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Every Friday, join us as we dive into the latest in real estate multifamily with David Moghavem, Head of East Coast Acquisitions at Trion Properties. David invites top experts who know the ins, outs, and trends shaping the real estate multifamily market across the nation!
Whether you’re a seasoned investor or just curious about where the next big opportunity might be, Deal Flow Friday brings you the weekly inside scoop on what’s hot, what’s not, and what to watch for in today’s ever-evolving real estate scene.
David Moghavem (00:17)
All right, welcome to another episode of DealFlow Friday. I'm your host, David Mogavum. Today we got John Zalkin, the founder of AdviseAI, a guy who's been in the multifamily trenches for decades. John built his career in South Florida, working his way up to partner at RKW, ⁓ one of the fastest growing third-party management platforms in the country. and while he was there, he launched RKW Advisory.
Guiding developers, owners through site acquisitions, due diligence, underwriting, and financing across Florida and the Southeast. Now he's channeling all that experience into something new, very exciting. Advise AI. It's an advisory firm helping real estate owners and operators actually implement AI into their business. So, John, great to have you on.
John Zalkin (01:08)
Thank you. Thank you for having me. Really excited to dig into real estate and ⁓ one of my favorite subjects and now my s close second favorite is AI. So v ⁓ I'm very excited for this.
David Moghavem (01:20)
So you still have real estate above AI of favorites.
John Zalkin (01:22)
Yeah,
it's still my baby. Twenty almost twenty-five years doing this. I come from a real estate family here in South Florida. My dad was raised here in South Florida, been in and around the scene forever. ⁓ so we were early pioneers of the Miami Beach, Miami markets a very long time ago. So grew up around it. My father also had a construction business for a long time.
So real estate's just always been my baby. Really started at 20 years old managing apartment buildings in Miami Beach. ⁓ got my first job through my best friend's father, and that started me managing an 88-unit apartment building in South Beach back in the late 90s, and from there turned it into a
A group of ⁓ properties we owned all throughout South Florida as well into Fort Pierce. We were very large in Fort Pierce, owned a lot of properties there, and then got asked to start RKW with ⁓ the guys from RKW who are Miami legends in the real estate game. Paul Kaplan and Robert White were ⁓ were still our KW property management, one of the largest condo HOA major firms.
And the legend himself, Jay Masterman, was the R and RKW. And so they had started RKW, they brought on Marcy Williams as the CEO, and then I came on shortly thereafter. And the idea behind RKW was to create a strictly third-party management firm. We didn't own, we didn't develop, we just were a third-party management group. And starting it over a a decade ago was really good timing. ⁓ and that market ⁓ was needed, and we
We took that company ⁓ from really no units to when I left about a year ago, it was at close to 35,000 units or four 40,000 units. ⁓ but we sold the company ⁓ late 22 to ⁓ a group and at that point I had stayed on. ⁓ so yeah, it was an exciting ride. ⁓
David Moghavem (03:13)
Wow.
John Zalkin (03:28)
loved it and to start from nothing to build it to what it was was certainly no easy feat, but we had great people and a and a great team.
David Moghavem (03:37)
To scale to that level is it's it's something special. What was your secret sauce to really getting that scale with RKW?
John Zalkin (03:45)
she'll
kill me, but Marcy ⁓ was our secret sauce ⁓ in the company. No, it was good timing. ⁓ Marcy was a legend and soul's a legend in the multifamily space. She was running Graystars Oc Oc for North Carolina and South Carolina, when she came on to RKW. So she had a great network.
⁓ and then myself, Jay, Paul, we were all down here in South Florida. And we just did what we say we were gonna do. ⁓ at one point, I would say we were probably the best management firm out there, one of the best management firms. We were just really dialed in on delivering results for our clients. ⁓ then we started doing a lot of development work. so we worked with some of the biggest developers from the Carolinas down into South Florida, and that's where I really enjoyed doing a lot of the work.
From helping with site selections to going all the way to ⁓ the architecture plans, layouts, unit mixes, amenities, you know, all the good stuff. And going all the way through the marketing side, through the leaseup, and then to stabilization. So COVID obviously helped us down here in South Florida. We were it's the perfect timing. ⁓ we had a bunch of lease ups going on at the time and
David Moghavem (04:54)
yeah.
John Zalkin (04:59)
One of them, Grand Central, which was a partnership. It was the first Opportunity Zone high rise that went up between the estate companies and PTM. And that was wild. That was 357 units and we leased it up in four months with like nine raises. 2021. 21. Yeah, we we opened.
David Moghavem (05:19)
What what year was that? You said it was like twenty twenty twenty twenty twenty one. Yeah. So everyone moving to South
Florida, running that up. And then obviously credit to you guys for ⁓ leaning into those tailwinds and and getting that momentum.
John Zalkin (05:33)
Yeah.
Yeah, we were we we we hit nine almost a hundred units in one month leasing and a lease up and we we did another one called first, which was right in little Havana. we leased that up in like that was a hundred and ninety one units. I think we leased that up in like three or four months as well. It was the wild times and everybody was
David Moghavem (05:40)
Wow.
John, how
how long do you think that takes to lease up today?
John Zalkin (05:57)
Today, if it was ⁓ I wanna say Grand Central is like 360 units, I'd say that's all of 18 months today, 15 to 18 months if you're lucky. You know, I I'm a little off the beaten path now. You know, I'm not in the weeds anymore. We don't have as many loose-ups. ⁓ you know, obviously I'm not still involved in RKW.
David Moghavem (06:14)
Right.
John Zalkin (06:19)
But you know, 20 to 25 units a month, potentially hitting 30 units a month. You know, Marcy used to have a saying, a lease a day keeps Marcy away. So, you know, we always average, we did the lease up actually for Shoreline at Solomia, the first two properties for LaFrac. We were the first outside management firm they brought in. And that was 400 units. We did that in 10 months. But what what we learned is the partnership with the developer is the most important, especially a group like that who.
