Latest / Real Estate Investing with RealDealCrew / How AI Is Reshaping Real Estate Brokerages w/ Eric Bramlett

Transcript

How AI Is Reshaping Real Estate Brokerages w/ Eric Bramlett · Real Estate Investing with RealDealCrew

• 0:00
  most real estate investors think AI means chatbots and canned advice.
• 0:04
  Eric Bramlett built something completely different.
• 0:07
  An AI system wired straight into his entire brokerage when he can
• 0:12
  ask how the business is doing and tells him exactly where he's leaking money.
• 0:17
  In this episode, you'll learn how to actually put AI to work in your real estate
• 0:23
  business instead of just poking at it.
• 0:26
  Why Eric says you're probably lying to yourself about how well you've analyzed your
• 0:32
  last deal and why he thinks the next three to five years favors small operations
• 0:38
  over big ones for the first time in a while.
• 0:41
  Eric Bramlett runs Bramlett Partners,
• 0:43
  the fastest growing independent brokerage in Texas,
• 0:47
  and he's been investing in Austin real estate since 2003.
• 0:51
  If you want to build your own systems around this,
• 0:55
  check out RealDealCrew.com. Let's get started.
• 1:03
  Eric Bramlett joins me here today and you can learn what his team can help
• 1:07
  you with by heading over to bramlettpartners.com.
• 1:10
  I'm going to have that as a clickable link in the show notes,
• 1:13
  but really appreciate your time today here,
• 1:15
  Eric.
• 1:16
  Jack, thanks so much for having me.
• 1:17
  I'm really happy to be here.
• 1:20
  Well, we got to start things off brief origin story here.
• 1:23
  How did you find your way into this?
• 1:26
  Yeah, into real estate, I sort of fell into it like I think a lot of people do.
• 1:31
  Out of college, planned to go to law school,
• 1:34
  decided against that and decided to my hand at real estate.
• 1:38
  That was in 2003. I joke that I...
• 1:41
  didn't get real serious. I mean,
• 1:42
  I was full time the whole time,
• 1:44
  but didn't get real serious about it or go all in until I kind of had
• 1:48
  to when the recession hit in 08.
• 1:49
  That's whenever I put my nose down.
• 1:52
  By necessity, started building systems out.
• 1:55
  These are all based around sales.
• 1:57
  whenever sales are rolling along,
• 2:00
  then started investing in 2012,
• 2:02
  2013, growing the brokerage. And since then,
• 2:06
  have grown to a mid-size brokerage in Austin,
• 2:09
  a number of investments, and just kind of it's all worked out.
• 2:11
  out.
• 2:12
  Yeah, it's kind of typically the opposite of what I sometimes hear is that
• 2:17
  you you kind of moved into this out of necessity,
• 2:20
  almost accidental where a lot of people kind of like this would be kind of seen
• 2:21
  Yeah.
• 2:26
  as a risky endeavor.
• 2:29
  I was really young, 24 years old when I got into the business.
• 2:33
  I didn't need a lot then. I looked at it as money for...
• 2:38
  gas from my wakeboarding boat at the time,
• 2:40
  collected obligations really. When the recession hit,
• 2:44
  I actually decided to get out of the business.
• 2:46
  I said, well, I'm gonna go to law school now.
• 2:48
  That was always the game plan.
• 2:49
  Actually I accepted, started preparing to go and then started doing the math
• 2:53
  and I would have had to sell my house.
• 2:55
  I really liked my neighborhood.
• 2:56
  I was looking at the income I'd been making and said,
• 2:59
  well, it will take me 10 years to get back to where I am.
• 3:02
  today and it was a conscious decision at that point.
• 3:05
  And at that point I said, okay,
• 3:06
  well have to make this work and I'm a pretty tenacious guy and I tend
• 3:11
  to pay attention to what works and what doesn't.
• 3:13
  Built a lot of systems around it and then it became fun.
• 3:16
  Whenever I started looking at it as,
• 3:18
  is my career, let's systemize this.
• 3:21
  The systems became a game for me almost and that's when everything really started
• 3:25
  clicking.
• 3:25
  So it sounds like that when you locked in and you picked
• 3:29
  the necessary directions and goals associated with it,
• 3:33
  that's when things kind of really started to click.
• 3:36
  Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think that's a necessity.
• 3:39
  I meet people today that I can tell are not,
• 3:42
  as you just said, locked in. And you have to fix that first,
• 3:46
  right? Like you have to decide,
• 3:47
  this is what I'm doing. You'll see people that market themselves as,
• 3:51
  I'm a realtor because I like to do this other thing,
• 3:53
  or I invest because I like to do this other thing.
• 3:55
  And that's not reason enough. mean,
• 3:57
  you have to really own it. This is you.
• 4:00
  Then there's a number of other things you have to do after that.
• 4:03
  But if you don't own the position,
• 4:06
  if you don't
• 4:06
  love what you do, then really you need to find something else.
• 4:10
  Yeah, the reason this is top of mind as of late is because I've met
• 4:13
  a number of entrepreneurs lately and they all seem to have like multiple things
• 4:19
  going on. It's like chasing multiple rabbits and you're never going to catch
• 4:23
  one of them.
