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Artificial intelligence (AI) like ChatGPT might not be great at writing podcast intros, but when it comes to building a rental property or real estate portfolio, these platforms produce far more help than harm. While most of the general public uses AI to write poems about their dog or history papers for class, real estate investors are harnessing this technological power to buy more properties, outsource simple tasks, and reach sellers faster than ever. Want to do the same? You’ll have to stick around!
For years, our panel of real estate experts have been using AI, automated apps, and software to grow their portfolios to new heights. And, even if you don’t own thousands of rentals or do hundreds of fix and flips a year (like James), you too can use this real estate tech to make your life easier, spend less time working, and focus more on what your business needs from YOU.
In this episode, Dave, James, Jamil, and Kathy will go over exactly how they’re using AI platforms such as ChatGPT, the systems and software they’ve implemented into their own businesses, whether or not more automation could threaten jobs, and how you, even as a small investor, can leverage the same tech top investors use to build wealth faster!
Dave:
Welcome back to On the Market, the podcast that takes you on an exciting journey through the world of real estate investing. I’m your host, Dave Meyer, and today I’m joined by my brilliant co-hosts, Kathy, James, and Jamil, as we explore the newest tech trends revolutionizing the game. Get ready to level up your investing skills because together we’ll uncover cutting edge technology that’s reshaping the way we do real estate.
Picture this: virtual reality tours that transport YouTube properties without leaving your home, and AI-driven algorithms that help you make smarter investing decisions. It is mind-blowing stuff folks. So grab your notepads, buckle up, and get ready for a thrilling episode of On the Market with your hosts Dave, Kathy, James, and Jamil. Together, we’ll explore the game-changing technologies that will take your portfolio to new heights.
Kathy:
Hey, Dave, my awesome co-host, your enthusiasm for the tech trends we’re discussing today has got me so fired up too. Being a laid-back California investor has its perks, I may have a relaxed vibe, but I’ve also seen how embracing technology can enhance our real estate investing game. From leveraging innovative tools to staying ahead of market trends. It’s all about finding that perfect balance.
James:
Kathy, my California cool co-host. I’m always up for good chat, especially when it involves tech trends. This sounds just like me. But I must admit, I might need some extra help navigating the digital landscape. As you know, my yacht is my natural habitat, and technology sometimes feels like uncharted waters for me. But hey, even a successful investor like me can’t resist the alluring cutting edge tools that take our portfolios to new heights. So Kathy, I’m counting on you to make me afloat in this tech-savvy episode. I’ll bring yacht jokes, you bring tech expertise, and together we’ll strike the perfect balance between high seas luxury and digital wizardry. Deal? Let’s set sail on this adventure Kathy.
Jamil:
James, my yacht loving friend, ah, the tech episode. I can already see the waves of confusion crashing over you. But don’t worry, buddy. I’m here to navigate these treacherous technological waters with my signature wit and charm. Now, I know you’re swimming in that sea of wealth, but let’s remember to keep our heads above water when it comes to technology, shall we? Who knows? Maybe we’ll even teach you a few tech tricks that’ll leave you more amazed than finding a hidden treasure chest in your yacht.
Dave:
All right, ladies and gentlemen, before we continue, I want to take a moment to ask you something. Did you notice anything funny about this episode so far? Well, here’s the big reveal. The entire introduction you’ve heard from Kathy’s California vibes to James’s yacht jokes has been written by none other than our trusty AI assistant. Even the words I am saying right now have been written by AI. That’s right. We’re just reading the responses generated by ChatGPT, our brilliant AI partner. But fear not. While the intro may have been a fun little detour into the AI realm, we have an amazing human-driven episode about real estate technology coming up after the break. See you on the flip side.
So it seems like we’ve found something we shouldn’t be using ChatGPT for, which is writing podcast outlines as you can all see. But thank you three all for indulging me as we tried this, and thank you listeners for listening to that pretty awkward, lame script that ChatGPT wrote for us. What’d you guys think of ChatGPT’s performance there?
Jamil:
Corn ball.
Kathy:
Yeah.