David Moghavem (06:27)
Ha ha.
Okay. Right.
John Zalkin (06:46)
knows more in their left finger than we will know in our whole lives. And obviously they're one of the most prolific owners and developers of real estate. But working with them in partnership and just they knew they had to crush that. And so the budgets that were there for, you know, at that time Google was still I mean it still is big, but that was the time where search was killing everything. So I mean we were spending a a crazy amount of money. We did all the wraps of the buildings and everything. And that was 2018, I want to say. So that was
David Moghavem (07:16)
Yeah.
John Zalkin (07:16)
pre-craziness
⁓ of pre-South Florida. So yeah, we've been involved or I was involved in a lot of fun deals here in ⁓ South Florida.
David Moghavem (07:26)
Nice. Do you miss that side of the business, the management side? Not one bit. Wow.
John Zalkin (07:28)
Not one bit. Not one bit. Not one bit. I just came
from an old client ⁓ of ours lunch today, and we were just r reminiscing. They brought all their stuff in-house. They're a big New York group. And ⁓ we were talking about it. He was like, How do we do this and that? And I'm like, Yeah, no. It's it look, it's a great business. ⁓ I didn't come, I wasn't like
a person who grew up in a property management world. I was more of a street guy, Miami Beach back then, studio apartments we had were $400 a month. And so it was a much different world the way I grew up. Most people in the property management world start out as leasing agents, then they go up to head leasing person, assistant manager, manager, regional manager, and they'll grow their way up through it and they're lifers. And it takes a certain breed and type of person to to be in that.
position. So I was not that person. Paul Kaplan just had faith in me because I understood real estate and could build a network of people and sales. So he said it'll fit. And Marcy really took me under her wing and you know showed me how real institutional grade management works. ⁓ And Marcy was also very good at bringing a great team around as you know, who's at your guys' company Johnny, who's one of my favorite people in the world running your guys' management
David Moghavem (08:47)
Yeah. We love Johnny. Shout
John Zalkin (08:49)
And
David Moghavem (08:49)
out to Johnny.
John Zalkin (08:50)
yeah, th there's a lot of ex RKWers out there who are running ⁓ companies. So it's very, it's very exciting.
David Moghavem (08:57)
Yeah, and RKW definitely carries the name, I think, of who I for anyone who is in South Florida or the South East and they hear, you know, RKW, it's great management. You guys had a great run. Credit to you guys for executing well and and scaling the way that you guys did.
John Zalkin (09:13)
Yeah, it was ⁓ it it was certainly fun. We we had a really good time doing it. It was a great group of people and ⁓ you know, but my days of management are long wrong.
David Moghavem (09:24)
Yeah. So here you are now starting Advise AI. Been about a year now. ⁓ maybe give a little bit of background of what you're up to now, Advise AI, what you guys do and how you're helping your clients.
John Zalkin (09:29)
Yeah.
So the backstory was I got into AI accidentally a few years ago through a personal investment I had made ⁓ that turned into high compute power company that's one that Google ended up buying a big chunk of later on. But I was for me, it was a very nice investment. And I was like, what's this power? What does AI mean? So I really dug into the true understanding of AI and really what it was. This was the early ChatGBT.
days right when it first came out and we were all using it a little bit but ⁓ and so my daughter's best friend's father who is now my partner ⁓ he is a high level ⁓ advisor consultant he ran
Accenture's AI and data for hospitality, built all the hotels and chains and their AI. This is pre-Chat GBT, this is going back fifteen plus years ago when it was really analytics and data.
And then he went on to Alvarez and Marsal to become a partner there and build out their advisory services. So I would use him a lot, like we'd be together because the kids were playing, and I'd be like, what does this mean? So we built a really good relationship off of it. And he became like my guru, kind of, you know, to say. And so what happened was he wanted, he saw the writing on the wall with large advisory. And he came to me one day and said, Look, I'm looking to leave and I'm gonna start kind of like a fractional AI.
Like a fractional chief AI officer. I'll work for a few bigger companies, but in a much different model. So I was like, amazing. I've always loved businesses. I've always invested and been intrigued by it. So I was like, explain to me your model. And he started explaining me the advisory business and you know how you know the Accentures of the World and McKenzie's will charge you a half a million dollars. They come in and build you a deck and all that stuff. And he's like, I have a different way of doing it. So I was like, very cool. And I said, Have you ever thought about any real estate?
Groups and he's like, no, why? And I said, you know, real estate's an interesting industry, especially commercial real estate, the multifamily office industrial groups, is that it's a very small amount of people, usually in an office, that control a large amount of capital and a large amount of property.
And so AI and data would go really well with it because it automates and does things. So he did his research and came back to me, and he was blown away that a group of seven to ten people can control a billion plus dollars in assets. And he was like, Wow, this is amazing. So we got together, started hanging out, and he said, This is really intriguing. And I said, How intriguing? And he's like, Like, really, really cool. And I said, Okay. I said, I'd love to build a business with you.
David Moghavem (12:19)
Mm-hmm.
John Zalkin (12:22)
⁓ if you're interested. And I have obviously the contacts on the real estate side and have a little bit dangerous. For the layman I know AI. For the really smart people I don't. And
So that was the start of Advise AI. And Advise AI, the whole the whole idea behind it was we're just your fractional chief AI officer, right? So we started the company, and within the first four to five months, we had a ton of meetings. Everybody was loving it. It was getting exciting. And then around December, January, Claw ⁓ OpenClaw came out, Claude released a new model, and everything changed. And it became an agent-driven world.
And so we saw that very quickly that.
