Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools

Harnessing AI in Real Estate with Betsy Pepine

• Jonathan Green : Artificial Intelligence Expert and Author of ChatGPT Profits • Episode 329

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Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast with Jonathan Green! In this episode, we're delving into the transformative potential of AI in the real estate sector with a distinguished guest, Betsy Pepine, an esteemed leader in the industry known for her innovative strategies and success in growing a real estate agency.

Betsy brings a wealth of insights into how artificial intelligence is reshaping the real estate landscape. She shares her perspective on integrating AI into brokerage operations to streamline processes and enhance client experiences, from the listing to the closing. Her focus on automation aims to reduce overhead and improve efficiencies, allowing real estate professionals to prioritize relationship-building over data entry.

Notable Quotes:

  • "The allure of quick success in real estate can be strong, but the truth is, it requires discipline and a commitment to consistent practices to truly thrive." - [Betsy Pepine] 
  • "The human-to-human connection is irreplaceable. AI should support us in what we do best, not replace the personal touch." - [Jonathan Green] 
  • "Real estate isn't just selling houses; it's about selling trust and fostering relationships." - [Betsy Pepine] 

Connect with Betsy Pepine:

Website: https://www.pepinerealty.com
Social Media: @BetsyPepine 

Connect with Jonathan Green

Is artificial intelligence gonna change the world of real estate? Let's find out on today's special episode. Today's episode is brought to you by the bestseller Chat, GPT Profits. This book is the Missing Instruction Manual to get you up and running with chat g bt in a matter of minutes as a special gift. You can get it absolutely free@artificialintelligencepod.com slash gift, or at the link right below this episode. Make sure to grab your copy before it goes back up to full price. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you wanna make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now. Then you can come to the right place. Welcome to the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. You will learn how to use artificial intelligence to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by bestselling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. Now that I'm so glad to have you here as an absolute expert in the real estate space because a lot of people are really wondering which sectors AI is gonna affect and which it isn't. And what I'm really excited about, I'm really passionate about art and design and some of the cool things we talked about last week. It's so amazing now that you can have AI stage a house to look how you like.'cause I watch a lot of real estate videos where people have missed staged houses. I, that's one of my favorite things to see where they've made all the rooms seem unuseful. Yeah.' cause I always use rooms different than other people will, like we all have our different use case, so I'm always fascinated by that. So I would love to start there and just where you see real estate going. And is the real estate market gonna be dramatically changed by artificial intelligence or it's gonna be small changes? Interesting. I think it's a very ripe industry for AI and automation with the virtual reality things. We were talking last week about builders in particular. I think when you have a new customer coming in and trying to visualize walking through a plan and a model that hasn't been built yet, that's a wonderful use of that. Changing out. And we're seeing that already just on social, but changing out different rooms like you said. Envisioning different uses of spaces. So I think that's great. What I'm more. More personally interested in is as a broker, how do I incorporate AI into my systems and processes to streamline my expenses and overhead and resources and where I think there could be great potential. And why I reached out to you in particular was trying to get, these processes taking from the listing to the closing. There's so many different steps in that process, getting it. From paperwork to the MLS feeding to all the websites, feeding to social media doing all of that automatically would just be so interesting to me. So that's where I see it in, in terms of the systems and processes side, but also on the graphic design side. Absolutely. I think you brought up two things which are very interesting, is that I remember, like when I was looking at renting an apartment in my early twenties, they let us walk through a demo apartment and I was like, I can't afford this furniture. Yeah, like I wish this seems amazing. Or often it's stage F like I have a very unique situation. I have five children, so very rarely. Is a house set up the way we want. This house, when we saw it, one of the bedrooms had four bunk beds as built-ins. And I was like, that's perfect for our family. Yeah. But most families, it's not the right thing. So it's just happened to match what we're looking for and it's very interesting to see that AI can let us envision things. One of the things I did want to ask you about is do people ever put on virtual reality goggles and actually do a 3D tour? Like I just couldn't match. Yeah, like in modern, not, we're not seeing that yet, at least in our market for a resale home. I know there are some markets like in Miami where you can do that and you go into a build center and you're looking at that, but we don't have that locally. But where I do think, not only in terms of envisioning like bunk beds and things like that, but especially for a builder where the list of upgrades is tremendous. And sometimes it's hard to visualize what it's gonna look like in your space. And so to be able to show the customized features of this is their wishlist and this is how it actually looks in your home, but it's not actually built, that's a tremendous value and a win-win for everybody'cause they can visualize it. You're gonna sell more product that way. So I think you've just brought up something that's so brilliant. One