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AI for Real Estate Agents: Build the System, Not the Prompt. · Connor with Honor: AI, Real Estate and Real Life

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Last Tuesday night, eleven o'clock, a homeowner about four miles from where I am sitting right now, sat up in bed, picked up her phone and typed one sentence into a machine.
0:09
SPEAKER_00: Who are the best real estate agents in Santa Clarita?
0:12
SPEAKER_00: She wasn't looking for a house and she wasn't filling out a form on Zillow.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: She was deciding whether to sell the place she had raised her kids in, and she was doing it at eleven at night because that's when people make the decision that changes their life.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: And before she called a single agent, she asked a machine which one of us to trust, and the machine answered and gave her three names.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: And here's the part I need you to sit with.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: You were not in the room.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: You did not get a notification.
0:39
SPEAKER_00: There was no lead.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: There is no record.
0:42
SPEAKER_00: You will never know that it happened.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: Remember her because I'm going to come back to her at the very end of this, and what she does six months from now is the entire point of everything I'm about to tell you.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: Now let me show you what the machine actually put on her screen.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: A brokerage with a national advertising budget.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: That was one.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: A team that posted something every single day for two years.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: That's the other one.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: And somebody who happened to answer that exact question online at some point.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: And you were on that list too, but you were faded out.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: Not because the machine hates you, not because you're bad at this, but because it just couldn't find you.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: And those are two completely different problems.
1:20
SPEAKER_00: So here's what I want you to hear before anything else.
1:23
SPEAKER_00: You're not behind on AI.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: You're just invisible to it.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: And that matters more than it sounds because behind means you have to catch up.
1:30
SPEAKER_00: And catching up is exhausting, and it never ends.
1:34
SPEAKER_00: Invisible means the machine standing between you and your next seller doesn't know you exist yet.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: So one of those you fix by working harder for the rest of your career, the other one you fix by building one system one time.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: We're going to build that system, and I'm going to hand you the whole thing.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: My name is Connor McIver.
1:53
SPEAKER_00: I'm a realtor with Sync Brokerage here in Santa Clarita.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: I've been licensed in real estate since 1998.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: And during that time, I also spent 20 years in LAPD, 17 years active full time, and three years as a reserve.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: I spent my career in law enforcement.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to come back to that in about 10 minutes because it explains everything about how you and I think about systems.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: And it involves a number that I think is going to bother you.
2:21
SPEAKER_00: What you're getting from me is not 50 new apps.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: It's not a clever trick that impresses people at a conference and dies on Monday.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: You do not need to write a line of code.
2:30
SPEAKER_00: And if you can talk into your phone, you can build every single thing I'm going to describe.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: One blueprint.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: And you can start it tonight.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: Now, most of this conversation you've heard about this and it's framed as AI versus human intelligence.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: I want to change that one character.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: It's not versus, it's a plus sign.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: Versus means one of them wins and one of them loses.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: AI versus human.
2:55
SPEAKER_00: And every headline for two years has been selling you this fight because fear gets clicks.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: Plus, it means, plus means they multiply, and I'm going to spend the next 40 minutes proving to you that the plus sign is the entire business, because think about what a multiplier actually does.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: A multiplier does nothing to a zero.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: You can take the most powerful large language model on earth, the most powerful AI, you can multiply it by an agent with no relationships, no local knowledge, and no trust in their own market, and you get zero.
3:29
SPEAKER_00: Faster, zero, more polished, zero, a better zero, but still zero.
3:34
SPEAKER_00: Which means the agents who are about to get hurt by AI, they're not the ones who ignored the technology.
3:39
SPEAKER_00: They're the ones who never built the human half in the first place.
3:43
SPEAKER_00: And the technology just brought it to the surface, just made it visible.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: So that may be concrete about what the human half actually is because relationships matter.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: It's a greeting card, but that's not strategy.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: There's four things, and no model does any of them.
3:59
SPEAKER_00: So number one is judgment.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: Knowing which of two perfectly legal options is the right one for this particular family, this particular week, with this much specific equity and that much fear in the room.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: A model doesn't know that.
4:15
SPEAKER_00: It has never met these people.
4:18
SPEAKER_00: Number two is going to be ethics.
4:19
SPEAKER_00: You carry a fiduciary duty.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: A model has no license to lose and nobody to answer to.
4:25
SPEAKER_00: Number three is going to be accountability.
4:27
SPEAKER_00: Your name is on the document.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: Your DRE number is on the document, not the models.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: And number four relationship.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: So 20 years of trust in a market cannot be prompted into existence.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: There's no prompt for that.
4:41
SPEAKER_00: There's no subscription for that.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: And every one of those four is something you already own today, right now.
4:48
SPEAKER_00: Before you learn a single thing about AI, that is your half.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: Now let us multiply it.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: And the reason most people never get to multiply it is that they fall into the first 10 minutes and then they quit.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: So let me show you exactly that failure and how that failure happens.
5:07
SPEAKER_00: Because I guarantee you've lived it.