The real estate the premise originally of Advise AI was we would vet off-the-shelf SaaS solutions that are AI-driven, and we would vet them for you, and we would have a suite of services that we would bring into your company and help you build your AI suite out. And then what we saw was with Open Call and all this is that it was really about automations and systems. So what we did is we created the Advise AI ecosystem. So the way it works is you have one pane of glass called a dashboard.
That you enter into. And inside of that dashboard is how you get to the ecosystem. And in the ecosystem, you have off-the-shelf SaaS solutions that will do all the AI and work for you. You will also have agents and sub-agents, and then you have a repository of data. All your data would live in there as well. And you could talk to your data. You can query it. How many vacancies do I have?
When's this lease up? And the ecosystem all works together. So the agents move everything around behind the scenes and bring the reports to you. So you query a report. I want to know how in all my units I have 5,000 apartments and 30 apartment buildings.
Give me the leasing activity for last week. And that's all you say. And then behind the scenes, the agents are taking, grabbing the information from your repository, whether it's through YARDI whatever it is, and then it's moving it into the AI solution, building that report, and then bringing it back to you. And the reason why we built it like that is I how I say it in the layman's terms, and my partner Philip.
David Moghavem (14:26)
Mm-hmm.
John Zalkin (14:49)
goes crazy when I say is don't worry how the hot dog's being made. Just tell us what toppings you want on top. So behind the scenes, there may be four to seven SaaS solutions that we have provided. You are probably using Claude, we're using Claude, OpenAI, Mistral, ⁓ Kimi 3.3, all the different LLMs, and then usually one or two different systems that are holding all your data.
And so we are constantly moving things in and out behind the scenes. So if somebody needs a different report system or there's a new system that comes out, we easily replace it from behind the scenes in the ecosystem, bring a new one in, but you never know the difference because you're just working on that one dashboard. So you don't have to learn any new systems. And as you want to build out reports and systems, so a couple of our clients I'll do a couple examples and then you know, I'll stop.
⁓ But we do a Monday morning report for a client of ours. So they have 17 apartment buildings that they own, and then they manage another 25. Every week, the managers have to go into Yarty, pull the weekly leasing reports, have it, and then tell why the apartments didn't lease. Well, David's wife is gonna come see it next week, right? And then they have to build a report off of all that.
David Moghavem (15:51)
Mm-hmm.
John Zalkin (16:15)
And then they take that report, they send it to somebody on the executive team. That person, the executive team, now has to put that all together. And then the executive then has to bring that to the executive team. They have a meeting. It takes the managers three three hours, let's say a few hours, and it takes the executive person four to six hours a week. So what we said is, okay, fine, all your YARDE data gets dumped every night into this file, right?
The manager now doesn't have to do anything. The agent knows to go into that file and pull all the leasing reports, read the emails or whatever came in to say why it didn't read, move it to the AI system that's going to build the report. The report then gets built. The agent takes it from the report and puts it in the executive's inbox. The executive Monday morning wakes up.
reads through that report, makes some changes, everything you you can make changes in, and then that person can send it out. So it took a total of, I mean, there's really 30, 40 hours if you take all the managers together, but that at least executive is saving three to four hours a week. Very simple report. And another one we do that people love is the buy box report, right? So you you you get an OM in your inbox and you have to now underwrite that OM.
David Moghavem (17:25)
Right.
John Zalkin (17:36)
Right, usually to first glance quickly, you're like, Okay, this is not my area, but all
Real estate shops, it's funny, everyone has their own secret sauce trying to get to the same recipe of buying a building and making money running it better, right? But how you guys look at a deal at your shop is very different than how you may not put as much, it has to be within a mile of a grocery store, or you guys may say, we don't care about that, we care more about the school. So it has to have an A-rated school. Everyone has their own secret sauce. You quickly can look at something within a few minutes. You guys know if it's for us or not. Then you have to do the deep dive, right? Then you have 60 to
David Moghavem (18:10)
For sure.
John Zalkin (18:11)
80 points that you're gonna look at and you're gonna say, okay, this now makes sense. Let me now send it to underwriting. Let me underwrite this deal. Let me get the T12 the rent roll and put all that together. And then I'm gonna build it in Excel. I'm gonna throw my modeling numbers together, and I'm gonna say, okay, this now pencils out to where we need it to. Let's now really dig into it. What we do is that email OM comes in, the agent recognizes it and automatically gets moved in.
To an AI software. That AI software has learned your buy box. So we sit with you, you get 60 to 80 points, you put in three-story walk-up, Midwest, all the different things that you want. And it immediately, not immediately, within five plus minutes, 10 minutes, it reads the OM, studies it, and says, ⁓ this is for us. We're gonna score this from zero to a hundred, and we're gonna give it a score of 85.
We've pre-programmed it to say anything over an 80 now gets moved to ⁓ the underwriting team. The underwriting team glances it and says, great, now underwrite it for me. The agent picks it up, moves it into another AI software, fully underwrites it for you into your model in Excel. Then from there, it gets sent back to you. So the idea is this is all happening behind the scenes automated without you having to do it.
And that's the whole premise of Advise AI is to handle problems and situations like this and tasks without the user having to really prompt it a lot and do a lot of things. And that's the beauty of my partner. I didn't mention my other partner, Xander, who is Philip's brother, ⁓ was a systems integrator ⁓ for 15 years, some of largest companies, ran a multifamily family office as their CTO, built out all the AI over the past bunch of years.
And he's also behind the scenes creating that.
David Moghavem (20:10)
Yeah, so John, thanks for giving the full the full summary there of advise AI. There's a couple of things
John Zalkin (20:15)
Look, it's been a while
since I got to talk real estate in sales with somebody, so you know the the the the old John's coming out.
David Moghavem (20:18)
Yeah. Exactly.
