[T]echnology: I Fired My Chief of Staff. Meet Marlowe.
[E]ducation: Zillow and Realtor.com Agree on Something
[C]oaching: The Fed Raised Rates. Now What?
[H]ow To: Edit Videos Using AI
[T]echnology: I Fired My Chief of Staff. Meet Marlowe.
Quick update on the Grok Bot I hired three weeks ago. It was on a 30-day probation. It didn't make it.
Funny timing. This week xAI ran Grok Bot Galaxy, a three-day livestream where their own team built a company from scratch with Grok Bot on camera. Bots building bots. Looked incredible. Mine burned through $100 in credits and never once handed me the thing I actually asked for. So I let it go. The lesson isn't that the tool is bad. "Chief of Staff" is a terrible job description for an AI right now. Too vague. It'll spend your money looking busy.
So I hired again. Meta launched Muse this week. It lives at muse.ai, in an iPhone and Android app, and inside WhatsApp. Free tier, $20 Power plan, $100 Maximum. I named mine Marlowe.
Here's the thing no other assistant can do. Muse posts to Instagram and Facebook Marketplace for you. Natively. No scheduler, no copy and paste. It's Meta's own product, so it has keys the others don't. 🤯 ChatGPT can write your caption. Claude can write your caption. Marlowe writes it, builds the graphics, and hits publish.
Day one, I asked for a recruiting carousel. It came back with six finished slides and a permission card… "Allow Marlowe to post this to Instagram?" One tap. Here's the live post. That's the whole workflow now.
Swap in your world. "Every new listing, build a six-slide carousel from the photos and post it to my Instagram, and list it on Marketplace." "Every Friday, post my open houses for the weekend." "Watch comments and DMs on my listing posts and draft replies for me to approve." It connects to Gmail and Google Calendar too, and it keeps working after you close the app, then pings you when it needs a yes.
You stop being the person who does the posting. You become the person who taps Allow.
Yes, it's Meta, and you're handing over your accounts. Their answer is a locked-down virtual computer per user and a second AI whose only job is to approve or block what the first one does. You decide. 🤷
Here's what the $100 taught me. Start free. Connect Instagram and Facebook only. Give it one narrow job with a clear outcome. Let it earn the next one.
[E]ducation: Zillow and Realtor.com Agree on Something
Write that date down. Monday, September 15, 2026. ⬅️⬅️⬅️
Realtor.com, Zillow, the National Association of Home Builders, Habitat for Humanity, Veterans United, ICON, T3 Sixty, RISMedia and a handful of others all signed the same declaration. Fifteen names total. Some of them spend most of the year suing each other or lobbying against each other. Jared James posted a video on it this week that's worth your time.
The campaign is called Let America Build, and the pitch is one sentence… we need about 4 million more homes and everybody knows it.
The numbers they're leaning on: a 4.03 million home supply gap. Regulations that add more than 26% to the price of a new home, roughly $132,000. And a Zillow study that found building on the 300,000+ vacant small lots already sitting in our cities would close 6.3% of that gap by itself. No new land. Just lots nobody's allowed to build on yet.
That last part is the whole point. The ROAD to Housing Act we talked about back in issue 179 handled the federal side. Zoning, lot sizes, and permit timelines are decided by a city council or a county commission… and that's who this campaign is aiming at. They're careful to say they don't endorse candidates or ballot measures. They just want voters walking in with the facts.
So here's your homework. 📝 Pull up your town's zoning map this week. Find out the minimum lot size in the neighborhoods you sell most. Ask how long a permit takes. You will be shocked how few people in your market know those three answers, including the people running for office.
Abby talked in 186 about being the informed voice on data centers during election season. This is the same play. Your buyers already ask you why there's nothing to buy. Now you have an answer that isn't "rates." And the agent who can explain it calmly, with the local numbers, is the agent people trust with the biggest purchase of their life.
Facts first. Fear second. Or never.
[C]oaching: The Fed Raised Rates. Now What?
Wednesday the Fed raised rates a quarter point. First hike since 2023, and they were pretty clear it won't be the last. The 30-year fixed is sitting around 7.28%.
HousingWire asked brokers around the country what that does to buyers, and I was one of them. What I told them is what I'm seeing here… things sit a little longer, the hot houses still get multiple offers, and the older ones that need work wait. It feels more balanced than it has in years. Nobody wants a rate hike. But this is where the stronger agents get to shine. ✨✨
A broker-owner in Reno put a number on it… going from 6.75% to 7% "takes out a swath of buyers." Not the ones who have to move. The ones who want to. The discretionary buyer who came back over the last 18 months is the first one to sit down again.
So here's the coaching moment. You cannot do one thing about the Fed. Not one. But you can decide what kind of agent shows up in a 7% market, and there are exactly two kinds.
The first kind quotes the rate. Every conversation starts with "well, rates are…" and ends with the buyer deciding to wait. That agent is just a slower version of a news alert.
The second kind quotes the reason. Why did this person call you in the first place? The third kid. The commute. The divorce. The parents moving in. None of that changed Wednesday. The rate is the cost of solving the problem. It isn't the problem. ❌
The buyer who has a reason will pay 7%. The buyer who only had a rate never had a reason.