5:09
SPEAKER_00: Most agents treat AI like a vending machine.
5:11
SPEAKER_00: They open up Chat GPT, they type 8 words, write me an MLS description, they hit enter, then they expect a miracle to fall out of the slot.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: And that comes back.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: What comes back is a stunning kitchen nestled in a quiet cul-de-sac, light and bright, open and airy, contractor's paradise.
5:30
SPEAKER_00: You generated that exact paragraph, and then you decided AI does not work.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: And you told three people at the office.
5:38
SPEAKER_00: And that story travels faster in this business than any success story ever will.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: But here's what actually happened.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: Traditional software is hard-coded.
5:47
SPEAKER_00: It does exactly what a developer wrote and nothing else.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: That's forever.
5:51
SPEAKER_00: A large language model is not software in that sense.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: It's a reasoning engine.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: Think of it as a chief of staff, not a vending machine.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: And a chief of staff, your chief of staff, who knows nothing about your business, gives you garbage every time.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: And that's not the chief of staff's fault.
6:10
SPEAKER_00: The moment you feed it your actual voice, your brokerage structure, your splits, your compliance rules, and your neighborhoods, it stops guessing and starts reasoning on your behalf.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: The failure is always the same four steps in the same order.
6:23
SPEAKER_00: A cheap prompt, cliches come back.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: No context was ever given, no voice, no structure, no rules, no history, and then they quit and tell everybody.
6:34
SPEAKER_00: Notice that only one of those four steps is about the machine, the other three are about us.
6:39
SPEAKER_00: Which brings me to the number I promised you.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: And this is the part of my own career that changed how I think about all of this.
6:47
SPEAKER_00: In law enforcement, we train constantly.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: Range time, qualification, drills, over and over for years.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: And the number that comes back out of my real encounters is about 30%.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: When law enforcement officers get in a shooting, they have a 30% chance of hitting who they're shooting at.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: Those are the odds.
7:08
SPEAKER_00: 70% of the time, at less than seven feet, they miss.
7:11
SPEAKER_00: And here's the part that should stop you, Cold.
7:13
SPEAKER_00: That's at seven feet.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: Seven feet.
7:16
SPEAKER_00: That's across a small room.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: My camera that I'm filming in front of is practically seven feet away.
7:23
SPEAKER_00: That's closer than you're standing to somebody in an open house.
7:26
SPEAKER_00: Trained professionals at that distance, hitting three out of ten.
7:32
SPEAKER_00: It's atrocious.
7:33
SPEAKER_00: And it's not a training problem because these are trained people.
7:36
SPEAKER_00: But under stress, your fine motor skills, they degrade.
7:40
SPEAKER_00: Tunnel vision, you get audio exclusion.
7:43
SPEAKER_00: All of that stuff sets in.
7:44
SPEAKER_00: You lose your hearing, like audio exclusion.
7:46
SPEAKER_00: Everything you rehearsed goes out the window and you're operating on hope.
7:50
SPEAKER_00: You go from shooting paper to having somebody trying to kill you and having to defend yourself or somebody else.
7:56
SPEAKER_00: And the people who hold up under that, or they're not braver.
7:59
SPEAKER_00: They don't have different DNA.
8:01
SPEAKER_00: They have repeatable mechanics that run when the thinking part of the brain checks out.
8:07
SPEAKER_00: Now hold that number for a second because I want to put something completely different next to it.
8:11
SPEAKER_00: Give a man, give me a hammer and a box of nails and a four by four piece of wood.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: And you tell me to bang a nail into this four by four.
8:21
SPEAKER_00: I'm going to miss over 50% of the time hammering that nail.
8:25
SPEAKER_00: And when I'm hitting it, it's going to be slow.
8:28
SPEAKER_00: If you've seen a contractor, a framer, somebody that the hammer is their weapon of choice, hit a nail, they don't miss.
8:36
SPEAKER_00: And they drive it through a solid red oak piece of wood with a couple of hits.
8:41
SPEAKER_00: It's a phenomenal thing to watch.
8:43
SPEAKER_00: Me, I bend the nail over, I have to prop it back up.
8:46
SPEAKER_00: I try to hold it, I hit my thumb, I scream, I gotta go to the hospital.
8:49
SPEAKER_00: It's just a mess.
8:51
SPEAKER_00: He swings, he eyeballs it.
8:54
SPEAKER_00: Some go in clean, some bend over.
8:56
SPEAKER_00: From me, he eyeballs it, and then the man hits it and it drives it all the way in.
9:02
SPEAKER_00: Some bend over when other people do it, some split the board, then you have to come back, you have to prop it up again.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: And that man is not unskilled.
9:10
SPEAKER_00: He's driven 10,000 nails in his life.
9:12
SPEAKER_00: He's just doing it freehand, every single nail from scratch, relying on his eye and his arm and whatever kind of daisy days he's having.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: But then you put the expert in and he does it well.
9:23
SPEAKER_00: Or you give that guy, the untrained guy, a nail gun, give him a jig that sets the angle and depth, stop for and then decides exactly how far it sinks.
