Speaker 1 (00:00:00):
The future of real estate is cyborgs and no matter how you feel about the statement I just made there you won't be very deep into this episode. Before you come around to clarity, understanding, acceptance and excitement about this idea, no matter what your starting point is, this conversation is with Taylor Hacks, someone who is passionate about marketing and technology and among many other things is the owner of Hack and Company. Up in Edmonton, Alberta, you'll learn why he started his real estate team and why he's not building a mega team. He shares a very specific framework to help us create and deliver an awesome and now experienced by blending the best of people with the best of machines. He also shares many very specific ways that he's using AI in his business and the way his team is using AI in their business to enhance relationships and results. Here is Taylor Hack on Real Estate team os

Speaker 2 (00:00:53):
No matter where your business is today or where you want to take it, you'll get there faster and more profitably with an operating system. Welcome to Team Os, your guide to starting, growing and optimizing real estate team. Here's your host, Ethan Butte.

Speaker 1 (00:01:07):
Taylor, I am so excited to have you on the show. It's been a little while since we've connected in person. We've connected a few times over a long period of time and I'm psyched to have you on the show.

Speaker 3 (00:01:18):
I'm so excited to be here. I really felt like when you came to follow up boss, it was such a big win, right? Seeing this type of energy is fantastic. Seeing this type of exploration where you are really working with the top teams to try to understand excellence and understand performance, I can't help but to support that. That's exactly what I'm into.

Speaker 1 (00:01:43):
You absolutely are. I appreciate the positive feedback and it's been an absolute joy and privilege to go down this road and we'll follow some of the normal courses here. Off the top, get a little bit about your journey, where you are with your team, how maybe that's ebbed and flowed over the past, I don't know, decade or so. And then we're going to get into something super interesting just to tease for folks watching and listening. You probably picked it up from the title of the episode, but we're going to get into the future of real estate being cyborgs for real and real use cases of AI beyond having chat GPT write you a property description, an email nurture sequence, which is where I think a lot of that's the depth that most people have gone. So I'm excited about it all, but we're going to start Taylor where we always do, which is a must have characteristic of a high performing team. What comes to mind for you?

Speaker 3 (00:02:31):
A must have characteristic for a high performing team? I really feel as though it is, you see it in the relationships of the teammates, so maybe I would say synergy is the actual word that you would put on it. I think the high performance teams, they feel like a sports team. I often feel as though entrepreneurs make mistakes when they refer to their business as like a family. I would love if my teammates were expressing that. If my teammates said this feels like a family, that would be great, but I probably would never say that because I feel as though this is a sports team. People are here to play to find the best in themselves, but also to be among other great players

Speaker 1 (00:03:16):
Synergy. I mean it's one of those words that I think is misunderstood, but it's applied perfectly here and I think you described it really well too. It's another cliche way to treat it, I guess would be like a three plus three equals seven or eight or eight and a half or something because we're all getting more out of each other. We would get than we would deliver individually. So you started in mortgage, you did that for eight plus years-ish. You transitioned into real estate at some point you started your team hack and company tell that story in as much depth as you would like to and I'm specifically interested in two transitions. One leaving mortgage and coming to the real estate side and then two going from I'm an agent who's found success and has my legs under me and I'm getting serious about my business. I'm going to bring some people around me, but tell that story however you wish to bring us up to today.

Speaker 3 (00:04:11):
I appreciate that. I think that the way I see those is almost like solving problems. So the problem that I had in mortgages was that I seemed to be at the edge of my skillset. It wasn't right in my wheelhouse. There wasn't a lot of things that I was passionate about. In fact, it felt like being the wide receiver in a game where you don't maybe get thrown to all that often or the plays that you make are not the plays you want to be on. Whereas I was watching the quarterback, I was watching the real estate agent from that position and I did mortgages for eight years and at a pretty high level, I think the last year that I did it, I cracked $30 million in mortgages funded that year. And so I was getting these deals from top agents and I would also get these deals sent to me from not agents and where I could see the patterns was something that was really remarkable because it helped me see that top agents were kind of fit into two groups. There were agents that were really good at finding people to help and there were agents that were actually good at helping people and you would see it in the deals. And then you would also see that there are people that are struggling with the concepts in real estate that are writing actual deals.

Speaker 3 (00:05:33):
You would definitely see in back and forth negotiations on paper how those things landed and that was first or that was my experience of doing mortgages is that all the deals were on paper and you could see the back and forth in the initials and crosses out. And then I transitioned into real estate mostly because I was upset, I was angry. Those families are trying to deliver 18 summers to those kids and you got into real estate because you didn't like showing up to work and now you are their person. And I blame everybody. I blame the clients that choose their agent by who's the nicest at the barbecue, this is your family business, get in it to win it. And I am irritated with the agents that are satisfied with the three star experience. They got a deal and that was great. And so when I came in, I was doing the math, every time I would sell six houses, I would put one person out of business in real estate and that was what motivated me. I knew that if I came in I would be able to be competitive and then I really wanted to try to do well enough that there wouldn't be any room for these people that just they weren't looking to create value.

Speaker 1 (00:06:58):
And so you saw the opportunity just being the bar is low. I know I can come in, I can walk my way into exceeding that bar. Obviously being on the mortgage side gave you some insight into the industry to come in cold. You weren't necessarily like a firefighter or a teacher who had some understanding of real estate, but you knew a lot of the process, at least from a different perspective. I assume you were successful pretty early on as you imagined you would be. So pick up from there. What were the first couple years and when did you start your team in earnest and why?