Well, there's there's a lot to unpack there. One one of the things is the fact that the learning curve for some of these products to reach its full capability is high. And you do need an advisement firm like Advise AI to really tap into the full potential of the efficiency that AI can bring. So these workflows, I think, are gonna do wonders with the productivity.
I think what I'm interested in too is now we're moving from generative to a gen agentic AI. And I feel like there's a third path already happening where everyone's sitting on tons of information, tons of data. And just having the agentic part of it to be more efficient is beautiful. But maybe we're reaching this other path where we can now start synthesizing our own data, having our own.
proprietary reports, proprietary data through our own portfolio lens, aggregate that type of data, all the underwritings that have been done, all the performances in ⁓ YARTI and in our reports, and come up with our own data-driven decisions through AI. I kind of wanted to hear your take on are you putting together any of these reports going beyond just productivity where you're actually synthesizing data?
seeing a different thesis and investment that might be beyond, you know, what CoStar spits out or what beyond what some of these other third party tools spit out.
John Zalkin (21:51)
No, it's a great, you know, questionslash ⁓ thinking. ⁓ look, full disclosure, the AI is good, it's not great, right? We're in the early stages, the first thing. As I like to say, we went from ⁓ dial up to broadband very quickly, and now it's gonna take a while to get the fiber, right? And so all these things, so part of the advice I ecosystem is the repository is a folder, let's just call it what it is, a AWS that
Has all your company information, right? So for you guys who own a lot of stuff in Denver, right in Colorado, you would be able to upload all your information to the system and then query questions into your own data, right? You guys have spent a decade plus building all this amazing real estate, all this amazing data. How do you access it? I call talk to your data, right? How do you ask it questions and build your own Chat GPT? And that's the other part of Advise AI.
Is as we're pulling in all the data from YARDI, RealPage, Intrada, or you know, ⁓ wherever else you are. We're we're we're not just a multi-family shop. We have Office, we have industrial, we do retail, we do multi. ⁓ we're agnostic in terms of that. So there's different MRI and other systems that the commercial groups use, but we're pulling all that information. But we're also doing is taking your Dropbox, your
SharePoint, what whatever everybody uses. And we're mirroring all the data that you already have into that as well. We don't touch the data, right? You still have to be very careful and you have to make sure agents or read only tons of guardrails. We have a full development team of 20 plus people, not all for us, but that handle all that for us. So that is all being built and developed for each individual client. Each individual client has their own AWS account with us.
David Moghavem (23:34)
Mm-hmm.
John Zalkin (23:47)
And all their information is kept separate. But now what we're doing is we're going to take all your data, we're going to tinker with it a little bit and move it into where the AI can read it and understand it. And like what you said is how do you start finding different things and ideas inside of what you've already built and looking at your buildings and looking at all the data and querying it? But in the beginning, it's how do you really understand what's going on? And then the AI, one of the
One of the softwares we use behind the scenes that does it is smart enough to look at your trend. So we what we did is we went out, let me step back a second. We went out and vetted, I've been to Vegas, New York, all the conferences. We probably had 50 to 60 meetings with vendors, the best there are out there. And we said, Okay, we have things that we need solved. What are the best things to do? One of the systems we use, amazing group, ⁓
Venture capital backed, for five years they've been building a real estate-centric LLM, right? So it understands everything. Well, it's gotten so smart now that when we put in 10 buildings, it will quickly understand a trend. So if you put in five buildings in Denver, it will understand very quickly what is renting, what is not, why your one bedrooms are. It will start asking you questions about your property.
David Moghavem (25:08)
Mm-hmm.
John Zalkin (25:13)
And it's not asking the problem with just regular LLMs, Claude, Open, all that stuff, is they're trained on everything, right? They're large language models, the definition of LLM. What we found was that single source solutions, just real estate centric real estate, understand it a lot better and become a lot smarter. And those are, as we say, in the ecosystem, those are the companies that we partner with behind the scenes that do a lot of the AI work.
David Moghavem (25:40)
Right. It's like having a a clean, a clean version of a LLM that, you know, these systems are only as successful and powerful as the data that they've been trained with. And so if you have a system, a closed end system that has training data from your own properties, your own data, or just focused on pulling, scraping data, apartment data in this one market on the different sites, you'll get much better results for that.
Type of data.
John Zalkin (26:10)
The LLMs hallucinate a lot. They make stuff up. So what we've been doing is we've been running a lot of reports and a lot of OMs, T12s, and Rent Rolls through all the different. We're always testing what we have, right? To make sure it's working well and clients are always using it. But we started running with the new Claude, with new ⁓ with ⁓ codex, all the different new systems from ⁓ OpenAI, Mistral, all the different things. We started testing everything, even Grok and everything, saying, here, build a report.
And not one of them was able to get it right. And we just, it was very simple, T12s, rent rolls, all stuff. One made up that we had three bedrooms, we didn't have three bedrooms. One said you're one bedroom's or night. So we did it with Claude and Open AI. OpenAI said you're 94% occupied. Claude said you're an 89% occupied. We fed the open open AI was right in this situation.
Open AI, we fed the open AI report back to Claude, and Claude said, my God, I made a mistake. My bad. And so what people, where we're getting most of it, so it's interesting this whole world of ⁓ advisory and really AI is early on, no one knew anything, including us. I mean, my partner, I mean we did, but it was so early. Once we started rolling out the agents and all that, what we got was a lot of people saying, Hey, we're building it ourselves right now in Claude.
We're doing this was like February, March, even going into April. Well, now my calls are hey, we built this stuff out. We're very smart, we understand it, but what we didn't realize was it breaks all the time. And the amount of hours we're having to keep it up is just not worth it for us. A good friend of mine, I won't mention his name, if he watches this, he'll know. But he's a really smart guy, very successful real estate guy, and he went down a rabbit hole of open claw.