9:35
SPEAKER_00: That's us, the same man, trying to hit it with a hammer.
9:39
SPEAKER_00: Now, same man, same nail, same wall, and every single one goes an identical.
9:44
SPEAKER_00: It's not that we got better.
9:46
SPEAKER_00: Our system got better.
9:47
SPEAKER_00: And that's the whole thing.
9:48
SPEAKER_00: You don't need to get better at real estate.
9:50
SPEAKER_00: You have the license, you have the market knowledge, you have that interpersonal connection thing.
9:56
SPEAKER_00: Some of you have been doing this longer than I have.
9:59
SPEAKER_00: You don't need more talent.
10:00
SPEAKER_00: You need a jig and a depth stop and power behind it.
10:03
SPEAKER_00: You need to ask yourself, where are you swinging freehand?
10:08
SPEAKER_00: The listing appointment with no structure, hoping the rapport carries it on the day.
10:14
SPEAKER_00: The CRM nobody has opened up in three weeks because the database is the single most valuable asset you own, and most of us treat it like a junk drawer, praying that the phone rings and hope has never been a lead source and it never will be.
10:28
SPEAKER_00: And follow-up that starts over from nothing every single time.
10:31
SPEAKER_00: You came into this thinking your problem was technology, your problem is you don't you don't have a jig.
10:36
SPEAKER_00: And AI is about to make that very visible very fast because the agents who build one are going to look like they got lucky.
10:44
SPEAKER_00: So let us build one right now with something you already own and already paid for.
10:49
SPEAKER_00: Now, three moves data in, cluster it, compare it to the market, about 10 minutes of work once it's set up, and I'm going to walk each one.
10:58
SPEAKER_00: I want to flag something before I start because there's one mistake in step one that can genuinely cost you your license.
11:05
SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you exactly what that is when we get there.
11:08
SPEAKER_00: Now, move one, start with a junk drawer.
11:11
SPEAKER_00: You have a list.
11:12
SPEAKER_00: Past clients, dead leads, an old farm list, maybe something title gave you.
11:16
SPEAKER_00: Maybe something scrubbed on DNC, which will be perfect, but again, do not call this.
11:20
SPEAKER_00: But you have something, a spreadsheet maybe from 2019 with 10,000 names in it, and you haven't opened it since you made it.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: You've been calling it dead.
11:28
SPEAKER_00: It's not dead, it's the most valuable list you'll ever own.
11:32
SPEAKER_00: And you've already paid for it.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: Think about what it exactly costs you.
11:36
SPEAKER_00: Every name on it came from a sign call or an open house, a referral, a mail, or a lead source you were writing a check for every single month.
11:43
SPEAKER_00: You spent years and real money assembling that.
11:46
SPEAKER_00: And then you stopped looking at it because it got too big to be useful or you just didn't think it was going to pan out.
11:53
SPEAKER_00: That's the whole problem.
11:54
SPEAKER_00: It didn't get less valuable, it just got harder to sort.
11:57
SPEAKER_00: And sorting is precisely the thing a machine does better than any of us.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: At a scale neither of us can touch.
12:04
SPEAKER_00: Messi is fine.
12:05
SPEAKER_00: Inconsistent names, missing fields, duplicate rows, three versions of the same person because one of them used a middle initial.
12:12
SPEAKER_00: Half the reason you stop using that list is that cleaning it looked like a 40-hour job.
12:18
SPEAKER_00: And anymore, it's not a 40-hour job.
12:21
SPEAKER_00: It's an upload.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: You do it once, and the clean version is a permanent asset that pays every month after.
12:30
SPEAKER_00: Now, here's a mistake I warned you about.
12:32
SPEAKER_00: The data goes into a secure paid workspace, not a free consumer chatbot window.
12:38
SPEAKER_00: You're handling other people's names, addresses, financial situations in a paid workspace.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: You can turn off training on your data, you can control what's retained.
12:48
SPEAKER_00: In a free account, you very often cannot.
12:51
SPEAKER_00: Client data does not go into free accounts, ever.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: If you write down one thing from all of this, write that down.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: Move two, and this is the move almost nobody makes, do not cluster alphabetically.
13:05
SPEAKER_00: Alphabetical order is how you turn yourself into a telemarketer.
13:08
SPEAKER_00: Think about what alphabetical actually does to your day.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: You call an Anderson in Saugus, then an Andrews in Canyon Country, then an Aguilar and Stevenson Ranch.
13:18
SPEAKER_00: Three completely different markets, three different price points, three different conversations, and you are switching context every 90 seconds.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: By the 11th call, you sound like a robot because you haven't gotten to say the same true thing twice.
13:34
SPEAKER_00: So cluster by track code, then by street, then by how long they've owned.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: And here's where why those three.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: Jeep geography is what a homeowner actually cares about.
13:46
SPEAKER_00: Nobody in the history of the business has ever cared about what letter their last name starts with, except in school.
13:52
SPEAKER_00: But they care about the house four doors down, four doors down that just sold.