• 4:24
  I'd agree with that.
• 4:25
  I'm not here to say that nobody can do that successfully,
• 4:28
  but it usually is a sign that nothing is working really well if people
• 4:33
  are chasing a lot of different things.
• 4:34
  I think focus is a superpower,
• 4:36
  really. think that saying no to a lot of other extraneous things helps
• 4:41
  you do that one thing really, really well.
• 4:44
  So yeah, I would agree with you that locking in on your singular focus
• 4:50
  is pretty critical if you want to achieve
• 4:52
  level of success.
• 4:54
  Yeah, you even mentioned that on your website that focuses your superpower.
• 4:57
  I thought that was interesting that you called that out.
• 5:00
  Yeah, I don't remember doing that,
• 5:02
  but I can, I've been accused of being a bit OCD whenever I,
• 5:06
  whenever I like something that can be anything from business to my family,
• 5:09
  to the different sports that I like.
• 5:11
  Yeah. I tend to like really lock in and focus really hard on,
• 5:14
  on doing that one thing really,
• 5:16
  really well.
• 5:18
  So how often do you get or maybe it's,
• 5:22
  maybe it's not as common anymore where people tell you to kind of ease
• 5:26
  up or stop being so locked in on things like that.
• 5:31
  You
• 5:31
  know, I'm 47 now, so I've learned to soften those edges a bit,
• 5:37
  but certainly still happens. My passion or intensity is not always well received.
• 5:43
  yeah, have to, when you have that trait,
• 5:47
  it's not all positive. have to learn how to play well with others with that,
• 5:51
  when you have that trait.
• 5:52
  Well, you're you're in Austin,
• 5:53
  Texas, you've been in that market now for a very long time.
• 5:58
  What has what's the biggest changes in investing over that time that you've seen
• 6:03
  or noticed?
• 6:05
  I mean it's constantly changing.
• 6:07
  When I started there was a lot of opportunity and a lot of...
• 6:11
  a lot of growth in the market,
• 6:13
  a lot of potential for growth.
• 6:15
  The COVID market really flipped that on its head.
• 6:19
  mean, there was very, very little opportunity for any sort of purchases.
• 6:23
  But people were buying anyways because the market was,
• 6:27
  it was appreciating at such a high pace.
• 6:30
  Since then, we've been in a pretty bad market.
• 6:33
  We've really led the nation with regards to booming during COVID
• 6:38
  and then certainly adjusting back.
• 6:40
  We crashed pretty hard.
• 6:41
  2022. Prices aren't falling anymore.
• 6:44
  They're pretty stabilized now,
• 6:45
  but they haven't been going anywhere for call it four years since 20 since 2022.
• 6:50
  And more importantly, the job market here is not doing so well.
• 6:54
  So it makes investing you have to be incredibly conservative.
• 6:58
  It makes running a business you have to you have to play it you have
• 7:01
  to play it pretty safe. But but yeah,
• 7:03
  it's just it's part of the game.
• 7:04
  You know, the the playing field changes and when it does you have to just be aware
• 7:09
  of the field that you're playing on and make sure that you're making
• 7:11
  the right decisions.
• 7:13
  Well, are there opportunities that you see right now that the casual investor might
• 7:17
  be missing?
• 7:18
  Yeah, I think so. you know, one,
• 7:20
  I mean, there are not a lot of casual investors right now.
• 7:23
  Investment has pulled back by a very large degree.
• 7:26
  So there, you know, when you go out and you are really particular about what
• 7:31
  you want, you can get it. You just have to say no a whole lot.
• 7:34
  So that's
• 7:35
  180 from what it was in 2021. Where 2021,
• 7:38
  if you found a deal that worked,
• 7:40
  you better snap that up. Now, that deal better be perfect.
• 7:43
  It better be the right price. You better make sure that your exit price,
• 7:48
  your assumption is very safe. Make sure you've baked in plenty of overage
• 7:51
  and it's going to work out for you.
• 7:53
  So there's always the opportunity to make money.
• 7:56
  You're not falling on a knife or anything like that by buying right now.
• 7:59
  And the opportunity is just simply that there's not
• 8:01
  anywhere near as much competition as there was in 2021.
• 8:04
  And there's way less competition now than there was in a normal market in 2017,
• 8:08
  18 or 2019.
• 8:10
  Can you talk a little bit about,
• 8:11
  you you mentioned your brokerage and your investments.
• 8:14
  where is the, like, percentage-wise,
• 8:18
  where your business or income is coming from?
• 8:21
  Like, is it prim?
• 8:21
  Yeah, it's predominant.
• 8:23
  Yeah, it's predominantly from the brokerage.
• 8:25
  what happened, you know, we were for about a decade,
• 8:28
  I was selling a whole lot and I've loved development and I love renovation
• 8:33
  and I love investing. And so we would do that.
• 8:35
  Since then, my time has been occupied with the brokerage in a very good way.
• 8:39
  The brokerage has grown considerably.
• 8:41
  We're the fastest growing independent brokerage in Texas right now.