Dave:
Well, I really love the fact that James had a yacht, but let’s move on. Clearly it does not like writing podcast scripts, which I guess is good for us. We’ll keep our jobs, but there are some really good uses for ChatGPT, and if you’re not familiar with ChatGPT, I’m sure everyone has heard of it, but it is a generative AI platform. You can basically type and talk with it and there are all these incredible use cases for it that people are using in real estate and beyond.
And so in today’s episode, we’re going to spend some time talking about how we can use ChatGPT for real estate businesses, and then we’re also going to move on to just other technology that each of us use in our real estate businesses to help grow, scale, be more efficient in that. So I’m curious, Kathy, have you used ChatGPT before for real estate?
Kathy:
You know, I was kind of struggling with a job description for our syndication manager, and I don’t know why this is not my strength. So Rich just got on ChatGPT and it was really simple, just said, “Give me a job description for a syndication manager.” And I didn’t think AI would know what a syndication manager was, but within seconds I had a full job description that really hit it completely. I maybe had to add or change a couple of minor things, but that was super accurate. So I would say for more less feeling involved stuff like a job description, AI could be good for that. But if you’re again, trying to have AI write a story, I’m not sure it’s there yet.
Dave:
That’s pretty interesting. So did you iterate on it? Did you ask ChatGPT, get a response, and then have a conversation with it? Or did you download it and then just make the changes on your own?
Kathy:
Yeah, I just made it on my own. But Rich is definitely an early adapter, so he’s been playing a lot with it. And part of AI is it’s machine learning, it’s constantly learning and needs human feedback. So Rich is always giving it feedback like, “Oh, I didn’t like the way you wrote that,” or, “This was corny,” or whatever, and it’ll come back and rewrite it.
Dave:
Yeah, I’ll tell you guys some of the things I’ve done to use it in a minute outside of real estate, but it is really interesting how it works. Jamil, are you using ChatGPT at all?
Jamil:
I am actually. So as you know in wholesale, the name of the game is to have an extreme number of conversations every day. You need to be able to do a lot of lead generation. And because my main method of finding deals is communicating with real estate agents, that can become a very voluminous task. So what we’ve done is we’ve actually embedded ChatGPT in our outreach software. And because the texting laws and the way that the firewalls work when you’re trying to communicate with people through text message, especially real estate agents, a lot of words get blocked. A lot of phrases get rejected and the agent will never see your message. And so what we do is we send out an original opener that we would typically say when we’re trying to engage a real estate agent in forming a relationship with us or to bring us an opportunity, and then we put it through ChatGPT and have it spin it like 30 times for us.
And then that way we’ve got 30 iterations of this opener message that we are now having conversations with these real estate agents and it’s been working really well. And so for those people that have 9:00 to 5:00 jobs that don’t have time all day to sit around and think of the response to talk to somebody, ChatGPT is doing it for them and they really only have to get on the phone once the agent has an opportunity. And so it’s really revolutionized the way that we do our lead generation and people have no idea they’re forming a relationship with a robot because a few conversations later they’re talking to a human.
Dave:
So is it automated or are you … A human is writing the first thing, they put it into ChatGPT, and can you just explain if our audience, if you haven’t used it, can you just explain what the process is?
Jamil:
Yeah, so it is a human that is starting the conversation. So we’ll put an original opener. Like for me, one of my openers for agents is, “Do you have anything coming to market in original condition or needing work that I can look at before it’s listed?” So let’s just take that opening line, and I write out that opening line and I put it into ChatGPT. Well, ChatGPT will give me 30 or however many versions I want of that messaging in different words, in different phrases, in different combinations, so that it sounds like me, but different. We have to put it into ChatGPT and it’ll give us the different versions, but then the software we use will take those different versions and then automatedly start having conversations. So it initiates having the conversations and then when they respond, it initiates a response.
Dave:
Wow.
Jamil:
It’s incredible.
Dave:
So you’ve programmed it so that it is automatically responding to people?
Jamil:
Yes. Now here’s the rub, right? So normally, we would be paying people $20 an hour to have these conversations just to get it to the point where I can get on the phone and start talking to the agent or a senior acquisition manager can get on the phone and start developing the relationship further. That whole position is gone now. That’s been completely taken over by ChatGPT and the automations. It’s incredible.