Speaker 3 (00:07:34):
I had a few skills coming into real estate that were uncommon. I had been in mortgages, but previous to that I had been in high-end car sales and as an adult I've never received a regular paycheck. I've been on a hundred percent commissioned the whole ride. So those things gave me some advantages. I didn't actually see how well it would go. I didn't have confidence as much as I was irritated past my fear, I was coming in to kind of make a mark and I overshot because of how scared I was. So it only took me about 32 months to make a million dollars in commissions. After that, I was getting a lot of attention from the industry where there was groups like my own brand and others that were asking me to come and speak in places that I'd never traveled to. I didn't travel a lot before real estate, but it came into this other real big challenge, which is in my third year of real estate I did 60 transactions in the first six months.

Speaker 3 (00:08:32):
I wasn't set up for that. Worked all the time. That sounds exhausting from when my eyes opened until when my eyes closed for stretches over 180 days. I had a young family. My wife is an incredible partner and she needed to be because our approach was divide and conquer and coming through that I ended up with a situation where I just sold all my time. I sold out on all my time. If somebody wanted to meet me, I was easily two or three weeks away and it wasn't even a situation where I consciously made this decision, I just ended up in this trap and that's how it felt. Everybody around me was looking at me. I just got the biggest dream. The industry was like, how did you do this? People outside were surprised, but then in my own experience I was like on fire. I was so uncomfortable and I was afraid that if somebody called me and said they wanted to have me help their grandmother, I can't. I was afraid of other things. Like what I was hearing from coaching was that I needed to set these filters. So could you imagine asking me if you could trust me with your grandmother and me asking you what price point she's in?

Speaker 1 (00:09:57):
Right? No, I can't do that. I

Speaker 3 (00:09:59):
Just can't do it. And so if I was developing this much referral business and repeat business, how could I put this together and I could already start to see how I was putting it together because of some of the things I did kind of early on. So I see my phone similar to maybe how a carpenter might see a hammer and I used my phone in ways that I didn't see other people using it. This is a ways back, I'm talking like 2013, but in 2013 I had enough text shortcuts from my common text messages to other people that if you average at 22 minutes or 22 words per minute, like the average thumb typist, I would've had an extra work week every year against a competitor like that. I was already starting to use my phone like an extra hand and now that's starting to transition because artificial intelligence is giving us the option to have a second brain as well as a third hand.

Speaker 1 (00:11:01):
How did you bring the right people around you who had the same standards as you and what does the team look like today? And then we're going into appendages, digital and physical appendages.

Speaker 3 (00:11:17):
When I first started, I didn't understand it. I think that learning how to manage and run a business was harder than learning real estate by an order of magnitude. So I realized that early on, all I could show people was how I did this, not how to do this. I just didn't have a large enough sample size of experience, but I had also learned in sales that no one is going to do it like you, so I could kind of help them find their own way. My first teammate was Christian Bailey. He was amazing. He ended up on HGTV. He's just an incredible person and we still talk and that also helped. I had maybe better teammates than I was a team leader and I just appreciate these people because we did end up finding those win-wins. But when you were saying like three plus three equals seven, eight or nine, well I think in the beginning it's like six and a half and you try to work it out from there.

Speaker 3 (00:12:20):
Having that as the first start, then you have to just learn all of the skills involved there, when to bring people on, when to recognize that they're not in the right spot anymore. I really believe that it's right person or wrong person for the culture and then do I have a seat for them or not or are they in the wrong seat and there's another seat they should be in? That's a big part of how I look at it now and that's where it's progressed. I think if you looked at maybe our business now not knowing what it was supposed to be, you might see it as a coaching program with a very controlled environment. So imagine if coaches could systemize a lot of people's businesses. It would be easier to help them achieve results if you started to level out these things. I see that that's what you're helping people do through this podcast and I appreciate that. But that's probably what I would say it looks like. Now as far as people, there's about 10 of us now including our support team and so far this year we've been selling a house pretty much every other day.

Speaker 1 (00:13:35):
A couple of keys to per agent productivity because it's one of the things I really love and respect about what you're doing. Highly productive people working together in a synergistic way. Give folks just a practical tip before we dive into the tech side of stuff or the intersection of humans and tech. What are a couple of keys to per agent productivity? I mean how much of it is just straight up do the work and do it consistently and do it reasonably well? And how much of it is looking for efficiencies in prioritizing things in some of these other more strategic plays?

Speaker 3 (00:14:08):
Well, I think I would have to subscribe to the Billy Bean approach of baseball, which is like instead of get a few people that are really high in talent, you're really looking for those things. That score runs how many that getting onto base all the time in real estate, the habits that people develop and how they spend their time is probably the equalizer. I know agents that are incredibly talented. I also know agents that it surprises me on their results based on their skills. That's something that amazes me. I know a few real estate agents that are high producers that are terrible salespeople. I think the hardest thing about them listing houses is someone else has to spend two hours with them, but then you look at them and you're like, you're amazing. Can I get closer to this? Can I see more of this? And that actually got me obsessed early on when real estate went really well, I was nervous.