of the things that I deal with in the past, I've done a lot of ghost writing projects, is you'll write the rough draft and someone goes, now that I've read it, I realize I want something completely different. And I know that so many builders. I remember I heard a story of someone who was like a germaphobe and they go, I want a prison toilet because those are germ proof. I don't know why they thought this. They wanted a metal prison toilet. And then those are, they're hard to get 'cause they're not. On the market, like you just don't normally see them at the hardware store suite. They put one in and then he looks and he goes, where's the toilet seat? And they go you don't get one of those in jail. That's part of the package. Yeah. Is that And massive amount of money goes realize I don't wanna rip it out. Yeah. And I imagine that because one of the things I'm always fascinated by where I live. Everybody builds their dream home. And then sells it a year and then wants to sell it a year later. And that's how we got this house. Like it's and I'm always fascinated by this. It's something I grew up around a lot and like people would spend three years building a house. So much effort. Like a massive amount of stress. And then they sell it within two years. Yeah. And it's, we see that all the time. Yeah. And it's what if you I wonder how much that is. It's not what you thought it was gonna be like it looked like one thing in your head. Yeah. And it's very hard for a person who's not trained in blueprints. One of my my brother-in-Laws is an architect and Oh boy, right? Like I looked at his plans for, I go, I dunno what any of this means. Yeah. So I'm sure there's this huge issue where people can't envision it and just imagining how frustrating it would be as a builder where a person tells you what they want and then you build it and they look it and go, this isn't what I wanted at all. And I don't wanna. I think that's a very clever use. I really like that, where it solves that particular problem. It allows people to see something before it's built and figured out. Do I really want that feature? Because so many, so many times we think we're gonna do things that we're gonna do. Like we, there's a room here that's meant to be an office in this house, but it's too small. So they didn't measure it. So if you're sitting in a rolling chair, you can't back up enough from the desk to stand up, which is really big problem. And it's not connected to any of the rooms that have air conditioning. So it's. So hot. Yeah. It's where we live. On the equator, it gets crazy hot. So there was like these two small, which means it's a storage room. Yeah. Long story short, the office is just a storage room. Nobody goes in there. It's so hot. And it's exactly the little mistakes that Yeah. If you actually put in a chair and moved it around, maybe you would've caught that. So I think that I really like where you're talking about there. And then earlier you mentioned the automation thing. And this is actually something other people brought to me is that. The buying and selling house process is really long, and I know that a couple of companies tried to solve it with send us a picture and your address and we'll make you an instant offer, send you check same day. And those two companies did not go well for them. Their algorithm got the numbers wrong because there's the human element, which is that sometimes people don't want a house. For what you think. It's like guessing of the price sometimes goes wrong. That's why sometimes a house on the market for a week and sometimes it's two years. Like I saw, like it took 14 years I think to sell one of Michael Jordan's houses and it's because everything was shaped like a basketball. Like you have to really want house, which is not a lot of people. That's that kind of thing where you over personalized. Trying to shorten that path. I think doing it all in one step seems to have not worked, but I really like what you brought up about shortening the process because we certainly have all these different things that were invented 30 years ago, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, that don't really talk to each other very well. And that's one of the biggest problems we're seeing in tech is that I have an email here, I have a answering machine message there. How do I get those on the same place? It's really amazing that it hasn't been solved yet. So I love that you brought that up. And I think that one of the challenges in your industry, and we're seeing this a lot of other industries, is just data organization. How can we simplify the things? Because I wanna be on the phones or showing listings and closing deals. I don't wanna be moving files from A to B and I feel exactly the same way. So I love that you brought that up.'cause I think a lot of people one of the things I noticed in 2008, everyone I knew who lost their job. Got into real estate, they became a real estate agent or a real estate broker. And this is when I was living in Nashville in 2020, everyone became a coach. So it was a different shift. But I saw all these people get into real estate and everyone thinks that real estate is just showing houses, but so much of it is client acquisition. Yeah. And then like handling ruffled feathers. There's so much of the person, and it's the husband likes the house, the wife doesn't, there's always those things, right? And it's like that's the part that you need your time on, not the part where you're filling in forms and moving data from here to here. So the more you can spend doing the thing that generates revenue, and the less time you can spend on just the data entry and data organization the faster your business can grow. And a lot of people especially the larger teams and companies have moved to. Recognizing those non-revenue producing activities and moving those offshore to VAs. And that's been a cost effective way to get the costs down. But I think using auto pure automation is even better if we could figure that out. Yeah, I think that you're exactly right, which is that it's a stair-step solution. I'm I. There was a invention in I think the 18 hundreds of a master chess machine, a robot that could win NA chess game. And