How AI Is Transforming Real Estate Investing | Carlos Zamora of Carrot

Mike Hambright (00:01.23)
Everybody welcome back to the show today. I’m here by buddy Carlos Zamora from Carrot. We’re going to be talking about AI and sales and marketing in the real estate space. It’s kind of taking the industry by storm and I have a feeling we’re just getting started here. We’re at the very tip of the iceberg from where we’re going. And so Carlos and Carrot are on the cutting edge of that. We’re to talk a lot about where that’s at today. So if you feel like you’re behind, this would be a good show to watch. If you feel like you’re on the cutting edge. Well, that’s going to change tomorrow. So also make sure you pay attention to this show. So Carlos, welcome to the show. Buddy, good to see you.

Carlos Zamora (00:30.607)
Thank you, man. Always good to see you, Mike.

Mike Hambright (00:33.123)
Yeah, it doesn’t feel like we’re on the cusp of something like much bigger, but nobody really knows what it’s going to be yet.

Carlos Zamora (00:39.631)
It kind of feels like when Elon Musk has always announced like self-driving cars, how it’s like, oh man, it’s going to be out next week, next month. But then that period goes on for so much time. It feels like we’ve been in a little bit of that in 2026 and the 2025 for sure.

Mike Hambright (00:54.988)
Yeah. So my wife actually literally just like three days ago, we just ordered a Tesla, which we never had before. But she absolutely hates driving. And so we’re just she loves the we went and test drove one and she’s like, I want this like now. No, no, it’s a model Y. Yeah, I don’t I actually hate the looks of the Cybertruck. But she just wants a self driving car. She just doesn’t want to have to drive. And so she’s like, I want to make my life simpler. And this is one of those things that would help. And I was like, All right, let’s do it.

Carlos Zamora (01:07.523)
What’d you get, the Cybertruck?

Carlos Zamora (01:11.599)
I’m gonna buy it, are sweet.

Carlos Zamora (01:22.703)
The Waymo’s just got launched so when we’re recording this they’ve been in Miami for a little bit But I saw him as early as September in Scottsdale when I was out there for a mastermind So hopping into a car that literally has no driver in it is pretty pretty crazy

Mike Hambright (01:35.18)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, well, hey, before we jump in, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background?

Carlos Zamora (01:41.903)
Yeah man, for sure. I definitely appreciate you having me on. If you guys, make sure you guys see the Investor Fuel shirt here.

Mike Hambright (01:47.362)
You’re pimping the Investor Fuel shirt. I like that. Yeah.

Carlos Zamora (01:48.975)
I got a thank you note from a great guy and investor for Alexander Cruz, another Baltimore guy right to my left here that he just sent me. So I appreciate that. But yeah, my name’s Carlos Zamora. I’ve been with carrot.com now for a little over four years. And I started wholesaling back in 2013 with my buddy Dan Schwartz in Baltimore at the time where I grew up. And he was always building out our CRM that we’re using internally. And we ended up selling that as a SaaS.

Mike Hambright (01:54.871)
Yeah.

Carlos Zamora (02:17.197)
product on top of a podium called InvestorFuse. So that launched April, 2016, a little over 10 years ago. So I’ve been in the wholesaling space since 2013, about three years doing, you know, acquisitions with Dan and now in the SaaS space, which is actually really crazy. Say I’m aging myself a little bit, but for 10 years I’ve been mainly in the CRM and then we got acquired by Carrot. So now I’m getting under the hood more with web and SEO and everything like that. So 10 year SaaS guy in the real estate wholesaling space.

Mike Hambright (02:45.55)
Yep. And there was InvestorFuse 1 or 1.0, which was Podio based and InvestorFuse 2, nobody wants to talk about, right? And then there was InvestorFuse 3 and then it got acquired by Carrot and now it’s changed the name to, what’s new name? Carrot CRM?

Carlos Zamora (02:48.355)
Mm-hmm.

Carlos Zamora (02:54.595)
Mm-hmm.

Carlos Zamora (02:58.136)
Mm-hmm.