13:56
SPEAKER_00: Neighbors talk a conversation about their suite beats a c about their street, beats a conversation about the market every single time, because the market is an abstraction and their street is where they live.
14:08
SPEAKER_00: When you can say the family on your street closed three weeks ago and it changed what your place is worth, you're not selling anything.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: You're telling them something true about their block that they probably didn't know.
14:21
SPEAKER_00: And tenure is the third filler because it's the closest thing this business has to a prediction method.
14:29
SPEAKER_00: Owners at seven to twelve years are sitting on real equity.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: Their family situation is usually changed, and they're statistically closest to moving.
14:37
SPEAKER_00: Under three years, they just bought.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: Over 20 years, they're saying out loud.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: 7 to 12 is the window.
14:44
SPEAKER_00: And what comes out on the other side is not a call list, it's a route.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: You're building a door-dropping, a door-knocking map where every single stop has a reason you can say out loud in one sentence.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: Move three, cross-reference that clustered list against what's actually happening in the market right now.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: What's sold, what's sitting, what got pulled, what never came back, because an expired listing on the street is also a conversation starter, and almost nobody brings it up.
15:10
SPEAKER_00: You find the pockets where inventory is low and turnover's high, because that combination is where a listing is genuinely winnable.
15:18
SPEAKER_00: Low inventory means the seller has leverage.
15:20
SPEAKER_00: High turnover means people on the street are already thinking about it.
15:25
SPEAKER_00: Where those two overlap, you're not creating demand, you're walking into demand that already exists.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: You build the equity picture.
15:34
SPEAKER_00: What they likely owe based on when they bought against what the street says the house is worth today.
15:41
SPEAKER_00: And now watch what actually changed.
15:43
SPEAKER_00: Here are two versions of the same door, not version one.
15:46
SPEAKER_00: Hi, I'm Connor, I'm a realtor.
15:48
SPEAKER_00: Are you thinking about selling?
15:50
SPEAKER_00: You know exactly how that goes because you've lived it a hundred times.
15:53
SPEAKER_00: Version two is hey, I put together a report on your street.
15:56
SPEAKER_00: Three homes closed here in the last 90 days, and here's what they went for.
16:00
SPEAKER_00: And based on when you bought, here's roughly where your equity sits today.
16:05
SPEAKER_00: I'm not asking you for anything.
16:07
SPEAKER_00: I just thought you would want to see it.
16:08
SPEAKER_00: Same door, same person, same you, but a completely different conversation.
16:13
SPEAKER_00: And you did about 10 minutes of prep.
16:15
SPEAKER_00: You're not a salesperson asking for a listing.
16:18
SPEAKER_00: You're the local data authority delivering something that they wanted and did not know they could get.
16:23
SPEAKER_00: Now, six rules make that playbook actually work, and I want to be fast about them.
16:28
SPEAKER_00: Now, target the motivated first.
16:30
SPEAKER_00: Expired's canceled for sale by owner, foreclosures, geographic leads.
16:34
SPEAKER_00: Start where the intent actually exists.
16:37
SPEAKER_00: Notice of defaults, for example.
16:39
SPEAKER_00: Personalize every single touch.
16:41
SPEAKER_00: The machine drafts it.
16:42
SPEAKER_00: You make it sound like a neighbor instead of a campaign.
16:46
SPEAKER_00: Qualify and categorize inside of the CRM because an untagged lead is a lost lead.
16:53
SPEAKER_00: Automate the follow-up and then follow up personally anyway.
16:57
SPEAKER_00: That's where the human element comes in.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: Don't let the machine drive this.
17:01
SPEAKER_00: The sequence keeps you on the board.
17:02
SPEAKER_00: The human call is what closes.
17:04
SPEAKER_00: Now give value first, apply pressure, never.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: Hand them the equity report before you ask for anything at all and track it weekly because if you're not measuring it, you're guessing.
17:15
SPEAKER_00: And guessing is the 30% at seven feet.
17:20
SPEAKER_00: That's the system's half.
17:21
SPEAKER_00: Now speed.
17:22
SPEAKER_00: And speed has two halves of its own being found and being fast once you are.
17:28
SPEAKER_00: And I want to talk to the person who has been listening to this thinking, Connor, this is great, but I'm a people person.
17:35
SPEAKER_00: I hate spreadsheets.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: I hate cold calling.
17:38
SPEAKER_00: I got into this business because I like being with people.
17:41
SPEAKER_00: And that's good, genuinely good.
17:43
SPEAKER_00: Double down on exactly that because this is the half nobody can copy.
17:47
SPEAKER_00: Host those open houses, run the charity events, coach the team, be the person everybody in the neighborhood already knows.
17:54
SPEAKER_00: That's an enormous advantage.
17:55
SPEAKER_00: And I'm not going to try to talk you out of that.
17:59
SPEAKER_00: But here is what's happening to you right now.
18:01
SPEAKER_00: You meet 40 people at an open house on a Sunday.
18:04
SPEAKER_00: If those ever come back, that'll be great.
