[T]echnology: I Rehired Grok Bot
[E]ducation: We Need More Babies
[C]oaching: How Can I Help You?
[H]ow To: CapCut AI Packaging
[T]echnology: I Rehired Grok Bot
AI is moving too fast. I sat down to write this week and didn't even know which thing to write about. 🤯
So I'll start with the one that surprised me.
I rehired Grok Bot.
Yep. The same one I fired back in September. It burned through $100 in credits and never handed me what I asked for. Turns out the problem wasn't the bot. It was me giving it a job too big to finish.
So this time my Chief of Staff, Gina, has one job. Hiring. I tell her what I need, and she spins up an agent that does that one thing.
Meet Pablo, my new video producer. 🎬 I recorded a podcast at a conference with one camera and one wide shot. One prompt to Pablo, and he figured out who was talking and zoomed in on them every time the speaker changed... just like a multi-cam setup. That edit used to take hours. Want to see how Pablo did? Check out the Coaching section below.
Every day now I find myself spinning up another agent that does actual work for me.
And I'm not the only one thinking this way. At Real RISE in Vegas this week, Real launched Leo Pro, and the whole pitch was AI employees. Not one assistant. A team of specialists. A Print Marketing Creator. A Trending Video Creator that watches what's trending and films your version. They launched with more than 40 of them and plan to add a new one every Wednesday.
The part that got me was the Builder. You describe the employee you want, Leo asks you a few questions, and it builds it. They said it's the same tool their own engineers use. 🤖
The trick isn't a smarter bot. It's a smaller job.
Here are three that Leo showed on stage. You can spin any of them up today with whatever agent tool you're using.
The database agent. Connect your CRM and let it fill in every contact with deed records, mortgage info, estimated value and how long they've owned. Then it texts them for you. "Hi Dana, your home on Cypress Bend is now worth about $1.2M, up 9% this year." When Dana writes back "wow, really? Tell me more," it flags her and you take it from there. Their demo flagged a contact with "equity up $98K and two neighbors just sold. A good reason to reach out." It's not more leads... it's knowing which of the 4,000 people you already know want to talk this week. 📈
The listing launch agent. Upload the listing PDF. It pulls the specs, writes the description, grabs the MLS photos and sorts them by room, then builds the home tour video, the property website and the social posts. One upload and the whole launch is ready for you to review. 🏡
The transaction agent. Upload the signed contract. It builds the timeline, puts every key date on the calendar, and shares it with the buyer, the seller, the lender and title. Inspector didn't show? Say "draft an addendum to move the inspection" and it sends it out for signatures. The deadlines stop living in your head. 📅
Start with one. Let it earn the next.
[E]ducation: We Need More Babies
Back to Vegas. Before anybody said the word AI, Tamir Poleg opened with the economy. A lot of charts... most of them from Zelman & Associates. If you've been reading for a while, you know Ivy Zelman is one of my favorites. I've talked about her before... when Ivy speaks, I listen. 📊
Start with this one. Since January 2000, gas is up about 198%. Education, 193%. Utilities, 168%. Household income... 129%. Nobody really noticed because it happened a little at a time for 26 years. We just got used to paying more.
So people are stretched. Consumer sentiment came in at 46.3 this month, lower than at the start of every recession the Michigan survey has ever tracked. And household debt actually dropped $13 billion last quarter, per the New York Fed... the first decline since 2020. People are spending less and putting less on the card.
Does that mean 2008 again? Tamir doesn't think so, and the numbers agree with him. Nearly 40% of homeowners don't have a mortgage at all. Most of the rest are sitting on a pile of equity. In 2008, bankruptcies and foreclosures spiked together. Right now foreclosures are up a little but still below the historic average, and bankruptcies are going down.
Stretched isn't the same as broken.
The lock-in effect is loosening too. In 2022, about 7% of mortgages had a rate over 6%. Today it's 22.5%, according to FHFA. That's more than one in five homeowners who wouldn't give anything up by moving.
Then he got to the long-term stuff. Population and household growth have been slowing for decades, immigration has slowed, and by the early 2030s the US is projected to have more deaths than births. Fewer people means fewer households... and fewer clients.
His fix? "The babies of today are the buyers of tomorrow, so we need more babies in this country." 👶
Best line of the morning. Funny, but he's not wrong. If you're planning to do this another 20 years, the pie is getting smaller.
[C]oaching: How Can I Help You?
Here's Pablo's work. 🎬 One camera, one wide shot in a Vegas hotel room with the blinds half closed... and he made it look like a three-camera shoot.
I sat down with Nimesh Patel, who runs REMAX in Houston and Austin, and our markets couldn't look more different right now. Houston has more inventory than it's ever had. When there are 19 other houses at $400,000, he says, "it's all about price." Then he dropped one I didn't know... in Texas, a 14-year-old roof can kill a deal because the buyer can't get it insured.
But the part I want you to watch is the end. We got on the trusted advisor thing, and it turned into the easiest business plan there is.
Call your past clients. Sit down with them for 20 minutes. Don't tell them what their house is worth. Don't sell them anything.
Just ask, "How can I help you?" 🤝
Last week I promised a bit more on Charlie Rocket... if you need a bit of inspiration, WATCH THIS CLIP.
[H]ow To: CapCut AI Packaging
As I was editing a video the other day, I noticed a new button on CapCut under the “Text” tab labeled “AI Packaging.” The description read, “Automatically generate captions, highlight keywords, and add sound effects and more to your video.” As someone who hates editing 20-minute videos and manually adding subtitles to emphasize certain points, then dragging the tiniest sound effects over for even more engagement, I was excited! 👏 I applied this to a 9-minute video, and the AI generation finished relatively quickly (about 2 minutes to render).
Although it did generate captions with emojis, the sound effects were pretty bad. They were randomly placed rather than added at the points I actually wanted to emphasize. However, the captions themselves were pretty good! There was really nothing I needed to edit. I do wish they had a slider or setting that allowed me to control how much AI packaging was added. For an almost 10-minute video, I wouldn’t opt for subtitles with emojis throughout the entire thing, as I think it would become pretty overwhelming to watch. I wish there was an option to tone it down so that only certain important points were emphasized with subtitles and sound effects.
Overall, I found the whole thing to be a bit much, but it does excite me that this feature was able to produce results so quickly! The actual words and captions were accurate, with very little intervention needed on my end. You do have the option to go through and delete individual subtitles. ❌ Realistically, I’ll probably continue using this feature and just go back through to remove the excess so it’s not so in-your-face. At the end of the day, it will still save me time, so I’m happy with it!
If your brokerage isn't providing you with the AI tools you need to save time, generate leads, and grow your business, let's change that.
-Ty Morton + Abby G