Carrot CRM, so yeah, if you guys are looking at this online, if you go to InvestorFuse, it’s gonna redirect you to Carrot CRM, so that’s the new rebranding. And we can talk about 2.0, I’ve talked about it on podcasts. I mentioned some of it, me and Trevor were on lately. It’s a good learning lesson for sure, so we can definitely talk about that. And I was talking at some point this past week or two, I’ve had some pretty crazy days in my career, in my SaaS career. InvestorFuse 2.0 was one of them.

Mike Hambright (03:10.894)
Yeah, well I know.

Carlos Zamora (03:29.839)
As far as just selling a lot of software in one day But essentially the long and short we can dive into this as much as you want But we rolled out a product that was still in beta and did not do good Expectations of setting that where people were expecting a fully built out Products and everything like that. So we sold a ton in that day some of the most money I’ve ever seen come in in one day, but all that came in and and churned

And then the other day that I was recalling was doing the co-launch with Investorlift, a Dispo product. Me and Dan did the very first call with Investorlift and same thing, sold a ton, but those didn’t churn out. So some, some crazy days looking back on the last 10 years for sure.

Mike Hambright (03:55.886)
Mike Hambright (04:08.078)
Hmm.

Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, let’s, let’s talk about kind of AI, what’s going on. So maybe we could just talk at a high level of high level, like, what are you seeing right now? I want to dive into kind of marketing, and we’ll get into some specifics and even sales and like acquisitions. But what are you seeing so far? Like, where are we? What’s the? What is the state of the union right now on kind of AI state investors for marketing and sales, let’s say.

Carlos Zamora (04:25.646)
Mm-hmm.

Carlos Zamora (04:32.002)
Yeah.

Carlos Zamora (04:35.82)
Yeah, and I love how you opened the interview, Mike. So I think right now at the end of the May where we’re at with AI is we’ve seen a lot of people the last couple of months using open call and Claude co-work and people posting on Facebook saying like, Hey, I built this, I built that. And some people painted more of like a doomsday, like a Terminator type scenario of like, Hey, AI is going to call all these jobs. There’s going to be one to two person real estate companies where essentially you’re to be able to build out.

Open call or AI agents essentially coming and doing that that’s been up until maybe the beginning of May and it’s been pretty cool having a lot of conversations with real estate investors and Trevor predicted this a couple months ago where we saw it’s almost like a Like a comeback really quick where it’s like all these people were super super bullish on AI And now even some people that are big on AI voice are coming back a little bit to reality and saying hey Maybe this AI stuff isn’t gonna take off just as much. We’ll see if that keeps halting

But I think in general from a high level and we can dive into like the marketing aspect and acquisition aspect for real estate. But I think it’s, it’s where that’s where it’s at right now where people are probably realizing like, Hey, I can spend some time. can spend my nights and weekends building a product or an agent. That’s 80 to 90 % what I need, but I’m not going to get it across the finish line. And then at, to what extent am I taking away my actual revenue generating activities or like what’s making me money in the business to work on open claw.

or Claude co-work for hours at night and am I taking time away from my family to do that? So it’s like, it the best use of your time? I think people are coming to that realization right now that it’s not.

Mike Hambright (06:03.042)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (06:09.902)
I think there’s a couple, there’s a couple of things that I’m seeing. One is, well, there’s this, I guess this hope out there for some people, and I don’t have this. I don’t share this, that I want to eliminate my whole team and just use AI, right? Like I would say my team is triple at Investor Fuel. I have a lot of different companies, but Investor Fuel, my team has gone from 12 to 40 in the past year and a half. And I just told everybody like, look, I’m not trying to eliminate any jobs, but where we’re going, I don’t want to have to go to 60 or 80.