Speaker 3 (00:15:11):
I'm like, man, I'm responsible for this potential now. So I started to really pay attention to some of the top agents in the world to the point where I developed relationships and then I went and found them. There was this guy Don Matheson, he's out of Phoenix, Arizona. He let me stay at his house. Dawn was a gracious host. I told him I'm new but it's going well and if there's anything that I can give you, I will literally come and work in your office. I went and saw Veronica, I Figueroa in Florida, same thing, man. She's so warm. It was like being part of her family. I was out at a barbecue with her friends. She gave me a group of her team that I sat down with for an afternoon and just worked with them and it was amazing. But going and seeing these businesses is kind of what gave me the confidence to build something like this and to understand what it's like.

Speaker 3 (00:16:11):
But I also have to credit the follow-up boss community. A couple years ago I got to be a speaker on the first national convention and I was standing on the balcony between Justin Haver and Chris Lindell and these are the people that I was chasing. It took me a long time to be on a panel with Justin and at a separate event be on a panel with Chris and that was something that was amazing that I then was standing there and even though I don't fit in anywhere near with their production in that moment, I fit in and we were just standing and talking about things. And I've had other chats with Justin, but I think it's a lot about the people that you surround yourself with as well.

Speaker 1 (00:16:56):
Just a quick aside for folks watching and listening, everyone I've had on this show is open and welcoming. I've connected people behind the scenes. Some people have reached out to those people directly. That's what this is about. This is about of course the episodes themselves and having something to watch or listen and learn while you're walking the dog or working out or doing whatever you do while you listen to a podcast. I do a variety of different things, but it's also about bringing this stuff to light. So I love that you took that approach Taylor and I can only imagine how much that accelerated your learning and your curiosity and opened your mind and changed your perspective. You gave me one more follow up here on behalf of all those folks who are at that edge of a 6, 8, 10 person organization. Depending on what you're watching or what you're listening to or what you're motivated by, some people feel compelled to step on the gas and try to plow up to say 30, 40, 50, 60, 70 agents.

Speaker 1 (00:17:54):
That's a very messy process. I feel like where you're at is that edge where you're like, I have control of things. I understand what's going on. I have great people around me. We have very high productivity. This is probably a profitable organization in almost all seasons with maybe a few exceptions because of the way that it's sized and structured. And again, per agent productivity is the key to all profitability in my limited experience. Why haven't you? Because you have access to these people. You created access to these people. You certainly are a smart enough person to figure out how to get through to a hundred agent organization if you wanted to. On behalf of all those people who are like, I don't really want to do that either. What was your thought process around this stuff? What did you see that you were like, I love what we're doing right now and I have other things I want to dial in and work on rather than just cranking up the scale of this organization? Because I think that confuses a lot of people and most of the mainstream culture says bigger, bigger, bigger.

Speaker 3 (00:18:59):
And also they're different animals. And I also, I know a lot of real estate agents and the people that run mega teams, I feel as though it's a different expression of entrepreneurship than the people that run these smaller squads. For me, I looked at it like creating the Navy Seals against everyone else's standing army. I very much understood what you were talking about with profitability is based on agent production. But I also looked at it from their perspective. When someone was asking to join my team, what were they actually asking? Can we win together? I need to get to know these people enough to understand what wins look like to them, but then can we win together? Is the basis of all of that and understanding how they recognize what wins are and what they see as being connected. Those things are kind of what I felt on that side. And then it became down to how many people can I care for? How fast can I get them running and how far should I take them? And then starting to more so look at it like what's healthy? What database size is the right tribe for each one of my teammates for a group that they can kind of shepherd in real estate and stay connected to? So I keep going in that and I think that that's more what dictates the size more than me saying like, oh, what's big is good. Small is not good.

Speaker 1 (00:20:31):
I think a key part of per agent productivity going forward is something that you spend a lot of time thinking about, talking about. I'm sure some of that is formal, some of it's informal. I'm sure you do a lot of reading, watching and listening around this stuff. I know you're involved in a number of other things outside of real estate as well, personally and professionally. So I guess to send us in the zone of cyborgs and artificial intelligence, I'll just give you a paraphrase from one of our conversations recently. It's that the future of real estate is cyborgs. I'd love for you to just start there.

Speaker 3 (00:21:06):
The future of real estate is cyborgs. Look at where we've come from and where we are now and where we're going. So where we have come from is no machines and then there were some machines arguably now they're saying it's even. So when you take a look at some of the entities that have challenged the real estate model the way that we know it, those big brands they have so far failed at offering realtor less service that is primarily delivered through computers. And that's because I think that there's this flickering edge that every business is trying to catch no matter what industry they're in. And that's that consumers want awesome and now they want awesome and now and computers are really good at being now, but so far they've failed to be awesome. When we count it in five star experiences, that's just where it's, so if you take a look at using the computers to make you more now and then bringing that real human connection to make it awesome, that's the mix.

Speaker 3 (00:22:20):
And without bringing that now part of computers, you're never going to be competitive. The response rate that consumers are looking for is too demanding to do it volume without computers. And so now it's where can you make the mix? So I imagine this future where we're actually living part of this right now where I get to walk through your house with you as maybe an agent that you're interviewing as a listing agent and I get to be Taylor spending time with Ethan. I have to remember enough to ask the questions that will get all the information that I need to keep doing my job, but there'll be no note taking. There'll be no stopping and being like, oh, I just got to and then I had to send you three forms, none of that. All of that will be taken out, those interruptions and we'll demand it from each other. When we are having machine list contact where we're talking and having coffee to do anything else, we'll start to steal from that experience. So you're going to end up with these really gifted real estate agents that are gifted at empathy and gifted at connection, and they're going to be paired with some of the best systems that will essentially record those conversations and turn them into task lists and highlights and essentially use prompt chains to deliver things like real estate listings.