• 8:43
  But the downside to that is that I don't have time to get my hands dirty.
• 8:48
  So like
• 8:48
  right now we have two spec projects we're finishing up.
• 8:50
  I'll wait until those are sold before we start looking for another spec project.
• 8:55
  I actually think it's a great time to start a spec because I think there's like
• 8:59
  I said a minute ago very little competition and I do think that we're going
• 9:02
  to start seeing some sort of a recovery in the next in the next couple of years.
• 9:05
  But the short answer is it's I would say 90-95 % brokerage and
• 9:09
  the remainder is through investment.
• 9:11
  Sure. You mentioned the importance of setting up your operations,
• 9:16
  your processes. Could you talk a little bit about that process,
• 9:21
  the pillars that you've developed your brokerage around,
• 9:24
  and maybe even go into who was that first person you brought on board
• 9:29
  to support that endeavor?
• 9:31
  Yeah, so...
• 9:33
  To start, you have to have really,
• 9:35
  really strong reporting and you have to have visibility into everything that's
• 9:40
  important in the brokerage. So the most obvious is revenue,
• 9:44
  right? If you're just running QuickBooks,
• 9:46
  you're not going to have the level of visibility that you need.
• 9:49
  At the brokerage level, you need to know which agents are performing,
• 9:52
  which agents are not performing.
• 9:53
  You need to know how much company dollar you're getting from each agent.
• 9:56
  a leads program, meaning that we market for our agents and then we will pass those
• 10:01
  leads to them. You need to understand the revenue from each marketing source.
• 10:05
  That way when you're paying out,
• 10:07
  you know if it's profitable. So that's imperative.
• 10:09
  And we built a proprietary system in 2013 that we,
• 10:12
  it's a different code base now,
• 10:13
  but we still use the same system now.
• 10:16
  Expenses, obviously, you can look at that through QuickBooks.
• 10:19
  So before you even think about who are you gonna
• 10:21
  hire, you need to make sure that you have visibility.
• 10:23
  You don't want to operate based on feel.
• 10:25
  You need to be able to operate based on numbers.
• 10:27
  What's funny about that is I always say,
• 10:28
  your intuitions are usually correct.
• 10:31
  So listen to your gut, but then go verify it with the numbers.
• 10:35
  When you start hiring, in my opinion,
• 10:37
  it's very difficult. mean, hiring,
• 10:38
  in my opinion, is the hardest part of running any business.
• 10:41
  It's not fun to hire.
• 10:42
  it as well as you can possibly do it,
• 10:44
  you're going to get it right 75 % of the time.
• 10:45
  You won't do any better than that.
• 10:47
  So it's arduous process. But when you start looking at who you're going to hire,
• 10:51
  you just need to look at what are you doing that you really hate or that you're
• 10:56
  not really good at or that it's pulling your time from something more valuable.
• 10:59
  So a more technical way to say that is that you always want to look
• 11:02
  at highest and best use. And what is the highest and best use of your personal time?
• 11:07
  What is it that you
• 11:08
  do that pushes the business forward.
• 11:10
  That could be brokerage, could be investment,
• 11:12
  that could be literally anything.
• 11:13
  And then you start carving off and handing off these tasks to support.
• 11:18
  And support can be contractors,
• 11:20
  it could be virtual staff, and it can be traditional employees.
• 11:24
  So we started with virtual assistants,
• 11:27
  really mundane things that I had to do to make sure that sales happened.
• 11:31
  And we hired our first VA. That was a long time ago.
• 11:34
  She's still with us.
• 11:35
  ~
• 11:36
  and I love virtual assistants,
• 11:38
  like they're really inexpensive and they can be really great and really reliable
• 11:41
  if you hire right. Then we were hiring contractors,
• 11:45
  so for particular tasks, and then the first just assistant we ever hired
• 11:49
  was in 2013, and she's actually still with us to this day as well,
• 11:53
  but that was, at the time it was,
• 11:54
  the,
• 11:55
  The biggest time suck for me was showing properties.
• 11:58
  And so when we hired Bailey, it was office admin tasks and showing properties.
• 12:05
  And that freed up so much of my time that I said,
• 12:09
  gosh, why didn't I do this years ago?
• 12:12
  And when you make the right hire,
• 12:14
  you do it the right way, that's usually the feeling.
• 12:16
  It's like, why did I not do this a long time ago?
• 12:18
  You know, one of those things,
• 12:19
  I don't know if you've looked into what I do,
• 12:21
  but I help people with their operations,
• 12:24
  establishing those processes and implement even AI in many situations.
• 12:30
  That bar has gotten so much lower for people to do some of the things that you're
• 12:35
  talking about having those insights,
• 12:37
  establishing those KPIs.
• 12:40
  But for some people, there still seems to be a reluctance there.
• 12:44
  And that's probably one of the first things they should consider tackling.
• 12:48
  So tell me about the reluctance,
• 12:49
  right? I mean, what do you see?
• 12:50
  When you, like they're reluctant to look at it,
• 12:53
  they're reluctant to hand off,
• 12:54
  what do you see for the most part?
