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The Real Estate Addicts (REA) podcast is a must-listen for anyone interested in real estate development, investment, construction and entrepreneurship. Each episode dives into a wide range of industry topics and features conversations with savvy, successful entrepreneurs who candidly share their career paths, challenges, breakthroughs, and the stories behind the remarkable companies they’ve built. Expect big personalities, thoughtful insights, and conversations that both educate and inspire.
Co-hosted by Ray Hurteau, Dan Rubin (Instagram: @rhinvestgroup), and Marc Savatsky (Instagram: @choose_boston)
Follow the Real Estate Addicts Podcast on YouTube: @RealEstateAddicts
00:00
oh Welcome to the Real Estate Addicts podcast with your host Marc Savatsky, Choose Boston. Ray Hurteau, RH Investment Group. Dan Rubin, RH Investment Group. All right. Today we're talking more AI. ah So we have a hackathon tonight at the Union. This is my first hackathon. What are we hacking? We are hacking. So we have a series of events at the Union which recur monthly.
00:29
Uh, one of them is, uh, hard hat, how every third Thursday, it's just informal casual networking, uh, every third Thursday, the hackathon is one and, uh, behind the build is the third. So behind the build is no cameras, no microphones. Someone really just goes through all the, all the ins and outs of their projects. Um, but the hackathon, uh, I'm excited about, have a number of students from the Northeastern real estate club, really big brain, smart, smart kids.
00:58
And people who rate school, you know, maybe a little more gray hair, uh, but some, certainly some experience to go with it, who are not quite as technology savvy. We're going to break into teams or we're going to attack a prompt and tonight's prompt is construction estimating. It's fairly broad, but we're going to try to, uh, you know, do some vibe coding and, uh, come up, have a contest here and whoever has the best product at the end of the evening. you're trying to make the best product using AI only.
01:27
blank sheet and or can you bring your own resources? Hey, here's all my known higher costs. I mean, that's kind of like a more detailed answers, but yeah, do they have to use a specific AI tool? No, I use whatever they use any, any tool and uh, okay. And are they allowed to use like outside developed resources or does it just talk to.
01:51
Ray's asking so many specific You should come, Ray. Well, here's why I'm because now you guys gave me such a hard time about not using AI. I'm using AI and I'm trying to build like this entire, what started as wanting our virtual assistant to just send us better formatted emails has now turned into this whole 20,000. Replace our VA. Not replace her, but like get her focused on doing tasks rather than reporting on the tasks. Cause I think she can only handle one of those two things.
02:20
efficiently with her four hours a day. so rather than updating emails and sending me an email of what she did, or updating her own set of systems when she'll be using our system of record, just do stuff. Like when a message comes in, do it, or how do I know that she's following up? So it's going to have built-in follow-up flagging and status requirements and alerts and, you know, she won't be able to escape the end of day He's basically building our, like an in-house, like property management tool.
02:49
Yeah, yeah, essentially minus payment processing and that sort of stuff. We have payment processing for Circa, ah for the union, all that's built in. I think the distinction like, because this is episode three or something on AI, so it's really no longer just like a replacement for a Google search. You know, find me the best this. It's now really like, do things for me. And that that's what I was hoping we'd focus on here. Make me a billionaire. So I don't care how you do it. I also think though that um
03:19
You gotta be careful, okay? Because I've gotten, I've started to go down this path and my wife who works for a much larger financial services company uh also tells me that people within her organization are doing the same and it's almost like they're spending more time, like,
03:45
trying to use AI to solve or do something for them when they could have spent less time just doing that task. you don't, like they're trying, they're like swinging the complete other way and they're using AI for literally everything. I'm trying to think of an example, cause I just went down the same rabbit hole and I justified it to myself by saying, I'm going to have to do this repeatedly. So though I'm spending an inordinate amount of time, right? Oh, I know what exactly it was.
04:15
a Sun property, Anthony reached out for a certificate of insurance and a W9 from Circa and he wanted the COI to name his company's information. So I wanted to create a skill and the way to do it is we email Starkweather and Sheffley with the information, then we get the thing back and then I would attach that and send it with the, and I wanted to create a repeatable skill set for that. And it was torturing me a little bit. But I know it's going to happen a lot. That's
04:44
You know, blocking. It's a repeatable Did you get it done? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That works. Okay. So now you've got to do that. Yeah. But for every aspect of the business, like how long would that take to build out? Or do you do a couple of them and you go, okay, now analyze everything that I do. Just watch me. And then when you see a task that looks repeatable or one that you can build, build it and offer it. Is that something that you can? Oh, I get confused in terms of what the limits are.
