to log in with a password.

Y I'm working on getting the idx to connect with our CRM and it's a whole thing. But anyways, but the open channels that are out there for the masses, it can it can crawl those websites and find that information. You can dump in PDFs or Excel spreadsheets.

You can even screenshot different things and upload those photos into it. It can basically do anything. That's the game changer when it comes down to figuring out a price.

Now, bringing that the end result and bringing that to your potential client, you're sitting across from the seller. What what is the difference now that you have that type of information compared to going in the way you used to go in? It's not emotional anymore.

The data is the data. Numbers don't lie. So, if I'm looking and I'm telling them, hey, we could list here, but the data shows that we're going to sit on the market for 80 to 90 days or we could list here.

What's your pain point? Time verse money. It's no longer emotional.

The process is emotional. The decision-m is not emotional. How does that vary from going in with a bunch of comps in a book and doing that?

Are you explaining the process to them and how you got got these numbers? The whole overwhelm of the AI and pulling all these different things. No, but I am showing them I'm citing where the information is coming from.

I'm showing them, you know, here's what this had to say. Here's what this has to say. Here's the overview of what all of it means.

And it's no longer a, you know, I'm walking into a listing appointment and they're interviewing three agents and I'm saying in my opinion, right? It's no, it's statistical data that I now have the capability to pull all of this information on. That's incredible.

That is so much more powerful and so much so much confidence going in there. And like I said, I can site all of the different areas. So if I see if I see something and I'm like that's from I don't know apartments.

com I don't think I trust that then I just take that source out and it redo it without it. But on the flip side too with buyers who are investors I can run ARV I can show comps. I can run cost analysis.

I can run all of this stuff so much more efficiently so much more quickly. And again it's it's not an opinion that I have any longer. It's the data and what it's it's showing.

I have all those spreadsheets for when an analyzing an investment property. I wouldn't crumble them up and delete them though. I would put it into the AI once I once I take it and I would put it into the AI and this is how I run my numbers because everyone runs their differently, right?

You've got cash on cash. You've got you got all these different ways that investors are concerned with what their exit strategy is. You could train the AI, hey, this is my spreadsheet that I've worked off of for the last x amount of years.

here's how my brain works. And now you've just trained a faster, more efficient version of you on what you're looking for. And then if that investor you're talking to has a little different point of view, you go in and you is is it a copy and adjust or is it how's that?

Do you copy the bot that I created, they want all this except they want this, this, this, and that change. You just go in and Yeah, you just go in and and where you actually train the bot has all of your own verbiage, your prompting. So, you would just copy and paste it and then they could tweak or change whatever they want and create their own version of it.

Wow. It's fascinating. Are real estate agents going to go away because of all this?

No, I don't I really truly don't think that agents are going to we're not going to be replaced. It's just the agents who are using these types of tools are going to get so much further ahead so quickly that the gap is going to be very large in the next 5 years. I bet I I agree with that 100%.

Tell me about the team and how this has affected their their roles and their life and their pocketbook. So, one of the cool things with the team is just as I do for marketing, just as I do for anything in my life at this point with AI, there were some things that they were having to do that weren't very efficient. So, for example, when they went under contract, they had to let our transaction coordinator know this information and let us know this information.

And we had a client concierge person at one point who did the closing gifts and the moving kits and stuff like that. So there were three people that they had to kind of pick apart and be like, "Hey, here's the information. " So what I did is I created one big form that takes them about 40 seconds to fill out and once they hit submit on that form in the back end created, okay, this information goes to our transaction coordinator, this information goes to Lauren and Jen, this information goes to the client concierge.

That contact is created. It's assigned to that agent on our team. It's put onto an opportunity board with the value and commission and everything already there.

So, they fill out a form for, you know, 30, 45 seconds and that's it. They're done. That's fantastic.

But we're also showing So, is everybody doing more business or are they actually enjoying the life more or both? Yeah. So, Taylor, she's been with us now for three years.

She did before she came to us, she'd only sold one house. Her first year with us, she did seven. And last year she did 23.

So she almost 4xed her business with the systems and operations because she wasn't head down in the weeds with all of the the mundane things that we were able to automate. So from the time I started the AI stuff, she jumped from 7 to 23. And so far this year, she's already at 16.

It's April 8th and she's at 16 closings. So, it's taken a lot of extra stuff off of their plate so they can do what they do best, which is build the relationship and have the conversations and go find more business. I coach agents.

I now I feel like I became irrelevant. I'm No, I'm I'm facicious. There's no way that I could ever speak to my next session and not start promoting automat AI.

It just doesn't make sense not to start to champion that for my agents for sure. And I think that people so scared of it only because they don't understand. They think it's going to be something that only tech nerds can work with.

They think it's going to be something that they have to spend 18 months and $50,000 to figure out. I only did that because I'm highly ADHD and I'm very curious. I'm a student of life.

I need to learn how things work for my brain to be satisfied or else I'm just going to wonder and it's going to take so much energy so I might as well just do it. But that's why I've created my community and that's why I'm doing all these speaking events now is because I promise one thing. If you can do a text message, if you can do Google, if you can write an email, you can use AI and you can use it to make your life so much more efficient, so much easier, and save yourself a ton of time.

