AI Clones for Real Estate Investors

Mike Hambright (00:01.656)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today I’m here with Matt Shepard. We’re gonna be talking about some really cool stuff that how he’s using AI in his business as a real estate investor for marketing and also building an AI clone of himself to help manage his team where they can ask his clone questions. He’s essentially kind of built a second brain where people can get most of the answers without having to go through him and without him having to be the bottleneck on the business freeing up his time to do other things. So really cool stuff.

Looking forward to talking about that today. So Matt. Good to see you

Matt Shepard (00:34.549)
Yeah, glad to be here.

Mike Hambright (00:36.686)
Yeah, yeah. So I know you’re in the Denver market. I know you’re out on a rehab right now. So this is this is raw and real, I guess, here in terms of kind of being out on the job. So, hey, before we jump in, tell us a little bit about your background. I know you started around the same time that I did 2008 or nine or so in the business. But I know you also your family has been in the real estate business for a long, long time. So we’re going to talk about that a little bit more. But tell us kind of high level about you and how you got into the real estate space.

Matt Shepard (01:07.009)
Yeah. So we started investing in Denver Metro about 2009. interesting thing about my kind of big overall background is like, if I was going to call myself just a contractor or somebody in the trades, I would probably be like a third generation person with trades. So my great grandfather was carpenter, provided for his family with carbon really grandpa did the whole thing. That’s the same thing.

Um, then oddly enough, my wife, her dad put her through college by being a master electrician. So kind of deep into the trades kind of gave me the confidence to start out real estate and know that I could fit just about anything on property that I could need to run into. Um, so we’ve invested in Denver Metro since 2009. Kind of started out.

both feet in, two rentals at the same time, build our rental portfolio, kept doing fixing flips here and there to get more cash in order to be able to do more rentals. We just build our rental portfolio up in Denver Metro until the point where we couldn’t get any more rentals. It was kind of before you could get special financing, special DSCR financing, we had more rentals than most banks and whatnot would want to lend on it for.

Now you can get 20, 30 new portfolio arms, build massive portfolio. Back then we kind of got stuck at like 20 units.

Mike Hambright (02:47.66)
Yeah. So with a bunch of trades people in your family, were they primarily dealing with kind of retail buyers or homeowners? And sometimes I know there’s a lot of trades people that work with investors and they always like wish they could do that, too. Like there’s a lot of people that find their way in there from in those trades. Were they working with investors and are they, you know, is it something that they, I guess, saw in you?

that they’re like, I’ve always wanted to do that myself. mean, did you get some of that?

Matt Shepard (03:20.502)
Uh, got a little bit of that, but most of my family always did retail stuff, know, remodels for a homeowner. I great grandpa would build you a house in the ground up for your homeowner. was in fact, he was a depression area person. So this was back in 1930s, 40s, 50s. He would build you a house. You had a piece of land, he’d build you a house on it. He did just about everything. Uh, my father-in-law though, he did a lot of commercial work.

So he did work for massive companies. He lived in Boston and ran a massive commercial electrical business. And so he would do skyscrapers for investors and stuff like that.

Mike Hambright (03:59.576)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (04:04.27)
Wow, that’s cool. And you’re primarily, I know you started to do some syndications now too. for, guess, 15, 16, 17 years, you’ve been primarily doing single family, but doing more larger deals and stuff now kind of moving in that direction a little bit as well.

Matt Shepard (04:20.502)
I mean, think it’s just kind of a natural progression. know, you get one or two single families, three, four, five, six single families. you’re like, Hmm, what about a duplex? What about a quadplex? And then all of a sudden you’re buying six, eight, 12 unit properties and building your door count that way. So I can’t remember exactly when we started getting duplexes, squads. It was fairly early on. Like I think we had five or six single families.