05:10
and where I'm able to go. And this is where I turn to old man now because I love technology. I want to embrace AI. I don't know. I haven't unleashed Claude on my computer yet. Like I haven't given it full rain. Oh, you know I really like now is the integration with my Gmail. So if I have a list of attendees that I want to go to something or to email people, I just will search and find that person's contact information within my thousands upon thousands of unorganized emails.
05:41
So I like that, but I had a issue with my boat this past weekend. So I think this is didactic or interesting for a few reasons. One, so the boat you're, just cruising throttles in one position and the thing just starts like slowing down and you see the RPMs kind of falling. Um, so I took some videos of like each gauge, the pressure gauge, the electrical gauge, uh RPMs. And then I just did one for audio of the motor itself.
06:07
And overall video of the motor and I uploaded all those videos to Manist to digest and to figure out and pretty quickly like came to the conclusion that it's it's a fuel issue. It's being starved in some way. So there's a fuel filter. I was going to say it sounds like fuel filter. Likely the problem. Yeah. mean, so maybe it's that hard, but when I sent the diagnosis to Ryan who runs a candlelit East, I was very clear to preface it with like, Hey, I apologize. it, this is off the walls.
06:36
Like I 100 % used some AI applications to come up with the below. Let me know what you think. I certainly respect your expertise and opinion. Yeah, think that's gonna be more and more relevant as people use AI in their daily lives because again, you don't wanna piss people off.
07:00
by trying or insult people by saying, you cause we know that AI isn't a hundred percent correct all of the time. getting better, but it's not. It's not. You know, so you'll like put one clarifying point in there and it'll go, oh, this changes everything. And like, wow, we were that far off. I also think it also caters to you and tries to like make you feel it all the time. But anyway, um you know, another example is we are getting, we have,
07:28
we're working on doing some massing and exploring potentially adding some units to a building that we own down in Bridgewater. And there's a small part of the property that has some wetlands. And so before we do our existing condition survey, we want the wetlands flag so then our surveyor can make sure it's added to their survey. And I reached out to a local wetlands scientist, I guess they're called. um
07:58
It was like, it's like he sent a proposal for like 800 bucks and, and Ray plugged it into Claude. Well, you sent it. Well, I know Ray so well that I sent it. I sent the proposal, I forwarded the proposal to Ray and I said, Ray, let me know what questions Claude has that you want me to ask. Cause I know Ray's exactly. To be fair for an $800 proposal, they were like,
08:22
It was like five pages long. I'm not reading this. Well, thing that he prefaced to me when he called me and he was like, the attorneys make us do this, you know, it's a standard. Disclosures and limitations and all anyway, like for 800 bucks, I don't need to spend, I feel that it would annoy him if I sent the 12 or 15 questions that AI had about like, what methodology are you using and all this and all that.
08:50
He's fucking flagging the wetlands. it's just, you an asshole? Yeah. like, well, no. I knew the dollars to get a professional out of bed and take you on as a client, listen, I understand it completely. And I told Dan, I understand there are a lot of questions here and this is a lot for the size of the contract. I said, so maybe a phone conversation is better. Um, because then it doesn't come off the same way. Right.
09:18
And you still ask the same questions, but it's like, oh, hey, I just wanted to run a couple of things by you. I did call him and I asked him a couple of the questions, but I didn't ask him all of the questions because I think that some of them were not relevant. So you know what my like old school thing is now is phone calls. Like I'm big on like, know, anytime someone's like, yeah, well, I emailed them. like, okay, I don't care. Did you call them? You know, someone on my team. I ask that all the time. Ask what? Ask you that all the time.
09:46
Cause you're like, you want everything in writing. Well, some, yeah, at some point things have been writing. You can always send a follow- You can always start with a phone call. the phone call, like, especially if you're asking for something, I can't, what pet people of mine, this is tension, but just like, my dad's like, I called the plumber, I emailed the plumber and he didn't get me back, get back to me. What, like he's dead to me. It's like, he's just really busy on a job. just, did you call him and then call like, once you get someone on the phone, you're going to build that rapport. You're asking them to take time out of their day.
10:14
to estimate your project, come to your house to do something. They're pretty busy. And you know, a cold email from who are you again, you know, it doesn't I call the person, I leave a message, and then I follow, usually, if it's someone that I've never dealt with before, I'll follow up with a text just to let them know like who I am. It's like, hey, my name is Dan Rubin. I got your number from Mark Zabatsky. Because that instantly provides some sort of okay.
