[T]echnology: Your Assistant Just Moved Into Your Glasses
[E]ducation: 7 Is Back
[C]oaching: Stop Saying "Now Is a Great Time"
[H]ow To: Have Claude Do Work For You (for dummies)
[T]echnology: Your Assistant Just Moved Into Your Glasses
Last week I introduced you to Marlowe, my Meta Muse agent. This week Meta put Muse on your face. 😀
Meta Connect was Wednesday. The $1,300 VR glasses coming next spring got the headlines. For agents, the bigger news is that Muse now works across the Ray-Ban Meta lineup… including a brand new pair with no camera at all.
Ray-Ban Meta Audio. $349. Pre-orders are open now and they ship October 13. Twelve hours of battery, 48 more in the case, and they take prescription lenses. 👓
Why does no camera matter? Walk into a seller's living room wearing camera glasses and somebody's going to ask if you're recording. With these, nobody asks. They're just Ray-Bans that talk to you.
No screen. No camera. Just a voice in your ear that can actually do things.
Now picture your Tuesday. You leave a listing appointment and before you reach the car… "Draft a thank-you email to the Smiths and put the photo shoot on my calendar for Thursday." Walking out of a showing… "Email the lender and ask for an updated pre-approval." Stuck in traffic… "What's left on my calendar today?" Muse already connects to Gmail and Google Calendar. Now you don't have to pull out your phone to use it.
If you'd rather shoot content, the Gen 3 Ray-Bans are $449, available now, and record 3K video. Great for walkthroughs, but leave them in the car at the listing appointment. 🚗
Here's my advice. Start with the free app. If your agent earns its keep on your phone, the glasses are the next step. If it doesn't, $349 won't fix it.
The best assistant is the one you never have to take out of your pocket.
[E]ducation: 7 Is Back
It finally happened. Freddie Mac's weekly average for a 30-year fixed hit 7.03% on Thursday. That's the first time over 7% since January 2025. A year ago it was 6.3%.
Your clients are going to say the same thing… "The Fed did this." Kind of. Not really.
The Fed raised its rate last week, but the Fed doesn't set mortgage rates. Mortgage rates follow the 10-year Treasury yield, and it's sitting around 5.1%… the highest in about 19 years. Inflation and $100 oil make investors want more to hold bonds. Lenders add their markup on top. That's the rate your buyer sees. 👀
The Fed sets the mood. The 10-year sets the rate.
So if you tell a buyer to "wait for the Fed," you're watching the wrong number. Watch the 10-year. When it drops, rates follow.
Now for the part nobody's talking about. HousingWire's weekly tracker shows 86 pending sales for every 100 new listings, down from 96 the week before. Three months of inventory, up from 2.72 this time last year. And 42% of active listings have already taken a price cut.
In plain English… more houses, fewer buyers competing for them.
Do the math for your buyer. On a $300,000 loan, going from 6.3% to 7.03% costs about $145 a month. That's real money. It's also exactly the kind of gap a price reduction or a seller-paid buydown can close, and sellers are more open to that right now than they've been in a while.
These are national numbers, and nobody buys a national house. Pull pendings against new listings for your own zip codes before you say any of this to a client.
Rates went up. So did the buyer's leverage. 🏠
[C]oaching: Stop Saying "Now Is a Great Time"
Tamir Poleg, chairman and CEO of the new Real REMAX Group, posted his Friday market video this morning. He said he's optimistic for the long term… and then said the part most leaders won't. There will be "more pain in the market" before the next cycle of growth.
The comments were the best part. One agent said that at every brokerage she'd worked for, the message was always the same… "it's picking up," "now is a great time," no matter what the market was actually doing. Her point was simple. Admitting the truth doesn't make you negative. It makes people trust you. 🤝
That goes for you too.
Your clients read the same headlines you do. Rates crossed 7% this week (see Education above). If you text your sphere "great time to buy!" right now, they'll tune you out, and they'll remember it.
The agent who tells the truth in a bad market is the one they call in a good one.
Here's the thing about a tougher market. It separates people. Back in 188, I told HousingWire the rate hike would be "an opportunity for the stronger agents to really shine." Stronger doesn't mean louder. It means the agent who stays in front of people with real information while everyone else goes quiet or spins.
So here's your challenge this week. Send your sphere one honest message. What's actually happening in your zip codes. What it means if you're buying. What it means if you're selling. And what you'd do if you were them.
No spin. No "now is the time." Just the truth and a plan.
Honest isn't negative. Honest is the job. 👏👏
[H]ow To: Have Claude Do Work For You (for dummies)
We recently sat down as a brokerage and did a four-hour, hands-on training with Claude. We sat down and asked ourselves how we could utilize our time better, what Claude could do for us, and what we could better spend our time on. ⌛
There were things I learned that even I didn't know, and one of those features was "Record a skill." Claude's "Record a skill" feature lets you teach Claude a repeatable workflow simply by showing it what to do. It records your screen, clicks, typing, and voice narration instead of requiring you to write out complex instructions or code by hand.
It is quite possibly the most trippy thing I've ever seen. If you've ever had a computer problem where some tech bro thousands of miles away takes control of your screen, and you see them moving the mouse around for you while you just sit there and watch, that is pretty much what this is, except it's all AI. So, how do you do this?
First, you will need a paid Claude account. Second, you will need Claude as an app on your computer. Using it through Google Chrome does not work.
You can download the Claude app here.
Next, if you want it to perform an action that requires it to access accounts with passwords, you will need a Chrome extension as well. To add Claude as a Chrome extension, follow these instructions.
Once you have a paid Claude account, have it downloaded onto your computer, and have the Chrome extension installed, click "New." Then, make sure you have "Cowork" selected. You will see this underneath "How can I help you today?" Then select "Record a skill."
Now, this is the part I had to get used to because I am not a talk-to-text person. You do have to communicate verbally, out loud, the instructions as you are showing Claude how to do them. As soon as the skill is being recorded, just act it out as if you are teaching someone sitting right next to you. You will verbally say the instructions out loud so Claude can hear them while you perform the actions yourself on the computer. You can tell Claude to do whatever this task is at a certain time of the month, week, or year. Then, boom, it will perform that action for you whenever you tell it to.
If this still doesn't fully make sense, because I know it is hard to believe that an AI bot can perform tasks on your computer without you prompting it every time…
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