And then we found a quad or no, then we found a duplex and then we found a quad. And now we’re personally doing six, eight unit deals and then looking to syndicate stuff. That’s probably 5 million and above depending on the market. You know, you could get 30 to 50 units for that. then I don’t go much beyond a hundred, 150 units. Um, just gets a little bit big.

Mike Hambright (05:06.05)
Yeah.

Matt Shepard (05:18.218)
kind of try and stay like lean and mean, just me, select individuals that I really like to work with. I went the route of having employees back in like 2014, 16, and this really didn’t like it. It’s way, way more overhead, way more stuff. I try and feel like I can scale by helping other people do their thing instead of scale by.

getting employees.

Mike Hambright (05:49.91)
Yeah, yeah. No, I think you’re right. It’s a it is an evolution. I flipped hundreds of houses and then I realized that I I wanted to have more rentals and the way to move the needle was to start to do some larger syndications with other members of Investor Fuel. So we started doing deals. We’ve been a GP on quite a few deals between 15 and 50 million. And so they just kind of moves the needle faster when you can find those big deals. So.

Of course, it’s been a slow time for deals like that as well over the past couple of years, but that’ll start to pick up here in the next year or so.

Mike Hambright (06:26.51)
Yeah, hope so. Yeah. So let’s talk about this. The AI stuff. I mean, this is really fascinating. We were talking ahead of time and I’ve heard of a few other people doing things like this, not necessarily in the real estate space, but it doesn’t really matter what industry you’re in. This idea of kind of doing a brain dump of like everything that you know and training in AI clone of yourself so that people that have questions for you.

Can just basically ask the question of the clone and it’ll give it it just you know, if you’ve trained it to basically think Just like you so maybe first you could just kind of explain that a little bit better than I did like what that looks like and then maybe we could talk about some kind of practical uses for entrepreneurs and real estate investors of Like how to use that to kind of free up your time So maybe first tell us a little bit like what explain that better than me. Like what what is that? What does that clone look like?

Matt Shepard (07:24.352)
I mean, you explained it pretty well. kind of the cutting edge company that’s got the platform to do these AI clones is called Delphi. D-E-L-P-H-I. And you go on there and you set up a clone. I mean, obviously you’re paying monthly for the service, but you basically train it with everything that you possibly could train it with.

On your own, know, like this podcast, once it’s up and ready, I’ll upload it to my phone and it’ll know what I talked about on this podcast. You know, if I do a blog post, I’ll upload that to my phone. I do sometimes I’m going to have a conference call with an NT or something like that. I’ll bring that. I’ll bring that, meeting, report the meeting and I’ll bring that in.

knows exactly how to talk like me, like even my math and stuff like that. I like to use the some British slang like brilliant or something like that. And my clone will do that. So you talk to it and you get like a sense of exactly who I am and how I, who he can, what I talk about and what I know. The values for me is like, I’m pretty serious about my family time. like,

If it’s after 6 PM, you probably will not hear from me. So if you have a question at 8 PM, you can go to my client and you can say, like, what do I do about the fact that closing got delayed on my deal or I found electrical problems on my deal and now what do I do about it? So if something’s keeping you up at night at 2 AM and you’re a mentee or whatever of me, can go to my client and you can get.

some advice and maybe you’ll sleep a little better and we’ll talk personally one-on-one the next day or something like that.

Mike Hambright (09:26.434)
Yeah, or maybe not because the question’s already been answered, right?

Matt Shepard (09:30.1)
Yeah, maybe, maybe they say, Hey, you know, just want to shoot you a message that your clone made everything better for me last night. And I’ll be like,

Mike Hambright (09:38.04)
Yeah. So talk about some, you talked about kind of like students or things like that, but do you use these things in your operations of your business? Do you have, is your team able to go kind of ask questions and like, how should we do X with this project or things around maybe acquisitions or around, I want to talk about marketing here in a little bit, but if your team has questions, are they able to go, are you using the,

the clone in that way as well for just the operations of your business.