Practical version. This week, go back through every conversation from the last 90 days where somebody said "we're thinking about it." Call them. Don't mention the Fed. Ask what's changed in their life since you last talked. Then run their actual payment on their actual house, not a headline number. A quarter point on a $300,000 loan is about $50 a month. Say the real number out loud and watch how the conversation changes.
My friend Debra Beagle in Nashville put it best in the article. "Agents need to be smarter and better educated." Her market is tipping from sellers to buyers right now, and she's right. Fifty bucks a month either kills a deal or it doesn't. Your job is to make sure the buyer decides that with the real number in front of them, not the scary one.
Nobody controls the rate. You control the conversation.
[H]ow To: Edit Videos Using AI
I used to be scared to write this section, but I've come to realize and accept that AI won't replace me as a video editor. However, it can be a pretty nice tool when editing two-hour podcasts!
There are a couple of different categories when it comes to video editing, and depending on your skill level, you might not even need to try them all.
Let's begin…⬇️⬇️⬇️
Beginner Level: Generating Captions
One of the easiest things you can use AI for is generating captions. Captions are great to have in your videos because a vast majority of people watch videos without playing the volume out loud, think about someone scrolling while sitting in a waiting room. Captions make it easier for them to consume your content instead of simply scrolling past it. There are many platforms that offer instant captions now, but I personally use CapCut. You'll need the Pro version to use this feature, but it takes less than 10 seconds to generate them. Open CapCut and select your video. In the top-left menu, you'll see Captions. Click on it, then go to the section labeled Templates. Choose a style you like and click Generate Captions.
Now, if you notice mistakes that you need to tweak. Click the captions above the timeline of your video, at the top you will see a text box to edit if words are misspelled or incorrect.
Intermediate: Video Cuts
I recently started playing around with Gling, and I have been impressed! I'm pretty fast at basic editing, so I wanted an AI video editor that does it all for me without needing to be prompted. If I still have to sit and watch the entire video to remove the "uhs," "hms," "likes," and other filler words, even if AI highlights them for me but still makes me click "remove", there isn't much of a point. It would take me about the same amount of time to sit, watch, and remove everything myself. Until Gling. ⬅️
Gling is excellent at removing awkward pauses, dead space, filler words, and other things I don't want in my videos. It's also extremely user-friendly. I would give you instructions, but honestly, it does pretty much everything for you. Upload the video, and boom, it does the rest! I haven't tried it with anything multicam or with separate audio yet, but I'll report back when I do. For simple video editing, which I'm sure is what most of you are doing, it works perfectly. And guess what? It's FREE! You can edit up to one hour of video per month for free. If you're an active content creator, you can upgrade to the paid version, which allows you to edit up to 10 hours of video per month.
Audio: Auphonic 🔊🔊
You've heard me shout out Auphonic before, but I'm here to recommend it again. I've been using Auphonic to edit audio for two years now, and it has NEVER done a bad job. I highly recommend uploading your audio to Auphonic and listening to the difference for yourself. The improvement is insane and you don't even need a fancy mic!
Advanced: TBD
This is still TBD for me. As someone who edits a lot of videos, one thing I would LOVE is for AI to automatically and efficiently sync separate audio files with multiple video clips. Sometimes, even with Auphonic, I still need mics.
For example, we recently had two guest speakers come to our office to give a lecture. The room was large and echoey, so using mics was necessary. We had FIVE different camera angles PLUS a separate audio file from the mics. What I want is an AI tool that can efficiently sync the separate audio with all five camera angles while also intelligently cutting between those angles. AI companies have boasted that their tools can already do this, but every time I've tried, the results have been messy. Since the audio is recorded separately and isn't isolated to one specific video, AI struggles to determine which camera angle it should show. It will focus on people who aren't talking or choose angles where you can't clearly see what the speaker is referring to. At that point, it becomes messy and inefficient, and I'm better off editing it myself.
I'm also not sure AI will ever fully replicate the emotional appeal of video editing, especially when it comes to humor. Sometimes when Tyler films videos, I want certain points to hit harder, or I want to add humorous elements. That's something AI still can't replicate, luckily for me! 🍀 Those intentional editing choices are what give videos personality and make people want to keep watching, subscribe, and come back for more.
Lastly, B-roll footage. As of right now, there are AI tools that can automatically add B-roll footage to videos. However, in an industry that relies heavily on localized content, the B-roll AI generates tends to be generic and lacking. If I have a real estate agent talking about a specific local coffee shop, the viewer doesn't want to see a basic AI-generated video of coffee being poured. They want to see photos and videos of the actual menu, location, interior, food, drinks, and overall atmosphere. AI doesn't do that well. For localized content, real photos/videos is what gives the video context, authenticity, and value to the viewer.
People used to think video editing was something they could never accomplish themselves. With AI as a tool, that's no longer the case. You don't need years of editing experience or expensive equipment to create quality content, you just need to know which tools can make the process easier. AI may not replace the creativity, humor, emotion, and personal touch of a video editor, but it can take care of the tedious stuff and make video editing much easier for the casual content creators.
Want high commission, a low cap, and real support to grow your business? Aspire is our exclusive program for motivated agents who are ready to scale fast with elite coaching and next-level tools
-Ty Morton + Abby G