• 12:55
  Well, I think there's this concept that it's really complicated
• 13:00
  or it's going to be a heavy lift
• 13:05
  to get some of these insights.
• 13:08
  And frankly, in the past world,
• 13:11
  not too long ago, that would be the case.
• 13:14
  You have to have the discipline to
• 13:14
  Yeah.
• 13:18
  use CRM and have it.
• 13:22
  generate the necessary reports so you have the necessary insights.
• 13:26
  And it was almost a full-time employee to get those insights previously.
• 13:31
  But we can actually, with few prompts and some systems
• 13:38
  and processes and SOPs in place,
• 13:40
  we can standardize this pretty quick.
• 13:43
  And now those people that wouldn't have had that level of insight.
• 13:48
  I mean, it's the best leveling of the playing field I think we've ever seen.
• 13:52
  No, I'm with you. mean, what we've done recently is bring in...
• 13:58
  all of our data into one centralized location and then built an MCP out for that,
• 14:02
  that then pipes into cloud so that we can ask it questions.
• 14:05
  My favorite question to it is,
• 14:06
  how's the business doing? What do I need to pay attention to?
• 14:09
  And it'll dig in and tell me how's your email deliverability to which agents you're
• 14:12
  underperforming, overperforming,
• 14:13
  things like that. Yeah, totally agree with you.
• 14:16
  I haven't gone, I don't know what it would tell me if I said what am
• 14:18
  I wasting my time on? I don't know if I'm giving it enough data.
• 14:21
  I'm giving it all of my email right now and we're giving
• 14:24
  at QuickBooks and we're giving it all of our production data and a
• 14:27
  lot of other stuff. It does have my calendar.
• 14:30
  I don't know. I'm trying to figure out how to give it my call history
• 14:33
  and text messages as well, but you tell me.
• 14:35
  Would it be able to answer that question for me and what else do need to give
• 14:37
  it to get that level of insight?
• 14:39
  Yeah,
• 14:40
  and frankly, there's a couple prompts that I've implemented.
• 14:43
  I used and I usually try to do it like,
• 14:47
  or I'm going to do it again here at the beginning of the year.
• 14:49
  But I've asked it, like based on what you know about me,
• 14:53
  what is something like low hanging fruit that I could possibly monetize that
• 14:58
  I'm missing? And it will you'll be surprised at what it can answer.
• 14:59
  Okay? Okay.
• 15:04
  I asked it at the end of last year,
• 15:07
  it was when I was still on ChadGBT,
• 15:08
  I asked it what are the top three things,
• 15:12
  like the top three insights in the 20 % of the Pareto Principle and it
• 15:16
  had a great response. But I've not asked it that I could monetize.
• 15:20
  I like that. I like money. So why haven't I asked it that?
• 15:25
  Yeah,
• 15:26
  it was it's pretty powerful because it is one of those things like I have
• 15:30
  a tendency of getting extremely interested in extremely focused
• 15:35
  on particular topics and then everything else is like in my periphery.
• 15:40
  don't I'm not I'm not giving it any attention.
• 15:43
  So to have something like this that be that becomes like my
• 15:48
  partner in a way to kind of reel me back in on a couple things has been kind
• 15:53
  of game changing.
• 15:55
  yeah, I'm completely with you.
• 15:57
  Yeah, I don't have anything other to say than that.
• 15:59
  It's incredibly powerful. It's an incredibly powerful tool.
• 16:04
  Just to remind everybody we're talking to Eric Bramlett,
• 16:06
  you can learn more at BramlettPartners.com.
• 16:11
  That's going to be a clickable link in the show notes.
• 16:13
  If you found some value in what we're chatting about so far,
• 16:15
  us a favor, share this with one of your investor friends.
• 16:18
  If you are watching us on YouTube,
• 16:20
  give us a like and subscribe.
• 16:22
  So Eric, so I gotta ask you, I've built up Austin as this mecca
• 16:28
  of music scene in my mind. Is that actually the case?
• 16:33
  yes and no, you know, that's something that's changed about Austin.
• 16:37
  I moved here in 02. the, the Metro has doubled in size since then.
• 16:40
  there's a bit of a homogenization,
• 16:42
  right? Like, you know, Whole Foods,
• 16:44
  for example, bought by Amazon.
• 16:46
  that's just one example of many.
• 16:48
  There, there have always been a lot of really awesome,
• 16:51
  creative local businesses and musicians.
• 16:53
  And, for example, the musicians,
• 16:55
  a lot of them priced out of the city and it's not.
• 16:57
  It's not all together awful like they're moving to this community east
• 17:01
  of town called Lockhart and and that's where a lot of them That's where
• 17:04
  a lot of them have gone and now Lockhart,
• 17:05
  know Lockhart's amazing But the city still has its soul like when you're
• 17:09
  in when you're in Central Austin It's just gotten really expensive.
• 17:12
  And and so there's not there's not as much of that,
• 17:15
  you know Change is not always change is not always good.
• 17:18
  There are lot There's a lot of good things that happen,
• 17:20
  but that would be one that I would say is not not quite as not quite as good.