it was the first like ai and it turns out it was a man under the chess board playing the game. It was a man hit inside. And we've seen companies even do that in the last few years. Where they say it was, but actually they're just sending all the information to VAs and that is a stair step solution. But one of the challenges and the important things, and this is something that I was talking about to some of my other developer friends, is that. He's working on a project where with a very large company and taking their phone call data and moving it around. And I said how are you stripping out the personal information? I said, are you stripping out before it touches you? Because you don't want someone to send you a bunch of phone calls or credit cards in them. Yeah, because now you are. Yeah. If something goes wrong, you're blame able. Like you never want it to be blamed. And that's like really important. So one of the challenges with. Moving data offshore is that now all your innovation's traveling around. So the more you keep it in-house, you have a higher level of security. So I think that's one of the things that people are starting to notice.'cause I know people who didn't realize how much control of their business they'd actually passed on to someone else. So very much. I think that is the future. And controlling things with automation is allows you to be able to be in charge of everything, which is the most important thing. Yeah. So are you seeing a difference in between like residential real estate and commercial real estate, how they're changing their approaches to marketing? As we're seeing a big shift where a lot of people are doing work from home, which means more and more offices are becoming empty, and so that market has going through a different shift. It also means more people wanna be at home, so more people wanna be in a better house. So I'm wondering if we're seeing a shift from commercial to residential real estate and how that's affecting your approach, approaches to technology. I don't feel like, we are not a commercial brokerage. We do commercial work, but I know a lot of commercial agents and brokers and I don't feel that they are their systems and processes and how they're interacting with their customers and doing their businesses different than the residential agent. I think we're, I think it's all following the same path. We're all. In the US pretty much agents are 10 99 independent contractors. Even before covid, a lot of agents never came to the office, but it absolutely was exponential after covid because those that did come to the office realized they didn't need to come to the office unless they needed socialization or they work better in a structured environment. Which a lot of people don't get into real estate if that's what they need, because you need to be very disciplined and self-directed to be successful. I think both across the commercial space and the residential, we're seeing fewer and fewer agents in the office on a regular basis, which. Which really impacts culture more than anything, to be honest with you. It's hard to create this wonderful family culture that I, that's something that's always been important to me when you don't see most people most of the time. So that's been our biggest challenge with regards to that. We are seeing just in terms of real estate since Covid, obviously the need for, and even it's progressed since then because what we found in Florida, and I don't know if this is true in other parts of the country, but a lot of people, I. Got used to homeschooling in Florida and Florida was already a big homeschooling state, but it just seemed like Covid really made that growth exponential as well. And a lot of people, it seems and I don't know what the exact numbers are, but it seems like more and more families are homeschooling. They like the travel lifestyle. They like the flexibility and freedom of that. They like the control of what their children are being taught and the safety of their environment versus the school environment. So we're seeing more and more demand for. Rooms for classroom setups. Three or four kids have workstations in a, in one room, which that prior to covid, no one ever was asking us for that. So that's been interesting. And then also the surge in increased ancillary dwelling units. Mother-in-law suites, tiny homes in the backyard, some kind of. Structure that's not directly attached to the home for that kind of space, for somebody that needs to work from home now. Or an aging in-law. So that's been a, something that's relatively new as well over the last several years. It's really interesting. We homeschooled for a while. We had the exact same thing until my kids are like, we want to go to school. Yeah. So they wanted to, the socialization aspect, they wanted to get out and have more adventurous. And I was like, oh, I'm gonna miss you guys, but gotta let 'em. Escape the nest sometimes, but I think that it's very interesting. We're seeing some cultural shifts, which then affect all sorts of things we never would've thought about because when I started working from home and working for myself, running my own business, there was this perception of oh, he just doesn't have a job. Things just not working out for him. And I was like, no, I'm good. I didn't work from home or I worked at the office. And I love that you brought up the structured thing because there's a big challenge right now of. Working from offices, working from shared spaces. And what I found is being in the work remote lead space for a long time is that some people need to be around other people. So they go to like co-working spaces and they like to be around other people. And I had one friend who would always work from a bar I. Like all day. And he was sitting on a stool and I was like, how can you, the most uncomfortable of all chairs is the three-legged stool. And I tried them one time, I was like, this is a nightmare. This is the worst thing I've ever tried. And I can't work in a cafe. I work from home. I can't really do the cafe thing. Yeah. I don't, the socialization thing is just a distraction for me. But other people have discovered, you're right, they work in different ways and that is