Dave:
How do you feel about that?
Jamil:
I love it. For me, it takes away so much of my overhead and it allows people who don’t really have the time. I mean I’ve got a ton of mentees that have 9:00 to 5:00 jobs, they just don’t have the time to sit on the phone all day and talk to real estate agents to help them get a deal so they can quit their job. And so this has become a real incredible tool for them because it’s allowing them to do the work while they’re working and then they can work on their side hustle when they’re on … And it actually can now become a manageable side hustle because they can do it in a couple hours a day.
James:
So you’re from sales, we both have a big background in sales. How has the responses been? Because a lot of getting that deal is just saying that magical thing or that it really separates you from, whether it’s a direct to seller, you’re talking to somebody, you’re doing things, or a broker. If I’m communicating with somebody and I’m having an authentic conversation with them, that deal’s probably going to get done a lot better. Have you noticed any kind of pushback? Or because it’s just the opening question and then it’s going to professional salesperson, it doesn’t really matter?
Jamil:
Yeah, it’s all surface level. So as you know, right, with respect to real estate agents, they’re very busy people. You can’t always get them on the phone. A lot of them don’t answer the phone right away. You’ve got to engage in some ping pong back and forth before you get the person on the phone. And that ping pong takes a tremendous amount of time. The going back and forth takes forever. And so that’s what we’re eliminating right now and so that when the professional salesperson is actually taking it one step further, all they’re doing is jumping on the phone and furthering the relationship.
James:
It is pretty crazy because even what we just read, I mean I’d be afraid that a pirate’s going to be talking to a broker now like, “Ahoy, ahoy, do you have any deals on the storm front?” It’s like-
Jamil:
But what’s interesting James is that if you texted somebody in a pirate voice, they would be intrigued and say, “What is happening here?”
Dave:
Can we please do that?
James:
See, I would just be go, “Another weirdo from Seattle texting me.”
Jamil:
Or that’s another Californian looking to leave California and come somewhere else in the world, right?
Dave:
That’s just a normal day for James is someone talking to him in a pirate voice out of nowhere. Well James, are you using it at all or you sound sort of skeptical?
James:
You know, I’m like the old man now that’s like, “Oh, I don’t know about these new things.” It’s like when the internet was dialed up. I do believe this is going to get a lot better. Just like everything, anytime it comes out, it’s going to be refined, and this probably will. Like what Jamil was talking about, takeover for a lot of those VA style jobs where it’s that basic level entry communication and then bringing it over to a different sales funnel. Right now, we use VAs and cold callers to get into our office, then it goes to a professional salesperson, but it gets through those 100,000 calls before that person has to make that call. And so it can make you more efficient, and so we are starting to play around with it, but I’m just so old school that it kind of A, freaks me out that I think AI’s going to try to take my brain because I’m always worried about that.
But we’ve used it a little bit for being efficient on writing. For example, when we were trying to make a key glossary term just for general important facts and terms we wanted clients to look at, it was very efficient for us to run it through there, giving definitions of terms. But then the problem I was having is it wasn’t putting in my voice and how I would look at that term. And so I ended up rewriting the whole thing. And so I think it’s really dependent on what you want to do. Kathy used it in a very efficient way, wrote a good job description, but if you want your voice and your personality and your specialty in the communication, it’s never going to get there.
Dave:
I don’t know, man,
James:
Unless it steals your brain. So don’t load videos there.
Dave:
It’s not steal your brain. If you fed a machine learning model, I don’t know, 100 or 1,000 of emails that you’ve written, it will absolutely sound like you.
Kathy:
Yeah.
Dave:
Like ChatGPT out of the box solution might not, but if you made a custom model, you can absolutely do that. There are companies now that can literally make it sound like your voice. It can fake your voice and make it sound like you’re saying things that you’re not saying, which is absolutely terrifying.
James:
That is terrifying.
