5 Ways AI is Revolutionizing Real Estate Investing and Lead Follow-Up

Mike Hambright (00:01.25)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. This is gonna be interesting today. I’ve got my buddy Brad Bone here. We’re gonna be talking about a topic that we haven’t talked about on the show for a while. Of course, there’s a lot of evolution going on on the tech side and AI, but we’re gonna talk about how AI is changing the real estate investing game or changing the game for real estate investors. So Brad, great to see you bud.

Brad Bone (00:21.286)
Good to see you, Mike. Thank you.

Mike Hambright (00:22.924)
Yeah, yeah, I’m excited to talk about this because we dabble with a lot of technology or of course I have my ear to the ground in the whole industry and there’s you know, there’s a lot of tech stuff going on, right? There’s a lot of disruption going on really and I’ve been the real estate game long enough I’m gonna date myself by saying this but so long that I remember when there wasn’t even a single CRM for real estate investors It was it was just like find some other tool and bastardize it to work for you but I used to say it was when they first started it was kind of like

caveman with laser gun, like real estate investors who are just not used to using technology. But the truth is, if you’re not using technology these days, you’re gonna get left behind. So, excited to share some knowledge here. So, before we kind of jump in, I knew you before you were into AI. And I know that most real estate investors that start to solve a product or teach other people how to use a product.

Brad Bone (01:01.5)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (01:18.1)
usually solve their own problem first, right? They like saw a need for themselves and I know that’s probably part of your story as well. So why don’t you tell us how you got into real estate and then tell us how that led you down the path of using some AI technology.

Brad Bone (01:31.858)
Yeah. So, uh, this year, actually we just passed. Well, this year is about 10 years for us in real estate. We, remember in 2014, I started buying at the, at the courthouse steps. Um, but then we started our entity in 2015. So we’re coming up on, 10 years of, uh, of our, of when we started, you know, full time. So we’ve been in business for a long time. Like I was just thinking the other day, I remember when docuSign was kind of new, the idea of like getting signatures.

you know, through electronically was like a new idea, novel concept. So, and now we’re using AI, but yeah, we started, um, fixing flipping about 10 years ago and just, you know, started slow doing 10 deals a month or 10 deals a year. Back then it was my brother and I, we were partners and, uh, and then joined, joined investor fuel and I think 2018, something somewhere in there, 17, 18 and, uh, and then started growing.

at that point. So got around like-minded people and started growing. and then, you know, AI became a, became a buzzword a few years ago, at least kind of hit me a few years ago. And I started thinking, what is the biggest impact it can have for our business? And I feel like it’s in lead management. It’s an, especially in follow-up. and there’s a lot of uses for AI, but that’s like the immediate thing I thought of is, is how do we re-engage sellers and,

because that’s something we all are bad at. Everyone trying to do follow-up is either not doing enough of it or we’re just, even if we’re doing it at a high level, it drains us. It’s really something machines should do and let us have actual human conversations.

Mike Hambright (03:11.523)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (03:15.872)
Yeah, I say that I’ve said this many times before, there’s a lot, even outside of real estate, most small and medium businesses suck at following up with people or even answering the initial call. I’m certain that for almost any real estate or any, sorry, small to mid-sized business, they could at least double their business just by being better at follow-up.

Cause we’ve all probably called people that were like, I’m ready to give you money and they either didn’t answer at all or you fill out a form and they don’t respond to you right away. Or maybe never. Like I’ve had people that I like generate a lead for them and I’m the lead. And at this point, like there’s a lot of stuff that I do in my life. I spend a lot of money on stuff. I’ve got a ranch now. I’ve got like, you know, there’s like literally even like landscaping companies, like I need a six figure job done. And I’m talking to the owner and the owner doesn’t even follow up with me. And it’s just, it’s crazy, right?

like how poor people are at following up with prospects, which is really what business is all about.

Brad Bone (04:18.182)
Yeah, it really is. it’s, what’s interesting is we spend so much money on marketing. So it’s the money’s already been spent and now, now it’s just sitting there and like, we’re kind of very irresponsible for not doing follow-up correctly, you know? So, and, and we’ve been culprits of that. for sure. Like we all have, especially when you’re starting a company and you’re, we’ve all failed at follow-up. so AI just becomes something that you can.