Clawed and all that. and he built the most incredible stuff. We were just at his office three weeks ago because I was like, I want to see what you built. And so he built a great buy box, he built a great automated system, and he broke down to me. He's like, Look, it's just too much work. I can't do it, and it's always breaking. I can't get it to work right. So word that correct. And he said, My money needs to be spent.
David Moghavem (28:06)
Very easy to go down that rabbit hole. Yeah.
You become a part time coder instead of ⁓
John Zalkin (28:32)
My time needs to be spent making money buying and selling buildings. And he's a developer and he's like, I'm spending way too much time on it. That's probably the seventh or eighth client that we're bringing on because of that. And what the way we price our model, and I'll throw a little plug in here, is we're an advisory service first. So everything we're doing is for the bet behest of the client, right? So we're not just pushing one.
software to you and all that. We we're agnostic. Whatever the best is is what we're gonna bring in. So we bundle it all in one price and we say we're just a fractional cheap AI officer at about a quarter of the price. So if you went out to go find a cheap AI officer, or really a person who's gonna build the models for you, oversee it, do everything all that stuff, you're looking two to four hundred thousand dollars a year. And the way we said is we can do it for a quarter on the lower end and build it out.
And run it for you and stay on on the advisory side and help you. So we have a client that's now shifting from acquisitions into odd dispositions. They're like seeing a little tick up in the market and the industrial, and they're like, hey, we want to now go sell. No problem. We're now helping them build out what they need to do to make selling a little easier for due diligence. ⁓ one of the other things, a client just came to us the other day, they got a DDQ for a fund that wants to invest in their fund.
And one of the questions was, what's your AI strategy? And they're starting to get that a lot more. So the institutions, everybody wants to know what your AI strategy is. But the other thing, we said, well, how are you doing, how are you answering these questions? And they showed us. And we said, No problem. Give us a couple days, we'll automate it for you. So now what we're doing is we're learning all their questions and answers because a lot of it's the same. We're building out through an agent, a sub agent inside of Advise AI's agent system.
That's just gonna be there to answer questions for investors, you know, and it's gonna have all the answers. And obviously, nothing gets sent out until that person who's the the the responsible party looks it over, but that's kind of where it's going today.
David Moghavem (30:41)
John, I wanted to ask you, what are the synergies between growing RKW to how much you've grown it versus now at Advise AI and how you're helping your clients and growing that business out?
John Zalkin (30:54)
Sure.
So we were big with customer service. So we do an onboarding at Advise AI. We come in for we meet with you in person four to six hours, then we follow up with you. And for about 30 days, we build out what we call the blueprint that shows everything. Every time we do that in person, ⁓ we we tend to we we tend to bring customer service overfront is like look, this is who we are, this is what we're gonna do, and the most important thing is to follow.
So the customer service and follow-through are the number one things for us to make sure that clients feel comfortable and engaging with us. When it comes to growing the company and growing it, you know, sales, which has been my passion, what my job was really at RKW, I was just a glorified sales guy with a fancy title, ⁓ is to build a network, is to strategically find
You know, what we learned at RKW was you can't explode onto a market. You gotta slowly enter it. Once you get everything in place, then you go out. And I'm following the same model at Advise AI, where we've brought on the clients, we've onboarded them, we brought them into the systems, we've tweaked it. Now we're at the phase two of it, right? So revenue's coming in, things are good. Now how do we take that and double that?
And then we will go from there and then build it out. Look, outbound sales, what has changed a lot is the inbox has been flooded. It's very hard to get people to respond to emails today because everybody's running open clause systems and automated emails. We would look, I use an automated email system. I'll give them a free plug. Artisan. Yeah. Yep.
David Moghavem (32:30)
Mm-hmm.
The amount of spam that I get now versus
the past few years prior, it's insane. So it's n I know it's a numbers game, but the numbers have gone up.
John Zalkin (32:46)
We use we use artisan AI.
Yeah. And we get a decent response rate, but not nothing great. Where I build I good at building networks, you know, I'm coming into this with a lot of people that I know, and I'm finding the right groups to to fit with us. ⁓ one of the things we will be doing is we will be sending a hundred to a hundred and fifty gift baskets a month. ⁓ what I'm seeing is
The you know, the old days, I would get on a call, I would print out my list from Co-Star, find a person, go on, look up who is, find a phone number. David, it's John from RKW, how are you? Go into my spiel and my pitch and try to sell you. You make a hundred calls, it's like the broker game, it's like every game. The problem today is no one answers on known numbers anymore. And it's very difficult to reach people. So the two ways that we always went about reaching people was email and cold calling. Those are gone.
So we're gonna flip the switch a little bit and we're gonna go find a hundred, hundred and fifty people a month, and we're gonna start sending stuff to people, handwritten notes, little presents, little things, and to just gauge a little interest and see what's there. I'd rather spend the money that way and know that it's getting to the person than doing it. Is it is very difficult today to find people and to
I do. I think if I was long any business and my brother-in-law is in this business, but they run festivals all around, they do all the food and wine festivals, they they're all over the world. And I said to him the other night at a family function, I said, I would love to invest in your business because I believe like my budget mostly for next year, and I'm starting to plan for September for the 12 months, is going to be a ton of in-person events. we launched at NMHC in the end of January just because it's where I knew everybody.
I did not go to ICSC. ⁓ I'm gonna do it next year. ⁓ but those types of events in person where you can walk up and shake somebody's hand, look them in the eye, and befriend people, I think is going to be ⁓ the way forward. And if I was building outbounds back at the RKW's days and all that, I would be spending a lot of time, which I always did. The business now, I bit I don't I think BizNow is still around, they're still doing events, but back in the day it was
Like the Biz DAOs, IMN, you know, the family office world, you know, go where the owners are, and that's usually where you'll have success.