10:40
Like it kind of vets me and especially raise them. I was going to say the cost of an email is too low. That's the problem. We all get flooded with emails because it takes two seconds and it's probably not even written by you. too many. So to demonstrate the value that you're asking of somebody, I think the call and the time out of your day is. I think I talked about this on
11:03
maybe the first episode of AI where the human element is gonna become a differentiator again. You can't just defer to computers all the time. anyway, so we asked these questions back and forth. Wetland scientist, it's 800 bucks, you have all these things you're gonna call. And my only concern was like, just want it to be something where if for some reason we continue pursuing this opportunity, our intent is for it to be.
11:30
You know, buy right. don't want to get hung up on some technicality. It flagged it as a potential question. Again, whether or not it's right to your mode example. I'm glad you had the conversation. Thank you for doing that. thank you for listening to me. I value your relationship, you and our relationship. I love you too. You want another? This is literally me and Dan every day is a little bit of this back and forth shit. It's kind of a buzzkill. uh
11:55
My cousin, uh, my cousin Jason passed away recently. It was really sad. I appreciate it. It so was down in Texas, my aunt and uncle and mother cousin. And we're just like a couple of days for the funeral. And my aunt mentioned that she wants to redo her kitchen. And I was like, all right, let's, let's go. This is, this is what I'm good at. Yeah. So, uh, I, scan the kitchen, uh, with like a LIDAR app called magic plans. And then I grabbed a couple of the PDFs. pumped it into.
12:24
uh, Manus or Claude, whatever. And, uh, then I went through with my aunt and like, found some inspo photos for what want the kitchen to look like and pumped those in. And I just kept telling Manus, I'm like, wait, I'm going to give you a lot of information right now. I'm not going give you all at once. Don't do anything until I tell you go. So I started with like, these are the existing photos. I see. Rather than having one giant message, you were breaking it up. Here's some stuff. Just chew on this and don't do anything yet. So was like, here's existing photos of the kitchen.
12:53
Here's the plans of the kitchen to scale to the nearest inch. Here's inspiration photos of our style and aesthetic that we want. This is the appliance package I'm thinking of. And then I was like, okay, now redraw the kitchen. And really, really good shop drawing level ah stuff that I think you could go to four different cabinet vendors. I'm not saying to actually produce the cabinets yet, but enough that you could get three different cabinet providers to give you a real quote pretty close to apples to apples.
13:22
And standard sizes for like the cabinet sizes. You could, could really go all the way down to a reflected ceiling plan. It's pretty incredible. Yeah. And shop for the fixtures, then find the promo code to buy the fixtures better. Like, so it's those sort of multi-step design iterations. So that was, uh, that was cool. That is cool. Small silver lining. No, all this AI stuff, it's like, it gives you more information at your fingertips, but just like our episode on the trades, you still need someone to execute it.
13:52
And so it's just going to put more of a bottleneck on the boots on the ground folks that are taking vision and making it reality. expedite a lot of the administrative planning process. And then like the execution phase is just going to get all gummed up. You'll have everything all drawn out. Like this is perfect. Here's all the skews. Like when can I get you? And then they'll be like, we're eight months out. That's a real problem.
14:21
I don't know. Another thing I've been cool though. I've been using one AI to write a prompt for another AI. Oh, I've done that. Because prompt engineering takes so long. So sometimes I'll just like word vomit all my thoughts and say like, now make this like a masterful prompt. And yeah, that's a pretty good job of being like, you're an architect from, you know, this well known reputable firm. Do you have like a markdown file is what they call them MDs that kind of gives context as to
14:50
Who you are, did you go through like that self, is that what you're just referring to? Like, tell me everything about me, that kind of 50, 40, 50 questions. No, but as I've used it so much and I've continuously plugged it in, it now references, like it knows that I'm in real estate development and it knows that I have a podcast and it knows all this shit about me because now when it responds to some of my questions or my prompts,
15:18
It says, oh, this is, this is like great because it kind of fits in your real house of real estate development. It knows, it knows. For Circo. It is funny. Yeah. Yeah. For Circo demo and disposal, we're really doing battle with whether we should pay 50 bucks a month per user for like this kind of pretty basic CRM. Like you show up at a job, it's got the details that whoever answered the phone puts in it. You can bill, you can see who hasn't paid yet, who has. And
15:46
Thus far, we're sticking with our own that we built because we like it better. It has its flaws right now we're still ironing them out. But you can directly control that and in almost real time, fix a bug. Our transaction that we did was flawless as far as I can tell. If something happened behind the scenes, then... Well, someone texted me today and said, you just sent me a bill for zero dollars.