Mike Hambright (04:26.712)
Right.

Mike Hambright (04:33.453)
Yeah.

Brad Bone (04:47.426)
at least do a, you know, do zero to one on follow up. And in fact, it does a lot, but at least it gets something in place. You’ve got a platform that’s working your leads and you don’t have to worry about it.

Mike Hambright (05:00.173)
Yeah.

I think I’m glad we’re going to talk mostly about follow up today and kind of lead management and stuff like that because there’s a lot of I think for a lot of real estate investors, I mean, no, not trying to hurt anybody’s feelings here, but a lot of real estate investors, I feel like are a couple years behind other like people that are using technology for solutions. And so it’s fine. I mean, you’re probably making more money than those guys anyway in real estate. But let’s let’s just focus on the you could I guess you could adopt tech a lot of places in your

company but what will have the biggest impact is really on leads and lead follow-up and stuff like that so let’s kind of let’s take a deep dive on on that today.

You know, think it’s interesting and, you know, share your thoughts on automation. This is, think even people that are pretty good at answering the phone live and following up a couple of times, you know, there’s I’ve seen studies before and I can’t quote any of them because I don’t have any of them with me, but that people like stop following up after two or three attempts, like sometimes less. Right. But we both know you and I know as real estate investors. I mean, you bought houses from people that you followed up with for certainly months and years because they’ve been distressed for years or decades. And it just takes

more follow-up to get them over the goal line,

Brad Bone (06:14.832)
Yeah, I think the reason, you know, the reason we don’t follow up as much as much as we should is we start getting it, getting in our head about it. And the truth is you should follow up more than you think by default that you should. It’s always you’re, I don’t know that there’s very many people who follow up too much. I don’t know that that’s even a thing. so we should always be doing more than what we’re doing now. And the nice thing about getting

Mike Hambright (06:35.916)
No.

Brad Bone (06:42.226)
technology involved in that is there’s no emotions with it. It’s just gonna do whatever you tell it to do. And we get inside our heads and that’s what messes us up. So I think that’s a lot of it.

Mike Hambright (06:51.843)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (06:55.47)
Yeah, I think another big problem is that, and I’m all for, I mean, I have between our companies, I think we have 70 or 80 virtual staff members and we use a lot of virtual assistants and we use high level executives as virtual staff as well. But I think a lot of investors are really quick to hand it off to.

you know, a lower cost or a lower skill level person that it’s generally a little bit harder for them to build rapport with a seller and understand their needs, especially if it’s an overseas person. mean, I’m not trying to be critical of anyone. It’s not the same as what you would do for acquisitions here in the U.S. or at the quality level of the conversations is just going to be lower. Would you agree with that?

Brad Bone (07:38.546)
Yeah, I do. It’s, I’ve thought about that too. It’s interesting how in our industry, we often put the lowest skilled, least paid people in followup and high ticket sales kind of does the opposite. They’ll put killers on, on followup. They’ll have killers do, do cold calling because they realize that’s where, you know, that’s where the money is. And we, we do a little bit of the opposite and but you know, the money’s in the database. So you actually want

You want high skilled people or high skilled systems working that because that’s those are that’s money you’ve already paid for. So yeah, I definitely agree with that. I understand why it’s done that way, but there’s a there’s a need to improve there for sure.

Mike Hambright (08:15.245)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (08:22.668)
Yeah. One of the things about a real estate investor is really probably any small business is that, know, if you’re doing, takes, depends. Everybody’s a little bit different. So when I say this, like there’s an asterisk next to it is you really have to do, depending on your overhead, you know, two or three deals a month to break even. Right. But there’s still a lot of people that are operating right at that break even point. And if you could, so you don’t have to like 10 X your business, but if you could do one or two extra deals on the money you’ve already spent,

Brad Bone (08:40.594)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (08:52.682)
with the same infrastructure you generally have. You don’t really need more people. You just need, you don’t even need more leads if you’re generating leads now. You just need to convert more of the leads that you have. And those other deals are, you know, I don’t want to say a hundred percent profit, but you don’t have marketing costs. You don’t have as much overhead. You’re going to have some sales commissions in there or whatever. But those couple extra deals are, in my experience, the people that are like,

so-called crushing it or financially free from those that are like just getting by or surviving, right? It’s just a little bit more. And so we’re not talking about like go 10x your business. We’re talking about just convert more of what you already have using the resources that you mostly already have. And you could have a transformational business.