18:07
SPEAKER_00: You have genuine conversations with maybe 12 of them.
18:10
SPEAKER_00: You fully intend to follow up with all 12, but by Wednesday you followed up with four because Monday had an inspection, Tuesday had a client emergency, and you had a personal emergency thrown in there, and those other eight people were real who liked you.
18:25
SPEAKER_00: And that's not a character flaw, that's the absence of a system.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: So put a net under every handshake, a simple sign-in page on an iPad or QR code on the counter.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: Then follow-up goes out before they reach their car in your voice, referencing the actual house they just walked through, not a template.
18:44
SPEAKER_00: And then it keeps going at day three, day 10, day 30, whether you remember to do it or not, you still make that personal call.
18:52
SPEAKER_00: The system just guarantees nobody falls off the map while you're handling something on fire.
18:58
SPEAKER_00: Your memory is not a system and it never was.
19:01
SPEAKER_00: It just felt like one when you had six clients instead of 60.
19:04
SPEAKER_00: Now the other half of speed being found.
19:07
SPEAKER_00: And I need to correct something you've almost certainly been told.
19:11
SPEAKER_00: You've heard that SEO is dead and AEO replaced it.
19:14
SPEAKER_00: That's actually wrong.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: If you act on that, you're going to hurt your business.
19:18
SPEAKER_00: Now here's what's actually true.
19:19
SPEAKER_00: Pew Research tracked 68,000 real Google searches without an AI summary on the page.
19:27
SPEAKER_00: People clicked a result about 15% of the time.
19:30
SPEAKER_00: With one, 8%.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: The click got cut roughly in half.
19:35
SPEAKER_00: AHEFS, AHREFS measured 300,000 keywords and found about 34.5% drop in click through for the number one spot when an AI overview sits on top of it.
19:47
SPEAKER_00: So ranking number one still matters.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: It just pays about half of what it used to.
19:53
SPEAKER_00: Now here's the number nobody quotes to you.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: AI referrals are about two-tenths of one percent of all web traffic right now.
20:00
SPEAKER_00: Google still sends vastly more.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: So anybody telling you to abandon SEO for AEO, answer engine optimization or agenc engine optimization is telling you to abandon the highway for the bike path.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: You build both.
20:14
SPEAKER_00: SEO gets you into the index, AEO gets you named in the answer.
20:19
SPEAKER_00: Same foundation.
20:21
SPEAKER_00: Here's the second story.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: And the cheapest thing in this entire 45 minutes is next.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: So if you've been half listening, come back for this one.
20:29
SPEAKER_00: Your legal name spelled identically everywhere, your brokerage and your DR number matching on every profile, one phone number.
20:37
SPEAKER_00: Not the old one still sitting on three old listings, same headshot, same bio language, same service area.
20:43
SPEAKER_00: You know there's 80 some odd sites out there that carry your information right off the top for real estate.
20:49
SPEAKER_00: Google, Yelp, Zillow, your website, build your social profiles because when the machine sees conflicting details, it can't resolve who you are.
20:59
SPEAKER_00: It's a computer, it doesn't make sense.
21:01
SPEAKER_00: Connor T, McIver, Connor, MacIver, Connor with honor.
21:05
SPEAKER_00: So it moves on to somebody that can verify who they are.
21:09
SPEAKER_00: This costs you an afternoon and zero dollars.
21:12
SPEAKER_00: You do it this week.
21:13
SPEAKER_00: So here, how do you build any of this without being a software engineer?
21:18
SPEAKER_00: You hire, you build an AI employee.
21:21
SPEAKER_00: It has four parts a context memory, tools, skills.
21:25
SPEAKER_00: That's the entire architecture of every AI system I'm describing.
21:29
SPEAKER_00: If you remember nothing else, remember those four words.
21:32
SPEAKER_00: Context is the onboarding document.
21:35
SPEAKER_00: Think about what you would do if you hired a brand new assistant tomorrow.
21:40
SPEAKER_00: You would not hand them a phone and say, good luck, go ahead.
21:43
SPEAKER_00: You would spend the first week telling them how you work, which lender you trust, how to handle a lowball offer, what you say when a seller brings up Zillow, where your line is on, and what you will and will not do, where your line in the sand happens to be.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Week is the context file.
22:03
SPEAKER_00: The difference is you only do it once and it never quits with AI.
22:06
SPEAKER_00: It never forgets.
22:07
SPEAKER_00: It never goes to work for a competitor.
22:10
SPEAKER_00: It never leaves you and breaches the contract you had with them.
22:12
SPEAKER_00: So what goes into it?
22:14
SPEAKER_00: Well, your biography, years in, what you specialize in, what you what refuse you do, what you refuse to do, your brokerage structure and your splits, so it never drafts something that contradicts your own agreement.
22:30
SPEAKER_00: The neighborhoods, you know, cold, what actually makes each one different, because a machine writing about Valencia and a machine writing about Canyon Country shouldn't sound the same.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: And your fair housing parameters, written down explicit and strict, not implied, but written, because the model follows what you said, and it will never know what you meant.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: And I want to be direct about that one because it's the single highest risk place where this skill set touches your license.