16:09
Is that real? I was like, no. Discount. time. First time. Yeah, that's nice enough of an Italian. So do you, you use, you've created a lot of skills within Manus. Yeah. Yeah. So you save them and implement them. It's a repeatable task. Yeah. So like this, the workers comp skill, certificate of insurance plus W9 is a skill. So I just say like, you know,
16:38
start this skill. Another one is like agent onboarding for me for the brokerage. That one's my favorite. That's the biggest time-saving. I mean, I've used, I created a skill, I use it for podcast editing, right? I use it to add our intro and outro music, because it's a repeatable task. you know, it's, I just uploaded the intro and outro music to Claude and I said, I want to create a skill that appends the intro music at the beginning of every episode and at-
17:04
And after eight seconds, I want it to fade into us starting to chat. And then same with the outro, fade out into the outro music over the course of certain number of seconds. And it's a repeatable task. And then just have to upload the audio, say I wanna add the intro and outro music and we'll automatically do it. Yeah, that's super cool. It's just, I think it's those administrative time-saving things. It really, really helps. think, you know, and getting into the deep dives. I think if it can get you 80 % of the way there,
17:34
It's a massive time saver. Yeah, I also really like the feature of like having the group chats with AI and I've referenced this before. That to me is the most powerful thing. It's like my whole Circa team is on the Circa chat and it has this real institutional history of everything that we've talked about. And if my job is to research like new trucks that we're looking to buy, I'll have it filled 250 miles within Boston.
18:00
must have this, must be capable of that. It can't be more than 26,000 pounds. Find me 10 good options. And like, it's not your job that you can tangentially follow what I'm doing and then jump in where needed and go, whoa, wait, Mark, no, we don't need a knuckle lift. That's... Well, when you say you have your chats in there, what is it, like a Slack channel that it's connected to or a Discord or... connect with Claude now. Or just actual But we just were all in on a shared, like, mannus, you know,
18:30
chat called Circa. Interesting. And you're not like using unnecessarily using tokens and whatnot. we are. But right now I think it's so heavily subsidized. Got it. I mean, I don't, do I pay 1500 bucks a month for AI? Yes. Uh, is that worth every penny? And I'm getting, yeah, that isn't for the amount of business that's doing, we were about to pay just for the union. had 500 bucks a month queued up for some fitness app. That was a total circle in a square.
18:58
You know round peg square hole kind of thing but we're gonna like make it work because it did billing and it allowed us to reserve the conference room and At the time I was on Upwork trying to hire someone from overseas to build us this app and I was just like Josh like Hit the pause button. Give me one weekend and ended up in a tow truck from New Hampshire to Boston for four hours Which is a long story, but during that during that ride I built the man this app
19:25
That's crazy. Not the Manus app, excuse me, the The Yen app and Manus, yeah. Yeah, and it does, it did most of those things pretty well. And then I got Shams Shukla to join our team and he took it the last one. Well, that's the scary thing about, you know, or amazing thing about AI, right? Because in the past, to your point about the CRM thing, it's like, you know, we used, when we were doing a lot of direct mail and stuff to keep track of leads and everything, we were,
19:54
we would subscribe to a monthly CRM. Yeah, we have a CRM, so we pay for But it had all of these things that we didn't even use or need, and then it also didn't have things that we wanted. Right, it had gaps and excess. And so now, you can just create your own fucking app and do whatever you want and have it do exactly what you want, because not everybody is gonna, you want the same things that you're gonna use and vice versa.
20:24
whatever, customize, build an app and customize it to whatever you want. Yeah. I'll plug perplexity quickly too. Perplexity is like a multimodal, uh large language model. And by that, it sort of understands like, oh, you're a lawyer looking for this. Well, there's a large language model that's just for real estate attorneys. Or like you're doing digital creation for content. Like, I'm going to push it there. So I assume it's more expensive than all of those because you're kind of getting the best of all those things. But
20:51
What I've done now is I'll screen capture me using a paid platform or an app and be like, I want to build this functionality. Like what's going on here. There's also skills that other people create now, like libraries of skills and models that you can now import into or purchase and import into quad and Manus and everything. that's all I'm seeing on all my social media is like, oh, these are the top.
21:19
10 skills you need to have now. So now it's like information overload in terms of which skills are the right ones. How do know they're safe? Because you're just taking somebody else's skills and you don't know what it's actually doing. Well, safe is scary. Like for my subcontractor onboarding, like, so I put it on Instagram and someone messaged me, um, Binyam and he's like, you can't collect people's social security numbers without like, there's laws around this. like, uh, be careful. And I was like, oh shit. So.