Matt Shepard (10:09.268)
Yeah, I mean, if there’s something that needs that, that somebody needs me for, I’m almost always going to say, did you ask my phone first? Like, because my phone can answer any questions that I can. And obviously if you can’t, then I need to make an adjustment and do some more training for my phone. like, I’ll use it for anything. I had a mentee partner on a deal.

And she had another deal where she was trying to figure out how to refinance and sell. She had bought a duplex and she separated them so she could sell them individually. But then the market was kind of rough for her. So she wanted to keep one and then sell one. And we talked about it and she could have easily have gone to my phone and my phone gave him her the exact answer. I gave her, she wanted a little more personal touch, but.

My clone could have done the exact same thing.

Mike Hambright (11:08.92)
Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. Yeah, I just trying to, I think, you know, all of us, one of the challenges with a lot of entrepreneurs and real estate investors is we tend to answer the same questions over and over and over again. And, but this is an amazing way to potentially start to kind of build this out so that if folks are asking you questions, especially if it’s contractors or people on your team or whatever, and they’re like, I don’t really know, you know, what to do here. They can go ask your clone and probably.

pretty good chance they’re gonna get it taken care of.

Matt Shepard (11:41.687)
And it’s just a, it’s just a mind shift that you have to kind of get yourself wrapped around too. Like this thing, whether you want to call it a thing, a person entity, whatever you want to call it can do just about anything. So it’s like, why not let it do it? You know, like it can tell you just about anything and it’s pretty darn right. So like, just let it do it.

Mike Hambright (12:00.738)
Yeah.

Matt Shepard (12:08.064)
So I even catch myself sometimes like, why am I doing this when my clone can do it? Why am I doing this when chat CPT could do it and do it just as well as I could.

Mike Hambright (12:13.955)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (12:18.998)
Yeah, what are some things that that it can’t do? Probably look at specific deals and say like here’s the offer and things like that. I mean, what are what are some things that it can’t quite do at least yet?

Matt Shepard (12:32.944)
it is not quite very good at doing finances yet. Doesn’t do well with spreadsheets. So it can’t really analyze spreadsheets. So you can kind of get it to do like a really high level cursory analysis of a deal. But then once you start like digging into the financials, you have to put a person on that. I really wanted to swing a hammer. Haven’t figured that one out yet. I suppose Elon Musk will probably get it.

Mike Hambright (12:59.822)
They’re coming. The humanoid robots are coming.

Matt Shepard (13:02.048)
both muscles will probably get us a robot. Yeah.

Yeah, I expect he’ll get us a robot and then it will be powered by AI. Then we’re in for a rude awakening because anybody who’s trades person is not going to be able to have a job. I’ll figure that one out when it comes to it, I guess. But, you know, I programmed my AI with my personality, my mannerisms, my desires, wants, my pain points. So it can do just about anything you want it to.

Mike Hambright (13:14.05)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (13:20.12)
Yeah, yeah. So let’s.

Matt Shepard (13:36.308)
And you can even like tell it to be kind of smart. Like it could be like kind of mean to you if you want it to, or you could train it to be super nice and very flowery. can do either.

Mike Hambright (13:49.004)
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. And you can keep you can keep modifying it as well. So you have the ability to go look and see what questions were asked and how was it answered. And then you can say, no, I would do that a little bit differently. Basically kind of program it to say, if you’re asked this again, here’s a better way to say that or better way to respond.

Matt Shepard (13:56.854)
with one’s leg.

Matt Shepard (14:06.164)
Yeah. Like a perfect example is one time I gave my VA assignment to go talk to my clone about doing a bio for me. And it raised it. It said that I was raised in a two parent household and I was actually raised by my grandparents and my mother. So like, had just never thought to train my AI on that. And I was like, I need to go here and make that change and, and train my AI on that.

Just made that change quick and.