22:59
SPEAKER_00: Fair housing law applies to AI generated marketing copy, to add targeting and to anything that screens people.
23:06
SPEAKER_00: The liability lands on you and your broker, not the software vendor.
23:11
SPEAKER_00: And desperate impact.
23:14
SPEAKER_00: Desperate impact means intent doesn't save you.
23:17
SPEAKER_00: So that parameter is not nice to have in the file.
23:21
SPEAKER_00: It is the file.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: You write it once and it carries into every conversation forever after.
23:26
SPEAKER_00: And here's the part that actually matters.
23:28
SPEAKER_00: Nobody wants to sit down and write a document about themselves.
23:32
SPEAKER_00: That's why this step is one that everybody seems to skip.
23:35
SPEAKER_00: And skipping is exactly why their output sounds like a brochure.
23:38
SPEAKER_00: So don't write it.
23:40
SPEAKER_00: Open voice mode on your phone.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: Hit record and interview yourself for 10 minutes like somebody is asking you about your business.
23:47
SPEAKER_00: Then let the machine transcribe it, organize it into the file, and then ask the machine, ask me more questions to learn everything about me.
23:55
SPEAKER_00: So my skill set, your skill set, will be the best.
24:01
SPEAKER_00: You have it transcribe it all of that, you organize that into the file.
24:05
SPEAKER_00: That's exactly what I did.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: Now everybody will talk about themselves for 10 minutes.
24:08
SPEAKER_00: Almost nobody will write a page.
24:11
SPEAKER_00: Then teach it how you exactly talk.
24:14
SPEAKER_00: And this is where most people go wrong in a very specific way.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: They teach it how they think they should write.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: Formal, polished, the word you use when you think somebody important is reading, that's not your voice.
24:28
SPEAKER_00: That's your nervous voice.
24:30
SPEAKER_00: A real voice is the one you use at the kitchen table at seven at night when a seller asks whether they should take the offer.
24:36
SPEAKER_00: That voice is direct.
24:38
SPEAKER_00: It is short and it never uses the word furthermore.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: So paste in emails that you actually sent that actually got a reply.
24:47
SPEAKER_00: Not your best writing, your most effective writing.
24:49
SPEAKER_00: Those are usually two different documents.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: And tell it every word that makes you sound like a brochure and forbid them by name.
24:57
SPEAKER_00: Mine are stunning, nestled, boasts, and any sentence that starts with welcome home.
25:01
SPEAKER_00: You have your own list and you know exactly what's on it.
25:04
SPEAKER_00: Then make it prove it.
25:06
SPEAKER_00: Have it write something and correct it out loud until it sounds like you.
25:10
SPEAKER_00: That takes about three rounds.
25:12
SPEAKER_00: It's not a one-shot thing, and nobody telling you otherwise has actually done it.
25:17
SPEAKER_00: And the test is simple, and I'm serious about this one.
25:20
SPEAKER_00: If your spouse can read it and not know a machine wrote it, then you're done.
25:25
SPEAKER_00: Or a significant other or somebody close to you, mother, father, brother, sister.
25:29
SPEAKER_00: If they can tell them the first sentence, then you keep going, you keep at it.
25:33
SPEAKER_00: Because if the person who has heard you talk every day for 20 years can't spot its AI that wrote it, your past clients definitely won't either.
25:41
SPEAKER_00: Then you give it hands.
25:42
SPEAKER_00: You connect it to a calendar, connect it to an inbox, so it can see your actual week, your CRM, whatever you already pay for, and two rules that keep you licensed.
25:52
SPEAKER_00: Least privilege, your marketing assistant doesn't need access to your bank account, and a human checkpoint before anything reaches a client.
26:01
SPEAKER_00: Say this one with me because if you take a single sentence from all of this, take this one.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: AI only drafts.
26:09
SPEAKER_00: You verify, you sign, you ship every time, no exceptions.
26:14
SPEAKER_00: Your license is on that document.
26:17
SPEAKER_00: Your model is not.
26:20
SPEAKER_00: The last part is where it compounds.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: So stay with me because this is the piece that turns a tool into leverage.
26:27
SPEAKER_00: Right now you have procedures.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: A way you do an open house follow-up, a way you launch a new listing, a way you check out on a past client, and the one year mark, how that is.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: The problem is those procedures live in your head, which means they run at whatever quality you happen to have that day.
26:46
SPEAKER_00: On a good Tuesday, you do all seven steps.
26:49
SPEAKER_00: On a Tuesday after a deal falls apart, you do three of them and tell yourself you'll catch up later.
26:54
SPEAKER_00: But you never do.
26:55
SPEAKER_00: You never catch up.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: So write that procedure down once every time, every step in order, the way you explain it to a brand new agent, then save it as a name skill.
27:06
SPEAKER_00: So you invoke it by the name instead of re-explaining it every single time.
27:11
SPEAKER_00: And if something changes, this is very easy to miss.