Brad Bone (09:39.312)
Yeah, you really can. think, I’ve been, I feel like we’ve learned that over, over our 10 years too. It’s, like you start first of all, it’s it’s a fun problem to solve because it doesn’t require any extra money. So like if I can, if I can 30 % increase my business without spending extra money, man, like I want to go figure out how to do that. and the, and the answers are always way simpler than you realize. The answers are always, always just make more phone calls.

Mike Hambright (10:02.636)
Right.

Brad Bone (10:09.188)
And do follow up. We always think that there’s a more complicated answer than that, but it’s, it’s often the most profound answer is the simplest one. Just like do better. In fact, recently, this is like kind of embarrassing, but recently we, we had businesses kind of like epiphany to epiphany. feel like every six months.

Mike Hambright (10:17.891)
Yeah.

Brad Bone (10:31.794)
And the big thing we kind of realized is, yeah, we need to really be tracking closely our acquisition guys as well. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (10:37.046)
Hey, Hey, Hey, Brad. So there’s something just happened where there’s a lot of static coming in. you hear that or did something happen?

Brad Bone (10:44.685)
Um, it could have been a phone call that was sitting next to my, my, my. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, uh, one thing we, we recently realized, and this is kind of embarrassing because we’ve been in business for 10 years, but the need to track our acquisition guys and their outbound calls made. And that’s that’s a basic thing, but you start tracking it closely and, and, really, um,

Mike Hambright (10:47.648)
Okay, that’s okay. We’ll edit that out, but I’m sorry, go ahead.

Brad Bone (11:13.798)
holding them accountable to that, all of sudden deals start coming in. So it’s a simple solution, but FollowUp really does work.

Mike Hambright (11:20.59)
Yeah. So let’s talk about like channels here. So we’re talking about follow-up and obviously you could follow up with email, you follow up with text, phone calls, you can send direct mail. There’s a lot of things that you could do. And in my experience, you know, if real estate investors are doing a, you know, historically a good job at follow-up, they probably are using automation, like you said, because it’s easier to set it and forget it, but it’s more often than not emails.

because you can kind of write those and literally let them run for years ultimately. But it’s not like voice and text type stuff. It might be a task for somebody to call or text them, but it’s not necessarily.

using AI or tools that can kind of start a conversation. talk about, I guess, the channels, I guess some of the evolution that’s happening here and why that is more, I mean, I don’t say more important, but it’s certainly supplemental to people that don’t even read their emails. I mean, I get hundreds of emails a day and I don’t read most of them, you know.

Brad Bone (12:15.868)
Yeah.

Brad Bone (12:20.326)
Yeah, I think it’s important if when you, when you go and find an AI platform to, plug into your, to your lead management department is to have a multi-channel system. email, text, voice calling, ring those voicemails. If those are, if those are illegal in your state, you know, at least those four channels, because everyone responds a little differently. Some people respond to emails, some people text, some people phone call. so.

Yeah, I think the multi-channel is really important because you’re still going to miss if you’re only voice. There’s a lot of AI bots out there that are voice only and they’re impressive, but it’s a single channel. And I think multi-channel is super important. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (13:06.264)
Yeah, well, yeah, I agree because it’s first off, it’s kind of omnipresence. You just seem like these guys really need me. talk about like the evolution here, because I think, you know, there used to be, again, probably dating myself here, but when I used to be able to call and press zero to talk to a live person and now.

you you press zero and they’re like, I’m sorry, that number, like that number, like you’re gonna listen to our automation or you’re not gonna get help at all. So I mean, maybe talk a little bit about kind of the just, I guess, tolerance for people to be, to kind of, I guess, be automated in terms of the follow-up. know, like think people, there’s some people that just, only wanna talk to a live person or there’s some people that will get really pissed if they find out that.

Brad Bone (13:33.308)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Bone (13:46.044)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (13:54.358)
it’s a bot or something else. I mean, I think over time that fixes itself, but like we’re probably in the gray area now where some people don’t like it and some are fine with it because they appreciate that it’s efficient, you know.