Speaker 1 (00:23:49):
I say this probably every other episode, but I'm going to say it again. What Taylor just shared is the reason we have back buttons in our video players and our podcast app players. Listen to that again. And I just want to, before we jumped on, I looked up a definition of cyborg. I think a lot of people might confuse it for something like an Android or a robot. It is not one definition is a living organism, human being that has restored function or enhanced abilities. In this case we're talking about enhanced abilities, but cyborg could have site restored. There are a lot of really cool things happening in the zone of restored function of the human being as a living organism. So living organism that is restored function or enhanced abilities due to the integration of some artificial component or technology that relies on feedback. So that feedback is a human in the loop piece or some kind of a feedback mechanism. Maybe it's a technical feedback or human feedback. What all we're talking about is enhancing the abilities of the person by closely attaching whether physical or just kind of functional as you described here, your vision, I think I'm with you on it. Did that spark anything for you by the way?

Speaker 3 (00:25:02):
Well, you can break this down to a real fundamental, it's a Steve Jobs quote, but the least efficient animal on the planet is a human and the most efficient animal is a human with a bicycle. We introduced machines pretty early in this game and they improved our outcome. So I argue that at some level we were cybernetic, but I think most people think about cybernetic involving electronics. And so that's what's happening now. I'm delivered to my appointments in EZ without my phone, I actually would've trouble being a citizen. And what I mean by that is now in first world countries without a phone, you have real big challenges in a lot of the gateways around you for access, right? They don't make maps available because we have phones. They don't make the world the way they used to. So arguably now you actually have to be cybernetic to be a citizen and it's just degrees here from there on out.

Speaker 3 (00:26:06):
So the degrees that I see is dividing it based on kind of a meritocracy. My memory's shot. I might've seen too many people in person. And now when I come and see somebody that I recognize at the grocery store, sometimes I'm terrified. Sometimes I'm like three aisles in looking through follow past being like I know it's a Greg, which Greg, and that to me is because my memory isn't awesome, but if I was wearing the glasses that they're going to deliver, having that person in my contact when I rounded that aisle immediately would've identified them and what they mean to me, then I get to be a human and make them feel great. I think that that's a benefit. If you think that computers are just cold, no one has the memory that you want them to have, and it'll get so good that celebrities will remember every fan

Speaker 1 (00:27:09):
Man. So much good stuff there. You already teed this up, but I want to put a real button on it or get a more explicit take from you on it before we move into some of the practical side of ai, including prompt chains and custom gpt, but obviously the human is going to deliver the human experience. You used the word empathy around that. The machine is going to be good at memory recall processing, especially with speed, you already characterized that a couple of different ways and understanding is critical to empathy. And if we over automate or we outsource too many tasks to the machine, I personally feel like we're giving away some amount of understanding. What is your sensitivity or thought around striking that balance where I am still doing some of these things that might strike me as inefficient. I could get a machine to do them, the machine would be doing it at 85% versus my 90 or 95%. I'm not trading off that much, but I am losing something some amount of understanding by not keeping my hands dirty in some of this stuff. How do you yourself find that line and how are you advising the agents on your team or anyone else that's seeking advice or input around this stuff? What do you keep your hands on? Maybe that might surprise people because well, this guy's super tech forward. Why would he keep his hands on that?

Speaker 3 (00:28:34):
I would say that there's a surprising amount and also the way that I work around my business. So I'll make things run on their own and then I'll go work on another section of the business and then I'll come back to that later and kind of evaluate and move from there. But when you're looking to divide the world where you're going to use automation and where you're not, you actually have to walk off stage and wander into the audience. You turn around and you sit down and if you can see any of the wires behind any of the mechanics that you have made, that is a failure. We don't tolerate things like that anymore. So where you need to be what we call a human in the loop, which is going to be something that's so important as we move into this age of artificial intelligence, is going to have to be from that perspective.

Speaker 3 (00:29:25):
And you're going to make choices just like we all do when we're going through challenges and making compromises where you know what? When you delivered it in person, it could have been a hundred percent of your effort and your effort is amazing, but then when maybe you have a teammate deliver it on their experience, they might score lower. Or maybe in my case they might score higher than me. And then when you put a computer in, you might lose some points there. So the question becomes is it worthwhile to lose the points there? Are you making a positive exchange where you're going to deliver and possibly even deliver the unexpected in a different part of your experience as a human so you can make those trade-offs, but in the end, the people in the seats, and anytime you hear the world algorithm related to social media, I want you to think audience, the computer is just tracking audience behavior into a formula. That's what an algorithm is. So you have to go to the seats and look back at the stage and say, okay, this is the experience that we're delivering five stars or no,

Speaker 1 (00:30:34):
Really good. I am finding this just for what it's worth, eminently quotable, including the can we see the wires? That's it. And more importantly, can we see it from the audience perspective and what do we see and how do we feel about that? And more importantly, how do the people around us seem to feel about that? What kind of feedback are we getting or what does it seem like their experiences? Okay, obviously generative AI and chat, GPT in particular was the big public experience, collective experience with artificial intelligence. It's obviously decades and decades in the making, but that was the big opening scene of AI in popular culture. Obviously we got the slew of webinars and courses people could buy and information and misinformation and self-motivated disinformation about what can and should be done with this stuff. I think where most people landed, and I said this earlier is, oh, I got it to write a couple emails for my drip sequence, or I got it to write my property descriptions.