Kathy:
There’s an example of Tony Robbins put all of his materials, everything he’s ever said, written, spoke about, anything into an AI program to train it how to coach exactly the way he coaches. So I think it depends on what you put in it. So James, if you were to really work closely like Rich is trying to do, giving it feedback, training it like it’s an employee, absolutely it would learn.
Jamil:
I won’t say a name, but I was at a very influential person’s office recently and they have written a new book. This person’s a New York Times bestselling author, and so they would normally do their own audiobook. However, what they did is they contracted an AI company to do the audiobook recording for them and it saved them all the brain damage of having to sit through those recording sessions. And I listened to it and it sounded real.
Kathy:
Yeah, for sure.
Dave:
Dude, that’s crazy. That’s insane. Wow, that’s cool. I mean it’s terrifying, but that is one actually cool application. Are there other ChatGPT or similar types of programs, functions that you would like these types of programs to do for your business that you haven’t tried yet? Or have you heard of any other good applications for these types of generative AIs in real estate?
James:
I mean I think it could at some point do a surface analysis for you, like on a syndication deal or any kind of larger … Running the overall cash flow, you can give it the core metrics like the input numbers and then what the value add is. I could see it make those calculations and then that would be actually really handy for underwriting. If it can get you through 90% of the underwriting and then all of a sudden you just have to fine tune the whole thing, that’s what I’m hoping it can get to, which I’m sure it will, just to get you through the surface junk. Grab someone’s presentation, go through it all, kick out the numbers, and get you the key facts that you want to look at. That’s what I’m hoping it does, because that would make me a lot more efficient to not have to get through 90% of the fluff.
Dave:
That’s going to happen soon, I feel like.
Kathy:
Definitely. And just market data too, right, just knowing what the crime rates are and what the job growth, the wage growth of an area, all the due diligence you do on a project, especially if it’s not in an area where you live. It takes a lot of time to do that, to have an AI do that research would be amazing.
Dave:
Well, I wonder if you could do that now. Have you tried Kathy?
Kathy:
No, but I’m sure you can. I mean a lot of the data that we want is behind a paywall with expensive companies, so it’ll be interesting to see if ChatGPT can give us that, or whatever AI that we normally would have to pay for, although you have to pay for the AI as well usually.
Dave:
So what do you all make of the threat of ChatGPT? I mean I think there’s some existential threat that people are worried about, but more specifically about the economy and the prospect of job loss. Do you think there’s a real risk of that or is it overblown?
Jamil:
I don’t necessarily think it’s job loss. I think it’s job evolution, and I think that the internet did that to us in many ways. The Industrial Revolution did that to human beings in many ways. The technological revolution does that to humans in many ways, and this is an extension of the technological revolution. And it’s just going to evolve the way that we work. We are getting more efficient, we are getting more creative day by day. And as AI or machines take away some of the more basic skills, people are going to be pressed to tap into what makes us more human. The connection, the capacity to really be empathetic, I think what’s going to do is going to force human beings to lean into the things that make us more human and we get to remove the things that make us robots.
Because let’s talk about that, right? In the beginning when the Industrial Revolution happened, we became too mechanized. The assembly line of what we’ve done to people needs to undo itself if we want to be more creative. And I think this is part of that undoing.
Kathy:
Oh, I love that perspective.
Dave:
I like that. Yeah, that is a very hopeful outlook. I’m going to remember that one.
Kathy:
Yeah, I mean just as an example, when I was young, the way that a real estate agent operated is they had a book and that book showed what was for sale, but there was no way for an individual to know unless they just went and drove around and saw a For Sale sign, they had to go to the real estate agent. So then when that changed and things like realtor.com came around or Zillow and you could actually search and find out what’s for sale yourself, there was a lot of fear that real estate agents would be put out of business. There was a ton of fear about that. If you could find a property, why on earth would you need an agent?
But here we are today, 20 years later, 10, whatever it is, and real estate agents haven’t even lowered their commission very much. There’s a few companies that offer that, but most people still just go to a regular real estate agent even though they found the property themselves, because we do need often that human touch, that confirmation that you’re making the right decision, especially a big one like that. It’s a little surprising, but again, an example of how technology supported an industry and didn’t kill it. But of course it can kill an industry too while it’s developing a new one like taxis versus Uber.