one of the cool things. But also there is, as we talked about last week, there is this need to be able to self motivate and. Your industry has obviously for a long time, forced that isn't, if you don't go and find clients, you're not gonna get any clients. It doesn't, it's not like a job where you get paid whether or not you succeed. And I think that makes a lot of sense to why, for your industry, for people that have already had that element, they can succeed at work from home. Whereas I found a lot of people. I can't maintain it 'cause there's so many distractions. Like I have con distractions at home. My kids, five kids. I can't imagine. Yeah. They're asleep right now. That's the only reason there's no one interrupting my, normally my son is in here playing Fortnite. He just didn't get off.'cause we're doing some recordings, but that's the pro and the con, which is that you have more things you can do. You're at home, but also you still have to. Maintain your schedule. And I think we're especially seeing a revolution where people are starting to say I can work from and use AI to maintain things and get my tasks done. And we're seeing some shifts in the market, which are very interesting. And yeah, I do think that actually because of the way your market operates, that people have already had to be self-sufficient. Figuring out how much we can do from home and what is the value of socialization is one of the challenges we're going through because I. Yeah, looking at a house with a person there, like I just can't imagine doing it without the person there. Like the human to human connection is really important for a lot of these processes. So I think that what's, I think we're gonna see, for me, my perspective is that we're gonna see a future where the things we don't need to do, that we've been doing that are repetitive. We'll get pushed to AI so we can spend more time with our families, more time face-to-face more time. I think we're actually gonna see a shift towards less social media, not more that's what I'm hoping. But maybe everyone will start wearing AI glasses and it will just get way worse. We have here in Florida, we have keyless entry so they didn't get rid of the agent, they got rid of the agent, not the customer. So the customer sometimes goes into the home but doesn't have the agent with them. And I thought, that's interesting to me. How do you sell your value if you're letting the customer. You have you? Yeah. I would think that would lead to a lower success rate. Yeah. Because part of, so I watch I watch someone on YouTube who shows these amazing houses and he can make. Anyhow, like he's so good at making every house seem amazing. And then I watch someone else who does reviews and it's says, here's all the flaws. He didn't show you like it's next. One of 'em was like next to a nuclear reactor. Another one was next to a train. Train. So you know why the house has been on the market for five years, right? Like suddenly there's the missing piece and there is something about the presentation and telling a story. Because what you, when you're looking at a house, you're really imagining, oh, this will be the kids' room. This is where we'll do that. And if you don't have someone there who's driving the story, I would think that the conversion rate would go way down. Yeah. And you don't build, real estate's a relationship business, so you don't, you're not building the relationship. Yeah. My parents, once they found a real estate agent, when they bought the house, when we moved to Tennessee, that's who they always used. And when they got divorced, they still, they both used her separately to get their new houses like you. Have a longevity that I think is really important. I love that you brought that up. So yeah, I think that very interesting to see that the future of real estate, the part that matters, the human to human connection, that's not what's replaceable is the moving data around and maybe seeing some cool pictures. I just, again, like I can't imagine that many people are putting on VR glasses. I've never never used them. I don't know anyone who's using them now. Like everyone I know has. vr, they're just dusty. I've never seen them. So I think that it's so hard to get the same experience until you're actually there. So and also there's always like, when we looked at this house, there was such a gap between the pictures and the reality of the pictures were clearly 10 years old. Oh. Like they were fully 10 years ago. And I was like guys, this is not the same house. Yeah. And of course that helped us to negotiate very strongly. But it's same challenge with the vr. It's it's not real. So it's good for a mockup, which I think is true. You always wanna see it and see what the wood looks like and see what it smells like to actually know. So I think the human thing is really good. So for people that are earlier on in thinking about getting it into the real estate game, especially people in their early twenties, everyone. Wants to have an easy success business. What is the biggest advice you would give people that are thinking about entering this sector? What's the kind of biggest mistakes people make that kind of causes them to crash and burn and what are the things that really help people to succeed in this world? I think. We actually run a real estate school. So we see a lot of people who come into real estate into the profession, and we see a lot of people exit. 80% of agents are not no longer in business after two years of getting their license. And sadly, I think the industry does us a disservice because the bar to get a license and sell real estate is quite low in the United States. In Florida, you take a class with, you can get the class done in a couple of days online, or you can take it a week in person. You pass a test by the state and then you're licensed, and I think because it's so easy and inexpensive to do that. A lot of people assume it must be easy and inexpensive to make a living, and that's just not the case. Your phone does not start ringing the day you get a license. And in fact, you mentioned your parents were so loyal to their realtor. My parents were loyal to their realtor. They hadn't bought a house with her