Mike Hambright (14:39.714)
Yep, yep. So let’s talk about how you’re using AI for marketing. So you kind of made a comment that AI is largely running all your marketing kind of efforts, and I think it’s fascinating. So let’s talk a little bit about how you’re using AI for marketing.

Matt Shepard (14:56.874)
Yeah. So I’ve done the background work to make sure that my AI is trained up to be able to spit out good content for essentially my social media. even majority, majority use it for my like hopper funnel, social media campaigns and stuff like that. But I’ve trained it to be able to sit out good content and do good posts. And then my VA has access to that one.

Custom GPT is what it’s called. Cause pretty much I only use chat GPT. And then she just goes in there and says, Hey, let’s generate three posts for April 21st or whatever, or let’s generate three posts a day for the week of April 20th through the 25th. And he goes in there and it spits out things and she sends it back to me and I glance through it and I’m like, yep, it’s all good. Go ahead and post it all.

So there’s like, I couldn’t even tell you how much time that saves me because kind of hates social media. Like I’m always trying to, to post and stuff like that, it’s kind of brain damage for me. It’s not my go-to thing. So like that saves me tons of time.

Mike Hambright (16:06.956)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (16:12.002)
And to clarify, these are, it sounds like these are probably text posts, right? It’ll write up text, right? So this is not video stuff.

Matt Shepard (16:21.84)
so actually brilliant cutting edge as of last week, I think it was last week, that GFT will now do pictures, graphics, stuff like that. And then if I want to do video, I actually can, but that one usually requires me to get into it and massage. I don’t think my VA can do that for me.

Mike Hambright (16:37.219)
Right.

Matt Shepard (16:51.126)
A lot of times if I want to do a video or something like I’ll do video walkthroughs that’s on my YouTube channel of projects that we’re doing just so people can see what we’re doing. So a lot of times when I do that, I’ll just send it to my VA if my VA just cuts it up for me.

Mike Hambright (16:51.725)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (17:06.754)
Yeah. And a lot of, so we’re referring to this as your marketing. A lot of this is organic social media content. And who’s your target for that? You’re trying to find actually home sellers, distressed sellers, or is this more like agents and title companies and other people that could be like a lead, like a referral source? what is the avatar for your content, would you say?

Matt Shepard (17:36.407)
So I’m really trying to work with first-generational wealthy people who bootstrapped or whatever, got their money to build a business or something like that, and have become successful, but really want to buy back their time and really want to provide some kind of a lasting generational wealth that they didn’t have to their kids, whether it’s paying for college, whether it’s…

Mike Hambright (17:51.192)
Okay.

Matt Shepard (18:03.136)
set money aside so that they’ve got some generational wealth to build something new when they come of age or whatnot. So all my social media is targeted to this client of mine who would be an LP who’s probably 35 to 45 and he’s probably bootstrapped himself into a solid business and has been a successful entrepreneur.

And now really wants to just figure out how to keep his wealth without continuing to be working 80 hours a week.

Mike Hambright (18:39.926)
Yeah, okay, so it’s more for raising money.

Matt Shepard (18:43.252)
Yeah, it’s more for my capital raising endeavors for LPs and syndications, but, just knowing who you need to market to is half the battle. So once you know who you need to market to, you can market to anybody using chat. If you tell me that you want to find home sellers who just lost their leg in a tractor accident, we can get that unique on chat.

Mike Hambright (18:49.208)
Yep. Yep.

Mike Hambright (19:13.55)
Wow. Yeah. So maybe while we’re talking about it, maybe you could share a little bit about,

what you’re not doing yet with AI that you think is kind of coming. Like talk a little bit about where you think AI is going and how it could, you know, I mean, we don’t have to get into the scary stuff. Like it’s going to basically take over and get rid of humans and things like that. But more of just like, like practical uses that are coming soon for entrepreneurs that are not quite there yet.

