[T]echnology: This Is Not the Custom GPT Thing I Told You About
[E]ducation: "For Now" Is Over
[C]oaching: Film the Reps
[H]ow To: Not Create AI Slop
[T]echnology: This Is Not the Custom GPT Thing I Told You About
I was in Nashville this week for Broker Owner. Three days of demos, and I've seen enough demos to know most of them look better on stage than they do on a Tuesday.
A few of these were different. Here's what stuck with me.
They're building an app store for AI agents.
Now, I've written to you before about building your own custom GPT. Feed it your stuff, and it answers questions the way you'd answer them. That's still a good use of an afternoon.
This is not that, and the difference is the whole point.
A custom GPT talks. These do the work. Agentic out of the gate, as the guy on stage put it. It doesn't tell you how to make the Instagram reel. It makes the reel.
And it isn't sitting in a separate tab guessing about your business. It lives inside the platform, on top of your data. Your listings. Your transactions. Your pipeline. Your brokerage's actual procedures. A custom GPT has never heard of your MLS. This thing is already in it.
So stop thinking about it writing things for you and start thinking about what it can watch and act on. An agent that reads every inspection response the day it lands and drafts the repair addendum before you've opened the email. One that watches all 14 of your open transactions and tells you which one is quietly falling apart, because the appraisal date slipped and nobody said anything. One that runs your past client database every morning against ownership tenure, equity position, and the life events that quietly show up in public record, and tells you which five people are actually about to move. 🎯
That last one is the whole ballgame. There's roughly two percent of your database buying or selling right now. You just don't know which two percent.
Here's the part that made me sit up. You don't code any of this. You type in what you want the agent to do, in English, and that's the agent. Then you hand it to your team, your office, or publish it out to the network.
Think about what happens when that gets rolling. Somebody who has genuinely cracked expired listings in a brutal market builds the agent that runs her entire expired workflow. She publishes it. You grab it Monday morning and point it at your market.
We've all sat in a class where somebody shared a great script and we wrote it on the back of the agenda and never looked at it again. This is that, except it's live, it runs, and it's one click. 🤝
It works the other direction too. If you're the one who figures out what actually converts in your market, you publish it, and a few thousand people run the thing you built.
Leo 2.0 launched about thirty days ago and it's the same idea pointed at the agent. It has its own email address, its own phone number, and its own website, and it works as a concierge. It knows state regulations and it knows your brokerage's own procedures, so when an agent asks something it isn't guessing, and when it can't answer it hands off to a human. There are AI agents working behind Leo too, so it isn't one assistant doing everything. It's closer to a small staff.
Now the part I actually care about most, and it's the least flashy thing in this newsletter.
The first question I ask any technology company is whether they have an API. The answer this time was "yep, 100 percent, it's your data." Full read and write access. And then their philosophy, said out loud on stage in front of a room full of broker owners: if you want to build something that competes with us, build it on top of our API.
I've been doing this a long time. I have not heard a real estate technology company say that before.
So I'm plugging it into Tory. That's the thing I've been after for years... systems that talk to each other instead of you playing human copy and paste across six tabs.
None of this replaces what you're running today. It stacks on top of it.
The interesting part is that the ceiling isn't the software anymore. It's whether you're curious enough to go do something with it. Most agents won't. Which is exactly why the handful who do are going to look like they have superpowers.
I'll be in all of it over the next few weeks and I'll report back on what actually holds up. 🛠
[E]ducation: "For Now" Is Over
Three weeks ago I told you Zillow won its kickback lawsuit on paperwork, not behavior, and that the plaintiffs had until August 17 to refile. They refiled. Right at the deadline.
And the new version is leaner and meaner than the one that got tossed. HousingWire covered the filing. The racketeering claims are gone entirely. The plaintiff list got cut from twelve people to five. What's left is a narrow kickback case under RESPA and Washington's consumer protection law.
If you're thinking that sounds like retreat, it's the opposite. RICO was the headline grabber and the long shot, the thing a judge could swat away. Dropping it is what lawyers do when they're done making noise and ready to make a case. Five plaintiffs who can prove exactly what happened to them beats twelve who can't.
Here's the number to remember: $2,881.
The new complaint cites an economic study claiming buyers who got routed to Zillow Home Loans paid about $2,881 more per loan than they should have. Roughly $31.6 million across all of them. Zillow's response is that its tools are "free, transparent and optional" and the claims are baseless. Maybe a court agrees. But if one ever doesn't, the entire industry conversation changes, because a judge will have put a price tag on a "free" lead.
Your homework hasn't changed since last time, it just got more urgent. Know how your own lead sources make their money, and be able to explain it to a client in one plain sentence. Your buyers are reading these headlines too. The agent who can explain the money without flinching is the one who sounds trustworthy in a world where "free" keeps turning out to cost $2,881.
[C]oaching: Film the Reps
The Little League World Series is going on right now in Williamsport. Kids on ESPN turning double plays like they were born doing it. Here's what ESPN doesn't show you… February. The empty gym. The tee work. A dad throwing soft toss after dinner for the four hundredth time.
For years the coaching point was simple: nobody televises the reps, so do them anyway. Still true. But something changed, and it changes what you should do about it.
The reps are the content now.
Polish used to be expensive. AI made it free. Every agent in your market can generate a beautiful closing graphic, a perfect market update, a listing video with drone shots and a soundtrack. Which means polished is now wallpaper. Nobody stops scrolling for it.
You know what they stop for? Real. The 7am call block with cold coffee. The drive to pull comps on a weird street. The listing appointment prep at 9 the night before. The before photo of the staging, not just the after. That stuff can't be faked, and everybody watching knows it can't be faked. That's the whole appeal.
It's the same reason millions of adults spend a week in August watching 12-year-olds play baseball when actual Major Leaguers are on the other channel. It's raw. Kids cry. Coaches hug them. Nothing is produced. MLB understands this so well they send the Brewers and Braves to play in Williamsport this Sunday at the Little League Classic, a big league game in a 2,300-seat park, just to stand next to real.
So here's the assignment. This week, prop your phone up during the work. Not the win… the work. Thirty seconds of you actually doing the job beats three minutes of anything edited.
People don't want polished. They want proof.
[H]ow To: Not Create AI Slop
Oh, we have all seen AI slop. I'm sure you have even made some AI slop of your own. Don't be embarrassed, but learn from your mistakes. I know having ChatGPT make your flyers and posts is super affordable and convenient. Let me tell you, though: Canva has some really great templates for FREE that you can use, and they will look ten times better than what ChatGPT is making for you. As you have also discovered, all of the AI-generated flyers and posts look the same, so that is a surefire way to get people to ignore you.
You might be saying, "I don't care. It is still much easier." Fine. At least ask ChatGPT to make it correctly. The key thing with flyers is that they should be something you can glance at once and immediately get the information you need. You don't need every single piece of information on a flyer. Less is always more, so STOP filling your flyers and posts with paragraphs. No one is reading it. For example, let's say you need a flyer for an upcoming fall pumpkin patch client event. You are going to go into ChatGPT and say: "I am a real estate agent hosting a pumpkin patch client event. Create a flyer that I can share with my clients. The event is September 21st at noon. Include that apple cider will be available, as well as a pumpkin painting station. Make the flyer minimal and scroll-stopping."
Obviously, you'll be inputting different information depending on the event, but the key to not making your flyer look like an AI slop is not overfilling it with garbage no one will read. Keep it simple. You don't see people putting paragraphs on wedding invitations, so why do you need paragraphs on your flyer for a client event?
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