David Moghavem (35:15)
It's interesting as as an AI advisory firm, just hearing you saying that I'm leaning in on the in-person touch, sending gifts gift baskets, giving handwritten notes, ⁓ budget on festivals and networking conferences. And I think there's something to be said there. How even when your whole business is centered around how can AI ⁓
improve the workflow and improve automation and take out the human element in some of these workflows, you're saying how we need to lead lean more in to scale on the personal touch, on the human touch, on meeting for person to person, not standing behind a desk, ⁓ sending a bunch of emails that are going to get deleted, sending a bunch of ⁓ automated phone calls that are probably not going to get picked up.
John Zalkin (36:10)
Yeah. Look, w I'm covering all the bases and I'm utilizing a lot of AI. So my whole pipeline is all AI driven. I have we we have what we call ARIA and our clients get a Aria Schlipe first, and that's our agent. Aria schedules all my appointments for me. Aria gives me my whole pipeline report every morning. I CC Aria on everything. All my ⁓ conversation sales calls are all recorded. They all get sent to ARIA.
Aria logs everything in notion. So I know everything about David, our conversation, sales calls, this and that. Aria's reading it. Aria's telling me when I need to reach out to you. Aria's telling me what I need to follow up with. So I'm utilizing AI. Look, AI, you know, two months ago, anthropic and open AI, the world's coming to an end. 60% of jobs are going away.
there's a correlation between when they're raising money and when their the fear is gonna come in and but now all of a sudden David Solomon from Goldman Sachs just came out and said, ⁓ probably not. Dario from Anthropic just came out and said, it's not gonna be as bad. Samuel, it's not gonna as bad. They actually had a thir I think it was a 13% increase in ⁓ programmers being ⁓ hired, you know, because AI is great and it helps you
David Moghavem (37:10)
Right.
John Zalkin (37:34)
And it makes you empowered and doesn't, but it doesn't replace the human being. The analyst still needs to be there. Now, do you maybe not need four analysts and you could do it with two with AI? Possibly. But this skill, the sales skill, is going nowhere. One of the things I talk to my daughter about, and I tell people who's my nephew and people who are coming of age, but my daughter's still young, is the personable skill of being able to talk to people, look them in the eye.
Read the room, understand things, understand the ideas of sales, what your chair, and there is no perfect salesperson. My brother's very successful guy. We sell completely different. And there is no right way or wrong way of selling. I really don't believe that. I think each individual person has a way that they feel comfortable and they connect with people. I used to tell people who worked for me at RKW is that if you spent more than 50% 30%, 40% of your time.
Talking about RKW, you failed. Look at behind the person, find the pictures in the picture frames. Do they play golf? Do they have kids? Do they like to fish? Bond with the person because when you get to a certain level, most companies are the same, right? When you look at the top bunch of management firms, like the juggernauts, the graystars, the RPMs, they're not bad companies. They're really good at what they do, right? You don't get to a million units, 250,000 units. You don't get there without being good.
But in RKW, it was like, yeah, you have us. We were the boutique. We were the small, fast moving boat that could help you and do it. But you bonded with me, you bonded with our company. You liked us and you chose us. And that skill, I believe, is going to be the most important skill going over the next five, seven years, because this whole generation of kids are growing up, not talking to people. And they're not going out. Like I say, I had to meet my wife. I met my wife at a restaurant.
Like this is like those days are probably long gone, right? I'm old, I'm turning fifty in August. So, you know, I'll age myself. But w when we wanted to meet people, we had to go out. Like that's why I lived in Miami Beach for so many years. It was easy to go to a bar and you would mingle and meet people. And I I think that skill is being lost. And I think AI is gonna make it even worse. But if somebody is looking to hone a skill and to re that's why I'm a believer in going to the in-person, because if you're decent.
at in person skills and meeting people, you could crush it today. I really truly believe
David Moghavem (40:05)
Do I do think AI it could make it worse? But at the same time, AI frees up your time. And it's up to you to decide if you want to use that time towards doing what AI can't do or just trying to lean in more on the productivity. But the productivity, end of the day, has a bottleneck. It has a bottleneck, and that bottleneck now is gonna be relationships, it's gonna be human-led.
revenue generating relationships and work. That's the true bottleneck now. Not, I need to sit this weekend and write pump out this OM manually or ⁓ send out this email manually. So I think it's up to you of whether you're gonna use that free time now that AI has freed you with and use that to do human work or just go down this doom loop.
of productivity that's gonna get you nowhere.
John Zalkin (41:03)
Yeah.
You know, in baseball there's the five tool player who can play everything. I think
That's going to be the most successful. You have to learn AI, right? AI is John. You have to learn Claude. You have to learn how to automate things. Like I took lessons on doing it. I wanted to really learn. I built my own workflows. I go out and I find all the best commercial real estate articles with AI and it automatically posts on my LinkedIn. A simple thing. But I now never have to look or post or do anything on LinkedIn again. I use it for my automations for my sales. So there's powerful things you need to know how to do it. And I would tell people to definitely learn those.
Skills, especially going into this new world, but don't forget about the old skills because when you're in a company, you need to know it's you know politics 101, you need to know how to play the game, and if you're in sales, you you have to build the network is the key, right? You have to build a great network of people.