27:15
SPEAKER_00: It runs identically forever, same steps, same standard, whether it's a Monday morning or the 4th of July or the week your biggest listing blew up, the machine doesn't have bad Tuesdays.
27:26
SPEAKER_00: And when you find a better way to do that follow-up, you fix the card once in one place, and every future run is fixed.
27:33
SPEAKER_00: Never have to remember the improvement again.
27:36
SPEAKER_00: Now here's how I think about it.
27:37
SPEAKER_00: Every procedure you write down is a thing you personally never have to do again.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: Do ten of them and you have effectively hired somebody.
27:46
SPEAKER_00: Do them badly and you've automated your bad Tuesday, which is genuinely worse than doing nothing.
27:52
SPEAKER_00: So write the good version.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: Now here's the last piece, and this is how you actually talk to the thing.
27:59
SPEAKER_00: Level one is the vending machine.
28:02
SPEAKER_00: Listen to this prompt.
28:04
SPEAKER_00: Write an email about why somebody would sell their home in Santa Clarita right now.
28:09
SPEAKER_00: That gets you bloated, formal, cliche-riddled letter that gets deleted on site.
28:14
SPEAKER_00: Now level two, my goal is to close 100 listings in Santa Clarita.
28:18
SPEAKER_00: Here's my database, my comps, my brand file, analyze regional turnover, draft a neighborly equity update, and outline the exact outreach workflow to secure appointments.
28:30
SPEAKER_00: You hear that difference?
28:32
SPEAKER_00: Level one asks for a chore, like you're putting money into a vending machine and choosing the ho-hos.
28:37
SPEAKER_00: Level two declares an objective and hands over the data.
28:41
SPEAKER_00: Stop asking it to do chores.
28:43
SPEAKER_00: Start telling it to do what you're trying to win.
28:46
SPEAKER_00: Now, before I show you where this goes at the top end, I have to say something about discipline, because without it, none of this survives contact with your actual week.
28:56
SPEAKER_00: You own software you probably don't use.
28:59
SPEAKER_00: I'm not here to make anybody feel bad about that.
29:01
SPEAKER_00: I've done it too.
29:03
SPEAKER_00: You went to the convention, you walked the vendor hall, you bought the dialer and the marketing platform and the database tool and this and that, and now you have a dozen subscriptions and a half dozen half-built campaigns generating zero closings.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: That's not a strategy.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: That's paying a fee to feel like you're moving.
29:23
SPEAKER_00: So here's the guardrail, and it's the single best use of an AI chief of staff I know.
29:28
SPEAKER_00: Instruct it to push back on you.
29:30
SPEAKER_00: Tell it to refuse to help you start anything new until your current system is actually live and working.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: One system at a time.
29:37
SPEAKER_00: Finish before you start and spend the time you win on five real human conversations a day.
29:44
SPEAKER_00: And we're and there are seven mistakes that cost agents the moat.
29:48
SPEAKER_00: So let me be quick.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: Thinking AI replaces an agent, it does not.
29:52
SPEAKER_00: It replaces the paperwork.
29:54
SPEAKER_00: Shipping AI output without personalizing it, and clients can smell a template from across the room.
30:00
SPEAKER_00: Not verifying before it reaches a client.
30:03
SPEAKER_00: AI drafts you verify, you sign, over-automate it until the human is gone.
30:08
SPEAKER_00: Chasing tools instead of building a system, letting the CRM go unattended and optimizing for volume instead of quality conversations because a hundred bad calls lose to five good ones every time.
30:23
SPEAKER_00: Now I don't want anybody walking away from this overwhelmed.
30:26
SPEAKER_00: So don't try to build all of it tonight.
30:29
SPEAKER_00: Three steps.
30:29
SPEAKER_00: Step one get one paid reasoning workspace one.
30:34
SPEAKER_00: The free tiers don't have that persistent memory, the entire system depends on.
30:39
SPEAKER_00: These are LLMs, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Microsoft, Grok is making a lot of headway.
30:47
SPEAKER_00: So again, it depends on that higher memory.
30:52
SPEAKER_00: Step two, upload your context.
30:54
SPEAKER_00: Ten minutes of voice notes about your business, transcribe.
30:58
SPEAKER_00: Step three, connect one tool, calendar, inbox, or CRM.
31:02
SPEAKER_00: Start with one job, categorizing new leads and firing the follow-up sequence.
31:08
SPEAKER_00: And here's your actual week because a concept doesn't survive the drive home, but a calendar does.
31:13
SPEAKER_00: Monday, one paid account, nothing else.
31:16
SPEAKER_00: Don't browse for tools.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: Tuesday, 10 minutes of voice notes, transcribed and saved.
31:20
SPEAKER_00: Do Wednesday, one skill written down.
31:24
SPEAKER_00: And your open house follow-up is the easiest place to start.
31:27
SPEAKER_00: Thursday and Friday, connect one tool.
31:30
SPEAKER_00: Run the skill once and fix what was wrong.