Brad Bone (13:56.582)
Yeah

Brad Bone (14:05.83)
Yeah, so I think, I mean, one thing about AI, having an AI platform, email and text is actually pretty, it’s pretty hard to tell it’s AI because if you’re, you know, if you send an email or a text and it engages someone and they’re like, yeah, I’m interested. The way, the way a lot of AI platforms work, the one that we’re using is it’ll then just push for an appointment. So it’s not trying to go deep. It’s not trying to.

builder poor, it’s just pushing for an appointment. And there’s just a few, you know, it’s just talking about what time works. It’s hard to even, we never get pushed back on, this an AI? We never do on email and texts. Voice is a little different because voice, can kind of tell often, but so I think that’s why it’s, good to have multi-channels. People are getting more and more used to that. It’s like when you call Verizon often, it’s an AI agent and people kind of, you go through the motions with it, but

I think it’s good to not go all in on something that definitely sounds like AI, but have AI working through different channels. like you said, you’re picking up different people who may or may not like it. Yeah. But they still want to sell their house and they still want to set a time to talk to a live person.

Mike Hambright (15:19.064)
Right, right.

Mike Hambright (15:24.182)
Right. So it sounds like you’d be an advocate for not trying to trick people into thinking it’s not AI, just the purpose is just to restart a conversation and not to like try to get your AI to have these long details, not to try to get your AI to build rapport with people, right?

Brad Bone (15:30.247)
Next.

Brad Bone (15:33.916)
Yeah.

Brad Bone (15:42.064)
Yeah, because first of all, AI is not good at that. And second of all, I don’t even know how that works. If an AI has a deep conversation with a seller and you kind of make commitments to each other in a way, it’s like, well, now do I have to honor whatever that AI committed to? I don’t even know how that even works. Beyond that, first of all, they’re not… Right.

Mike Hambright (16:00.031)
All right.

Mike Hambright (16:04.066)
You said you would pay twice the retail value. It’s like, sorry, that was that was a robot that was not even a human, you know.

Brad Bone (16:11.216)
Yeah. So beyond that, I think if AI got good enough to where it could build rapport, think about just the inauthentic businesses we’d all be running because we’re buying houses from grandma. She thought we really cared. And then she realizes a year later, it’s just a robot. That robot didn’t even care about her. So I think there’s a, there’s a fine line between where you stop AI and where you start the human conversation, especially in our business. Cause we’re a, we’re a,

We, our business, we have to build trust. We have to build rapport. It’s like a high ticket type of sales business only we’re the buyer. So trust and true rapport and true trust matters. Now, if we’re just selling widgets off Amazon, maybe AI can handle that because there’s no emotions that need to be involved there. But with us for sure it does. So I don’t, I don’t know that AI really ever in our business will get to the point where it’s closing the wholesale. And I don’t know that we want it to.

Mike Hambright (16:49.613)
Right.

Brad Bone (17:10.406)
because we need to have true, real conversation with people. So, yeah.

Mike Hambright (17:10.7)
Yeah.

And I think for, especially for real estate investors that are easing into AI at some point, like you don’t have to have it take over everything. Just have it be one component like we’re talking about here is kind of restarting a conversation or being good at follow up and don’t try to get it to like take over everything, right?

Brad Bone (17:18.809)
No.

Brad Bone (17:30.576)
Yeah, for us, the line is set the appointment, set the appointment with a human being. And then you see your late lead manager’s calendar start getting stacked up with appointments. That’s the goal for us with AI. it works really well.

Mike Hambright (17:40.27)
Yeah.

So there’s a growing number of AI tools out there. Some of them obviously promise more than what they can actually do. But I think the evolution here is gonna continue to be rapid for sure. And so what should people look for in AI tools that they could start to implement in their business? It’s a big world out there, so what should they start looking for if they’re looking for some way to be more efficient?