You have to, I say pay it forward. My favorite email in the world was an intro email. I would introduce everybody together. I would say, here's you, you should meet this person. I did a ton of work with APAC over the years and built help build the South Florida real estate division. We had 1.400 plus members. And my thing was, you join, I will walk you around, whether you're a lawyer.
accountant you did debt, you did equity, you owned. I will walk you around to every person that you need to meet. I guarantee you you will make money. And I there have been more deals had in that community. A good couple good buddies of mine were big lawyers and accounts. They have because that's still how the world goes and the world works is being able to network and do it. So for the sales side, absolutely learn the the skills of
Today's technology AI, but you still have to, you still have to relate to people and close people. And I get sold all the time. I love it because we're we're always talking to software providers. And it's it's funny how a lot of times I'm like, yeah, and they're amazing. And to me, the follow-up and the follow-through, don't be annoying. I always had a rule, and Marcy would always laugh at me, like, you're gonna tell me no.
David Moghavem (43:06)
You gotta see the art. You gotta see the art of it. Like, hey, is this guy selling the right weight or not?
John Zalkin (43:19)
Right? It's okay to tell me no. In today's world, it's a simple email just saying, Hey, we're not interested. Thank you very much. And what would enrage me is when nobody would they just wouldn't respond. You would pitch to somebody, you would talk to them, you would get this big do I want to do and they would ghost you. And I would just be like, I don't think you understand. I'm not gonna stop until you tell me no. And it's okay to tell me no. And you know, it's funny.
David Moghavem (43:45)
Yeah. Yeah.
John Zalkin (43:48)
How I'm so respectful to all these because I get calls all the time. Obviously, people want to get into our network and because we bring a lot of clients in now and we do it. And I'm always like, hey, man, it's just not a good fit for now. Why don't we follow back up? So that would also say that to people. The follow-up and the follow-through is so key. And using AI for that is amazing. Like ARIA keeps me honest every morning at nine o'clock on the dot, I get my update.
I get my update and everything I need to do, she's telling me to do. And I and I now it's like the Salesforce, the CRMs that everybody uses, like I'm not a big CRM guy, never was. I always hated having to log in. I hate ⁓ Hate Hate And they're great. And people use them in ⁓
David Moghavem (44:30)
Really? Interesting.
It's
interesting as someone like having such a good network like yourself to hear you say, like, ⁓ I don't
John Zalkin (44:42)
You
I you wanna laugh? I still use this. I still use this. I love handwritten. I'm old school. And what I found was look, if you're running a big a friend of mine was very close with Rand Waste Management for the state of Florida. And this is going back a decade ago. And I went to his office one day and he was like so excited to show me his ⁓ sales force. And they had like 40 salespeople. You know, they were selling widgets, right? Everybody needs trash.
David Moghavem (44:46)
Wow.
John Zalkin (45:12)
And so for something like that, I totally get a good CRM. And I get from the management side, you want to see pipelines and you want to do it. But for me, now that I don't have to do anything, I just CC ARIA on all my notes and all my calls, and everything gets done. I don't ever go into and we have a CRM. I don't ever go into it, and I I don't my sales.
David Moghavem (45:21)
Right.
So John, how
do you how do you track, you know, as you're talking, you're leveraging your network, trying to source some new business? Like what's your way of staying organized, ⁓ talking to different people and having the multiple touch points to try to get something done with the
John Zalkin (45:54)
So I'm pulling it up here.
So here's, I don't want to show the names, but here's my email every day. That that that's how I do it. It gives me, so how it's written is ⁓ it's who's being contracted right now, what what are my active clients that I need to do for them, what are my hot pipelines, what are my medium pipelines, what are my small pipelines, and what's paused. Daily, but every morning at nine o'clock. Every morning at nine o'clock. And here's another beautiful thing that we built.
David Moghavem (45:59)
Right. Yep.
Like your daily brief. Yeah. Yeah.
John Zalkin (46:25)
is if I was pitching try-on, right? So there may or may not be a call coming up in the next few weeks with with with try-on. 24 hours before ARIA goes out and we've built a sub agent for ARIA that does a full dossier on tryon, right? All the people on the invite, it will give me all all the information on everyone at the team. And then it will give me all high level information about your properties, what you own, what you guys really do.
Anything you've bought and sold in the last little bit. And then an hour before that call, I get a brief summary just to remind me. So I don't ever go into a call anymore. I don't have to do any more research. I literally just look at my dossier. So now I meet David at an event. We have our first call. I go ahead and get granola. I I I like granola as my
David Moghavem (47:20)
Love granola.
Yeah. Yeah.
John Zalkin (47:20)
Because granola sits in the background, people don't realize you're not asking for
it, it's just sitting background taking notes. It's not recording anything, it's just taking notes. So we have a call. Well, first, I get your email at an event or whatever it is, David, great. And you've seen it before, Aria, and Morty was my other agent too. Aria or Morty will send you an invite with a calendar saying, hi David, people have no idea it's AI. They will s Aria will schedule that meeting for you, for me, right?
Send out the invites everything. Without saying a word, it will go schedule. Then, because it has access to my calendar, read only, cannot do anything else. And ARIA has their own email address at Advise AI and its own calendar. So ARIA is only looking at everything, but sending out through its own calendar. Then ARIA sends me a full dossier in you. The next morning before the call, whenever it is, I get another dossier, just a short synopsis just to make sure I'm good.
I get on the sales call with you. I hit granola. Granola now is taking all the notes. The notes get taken by ARIA into Notion. Notion is just a place where you can store everything, AI-driven storage. Now all the notes are in a try on or David folder. And now the next morning at nine o'clock, you will now become a lead for me. And now I will reach back out to you three to five days later and I'll CC Aria.
Say Dave, it was so great talking to you. I know we we talk, here are the next steps, or here's what I'd love to set up for you. All that gets put back into notion. Aria's reading it. If I say add ARIA, please book another meeting for us, we do that. And then the follow-through happens and I'm always being updated on it. And now the next phase is let's go to contract, right? No problem. I will send a contract to you.