31:33
SPEAKER_00: That's a complete first week, and it beats what 90% of people who watch this will actually do.
31:39
SPEAKER_00: Now, for whoever wants to know where this goes at the top end, because there's one more level and in the next few months there'll be many more.
31:48
SPEAKER_00: But most people never see this next level.
31:51
SPEAKER_00: Most people scaling this make the same mistake.
31:53
SPEAKER_00: They build one agent that does everything and it gets confused.
31:57
SPEAKER_00: It fumbles client details and it makes expensive errors.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: The operators who do this well build a boardroom instead, one orchestrator, and it's the only one you talk to, Cloud Opus 5, Chat, GPT 5.6, whatever family you prefer.
32:15
SPEAKER_00: And notice I said family, not version, because the version changes every 90 days or even sooner, and the architecture does not.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: Underneath it, specialists.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: One posts, one qualifies leads around the clock, one extracts contract deadlines and puts them on your calendar.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: You send a voice note from the car after a listing appointment, the boardroom goes to work.
32:38
SPEAKER_00: And now that part you are not going to get from a vendor.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: Before you install one of these self-hosted tools, four things.
32:51
SPEAKER_00: Turn it on before you connect a single account.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: These have real vulnerabilities recently.
32:57
SPEAKER_00: One popular harness had a zero-click takeover bug rated eight point eight out of ten.
33:06
SPEAKER_00: And researchers found 1467 malicious plugins on its own official hub.
33:13
SPEAKER_00: You hold client financial data and you have record keeping obligations, so scope every agent narrowly, and nothing runs tokenless.
33:21
SPEAKER_00: Local hardware trades a per token bill for a power bill.
33:25
SPEAKER_00: Cheaper at scale, but not free.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: A vendor will not tell you any of that.
33:30
SPEAKER_00: A vendor sells.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: I'm telling you because you're licensed and I'm licensed, and that is the difference.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: So divide the work correctly.
33:37
SPEAKER_00: Give the machine the contract dates, the comps, and the first draft of the lifting copy, and your inbox triage.
33:44
SPEAKER_00: Keep for yourself the kitchen table conversation, the empathy, the hard negotiation, the handshake.
33:50
SPEAKER_00: And I want to come back to the woman I started with, 11 o'clock at night woman, typing a question into the machine.
33:57
SPEAKER_00: Now it's six months later, same person, same hour, and she's not shopping anymore.
34:02
SPEAKER_00: She's scared.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: The deal is wobbling and she's lying awake doing math about her family.
34:08
SPEAKER_00: And no machine answers that one.
34:10
SPEAKER_00: An algorithm cannot look at a terrified client in the eye at 11 o'clock at night and say, I know you're scared.
34:17
SPEAKER_00: I'm standing right here beside you, and I will protect your family's equity.
34:21
SPEAKER_00: The machine got you into the conversation, but it can't finish it.
34:27
SPEAKER_00: That is the job.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: It's always been the job.
34:29
SPEAKER_00: So here is the real headline, and it's not the one you've been reading.
34:33
SPEAKER_00: AI is not replacing real estate agents, and it never was.
34:38
SPEAKER_00: That sells clicks, not truth.
34:41
SPEAKER_00: Agents using AI will replace agents that refuse to.
34:46
SPEAKER_00: That's the actual competitive line.
34:48
SPEAKER_00: And it's already happening.
34:50
SPEAKER_00: This has always been a relationship business.
34:53
SPEAKER_00: And nothing I said today changes any of that.
34:56
SPEAKER_00: All of what I said today protects it.
34:58
SPEAKER_00: Give away the paperwork.
34:59
SPEAKER_00: Keep the people.
35:00
SPEAKER_00: If you want help building any of this, I'll be happy to do it for you.
35:04
SPEAKER_00: And I do that for a living.
35:06
SPEAKER_00: I will do it with you.
35:08
SPEAKER_00: A free 15-minute zoom on it.
35:11
SPEAKER_00: No pressure.
35:12
SPEAKER_00: We look at your CRM, your tools, your biggest bottleneck, and you leave with a brew plant, whether you ever hire me or not.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: Everything from this talk is free at Santa Clara Artificial Intelligence.com.
35:23
SPEAKER_00: You scan the QR code on the screen and you'll get it.
35:26
SPEAKER_00: If you want to see the content for this exact show, it's Santa Clara Artificial Intelligence dot com forward slash SRAR0820.
35:36
SPEAKER_00: The field guide, the slides, the playbook, no email wall, or call me directly, 661 400 1720.
35:44
SPEAKER_00: I'm Connor McIver, California Department of Real Estate, 012825, 01238257 with Sink Brokerage.
35:52
SPEAKER_00: I do appreciate your time.
35:54
SPEAKER_00: Let's go build that jig, and we will see you soon.
35:57
SPEAKER_00: Last Tuesday night, 11 o'clock, a homeowner about four miles from where I was typed in a search.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: I want you to be there.
36:04
SPEAKER_00: I'm Connor with honor.
36:05
SPEAKER_00: We'll see you in the next one.