Brad Bone (18:10.928)
I think one of the main things would be, well, first of all, you want an AI platform that’s actually reliable and proven because there’s a lot of just bots that are being built that, you you can turn this loose on your leads and you don’t want, you don’t want, you don’t want to mess that up. So assuming that’s right, you want, you want a platform that integrates with your CRM. Cause we don’t want to start having to manage to, to systems. And a lot of people will say they integrate, but what does that?

really mean for us. means we want the CRM updated every time something happens on the AI side. Like the stage has changed, the next steps are set up, the appointments are set up in the CRM, whatever that happens to be. So you want really good integration between a CRM and a platform. Otherwise, your life’s going to be more complicated than it was before. You might as well just go back to calling leads.

Mike Hambright (19:06.818)
Yeah. Right.

Brad Bone (19:10.258)
And I of an AI platform as an assistant to the CRM. CRM’s the boss. CRM still controls follow-up and engagement, but it’s just asking the AI platform to go help it reengage leads. So an AI platform should be able to keep itself organized, have kind of a mini CRM inside it to organize its own leads from what has been scheduled, what hasn’t been scheduled.

but it doesn’t replace your regular CRM. So that’s another piece. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (19:41.23)
Yeah, yeah, and I think I mean, I know you do too, probably all the CRM owners in this industry and I’m not saying that, you know, I’m sure some of them are working on AI components or things that integrate and in my experience.

Just with technology across the board, think everybody can resonate with what I’m about to say here is like, whenever you find a tool that’s like all in one that says it does everything, it usually does a couple of things well and a couple of things terrible, right? And so, I mean, maybe you could talk about like, and I think with Zapier integrations and all these things that kind of exist these days where you can integrate different tools. I mean, that really is the way to go is to find a couple of things that are the best and find a way to integrate them together versus trying to find one

that says it does everything all in one because there’s definitely going to be components of that that you’re disappointed in,

Brad Bone (20:34.606)
I totally agree. I think the way to go is to be on a system that allows you to plug in the best platforms in the industry, whatever they are, whether it’s AI, phone system. So I 100 % agree with that. So there are all in one platforms that serve a need, but I think as you’re growing as a real estate investor, you’re just gonna, you can’t be the best at everything. that’s why like,

you know, an AI platform that plugs in is, yeah, that’s the way to go and have a CRM that allows that kind of philosophy and allows that kind of stuff.

Mike Hambright (21:13.294)
Yeah, yeah, the AI stuff is gonna move so fast that, you know, even if something is great right now, like it’s gonna evolve so fast that you gotta be nimble, like you need to make a change. So what are some of the best practices on how to kind of maintain these tools because there’s so much evolution moving so fast? how do you, you know, what are your kind of words of wisdom there?

Brad Bone (21:17.232)
Yeah. Yeah.

Brad Bone (21:22.842)
It will, yeah.

Brad Bone (21:37.638)
Yeah, I think, you know, one thing is with AI, it’s easy to get a little distracted by the demos and how impressive it might sound, how close to human a demo might sound. And we want to remember that that might help close rate if you have a demo or if you have a voice AI that sounds very much like a human.

But it might not too, it might just be impressive. And a seller might see through that. What’s important is the ROI. Like does it actually set more appointments? Does it actually cause you to buy more deals? And it may not be all voice that you want. You might want a platform that, in fact, we have an AI platform right now. We don’t actually use the voice feature right now. We have it turned on. We’re gonna start testing it out, but.

we just get a lot of success with email and text. And I mean, we increase our deal flow by 30 % just with that. and I think the other thing is, is when you think about setting appointments, it doesn’t need to be the cut, the most cutting edge AI out there. We don’t need to get distracted by that. All we want is appointment set. That’s it. We’re not trying to be the latest cutting edge. Now,

You want something that’s keeping up with the industry, but remember our goal here is just to set appointments and reengage sellers. So if it does that really well, it’s going to be a no brainer. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (23:15.63)
Yep, yep. I know there’s no way you have a crystal ball to know this, but what do you see happening with, well, like, I guess, AI for real estate investors over the next few years and regulation around that, because I know that there’s been a bunch of regulation or certainly a lot of discussion about it because…

you know, the threat of how this could kind of take over the world or annoy people or whatever. So maybe let’s first talk about kind of where you see things going over the, let’s not look out so far that it’s like the Terminator era, but like, let’s, let’s just look at like the next year or two. What do you see coming on? And then secondly, let’s, let’s kind of talk about regulation.