• 17:23
  So
• 17:24
  Yeah, I think that we've seen that a lot in any of the metropolis type areas
• 17:28
  is that the creatives kind of get pushed to the suburbs or into
• 17:31
  a different communities.
• 17:33
  Yeah, I mean, it's just reality.
• 17:34
  There's not a lot of money. And for most people,
• 17:36
  like 99.9 % in live music. I don't know,
• 17:40
  society can't fix that, I guess.
• 17:42
  But it's sad. I I recently have started going to Boulder a lot,
• 17:46
  and I love Boulder. And I think people think about Boulder in the same
• 17:49
  way that people tend to think about Austin.
• 17:50
  And I look at it, I'm like, this is like a lot of college kids and a
• 17:52
  lot of really rich people is what it seems like.
• 17:55
  And Austin's pretty similar in that way,
• 17:58
  I would say.
• 17:59
  I've run it and a lot of people come on the show and they are I would
• 18:04
  I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk if not I couldn't even
• 18:09
  put a percentage behind it Texas is kind of one of those investment hubs like
• 18:15
  everybody's investing in head in in in Texas in some way shape or form what
• 18:20
  are you what are you seeing right now especially regarding like commercial
• 18:24
  or multifamily or
• 18:26
  Flex space, what's the hotness right now?
• 18:29
  Yeah, mean, it's the hotness is that everything is pretty cold,
• 18:32
  to be honest with you. it's I mean,
• 18:34
  Austin is historically a boom town.
• 18:36
  I'm not down on the metro at all.
• 18:37
  Like our long term prospects are huge.
• 18:39
  They're very, very bright. But because of the run up that we had during covid,
• 18:44
  you know, we got we have a lot of empty office space right now.
• 18:47
  Multifamily, you know, same thing.
• 18:49
  The good news is, is that, you know,
• 18:51
  we we have solid data showing us that we found bottom,
• 18:54
  you know, prices are not.
• 18:55
  declining anymore. Certainly rent prices are not not declining anymore.
• 18:59
  We just need to see these positive indicators.
• 19:01
  And the easiest way to understand it is that,
• 19:03
  you know, technology drives the metro,
• 19:06
  you know, it's these big blue chip companies that have moved massive,
• 19:10
  massive spaces over here. And they are just not hiring,
• 19:13
  you know, I listened to a podcast a couple days ago,
• 19:16
  they said, well, we're in this no hire,
• 19:17
  no fire environment. And I would agree,
• 19:19
  I would agree with that. What has fueled the boom here for a long time
• 19:24
  is it's just it's
• 19:25
  It's migration in, it's population growth and great jobs.
• 19:28
  So we've hit pause on that and we need to see that start to come back.
• 19:32
  With that said, if you're a savvy investor and you want to park money,
• 19:36
  then I think it's a great spot to do it.
• 19:38
  It's just, we are not sure when we're going to start seeing things recover.
• 19:42
  I don't operate in the commercial space a whole lot.
• 19:44
  I do own one office retail space and I think there's a lot of opportunity there.
• 19:49
  I think that there probably is some opportunity in office space.
• 19:53
  if you look at it really long.
• 19:55
  The last that I had read about in terms of office space is it was gonna probably
• 19:59
  be 2030 or so before all of this empty space was absorbed.
• 20:03
  So that's where we are. There's no sense of urgency right now to go out
• 20:08
  and buy a ton of stuff, but I think that for the patient investor,
• 20:10
  there's a lot of opportunity.
• 20:12
  Well, you as a brokerage are continuing to grow even in kind of the softer market.
• 20:18
  Oh yeah, a hundred percent. mean,
• 20:19
  we've, we've grown considerably.
• 20:21
  We've doubled in size in the past,
• 20:23
  you know, the past two years, we've doubled our revenue in the past two years.
• 20:26
  There, that is the opportunity,
• 20:27
  right? Whenever, whenever there's any sort of disruption,
• 20:31
  those that will work hard and work intelligently have more opportunity
• 20:35
  to grow than whenever there are,
• 20:36
  you know, it's a stable, it's a stable environment.
• 20:38
  It's hard work. I would say it doesn't make it easy by any chance.
• 20:40
  Mm-hmm.
• 20:43
  But, but yeah, that, that's a great insight and,
• 20:46
  and goes back to the point from earlier.
• 20:48
  that when you asked about, you know,
• 20:49
  what are the opportunities now?
• 20:50
  Well, there's not a lot of competition.
• 20:52
  People just tend to become scared.
• 20:55
  They don't want to work harder.
• 20:57
  They don't want to grow. They are just trying to survive whenever things are slow.
• 21:01
  So if you say, great, like this is the time that I'm going to
• 21:04
  not necessarily take risk, but really go after it,
• 21:07
  you don't have as much competition no matter what it is you're doing.
• 21:10
  Well, outside of your level of focus,
• 21:13
  what other things have you you done in order to continue to expand even
• 21:18
  in a slow market?
• 21:20
  Yeah, I mean we're always looking for efficiencies so when you talk about AI we can
• 21:23
  I could, I could fill a couple hours with,
• 21:26
  think you certainly could as well.