James:
And it could kill off some of these algorithm companies. Like Zillow automatically calculates Zestimate, right? It goes through the algorithm, it computes the data, but it’s a little bit broad and it’s inaccurate because it’s too broad and it doesn’t get in key points of selling. So if ChatGPT can really refine that analysis, it could put companies like that just totally out of business because if you can get the ChatGPT to go through a specific property and get it more specific terms of pulling out values and running analysis on it, that would really cause some of those other companies to be irrelevant at that point.
Dave:
I think generally speaking, the potential for AI is much more economic growth. I get that there is fear that some jobs will go away, and that is probably true. You think about, like Jamil said, that the Industrial Revolution, I was listening to a podcast about this. There used to be people who physically did switchboard operators and connected people to the phone. That job completely went away. But if you think about GDP, the measurement of the economy, there’s not that many variables. It’s basically the number of people who are working and how productive they are. And if this tool makes you more productive, which it inevitably will just make the average person more productive regardless of their job, that to me seems like an enormous opportunity for economic growth, especially at a time where we’re in an economic climate right now where 15 months into a tightening cycle we’re supposed to have this job loss recession and there’s still 10.5 million open jobs in the country right now. Clearly we don’t have enough people to do all the jobs even during this adverse economic conditions we’re in. So in my mind, if this helps reduce the number of rote tasks that people have to do so that the people who are working in our economy can focus on more high skill kind of jobs, that just seems like a huge benefit to me.
All right, let’s move on from just ChatGPT and AI. I want to talk about other types of technology that you all are using for your businesses. James, I have to admit, I am skeptical to call on you here because I think we are losing credibility as an entire podcast by even having you on this show talking about technology.
James:
That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me, Dave.
Dave:
If you’re all listening, we always just give James a hard time for his technology because every time we record, his computer or his microphone or his cameras broken every single time. So we all just give him a lot of shit about not knowing how to use technology. But James, obviously you run a very successful and sophisticated business, so are there any types of technology that you’re using for your real estate business that you recommend or think people should consider?
James:
We definitely use tech. Luckily I have a good staff that can operate it a lot better than I can. But we’re kind of an old school business. CRMs, email databases, we use Salesforce for a lot of our communication through all of our internal companies. And the cool thing about Salesforce is that it can connect all of our people in our offices. We have almost 80 people at our office between six different companies, and it allows us to track properties, clients, projects, and they all speak to each other. And we have automations that automatically go through each process. It can be from underwriting a deal and finding it, going through our underwriting process, then it goes into the loan approval, then it goes into our sale process, transaction team, property increase, and then onto dispo. So it does allow 80 people in our office to go through very systematically, and it keeps one central hub for us.
From that though, we also use things like Follow Up Boss and other CRMs just for ease of … Salespeople have to be organized no matter what, because as salespeople, we can get lost in the leads. And so any kind of basic CRM we use just to keep our salespeople focused with a purpose every day what they’re supposed to be targeting. And then for properties improvement, we use simple programs. It’s not too complicated, like monday.com, where it’s a public storage, we can put things on it, everybody could communicate off a central hub, and it just gives a central place for people to track a project for our project management.
But we’re pretty old school and basic outside those core things, but we still believe in people, people get things done, and as long as we … So we use Tech more for a central hub for communicating.
Dave:
Yeah, so if everyone doesn’t know monday.com, it’s similar to Airtable. There’s a bunch of other tools out there. They’re basically project management tools. I personally love them. I think they’re extremely useful. For a small investor, would you recommend these tools? Or if you were just trying to buy one or two properties maybe a year or maybe just trying to get your first deal, would you use the same technology or do you think it’s unnecessary?
James:
I wouldn’t use Salesforce unless you’re a pretty … Honestly, it’s so expensive to maintain because it’s such a robust piece of … It’s a really cool platform for databasing, but it is robust, it’s complicated, so you have to bring in tech to fix it or design it. So it’s expensive. So I would not recommend it for any of your small businesses. Honestly we’re probably too small to be using it, but we just went down this road 10 years ago and we’ve spent so much money building it out, we’re already in it.