Speaker 1 (00:31:41):
I just pointed at this thing and it writes it. Like that's all cool. But I would love to know from your experience, what was your initial foray into generative AI in particular? How far did you push it? What do you really love about it and are still doing with it? And then what I'd love to really do is share with people who are with us at this point. This is not five minutes into the conversation, they're committed with us here. I would love to share a couple more operational things. I mean you already alluded to it. Let me set this up, let it run, and I'm going to come back in a day or a week or a month and tweak it up a little bit. I'd love to get into some operational applications of artificial intelligence, but start with your own journey into it, including the generative AI piece and what you've been doing with that out of the gate to present in order to have it be a little bit more relatable to people.

Speaker 3 (00:32:39):
I came into this a pretty weird way in 2017, I was nominated for Inman's Innovator of the Year and I made it as a finalist. So for the first time in my life I headed to San Francisco. A friend of mine has a good friend of his that at the time worked for Facebook. And one afternoon I was standing in front of Mark Zuckerberg's office with a few friends. Now it sounds weird how things can kind of happen from happenstance, and I didn't understand that that meant anything to anyone but the group of us, I didn't even know that Facebook was private and you couldn't go in there. It wasn't open for tours or anything else like that. And then I got a sense that I was in a special place where the person that was touring us, the head of security, was explaining that we were looking at about $11 million of ballistic glass for one office and that mark had the second highest amount of death threats to anyone in the United States that year, and Donald Trump was number one.

Speaker 3 (00:33:49):
So in that moment, I didn't think that anything was changing for me. I was on tour, I met some nice people, this was awesome. But meanwhile, I checked into Facebook on Facebook that's like how you log in and it showed up on my feed and all of a sudden I had friends that are like, Hey, we're in Silicon Valley right now too. What are you doing there? And there were people from my city that I wasn't connected to. And to make a long story short, I ended up in a cafe back in where I'm from Edmonton, wearing a virtual reality visor looking at someone's MRI floating in their head. A short time after that, I started attending tech events. I was an investor and advisor to a company that was doing augmented reality for surgery. It ended up with us being in contact with people like nasa.

Speaker 3 (00:34:39):
There are some podcasts that I've done interviewing some people from the tech community, including someone that would be considered the foremost expert in quantum computers in the United States. So my entrance to seeing some of these things roll out was from the tippy top where someone explains that quantum computers are so advanced that without artificial intelligence there's no way to interface with them. These large language models we're using are in some way like the keyboard to God when it comes to knowledge, and we are just fumbling around with them like children right now. So I've been in this place where I've stood next to some people that are astounding. They're at the foremost edge of this. And then I get to bring those concepts back to real estate and understand that, okay, one, there is no question that artificial intelligence will change us more than mobile phones and more than the internet.

Speaker 3 (00:35:40):
So what was very clear to me is that I needed to understand artificial intelligence at a deep level for defense. How was I going to save my assistant? How is I going to save her from this rising wave of the ability to do mundane tasks, which is part of what I needed help with, but now that she's part of my team, we win together. So she was the first person that I also had take a prompting course to start to understand where those pieces in our systems were so that we could essentially start by saving her, but save us all from this rising wave of ability. And through that, I learned a few things. I learned that the way the most of the world interpreted the entrance of systems like chat g PT was novelty. They looked at it, they used it four or five times.

Speaker 3 (00:36:33):
They found that it was kind of like it was okay, but it didn't have a lot of utility case in their life. So then they abandoned. And that's the thing I'm worried about is I'm worried that somebody that's hearing this right now is in that position and they don't understand that the water's rising in that way because the future of the way that people use these systems is going to be incredible. Right now we think of a marketer producing more content by using a large language model. Now once this tool gets optimized and you put it in the hands of someone who's like a generation in, watch a child use an iPad right now it looks like mental gymnastics by the comparison to what we did at that age. And when you see this next group that they feel like if artificial intelligence was taken away from them that they'd lost a pet, that group is about to screw us all up. That group is about to make average real estate videos that look like movie trailers. That group is going to take public remarks and when something is trending like Joe Rogan, they're going to have all the public remarks written as though they were read by Joe Rogan. There will be these trends, these novelties, and it will be so incredible. But that's the thing is that once it gets here, it's going to be sweeping and changing almost everything we touch

Speaker 1 (00:38:01):
First steps inside your real estate organization. You went on this journey, your motivation I already love because it's starting from the right questions. Like, okay, if I'm seeking utility from this thing that I know is powerful, how can I save this job? What does this job look like when it is a truly made more cybernetic or something? I don't know if that's the right term, but what does my assistant look like? So give us a couple practical things. What are some things that used to be done in a much more manual way three years ago in your business and how has prompting or prompt chains or custom GPT enhanced a couple of those things? I'm asking for a couple of use cases and I would be remiss if I didn't introduce the idea that I definitely want you to point someone watching and listening who fits the description you already offered, which I think is the most common one of all, I fussed around with it for a half an hour or for five minutes or for two days or two weeks, and it's just not that obvious to me. Where should we send those people to get psyched up and educated in a way that can start them down the journey that you've been on for some time now?

Speaker 3 (00:39:22):
Okay, so use cases. Imagine that somebody showed up in your business and they were good at the same things. Chad, GPT is good at. That means that they're going to be pretty good when given good direction on research and they're going to be able to the fastest typer you've ever seen. The way that they're able to produce text content is probably their superpower. Now, where can you apply that? Think about how much text communication we do through emails. There should never be any more email templates because imagine what it looks like with an AI system and a human in the loop. So I can essentially feed a text template into an artificial intelligence system like playground, the back of Chad GPT, and then tell them a few things that are personal to my clients, and now all of them look really human. They're better than what I write, but they're like a combination of the email template that gets the job done that you want and also that personal experience that you have.