• 21:28
  that in my opinion, uh, you know,
• 21:30
  like not necessarily just AI because generative AI from,
• 21:34
  you know, call it 21 to 25 was,
• 21:36
  exciting. Um, but what's happening now with the agentic AI
• 21:40
  and specifically with agentic coding,
• 21:42
  I think is the most exciting technology I've seen in my lifetime.
• 21:45
  And I was incredibly excited about the internet and performance marketing
• 21:49
  in the mid 2000s. That's whenever I started building the business and made a lot of
• 21:53
  gains with that. And I think that with the sort of rise of agentic
• 21:58
  AI and vibe coding, that there's a massive opportunity for the next three
• 22:01
  to five years, especially for smaller organizations like mine,
• 22:04
  because we have a real advantage against the large companies that are out there.
• 22:08
  They're having a terrible time trying to integrate AI into their organizations.
• 22:13
  The smaller you are, the easier it is to do.
• 22:15
  So that's the opportunity that I see.
• 22:17
  Well, you're one of the few that I've run into that even has mentioned leveraging
• 22:22
  an MCP. You know, so that that actually speaks volumes to me as to
• 22:27
  how quickly or what you're what you're adapting and adopting here.
• 22:31
  Well, thank you. You know, I look at it as like when you set it up correctly,
• 22:36
  you have Jarvis, right? You have this sort of almost omniscient,
• 22:39
  hyper intelligent, sometimes wrong,
• 22:42
  you know, coach to guide sort of sort of guide you.
• 22:43
  Mm-hmm.
• 22:44
  So, yeah, I think it's I think it's massive.
• 22:46
  And then and then in terms of not necessarily,
• 22:48
  I mean, the cost savings are great,
• 22:50
  but they're sort of the secondary benefit to it.
• 22:53
  The primary benefit is that you take a lot of these systems that have been
• 22:56
  run by humans for a long time and humans take more time and they take breaks
• 23:00
  and they make more mistakes. It just creates a much better experience.
• 23:03
  Everything you can offload to an agentic process is going to be much more pleasant
• 23:08
  for your staff, for our agents,
• 23:10
  for your customer. I always have to check myself because I'm
• 23:15
  so obsessed with efficiency that it really gets me excited and I always have
• 23:18
  to ask other people, is this exciting also?
• 23:23
  If we were to do this,
• 23:26
  is that something that would excite you?
• 23:28
  Most of time the answer is yes.
• 23:30
  Better processes that are more accurate and much quicker.
• 23:34
  Yeah,
• 23:34
  one of the things that I keep pushing is the concept that,
• 23:37
  you know, we're here, we can help you build your Iron Man suit.
• 23:41
  I can help you augment in 10x whatever you're doing here today.
• 23:45
  But in the end, it is freeing up your time so that you can make those personal
• 23:51
  connections and lean into the humanity of it all.
• 23:56
  preach into the choir 100%. What can AI not do?
• 24:00
  It has no emotional intelligence,
• 24:02
  it cannot connect. The verticals that require a lot of relationship building
• 24:08
  and human connection are pretty safe from AI,
• 24:10
  but you're not gonna be able to offload your entire job to it.
• 24:14
  Couldn't agree with you more. Free up your time so you can go do what
• 24:18
  you do best and hopefully that's making calls to your clients,
• 24:20
  hopefully that's solidifying relationships.
• 24:23
  So let's talk a little bit about your business or your outlook here.
• 24:27
  What are you hoping to accomplish over the rest of 2026?
• 24:31
  Oh man, 2026. Well,
• 24:34
  we...
• 24:35
  We'll hopefully internalize CRM within the next 12 months.
• 24:38
  That means that by the end of 2026,
• 24:41
  we are internally testing a headless CRM.
• 24:44
  We wanna continue to grow. We've been growing by,
• 24:47
  it's been growing by roughly 30 % a year for the past few years
• 24:51
  and that becomes harder as you get bigger.
• 24:53
  So we'll hopefully hit that this year.
• 24:56
  really like operationally, I wanna get like the human side of operations
• 25:02
  as dialed as possible. have really,
• 25:04
  really great staff and I'm a bit again,
• 25:07
  focus what you talked about. I want everybody on our team
• 25:11
  to own one thing and to be really excited about that one thing.
• 25:17
  And if we can do that by the end of 2026,
• 25:20
  everybody knows exactly what they're focused on.
• 25:22
  Everybody's excited about it. And I think that's how we'll have really great gains.
• 25:26
  That's a bit like esoteric and I apologize,
• 25:28
  but I would say that's my one goal this year is to get
• 25:32
  everybody pointed in one direction,
• 25:33
  like they know exactly what it is they're supposed to do and they're really stoked
• 25:36
  about it. That's my goal.
• 25:39
  You know, and I hate to say this,
• 25:40
  but you know, lot of the realtors I know,
• 25:43
  and there's a lot of realtors in my market.
• 25:45
  It's it's but most of them, like,
• 25:45
  lot of them.
• 25:48
  it's almost like a side hustle or a secondary thing.