Dave:
Dude, that’s Salesforce’s entire business model, it’s so complicated that you can never leave them.
James:
We can’t. Everything is tied into it and it’s a little bit clunky, but it does work and you can do whatever you want with it. But then when you have someone that’s tech challenged like me, I don’t even understand what it can do. I’m like, “Well, I don’t know. Does it have my documents?” But for smaller investors, Monday.com’s great. It’s a central hub, you can communicate on it. It keeps all your storage in there. It’s very affordable. It keeps records of everything. It’s great for property management. There’s so much tech out there that you can use that is not expensive and simple. Follow Up Boss is a fraction of the cost of Salesforce and my salespeople love it. It’s simple. They have their buckets they can go through, they can do the recorded calls.
Dave:
What does it do?
James:
It’s a CRM, we use it for off market and then our investor leads. So it allows you to sort your lead flow, classify them. You can set up drip followup campaigns behind it with texting and calling. It’s a very simple program. And for salespeople, simple is good. They want to get through their leads. They don’t want to be going through and clicking 100 buttons to update a record at that point. They want to get onto the next call, and that also makes them efficient.
But there is so much software out there that you can utilize that’s not very expensive. And every investor, no matter what, should be using central hubs for sales, whether it’s renovating properties for project management. If you’re doing loans, a central hub for how you’re storing your documents, your procedures. And there’s so many things out there, just explore and figure out what works well for you because it really depends on how you work as a person and then there’s going to be something for it that’s as simple or complex as you want.
Dave:
Kathy, what do you use your business?
Kathy:
Well, first I just want to say that I think James just redeemed himself. I want to give him a big applause there.
Dave:
He did, he did. He showed that we give him too hard of a time.
Kathy:
Yeah, I knew he had some technology behind the scenes. All right, well, I mean I couldn’t agree more. A central hub is central to a business where everybody can go find the documents they need, find discussions that have been had. Communication is everything within a company and so easy to have fall apart as the company gets bigger. So we’ve since the beginning used Infusionsoft, which is now key to track all the members of Real Wealth, to track all the conversations that any investment counselors had, so that if there’s a new investment counselor, they can just take it from there. They see the history. We know everything that they’ve been interested in. This might be creepy to people, but if they showed interest in a property in Cincinnati, then we know that. That’s tagged. We make sure that they get information on that area and that they’re not getting information on things that they’re not interested in.
There was a pretty cool stat that I was looking at before this show and it said that 77% of the world already uses AI, so we shouldn’t be too freaked out about it. We’ve been using it for a long time. We just maybe haven’t called it that. But definitely our system, we’ve trained it to work for us, to know what we want and need when really following our clients and what they want and making sure that they’re only getting what they want and nothing else.
And then from there we use Basecamp, which is project management for planning events or vetting different teams or whatever we’re doing so that everybody has access to, again, the procedures, the processes, and the work that’s being done internally. And then to just run meetings, one of the biggest problems companies have is meetings can be really useless. There’s too many of them and often there’s a loud mouth I’ll say, somebody who talks too much and will just derail the meeting.
So we use ninety.io, it’s kind of based on the EOS system to keep meetings really, really efficient. It will have all the to-dos that people said they were going to do so you go through that to make sure nothing just kind of got lost in the ethers. If somebody said last week they were going to do something, it shows up on that meeting to see if they did. And if they didn’t, then it drops down to issues and it’s discussed. So all issues are held in there and there’s a time limit per issue. And the team decides which ones they’re going to discuss so one person doesn’t, again, derail the meeting and think that their issue is the most important. Maybe nobody in that meeting is involved with that issue. So ninety.io has been extremely helpful in managing those meetings, and we do them efficiently and only once a week.
Dave:
Nice. James, and Kathy and Jamil if you use these projects too, when you talk about sort of project management, you’re talking sort of about a bigger business, but what about for finding deals or contractors? Can you use these tools for the nuts and bolts even if you have a small portfolio?