Speaker 3 (00:40:30):
Think about assigning things to Chad, GPT based on the stuff you can already see. Imagine going to the grocery store with a list and being like, okay, in real estate, what do we do? Well, we have these deliverables. We do a ton of communication. That's like number one. Oh, communication is number one of what you do. Yes, communication is number one of what we do. Okay, what percentage of that is text? Okay, let's assign this to Chad, GPT. So one of the things that we found is that we were in a buyer's market for a long period of time, so we had a lot of seller communication. So seller communication, whether it's feedback after showings, that's a huge pain point for so many agents, but imagine that you could talk on the phone with the agent that just showed the property or someone on your team can, and then they could just put the bullet points into a prompt and then the prompt makes an email that is really good for the client.

Speaker 3 (00:41:24):
So that's probably our highest repetition of using artificial intelligence is through our feedback system. My highest use of intelligence is probably related to becoming better at things I suck at. So I really liked the way that I could see some people navigate things like Google Sheets or Excel. Now with chat GPT, I'm a monster. All I got to do is tell chat GPT what I want the sheet to do and it will give me to-do steps. It will make formulas that I can copy and paste. So the way this allows me to do the other part of business, which is like measure and manage is huge, those sheets to me are so valuable because they answer the questions I'm asking related to maybe our finances in one section or teammate productivity in another. The other places that we've used it is in taking a look at a whole bunch of concepts. So can we make a custom GPT that's locked from the outside where we can basically feed in deal information like PDFs and everything else like that of deals and it can produce a trade record sheet.

Speaker 3 (00:42:39):
Can we do that consistently? How much garbage can we put in there? How bad can it get before this thing will still make it go? That's where we're testing a lot of these things. But how I think this is going to change the landscape of real estate is client expectation is going to change based on your competition. Imagine if for your next market evaluation I showed up there, but instead of just a basic six sheets from MLS, I had thesis level research. That's something that will change. There's going to be an agent in your marketplace that's going to say, I'm going to go deeper than anybody else to make sure that we extract all the value of your house. I have the best market evaluations could be one of the value propositions. There could be another value proposition where they talk about the amount of content that they put out, and that could be based on the superpowers given to them by these systems.

Speaker 3 (00:43:32):
And they can say, we put out more content every time we list a house, and each time those people are going to raise the bar and raise the bar and raise the bar until we all do it. We saw it happen with floor plans during covid. We saw it happen with all these other things as the market moves up. So I would more look at it, where do I think I'm vulnerable and based on who this employee is right now, this chat GPT employee, what are they good at? But the key is where am I going to have to ride as the human in the loop

Speaker 1 (00:44:00):
Again, back button for a reason? Go ahead and bounce that back whether it's set. If that's set to 30 seconds, I'd go three or four on that one. If I was listening to this on a neighborhood walk or something because you offered a lot of very good use cases there, I'd love for you to do a variety of things just for the sake of time, a variety of things kind of all in one here. I know that there are people watching or listening that are like, okay, this is compelling. I may or may not be compelled by fear related to this stuff. I don't know it. I don't understand it. This guy seems to know what the heck he's talking about. So maybe make that a little bit more approachable. I know you're wrestling with this stuff trial and error, and a lot of time that might feel wasted, but all you're doing is making an investment. You're fronting time today in order to save time forever. What are some first steps when you're empowering your own agents around this stuff and you're providing training and development or to other people who seek your guys? What are the first three to five steps? Where can people go to learn more? What are some good resources that you trust for someone who is in the early stages of going on this journey that you've been on for some time?

Speaker 3 (00:45:14):
Really, if you're looking to investigate further, it's so easy to get confused. Everybody's competing right now. The noise around AI is so loud, people are picking up jerseys for the different types. Oh, I'm a perplexity guy and you are a cloud fan. Those types of things, that tribalism is already taking place, and the worst part is it has never been easier to be taken by someone who's slinging snake oil than right now. The amount of experts in the AI space right now that are experts of nothing is the vast majority, and that's just because it's the new hot thing, and we've seen that before. So when I look at the things that I use the most in places where you can approach this, so the first thing I did is I looked around for somebody who might be credible in this space. So where I found it was the AI exchange.

Speaker 3 (00:46:09):
This is a community for small business owners that are looking to implement ai. And the reason I found it credible is because the CEO, Rachel Woods, she is a former Facebook data scientist, and her sister is also very credible. They had an exit in the wine business before making this. This isn't their first startup, but as a guy who pays a lot of attention to startups, I knew that this is the team I wanted to bet on. And then what they offered, and I was part of the beta test when I did this course, it was like a G sheet and a high five, but it was an understanding of how to use the backend of chat GPT, which is called playground, where you can adjust things like the temperature, which determines how creative the machine is or deterministic. You can do a lot of dance settings and the course was called AI for Ops bootcamp.

Speaker 3 (00:47:06):
Now, I liked how this gave me the fundamentals to do many things. So eventually I became an advocate. Now I'm an affiliate for that. So you can find those links in my Instagram bio if you're looking to look into this. And they have both a community and a course. So I went outside of real estate, and I have to say that I'm suspect of a lot of things that are going on inside real estate where people are professing themselves as experts, especially like a few people cruising around with four digit courses. I think that there's some people out there that will offer you a $400 course that'll smoke these people. So it's interesting from that perspective. And then when I look at my quick shots, if I look at the way that this makes my life easier, most days I kind of boil it down to three.