21:48
You know, I audited that skill. so that happens by rote or manually, but. so where do we, more than just it being like a really good, deep thought question and answer research type of tool when it's actually creating things or building things now, where, where are you? What's the next step? Like you've got the concept. And like you said, you just went to Madison's took a screenshot of a website and said, Hey, I want to build something like this. And then that's kept going down that road.
22:16
When did you introduce skills, know, mark down files, like just walk us through some of the details rather than just talking high level. Where are these things being hosted? Yeah, so like I have a website for my brokerage team called CBBTools.com. And on CBBTools, the first one I made was called Sun, it was a ripoff of Sunseeker, which is an app that I pay for from the Apple store. And as Sunseeker, you plug in your home address and it shows you the path of travel of the sun across the day at different times of the year.
22:45
So I was like, forget that all host fell built that. So that was easy. So it uses all open source data to make the app. So it's not like you're even reverse engineering. Here's taking the concept. Yeah. Okay. So that actually works really well. Then the next tool that I built is still doesn't work very well. I'm frustrated with it. This will be the subject of a future hackathon, I uploaded all the standard Massachusetts real estate forms from MLS. And then I wanted.
23:13
it to prompt me individually through the questions. Like, like who are the parties and then it fills in all the parties. Yeah. Yeah. What's the purchase price? How many days for this or give me a date for that. like my goal is to say, like, instead of like three weeks from now, I just wanted it to know, like, you know, instead of me, I'm like June 29th, I'd say like 45 days. Um, and it's buggy. It's, it's probably says, Oh, this looks like it's copyrighted material. Can I use it?
23:42
You're like, but I pay for a subscription, so yes, use it. What I like about it is that I'm doing everything on my phone and I'm always all over the place and I can't like always see like a whole PDF. And I don't want you to give me 20 questions at once. It drives me nuts. Like just give me one question, I'll answer it. One more question. And when you're done asking me questions, crank me a PDF. Oh yeah, and then brand it with my brokerages logo at the top. you know, so that's in process. That shouldn't be that hard. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty amazing.
24:13
You got a skill? I'm starting to work on some other stuff that we've talked about in the past or that we've tried to do in the past that wasn't feasible because we would have had to pay someone, you know, 50 grand to build an app. Now we'll just have AI do it. Yeah. So. And when you say app, is there like a server or how are you storing the data? It sets all that up.
24:41
A web tool, okay. I mean, when I set it to save to my home screen, like, what's the stack? The tech stack. Nah, that's above Mark's pay grade. Is it the capital stack? That's above Mark's pay Tech stack, like, ugh. So break it down. It would be great if it broke it down for you. Like, explain this to me, like I've never done programming. I know you have a CBB brokerage or CBB whatever tools, but where is that site live? Yeah. Like you register the domain with Squarespace or GoDaddy or whatever, but where's the data storage? I know, and what's dangerous is I don't even know.
25:12
You know, Manus is like, prompts me to put in my credit card and I do. And then it's saved and I'm not smart enough to know. Well, it's funny. I've tried giving it access. Do you give Manus like the authority? is it, is the website, is the domain pointing to a Manus name server? Like I don't understand how it's connected. When you hover over the link, where does it go?
25:42
We'll talk offline. I'll show you all this. Maybe we need a demo. We'll do a follow. One other quick thing that I'd to bring down. side coming out. This is our engineering stuff coming out. Dorks. We're not even dorks, like, speaking anymore. I'm pretty tech-retarded now. Yeah, can't use that word. Tech-r. Okay. I've been doing this one too, because I have a lot of screen time. We're always traveling. I'll have it make me custom podcasts.
26:11
So the topics I'm interested in, people have sent me articles or just like I'm reviewing something for a good housekeeping magazine. want to know like, well, don't you tell my electrician what are the benefits of this product? What are the things to look out for? Um, and I'm just like, do a, do a podcast and then I'll play it in the car. That's hilarious. So like it reads, basically reads it to you. Yeah. Like reads all the articles, reads the manual, but then like makes it a little entertaining. It's okay. Oh, yeah. Interesting. So.
26:41
I think, yeah, I mean, I don't know what- a lot more about AI. think this is for the half of the surprise. I think, let us know how it goes. Yeah. Let us know who wins. Okay. And I mean, this is probably, we're probably just gonna continue to talk a lot about AI over the course of the next X amount of months and the foreseeable future since it's here to stay and- How we're integrating it into our businesses now, how we're integrating it into our businesses and- not just talk anymore. Yeah, now we're actually using it in our daily.
27:11
daily lives. So cool, man. Thanks everyone for reading, reviewing, for joining our YouTube channel, uh, and for supporting the podcast. We'll catch you the next one. Later. Cheers.