We use a lot of AI. We have a legal whole system software that's going to read through the contract, and you're gonna have your notes. So we just did two different deals. ⁓ look, I I I don't want to use the the law firm's names, right? But one of them is probably 75 to 100 lawyers, a South Florida institution. Everyone knows it, right? It's very localized, big group. They had 107 comments on my content.
David Moghavem (49:29)
Of course.
John Zalkin (49:44)
Another client of ours sent it to the largest, I think it's the largest law firm there is down here and all across the the country. They had seven questions, right? We negotiated back and forth and signed two contracts, fully using AI and doing it. Now, my partner is obviously a controlled, and I'm pretty good at contracts too, and we understood it.
Now that contract gets sent to ARIA, it gets put in notion. Now a new folder happens up. Now you're a client of ours. So now on my dailies, I have to know what's going on with the client. Well, everyone else on the team is constantly uploading and using ARIA. So now everyone know now I know what's happening with my client in terms of onboarding. Where's the blueprint? Where's like what do we need to build for them? Where are we? When's launch? So the days of going into
David Moghavem (50:19)
Right.
John Zalkin (50:39)
Salesforce, Hub Spot and like tracking that, ⁓ I just see this as a much more efficient and it works better for me. I've know a lot of people that need to live in
David Moghavem (50:48)
No, I think I think you're on
to something. I mean, I think the fact like CRM systems, you know, we we use a ton of different CRM systems for investors, for tracking deals, and everything in between. And what I'm finding is it's so much work to keep the CRM updated. And then you spend more time trying to update it than following up and and really engaging with the leads. You're trying to keep
Trying to spend so much time keeping these leads organized that you miss out on actually engaging them. ⁓ whether it's a deal or an investor or a lead. And then, but what I'm seeing too is with the CRM, if you can connect that to AI and really synthesize it, like now you're in such a better position than maybe someone who's just ⁓ maybe had no system process of keeping these leads organized. So
I think there's like some benefit, I guess, having a CRM up to this point, but I also see how you know, we might be ⁓ moving to a world where CRM systems are either no longer needed or at least the front facing part of it is not as important.
John Zalkin (52:02)
Yeah, if you have a thousand
person company, yeah, you you you have to if you're an executive at a hundred person sales company, fifty per yes. We're all mid-sized to small real estate groups. Like that's not what's needed. But we have a client of ours, they're on their third fund, and he does everything on a hundred person Excel spreadsheet, right? Old school, but they have Salesforce, they use FinTrix, ⁓ you know, they're constantly out there and all that stuff.
So we just built a workflow workflow for him. We got with FinTrix, we got Salesforce. Now we're taking the information from FinTrix. It's going into Salesforce. We're overseeing that, right? Making sure it's there. And now we're just building a flow for them to send the email out to go and do it. But we're we're taking ARIA and we're saying don't he literally is a hundred person Excel spreadsheet because he it's his top 100s and he color codes them and all that stuff. We just took all that away for him.
We use all we use an agent now to build out for him this whole system of like how I use it every day. And like those are so there's as I say, there's nothing a there's nothing agent AI can't do. It's just a matter of importance and a matter of how much you want to either spend time and energy and money on, or on a scale of one to ten, where does that fall? And when we do our onboarding.
We usually pick one, two, or three major projects, and that's what we start working. And most of the time it's asset man a lot of asset management is like flows or reporting, like I mentioned before. Some it's on the acquisition side. Some it's investor relations side. And it's endless. Like where we are today, like it's funny, we're gonna have this conversation. So I did during COVID, I had nothing to do really, right? It was like the early parts of COVID. So I started a series called 15 for 15.
David Moghavem (53:36)
Mm-hmm.
John Zalkin (53:56)
And I interviewed people in real estate. They were all my buddies, and I would do exactly what we're doing here. And I did it. I actually won an award, a multifamily marketing award. I wasn't doing it for that. But what I realized was I looked back at some of the old videos, and it was like a buddy of mine was the first guy to go out to dinner in like May, right? When the restaurants opened in Miami. And we were like, ⁓ how was it? Like, what'd you think? And I look at that and I say to myself,
David Moghavem (54:21)
Yeah.
John Zalkin (54:24)
That's us today talking about AI. Like we're in the height of COVID, everyone's holed up into a house, everyone's scared to go everywhere. And it was like the first guy to go to dinner with three friends and get a bottle of wine at dinner. And it was like, you went out to dinner? And like I hear us talking now, and I know in hopefully two, three years, we're gonna do a follow-up to this call, and it's gonna be like, my god, can you?
David Moghavem (54:27)
Right.
Yeah.
We're gonna get some clips from here Swan and we'll go
back and say that was a fun time.
John Zalkin (54:52)
can you believe you guys were actually
automating that workflow and it wasn't like, you know, you didn't have an earpiece in and it knew everything? Like
David Moghavem (54:56)
Yeah.
Awesome. Well, John, it was amazing having you on DealFlow Friday. Looking forward to having you on in two, three years' time when we could reflect back at this and just see how the world's changed. ⁓ sounds like you're building an incredible platform with Advise AI. And I'm sure just like you scaled RKW, you're gonna scale Advise AI to beyond measure. So credit to you. Excited to work with you guys, excited for.
John Zalkin (55:01)
Mm.
David Moghavem (55:28)
our demo that we may or may not be having in a few weeks and ⁓ looking forward to ⁓ seeing advise AI grow.
John Zalkin (55:30)
This has been awesome. Thank you. It's
amazing what you got what you've built. I love the podcast world and this is my first podcast as adviseai, so I'm excited. And it wouldn't be me if I didn't say anyone who wants to reach me, you can reach me at Johnjo H N at adviseai.ai. Just go to our website, adviseai.ai, and please we'd love to hear how you're using AI and learn from you guys.
David Moghavem (55:38)
Thank you.
Awesome. Thanks, John.
John Zalkin (56:00)
Thanks, Dave.