Brad Bone (23:49.328)
Yeah.

Brad Bone (23:57.276)
Yeah. I mean, I think with Trump in office, he’s, he’s more open to AI than, than otherwise it could have been. So, so that’s gonna, there’s going to be, I think there’s going to be innovative solutions that allow AI to exist in business because, so that’s good. Now I, I, there’s been talk about like with voice AI, I think that might be the part that gets regulated first. And I think there are some regulations around that right now, but,

So voice AI, like you still need opt-in, still, can’t just turn a voice bot on and just have it cold call like crazy. You need some opt-in, there’s TCPA rules around that. So there might be some more regulation that comes around that, but the ability to use AI in business, especially with Trump in office is, they’re gonna figure out a way to make that work because that’s where the world’s going. So I think that’s good. Yeah.

Mike Hambright (24:52.17)
more efficient than you’re really just following up with or trying to convert leads you’ve already generated. Not necessarily how do we cold call a billion people every hour. That’s the stuff that somebody could figure out how to do that, but that’s the stuff that’s like super intrusive, right? Yeah, yep. So tell us a little about your, you have a platform called RiverX, like maybe you could just take a moment and just tell us a little about that and how people can learn more.

Brad Bone (25:01.244)
Right, right.

Brad Bone (25:08.294)
Right, right, yeah. Yeah.

Brad Bone (25:20.198)
Yeah, so we partnered with a company called WooCenter about a year ago. WooCenter is the leading conversational AI platform out there for sales teams. It’s used by the US military for their recruiting pipeline. So they use it to follow up with their recruits in high school and college. So very proven, very reliable platform. We partnered with them, customized it for real estate investors.

Our brand is River X AI. So what we do is we provide access to that with customization for real estate investors. And then we integrate into your CRM, assuming you have a CRM that’s integratable. And then, yeah, so we started that about six months ago and really started to push it in the past, probably past 30 days. getting some people signed up and it’s helped, we’re seeing a lot of benefits and improvements from it.

Mike Hambright (26:16.344)
Yeah, that’s amazing. I think the two things are kind of speed to lead, like getting somebody to schedule a call as quickly as possible, or even if, don’t know what your, like how you structure this, but there’s a lot of people that don’t answer the phone live or.

you know, certainly a web lead that comes in that people just don’t move fast enough on. And then the long-term follow-up. I I’ve, think the longest I’ve ever bought a house after the initial lead was generated was like 54 months later. But we, we, and we didn’t have AI for certain, certainly back then. And it was just like very detailed of emails, tasks for people to call, which probably weren’t.

Brad Bone (26:36.402)
Yep.

Brad Bone (26:47.195)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (26:57.838)
happening like clockwork, like AI would. But you know, the reality is, is we’re marketing to people that have probably been distressed for years, if not decades. I we’ve all bought houses that haven’t, that haven’t been updated in literally 20, 30, 40 years. You still have shag carpet from the seventies or whatever. But we expect them to make a decision to sell their house like that. It’s like, now they’re distressed and where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And you know, it’s like, you just have to stay on them because maybe they’re not ready yet, but.

just give them time and they will be. And if you’re not there tapping them on the shoulder with follow-up, then you’re gonna miss out on that deal.

Brad Bone (27:34.214)
Yeah, I mean, a lot of times the reason they got into that situation is because they procrastinated and pushed their problems off. So they’re going to push this solution off too. So we got to continue to stay with them, even though that is the best solution for them. So, yeah.

Mike Hambright (27:48.878)
Well Brad, hey thanks for joining us on the show today.

Brad Bone (27:52.08)
Hey, thank you, Mike. It was fun.

Mike Hambright (27:54.114)
Yeah, everybody, no matter where you’re at, gotta understand that technology is gonna play a big role in separating those that thrive in this business from those that just either survive or maybe even get knocked out of business. you’ve got, even if the tech stuff sounds a little scary, you’ve got to, you don’t have to become a tech expert, you just have to work with people that know what they’re doing that can help integrate it into your systems and stuff. we appreciate you guys joining us for the show today. Brad, thanks again, buddy. And everybody, we’ll see you on the next show.

Brad Bone (28:20.518)
Thank you.