in 40 years, and they clearly told me they were using her and not me when I got my license. That's how loyal people are. So even the people that you think you might be able to count on when you get your license don't use you. So you really have to you really have to want it. You have to have a nest egg. A lot of people they really come in with maybe one to three months of living expenses in the bank account. You, you can't do that. We tell people, minimum, you need six months, or you're living with somebody who's supporting you, but. If you don't have at least six months built up, you are gonna feel very stressed. It's gonna be very uncomfortable, and you most likely aren't gonna make it. You're gonna have to go get another job, and usually fast income. It's just the allure is too. Too strong. And they end up going back and we've lost agents to going back to waitressing just, not incredibly high paying jobs, but the money's there on a daily basis and they are used to that. And they're not used to having and living paycheck, or not paycheck, commission check by commission check. So just really understanding what that lifestyle's and then I think the second component is being incredibly disciplined to the practices. This is. To me, I, it's the simplest, it's one of the simplest professions to be successful at. It's, there is a formula. You work the formula, it's a numbers game. You understand what your numbers are, what, and if you don't have your own numbers, use your broker's numbers, use the national numbers. It's, and it all comes down to how many conversations you're having. With people about real estate every day. And if you're willing to have those conversations, your numbers will come, the income will follow there. But a lot of people, I think, try to get it to be complicated, have limiting mindsets on, oh, I can't do this. I can't ask that. I don't wanna, I. I don't want a door knock. I don't want a cold call. You gotta get over that fear and rejection, rejection's every day. To me it's just one step closer to the yes. I don't care that it's a no or it's never a no, it's no not today. So reframing some of those things that people may find uncomfortable, but really understanding what the job entails. I think the smartest people. They call us and they ask us to shadow, can I shadow an agent for a week? Absolutely. We would love that. Because you're gonna really understand what it's like to be an agent. It's not, I think sometimes some of those television shows do the profession an injustice too, because it's just not, it's just not all fun. And looking at beautiful homes looking at homes gets quite old after a couple of months and most people don't live. In the homes that you're seeing on television, it's not nearly as glamorous or as interesting. And it's also a I always tell people, houses sell themselves. We're not selling houses. We're selling people on us to use us when they decide to buy a house, but. You would never wanna sell somebody a house that they didn't want or it was over their budget or they don't even know if they're gonna be here next year. So you're not trying to talk someone into buying a house, you're just trying to gain their trust so that when they are ready to buy or when they know someone that's ready to buy, they'll think of you. I think that's a really good lesson. I think that what we're seeing, and that's why I'm so excited to have you on today, is that while parts of every industry are gonna be affected by ai, the human to human connection, the personal relationships, which is so much a part of business, like when I started working online, I was like, I never have to talk to another person again. 90 to 99% of my business is handshake or relationship based. It's so often chat or conversation meeting at a conference or meeting by happenstance. And very rarely is it like all computers in the middle, right? Because it's. So much relationship based and it was really a surprise for me and I think that's a really important lesson that while AI is really cool and it does a lot of great things as AI podcast, of course I'm a huge proponent of ai. But mostly AI is not here to replace us. It's here to help us to do the things that are not the best uses of our time. And let us get back to exactly doing the things that are the best revenue generators. Whether it's showing more houses, doing more calls, or spending more time with your family. So I think this was amazing. Thank you so much for being here on today's episode. Betsy, this was an amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. Where can people see what you're doing, especially if they're in Florida, they're just thinking about, I. How ma your massive success growing an agency and kind of all the cool things you're doing and how you're running a real estate tool. You're doing so many amazing things. Sure. So I have a website, my name, that's dot com and there you can find, you can click and get my free newsletter. You can order, I just released a book last month. You can get the book there and a variety of other things and learn more about me and my companies from there. And then I'm on all the social handles at Betsy Papin. We'll link to everything below the video and in the show notes to make sure you guys can see this. This is so amazing. Thank you so much for being here and everyone, thanks for listening. This has been another amazing episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Thanks for listening to today's episode starting with ai. It can be Scary. ChatGPT Profits is not only a bestseller, but also the Missing Instruction Manual to make Mastering Chat, GBTA Breeze bypass the hard stuff and get straight to success with chat g profits. As always, I would love for you to support the show by paying full price on Amazon, but you can get it absolutely free for a limited time@artificialintelligencepod.com slash gift. Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. Make sure to subscribe so you never miss another episode. We'll be back next Monday with more tips and tactics on how to leverage AI to escape that rat race. Head over to artificial intelligence pod.com now to see past episodes. Leave, review and check out all of our socials.