Jamil:
For me, I’m training new potential wholesalers that have never even done their first deal, thousands of them across the country. And so they don’t have big budgets and they need to be able to use technology to create exactly what you just said, get an opportunity or get a deal.
Real quick, I have a student who is 15 years old in high school and he wanted to wholesale houses. Problem was is that he’s in class all day long. So he actually developed a software that is what I was talking about earlier, that uses ChatGPT and does automated lead generation so that he could communicate with real estate agents while he was in math class. And what ends up happening is he starts generating so many leads that he gets to a point where he’s closing four or five deals a month and making literally the entire yearly salary of his teacher in a month. And so I actually bought into that software with him and now I’m his business partner because I seen the use of it and it’s very inexpensive for somebody if they’re just getting started.
Dave:
Wow, that’s awesome. Back in my day, we had to just cut class if we wanted to make money.
Jamil:
Well, it’s funny. He has to get permission to go to the bathroom so that he can hide in a stall and have a conversation with a real estate agent about a house. I didn’t do stuff like that in high school, but that’s what these ambitious ones are doing today.
Dave:
All right. Well, thank you all for sharing this information about how you are using technology in your business. I think generally speaking, people think real estate is a pretty slow adopter of technology. I guess that is kind of true. But as you can see, there are really good ways to be using technology, different software programs, to be helping your business. And I think we’re probably just at the precipice now and ChatGPT and more of these AI tools are going to further help you streamline your deals. I’m sure it’s going to help find deals eventually, find markets, all that kind of stuff. So it’s definitely something I will be keeping an eye on and I’m sure you all will too.
Kathy:
I was going to say I attend a conference called IMN, and it’s a single family rental conference with a lot of big hedge funds. They started the conference when they started buying single family homes in 2012, 2013 back then. And there was a lot obviously headline news. “Oh, no. Wall Street’s coming into the landlord business, the mom and pop business, they’re going to take it over.” And there’s always fear in headlines, right?
Here we are, fast-forward 10 years and they own 2 to 3% of the rental properties out there, so certainly not a takeover. But what they did do is bring a lot of Wall Street money into creating new systems for managing portfolios. Things like AppFolio, that didn’t exist when I started buying rental properties. You had mom and pop property managers who were usually real estate agents who on the side would manage your rentals if you were buying out of state. And generally they were awful at it because they didn’t have systems, you had no idea what was going on, and you just fire them and hire a new one and same issues. Property management is still not easy, but the systems have completely evolved in just the past 10 years with Wall Street coming in.
So I say that, I know there’s a lot of fear again about Wall Street buying up single family homes, so far that hasn’t happened. But what they have brought is some really cool technology with their deep pockets that have helped property managers tap into systems, again, where the landlord can just go into a portal and see what’s going on with their property. So all I see is the next 10 years being really exciting, just an increase in technology that supports our life to be able to be more human like Jamil said. I loved that. I think it was Jamil that said that. There were years that people were working like robots and still are in some cases. So if a real robot can do that, what can that human do that a robot can’t?
So I agree. I think there’s a lot to look forward to. There will be new jobs created, and we just got to stay on top of it.
Dave:
All right, I love that. I generally think that that’s so true that people have a lot of fear about technology, but it is a tool to make you better. So rather than think like, “Oh, it’s going to replace me as a property manager or replace me as an agent,” just concentrate on how it can help you as an agent or a property manager or as an investor. Because so many of these tools are designed to do just that, to make you more efficient and to make you better at the things that you’re already doing.
All right. Well, thank you all so much for joining us. Thank you all for listening. We hope that you have a wonderful 4th of July holiday. We’ll see you guys on a Friday for our next episode of On the Market.
Everything’s broken. My light broke today. My camera now broke. Yesterday, my headphones broke. I’m not the right person to be moderating this technology conversation.
On the Market is created by me, Dave Meyer, and Kailyn Bennett, produced by Kailyn Bennett, editing by Joel Esparza and Onyx Media, research by Puja Gendal, Copywriting by Nate Weintraub. And a very special thanks to the entire BiggerPockets team. The content on the show On the Market are opinions only, all listeners should independently verify data points, opinions, and investment strategies.
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