Speaker 3 (00:47:52):
There's three that I have saved that I use all the time, and it's write an email and it has my voice paragraph in it so I can just fire in who I'm sending this to, one sentence of what the email's about and maybe four bullet points and it gives me something that I can use. Now, I don't know if you want to do this, but I wanted to see that this was working, and so I made something in my prompt that at the bottom of all my emails, it says AI generated fact, and it's a fact about my city that's real estate related. So I want to raise the flag to the people around me that I have an interest in ai. So I actually have this weird AI tag at the bottom of my emails that I send out that I write with ai.

Speaker 3 (00:48:37):
I also have another quick shot that's reply to email where I can copy and paste an email that's been sent to me and then just a few bullet points, and it gives them a complete friendly email in return. This has made me better. I'm not as friendly as I am with ai. I just don't have the time. And then the other one is replying to reviews. I have one that I use that is about taking what the person said out of the review, recognizing the teammate that said it, and then also drawing on one thing that they said that we were good at, whether it was negotiation or finding them the house or going the extra mile and working that in. So it's just faster for me to participate in that. So see how basic those things are.

Speaker 3 (00:49:20):
But it's all based on time, and when you compare AI tailor to non-AI tailor, AI tailor can just do more. In my mind, it goes back to when humans started eating meat. If you take a look at a gorilla, they spend 80% of their waking hours trying to meet their calorie requirement, and as soon as we started eating meat, it dropped to 20%, which meant we all had free time. So we got to learn things and innovate and develop, and regardless of what you choose to eat now, it's kind of funded from that side of creating that free time, and I think that AI will do the same, but most of the thing that I think everyone has to remember is we're not going to use the free time to relax. The people you compete with are maniacs. They're going to use that free time to compete with you.

Speaker 1 (00:50:08):
Yeah, agree. I mean, that's part of the fear side of it too is what I'm not doing. I know someone else is doing, and I know that people are thinking working while I sleep. I also know, as you alluded to earlier in this conversation, it wasn't an illusion. You specifically said it, and I believe it as well, this next generation where they're completely native to this, it's just going to be natural to them and they're going to feel like you took a pet. If you take away the tools and it is just steps toward Cyborg for me or other people who are not steeped in this and have not committed enough time in trial and error in learning, how do you get these emails to write in your voice? Is it a series of rule sets that already exist so that when you engage with it already has a whole bunch of stuff by default? Just describe that process.

Speaker 3 (00:51:05):
So when you learn how to prompt, you'll learn some structures. So yes, you could type in a single sentence into any of these LLMs and you'll get a result, but then if the result's not what you want, how do you tweak that sentence that you asked it? Well, maybe if you separated what you were asking it into categories, like gave it instructions and context and criteria and other specifics, you could then, if you got the wrong output, go back and say, ah, it didn't understand this, or, oh, okay, I want it to be more specific, so I got to change what my criteria of response is, and that will help you start to problem solve, so you'll get things that feel smooth. What a voice paragraph is is it is written by AI for ai, so imagine doing an analysis of something you've either said or written and determining those speech patterns in there, and then getting the AI system to write a paragraph that would contain enough that you could use it in future prompts, like one that would write an email so that it becomes the criteria so that the system is instructed to make this email sound and feel like the example in the voice paragraph.

Speaker 3 (00:52:28):
That's how it becomes smooth. Now, I want to use this as another example because we're trying to cast out into the future and say like, okay, what does this look like in the future? Well, imagine that during onboarding, your voice would be recorded talking to me, and then I would analyze it to determine your disc profile, and then I would actually vary my entire experience to be custom fit to your personality. That's where I think people are actually going to create value, and it's going to be in ways that you can't see on the outside, but all of a sudden everybody will love one person and then that'll be the tell. But just imagine that the experience that you're delivering was tuned to someone's disc profile. That is something you can do right now.

Speaker 1 (00:53:12):
Yeah, I've seen disc profile analysis as chrome extensions for a while, but they're kind of clumsy. This idea of doing it in a more seamless way is super exciting. I appreciate sharing this vision. I know that it's been enlightening, encouraging, probably anxiety inducing for some, but all it is is a matter of exploration. I don't think you have to have been inside Facebook HQ and adjacent to millions of dollars of bulletproof glass to take this journey as well. I appreciate you sharing this. We'll probably do a follow up a year from now on emergent themes and use cases and things, but for now, we're going to call this an episode after I give you my three pairs of closing questions. You ready for that? I'm

Speaker 3 (00:54:00):
Ready. I'm ready.

Speaker 1 (00:54:01):
Okay. What's your very favorite team to root for besides hack and co, or what is the best team you've ever been a member of besides your own real estate team?

Speaker 3 (00:54:10):
My favorite team to root for is Red Bull Racing Formula one team, and the best team I've ever been a member of is Aris md augmented reality for surgery.

Speaker 1 (00:54:22):
Oh yeah. Cool. Nice callback. What is one of your most frivolous purchases, or what's a cheapskate habit you hold onto even though you probably don't need to?

Speaker 3 (00:54:32):
My most frivolous purchase was a stretch goal. It was a portion nine 11

Speaker 1 (00:54:36):
New or vintage.