• 25:52
  Like, how do you keep your your team focused and just staying
• 25:56
  top performers like that? Is it the direction and focus like you just mentioned?
• 25:58
  Yes.
• 26:01
  Yeah, so it's interesting, right?
• 26:03
  The brokerage business is very interesting.
• 26:05
  The end consumer, we're obviously serving them,
• 26:08
  but our staff, right? Our staff serve the agents,
• 26:12
  so our staff don't really interact with the end consumer very much.
• 26:15
  So the agents actually look a lot like enterprise-level clients to us,
• 26:19
  right? Like we serve them, we help them.
• 26:23
  Now, anytime you're running a company that is serving enterprise,
• 26:25
  like when they succeed, you succeed,
• 26:27
  so you have to be very selective.
• 26:29
  you
• 26:30
  know, client who's not super successful,
• 26:32
  they're not very awesome to work with.
• 26:33
  They're usually harder to manage,
• 26:34
  things like that. So one thing that we do,
• 26:36
  you're very correct that most of the agents out there,
• 26:39
  it is a side hustle, but by the numbers,
• 26:41
  the top 20 % perform.
• 26:44
  They sell more than the bottom 80%,
• 26:47
  like twice as much as the entire bottom 80%.
• 26:50
  So you can also look at that and the bottom 80 % are generally selling fewer than
• 26:55
  10 homes a year.
• 26:56
  And a lot of them are selling one home a year.
• 27:00
  So they are part-time. We made a decision that we are not going to hire
• 27:05
  any of the 80%. We're only hiring the top 20%.
• 27:10
  So it becomes cultural. We're hiring folks that are already pretty focused
• 27:14
  and already full-time, and they care a lot.
• 27:17
  And that becomes easier because they're already bought in that they need to do that.
• 27:21
  It's really hard to hire somebody who's doing three deals a year and train them.
• 27:26
  and help them have the motivation to get to 12 or 15.
• 27:29
  That's going to have a pretty high failure rate.
• 27:31
  So selection on the way in is probably the most important piece.
• 27:35
  And then, you know, it's our job to provide the tools and the strategy
• 27:38
  to help them grow from there. One of the most important things we do as a company,
• 27:43
  we call it turn down the noise.
• 27:45
  So there's so much noisy stuff out there,
• 27:48
  right? And we help them understand like,
• 27:50
  ignore the noise, turn that down,
• 27:52
  and let's focus on what's important.
• 27:54
  What's important is generally prospecting,
• 27:57
  and that is usually calling your past clients,
• 28:00
  servicing your existing clients,
• 28:02
  which believe it or not is a lot easier than prospecting because it's right
• 28:05
  in front of you, you're helping somebody.
• 28:06
  So to summarize, we're like, guys,
• 28:09
  all this stuff that's out there,
• 28:10
  even AI, whenever it comes to the agents,
• 28:13
  that's not as important as just picking up the phone
• 28:15
  and solidifying these relationships.
• 28:17
  So the investors that are listening here right now,
• 28:19
  how can you help them, whether it's in Austin or Texas in general?
• 28:24
  we, mean, we can help anybody.
• 28:26
  Like, here's my, my catchphrase on our newsletter is that,
• 28:28
  you know, all real estate is hyperlocal and hyper situational.
• 28:31
  So, you know, reach out to us if we can help you with your specific situation
• 28:35
  and your specific, in your specific sub market.
• 28:36
  so if anybody wants to talk about,
• 28:38
  know, what they're interested in,
• 28:39
  it's, it's, it's hard to talk about like,
• 28:41
  how is Austin as a whole? but if somebody were to call in and say,
• 28:44
  Hey, I'm very interested in the duplex market.
• 28:46
  we can talk to them specifically about that.
• 28:48
  If somebody were to call in and say,
• 28:49
  Hey, I want a,
• 28:51
  I want to invest in Austin, right?
• 28:52
  The first thing we would talk about is what does that mean to you?
• 28:55
  Does that mean that you want to buy and hold?
• 28:57
  Does that mean that you want to renovate properties?
• 29:00
  Let's help you define your situation.
• 29:03
  And then let's talk about different sub-markets.
• 29:06
  Whenever I'm sitting here telling you,
• 29:07
  the market is bad. And I'm not a doom and gloom guy at all.
• 29:10
  But that's actually bad advice.
• 29:13
  If anybody were to come away from that and just go,
• 29:14
  all of Austin's bad. Because if you look at some different zip codes,
• 29:18
  the downtown market is
• 29:19
  is really bad. Like 787.01 is not doing very well by the numbers.
• 29:23
  There's a zip code 78749,
• 29:26
  which is like 15 minutes southwest of downtown that only has 1.9 months
• 29:31
  of inventory on it. And the success rate is like 80%.
• 29:33
  It's a great, great market. So we can help folks identify
• 29:37
  and understand these different sub markets,
• 29:39
  which is the name of the game with real estate,
• 29:40
  right? Location, location, location.