Matt Shepard (19:46.134)
It doesn’t really do video like we were talking about. So you have to kind of shoot your own video and probably have it edit the video. I think it’s, it’s pretty close because it can now do any kind of image generation just within three minutes. can generate you an image of contractors swinging a hammer, a dad playing with his kids, mom playing with his kids. Generate just about anything as far as image now.

Mike Hambright (19:58.648)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Shepard (20:19.446)
Video is probably the next thing. But even some of that’s available, it just takes a little more input from a human. Like I said, I still think the next thing is probably some kind of robots that can do just about anything that a human can do. Swing hammers, build houses, whatnot.

Mike Hambright (20:28.814)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (20:37.24)
Yeah, yeah.

It’s an interesting time to be alive for sure and we’re just the tip of the iceberg. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I think a lot of the video stuff you’re talking about, like what’s kind of there now that I’ve seen is pretty dang close is the faceless video stuff. So if you can, you essentially can sound like you, can program AI to sound like you and talk like you and think like you just like you’ve already done, but create video. That’s not necessarily.

Rendering of you what it’s you talking and they’re showing kind of b-roll or other things that are kind of faceless You know that there’s this whole like Uprising of people creating baseless YouTube channels that are just like pumping out tons of content on faceless YouTube It could be about motivation or mindset or things like that. And so there’s a massive amount of that going on already

Matt Shepard (21:16.874)
V-roll thing is totally available.

Matt Shepard (21:30.74)
Yeah, the B-roll thing is totally there already. You can kind of cut back and forth between you doing your thing and then have AI generate the B-roll. So that’s totally there already. I just don’t know if we could have our two AIs have a conversation right now like we’re doing quite yet. But it’s probably going to be there soon.

Mike Hambright (21:53.966)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s weird because you don’t know. We’re getting to the point now where you often don’t know what’s real or what’s AI. So yeah, interesting time.

Matt Shepard (22:10.006)
Especially with the new graphics from ChatGBT, you used to kind of tell, know, AI would mess up graphics, letters would be inverted, letters would be like kind of weird, you know, not all the same typeface or something like that. But now this new rollout from ChatGBT, I think it was just like last week, their image generation just got 100 % better.

Mike Hambright (22:38.442)
Yeah, yeah, awesome. Well, Matt, thanks for sharing some insights with us today. I think it’s an interesting time for sure for those that aren’t using AI yet for their business. mean, you’re going to make sure you don’t get left behind. So you shared some interesting things here. There’s actually several things that we talked about today that got my wheels turning that I’m going to go look into for myself. So I appreciate that. So, hey, if folks want to connect with you and learn more about what you’re doing, like where can they go?

Matt Shepard (23:04.95)
The big thing I like to do is Instagram so Matt Shepard re investor on Instagram and Then LinkedIn’s the same thing Matt Shepard already investor. Those are my two go-to’s Post a little bit to X not much post a little bit to Facebook again not much my website is a ms capital LLC comm

Pretty much everything flows through there. can contact me there. You can look a meeting with me there. You can talk to my AI there. You can read my blog posts. I’ve published two books, international bestselling author on both of those books. So you can read both those books there. One’s about kind of my start in real estate, how I got from, you know, bootstrapping myself through college to real estate.

Mike Hambright (23:48.12)
Nice.

Matt Shepard (24:01.366)
And then one’s kind of about how you can buy back your time if you’re trying to figure out how to buy back your time from the normal nine to five and still build wealth for your family.

Mike Hambright (24:12.354)
Yeah, awesome. We’ll add links down below for all this stuff we just mentioned here. So thanks for sharing your story and sharing some insights with us today.

Matt Shepard (24:20.278)
Yeah, I appreciate it. Glad we could connect.

Mike Hambright (24:23.256)
Yeah, for sure. And everybody, hope you got some good insights and knowledge from today. Make sure you’re keeping an eye on AI and trying to find ways to make yourself more efficient. That’s just the world we live in these days. So make sure you’re taking full advantage of it. Appreciate you guys. We’ll see you on the next show.