Speaker 3 (00:54:38):
It was vintage. I was looking for an analog car. It was between that and A-B-M-W-M one, which is not very common where I'm cheap. I have to say that I think that the thing that I have struggled to spend money on is I think some services. I guess now looking back on it, some things I just do out of habit, I guess like mowing my lawn and I just won't farm it out. I don't know why.

Speaker 1 (00:55:09):
Yeah, I'll tell you what I mean. For me, mowing a lawn is good. Think time. I mean, it's physical. It's relatively mindless, unless you're moving a lot the shape of your yard, you're just kind of doing it. It's physical. I use it as think time. I like mowing my lawn, and I kind of wish my lawn was about 30% bigger, not just to have more space, but it is got a lot of curves in it instead of square edges. I wish it was more square so I could just chill out a little bit longer outside. Anyway. What are you doing, Taylor, when you are investing time in resting, relaxing and recharging, or what are you doing when you're spending time learning, growing and developing?

Speaker 3 (00:55:52):
When I'm resting and relaxing, relaxing, I actually really like time with dogs. So dogs come into my office every day. I love the lessons that they teach me. It makes me a better team leader, and having them around really helps you appreciate the mindset of being very present. They live in the now at another level that we very rarely, if ever achieve, and that's something that's amazing. Sorry, what was the second part of that?

Speaker 1 (00:56:23):
Learning, growing, and developing.

Speaker 3 (00:56:25):
Oh, learning, growing and developing. I always find something to grind on. I find that my mind will grind on things, whether or not I give it things to grind on, so I try to feed it like the right stuff. So I read quite a bit, but I think that the time that I spend developing recently has been artificial intelligence, and before that it was marketing, taking courses, just trying to consume myself, and that's the example of moving around my business and finding one thing after another. So right now, those are probably the two pairs is I've got one foot in the marketing world and one foot in artificial intelligence.

Speaker 1 (00:57:08):
Cool. Yeah, I mean, marketing could be an entire nother episode or three with you. Super practical follow-up there. You're a busy person, you're running a business, you're an investor in a variety of things. You're engaged in a variety of things where in your day to day and week to week. Do you make time to take courses or, actually, I feel like people are reading books less often. I think they're losing attention and the time and the patience. I would love to know from you, you're obviously a thoughtful person. Where do you find time in your day or your week to read or to take courses or to create some real meaningful learning time instead of drive by and flipping on my phone while I'm in line at the grocery or whatever?

Speaker 3 (00:57:49):
Well, a lot of it comes from books for me. So sometimes I'll be able to use a book as a user manual. Often when I'm trying to find something to learn, it's because I've recognized a gap in me. So for this one, it was Miracle Morning starting to understand that the trade off I was making, I didn't do it consciously. Basically. I didn't realize that I was trading away the two best hours of my day for the two worst when I was staying up late, it was to eat junk food, watch junk television. But when I wake up early, I would never wake up early to eat junk food and watch junk television. You don't even have it in you. So what's different at the top edge or the bottom edge when it comes to your day? It's your pool of motivation. So looking at where that is, like Dan Pink wrote a book called When. That was also another big push towards that, that was like, ah, when is the best tailor and when do I need to deliver the best tailor? So every day at 10 o'clock, my team has grindstone and they are going to get the best me. They're going to get the best me that I can deliver, and that me means that I wake up at 4 45, I'm like a lizard. I need to go lay in a hot rock or something before I'm warmed up enough.

Speaker 1 (00:59:04):
I'm not quite that early. I feel like 4:00 AM is still anything in the four o'clock hour is still night or middle of the night. I'm more of a 5:00 AM or five 15, but I'm with you on that and I haven't read that book, although I'm familiar with it. But this idea of the best hours of the day versus the worst hours of the day. Totally makes sense. This has been fantastic. I appreciate you so much. I'm so glad we did it. If someone has gotten to this point, they obviously are into the way that you're thinking and communicating what you've learned and your ability to share it with other people, if they want to continue that, where would you send them?

Speaker 3 (00:59:37):
There's a few places, actually, I guess very, I'm very thankful, but follow-Up Boss has probably been one of the places that has documented a fair amount of what I've put out. I've been a speaker for them, done several podcasts, they've done some content there. There's also just random content. I've hosted Leadership Line of Sight on Thursdays. I'm with Real Estate Magazine and we do a show every Thursday, but tailor the hack or tailor hack, wherever you put it. I'm very much not hard to find. In fact, that's one of the best things about being in real estate. You can Google your friends. You don't need to remember.

Speaker 1 (01:00:13):
Totally.

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
It's absolutely true. I mean, it's helpful for me as I'm preparing for these. I like to know things about people. I'm not just showing up and asking some random questions. I try to do this thoughtfully and spend our time together in a meaningful way. So I would encourage anyone watching and listening, especially at this point in one of these episodes, go connect with these people. Follow them, learn about them. See how they're expressing themselves. Almost everyone is open to a direct message. Almost everyone who's been on the show would be happy to hear from you and happy to help you because they wouldn't have done what they've done and gotten to where they've gotten if other people hadn't helped them. And that's one of the things I love about this industry. So appreciate you, Taylor.

Speaker 3 (01:00:57):
I appreciate you too. It's always a pleasure to get back together and I absolutely think what you're doing here is a gift. Thanks for showing off the inside of some of the best businesses in real estate.

Speaker 1 (01:01:08):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:01:10):
Thanks for checking out this episode of Team Os. For email exclusive insights every week, sign up@realestateteamos.com.