How much hands-on does the agent have to do? Is there an option for somebody to come in and do this for them, set it up, and then it just runs? Yeah, I have the CRM that I've built now.

I have a full-blown development team behind me. So, I finished it off to about 80% and then I said, "Hey, look, I'm just a small kid from Ohio. I am not I have zero tech experience.

take what I've been man I've managed to build from YouTube videos and late nights and make it the beast that I know it could be. And so what they're doing is is they're juicing it up even more and they're automating things that I didn't even think of. And when when I'm bringing it to the market, yes, all you're going to have to do is bring your contacts, copy and paste any differences between links and calendars and things like that.

Tell the development team what you want, hit go, and you're done. Wow. So this could run this could be special specially developed for an individual and teams teams it could be if people have their own portfolios it could be full-blown brokerages it could be plumbers and HVAC people electricians it could be anybody so on a team level you have the team are there individual voices for each agent?

Yeah they they can make them yeah they can do that if they wanted to within this world. Yeah. So for example Jen does farming.

I don't do farming. That's just not my cup of tea. So, if Jordan on our team wanted to also farm, he could just copy and paste Jen's workflows and bots that are already built out, tweak a few things to be in his voice or what he wants.

Maybe it's funnier, maybe it's more educational, maybe it's, you know, I always joke, but Moira from Shitz Creek, it could be her voice if he wanted it to be. It could be whatever. But all he has to do is copy paste, make those little changes, press go, and he's done.

That's That's phenomenal. Thanks, All right. So, where to go from here?

What should somebody do? Whether they're a firm owner or team leader or an agent, what should they do right now? Yeah.

So, I would say first thing, follow me on Instagram because I give a lot of stuff away on there as well. But just download chat GPT and start to tell it things that take too much of your time and it will help you figure out how to automate whether it's the full thing or different versions of the thing and just put one step in front of the other and figure it out step by step. Don't have to, you know, eat the whole elephant if you will, but at least give it a shot and see how much it can change your life.

I know that sounds easy and I know there are going to be a lot of agents, including myself. I was It took me a little bit to to accept all this and and go with it and see the value. What What are some words of wisdom now that you stayed up those late nights and you that you can encourage somebody to keep going?

It's here whether you like it or not. It's not going anywhere. So, you have two options.

You could do what I did and get super skeptical and, you know, turn your back on it or you could just embrace it because this is where the world is going. People said that the internet wouldn't last. then the up on the internet wouldn't last and then Facebook was silly.

I mean, look at everything that it it was the people who jumped on board first or early who really got the gap became huge because they got the understanding and they started to use it before the rest of the world caught up. And that's why, you know, I've got we've got older clients who still don't have email addresses. Yeah.

Email addresses have been around for 354 years at this point, you know. So, you can either be stubborn and and just pretend it's not happening or you can embrace it and change your life. I think we should end it there.

That this is outstanding, Lauren. Thank you so much. Let's actually let's not end it there.

Let's talk quickly about your business on the real estate side so they understand your where you're coming from on all this. Yeah. So, I've been in business now going on nine years.

Jen and I built the team in 2019, so it's going to be six this year. We've had everything from 11 agents at one point to last year it was just the two of us and one other agent. And last year with just the two of us and one other agent because of the things I've built, we did over seven figures in revenue.

We did not take any commission on eight of those cuz eight of those were us building our own portfolio. So we took a $1 commission for ENO insurance. We did we got million-dollar agent.

We were number top 20 in the region against teams who have 20, 30, 40 people on their team, right? Just three of us. And it was because we were able to automate so much.

It's just a welloiled machine at this point. Like sure, sometimes we're like, "Oh, that could probably be better. " And within 2 minutes, because I built it, I go in and change it.

And that's why I brought the development team in now is because I don't have the bandwidth to offer this at scale like I want to. So the development team now is making this available to any other business who wants to just rip off what I've built. Plug it into their business and there's really not more than 30 minutes to an hour of implementation and it's done.

Another quick question, maybe not quick answer because it's a big problem. I've been in leadership for 12 years now and one of the biggest challenges every company that I've had is onboarding. Yeah.

Is that part of you your pattern? You know, what you're working on for your own team to help you onboard and bring in new agents? Recruiting is in there.

Onboarding is in there. Training can be in there. It's completely customizable.

Whatever you need, if it's not there, I can build it for you and you could have it in a matter of three to five days. That's outstanding. Thank you.

Thank Thank you for coming on, Lauren. This is fantastic. Yeah.

And like I said, I mean, this isn't a sales pitch by any means, but I encourage you to at least check out the community. Like I said, you can get in there for 30 days, and if you don't like it, you can exit out, but there's a lot of lives being changed in there right now. And it's incredible the messages I get of people who are probably just like you or just like your audience of, "Oh, that's too advanced for me.

" Or, "Oh, I can't do that. " Yes, you can. And once you start to see the things that it's going to free up, you would be mind blown.

Phenomenal. Thanks so much for coming on, Lauren. You're very welcome.

Thanks for watching the show. Subscribe, comment, and we'll see you next time.