• 29:42
  You know, I got a-
• 29:44
  And I hate keeping bringing this back on to the AI topic,
• 29:48
  but there's a lot of something that I wanted everybody to notice
• 29:49
  you
• 29:53
  is that your brokerage in Austin,
• 29:56
  small team, you're adopting this technology,
• 29:59
  and you're a perfect example of it's not AI that's going to replace you.
• 30:05
  It's going to be somebody or a team like Eric's that's leveraging this technology
• 30:10
  that's going to replace you.
• 30:12
  Like it's this I to be honest with you Eric.
• 30:15
  I'm running into very few real estate teams and and investors
• 30:21
  for that matter. We seem to be one of the slowest industries
• 30:25
  to adopt new technologies and a new way of doing things.
• 30:31
  Yeah, I think.
• 30:32
  It allows you to get insights so accurately
• 30:35
  and so quickly.
• 30:39
  I agree with you that those that leverage the technology and learn it
• 30:44
  are going to have a huge leg up.
• 30:46
  It does remind me a lot of say 2005,
• 30:49
  2006, whenever you had a lot of older agents,
• 30:52
  older investors that just didn't want to even pay attention to the internet.
• 30:55
  The internet brought in massive efficiencies in terms of being able to get
• 30:58
  a lot of data really, really
• 31:00
  quickly. And this is just as transformative because now the data can,
• 31:04
  it can be like, you know, synthesized really quickly and it can be explained
• 31:09
  to you really, really quickly.
• 31:10
  So yeah, it's exciting. And what I would say to anybody out there that's
• 31:15
  not using it is that it's not that intimidating.
• 31:18
  I think most folks, they stay away from it because they hear things like
• 31:21
  MCP and they go, well, I don't know what that is.
• 31:23
  So I certainly can't, you know,
• 31:24
  use this. But if you just get started with it and just start playing with
• 31:28
  it is really the way to, is really the way to get started.
• 31:29
  started with it.
• 31:31
  Well, Eric, is there anything else we should have tried to hit on,
• 31:34
  are you ready to jump into the rapid fire and close us out?
• 31:36
  I guess rapid fire,
• 31:37
  I mean we can jam about AI as long as you want to.
• 31:39
  I think you and I could do that all day.
• 31:40
  Maybe rapid fire is a better idea.
• 31:41
  Yeah, that's
• 31:42
  that's a rabbit hole. You don't want to get me down.
• 31:45
  There's there's all kinds of things.
• 31:46
  In fact, everybody can go to the other channel real deal cast to learn
• 31:51
  how to leverage some of this. But Eric,
• 31:54
  if you're ready, we'll jump into the rapid fire and close out this episode.
• 31:57
  What lie do real estate investors often tell themselves?
• 31:57
  Yeah, sounds great. Let's do it.
• 32:03
  They tell themselves that they have analyzed the deal enough when they
• 32:10
  haven't.
• 32:10
  If you could go back in time and give your younger self a piece of advice,
• 32:13
  what would it be?
• 32:14
  It would be to go all in on your business from the very beginning.
• 32:18
  It sounded like you kind of did that,
• 32:20
  wasn't that the case?
• 32:21
  Yeah, no, you know I I didn't internalize that as my identity for a long time
• 32:26
  and No, it would be to it would be to like Really go all in from you know from from
• 32:33
  the get-go not not to monkey around and try to figure it out for six
• 32:36
  or seven years And then you go.
• 32:37
  this is what I do so yeah
• 32:38
  Do you have a book recommendation or what are you reading right now?
• 32:42
  A book recommendation I love is Measure What Matters.
• 32:44
  It's the OKR method.
• 32:46
  And then finally, what single processor tool have you implemented that
• 32:49
  has had the biggest time-saving impact?
• 32:52
  just talked about it. would say,
• 32:53
  so to expand on it, projects in Claude are,
• 32:56
  it's the simplest.
• 32:58
  easiest way to gain a ton of efficiencies and to expand on that even more,
• 33:01
  you couple that with record every conversation you have and
• 33:05
  run those transcripts into projects in Claude.
• 33:08
  I mean, you can use another one if you want to,
• 33:09
  but I Claude's the best. Great way to organize,
• 33:12
  great way not to miss anything.
• 33:13
  For investors, you should certainly have one project that is every investment you're
• 33:17
  looking at. And every investment you're looking at should be its own chat.
• 33:20
  And you should dump everything you know about it there.
• 33:23
  And you will never, if you
• 33:25
  you dump tons and tons of stuff into it,
• 33:27
  you will never lie to yourself and say that you looked at it enough when
• 33:30
  you haven't, because you will have looked at it enough.
• 33:32
  It's a huge time saver.
• 33:34
  Right. Well, Eric, this is fantastic.
• 33:37
  One more time you can learn more at blam blam.
• 33:40
  I'm going to screw that up. So I'm gonna have to add this up.
• 33:42
  Don't worry about it.
• 33:42
  Head over to bramlett partners.com clickable link in the show notes.
• 33:48
  Really appreciate your time. Eric,
• 33:50
  you brought a lot of value today and I really appreciate it.
• 33:53
  Likewise, Jack, thank you so much.
• 33:54
  been a really fun chatting with you.
• 33:56
  It's been a pleasure.