Carlos Zamora (06:21.293)
Hmm

Mike Hambright (06:37.966)
Like I want to find out a way that we can all use all of you more efficiently than ever, like how you can use AI, right? So I’m not, I’m trying to scale through the people I have using AI, not like eliminate everybody, right? So, but I don’t, so I don’t share that same goal. And I know some people do, but one of the things that I’m seeing is I think a lot of owners and I’m one of them, I’m out at night. I’m like creating stuff. I’m like caveman with laser gun with AI, right? I’m like figuring out all these amazing things, but it still has to get pushed into your organization. Like,

Carlos Zamora (07:06.83)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (07:07.406)
it’s a cool thing, but it’s like, okay, well, you know, I’m at a stage now and I don’t, I’ll admit this, I don’t, I don’t love this, but most people on my team, they’re using AI have their, they all have different accounts, like they don’t speak to each other. It’s not like a CRM or a lot of other softwares that we use for our business, like, you know, Slack or Asana or any of those things where we’re all using the same platform, like we’re all on different platforms right now. They’re not talking to each other. That’s where we’re at right now. And I don’t love that, but I feel like a lot of companies are in the same situation because

It’s a bunch of people dabbling and playing with stuff and they haven’t figured out how to integrate it and push it into the organization, you know, very deep yet. Would you agree with that?

Carlos Zamora (07:42.253)
Yeah, you got, I definitely agree with that. And with care, we’re working on our own company brain there. So everybody’s plugged into it. I do use my own personal stuff, but I also use our internal company brain, like even something as simple as drafting up some copy, maybe in Trevor’s voice or helping me with a Facebook post just to get me some, something really quick versus just like brainstorming. It’s nice to have all that in there. Or one thing caret’s really big on is in Slack, we have a company awesomeness channel.

where anytime there’s a customer win or anything positive going on, it’s like a repository of years and years and years. So I can even use our company brain and say, give me three awesomeness quotes that talk about how an investor closed a deal from XYZ benefit of the website and or CRM, and it can pull it right from there. So yeah, I’m seeing that as well. think we’re getting dialed in and we have some amazing people on our team and we’re very AI forward, but I don’t think as an operator you can…

just tell your team, go learn AI and expect them to be fully integrated into it.

Mike Hambright (08:42.766)
Right. And so a lot of those things with using open claw or different things, I’m not here to poo poo it. I mean, there’s some cool things going on. But it’s, it’s like, is it is it just a cool thing to do? Or is it really going to move the needle for him for you? For us, it’s really sales and marketing and kind of implementation or fulfillment, whatever that is for your business, right? So a lot of those people are creating this kind of cool thing on the side. But is it really moving the needle for your business? Is it is it? Is it a gimmick? Or is it like

Carlos Zamora (08:48.078)
Hmm.

Carlos Zamora (08:56.621)
Mm-hmm.

Carlos Zamora (09:07.352)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (09:11.158)
a world-changing type thing, you know?

Carlos Zamora (09:12.674)
Yeah. And I think that to answer that question of like where the state of AI is, I think the best way to put it is I think the majority of people are at least coming towards the point now of maybe seeing that AI is more of a supplemental tool. Like it’s going to help supplement or empower people that are using it versus getting rid of humans. And for me, like personally, what I’ve thought even a while ago is there’s going to be a comeback to branding companies that brand themselves. And this is like perfect for investors listening to this show.

where you can market yourself as powered by humans instead of powered by AI. And one of our core values is human, like humanity, essentially like bringing humanity to the workplace. it’s like, even though we use AI, like we have some amazing new features in the product that can spit out different versions of websites and AI leads to where you inside the CRM and some really cool stuff like that. It’s like, how can you bring humanity to business? think that’s something creatively, any investor listening to the show that you can do in any year interactions and think about that. So I think that’s still.

coming down the next one, two years, in addition to being at amazing in-person events too. A lot of people are talking about that, just human connection. it’s like, dude, Investor Fuel. I told you right here, I have a thank you note from Xander Cruz. Like there are long-time members of investor fuel. And I think surrounding yourselves in an environment like that, if we’re talking about AI is becoming more and more and more important, getting off screens and having communication in person.

Mike Hambright (10:28.152)
Yeah, because I feel like I’ve had this for years. This is even pre AI that everybody’s like Facebook friends, but nobody really knows each other. Like you have these shallow relationships on social media, but nobody has these deep relationships. And like literally post COVID with everything that’s going on in social media, with everything that’s happening in the world right now that kind of, you know, distances people. think people crave those personal relationships more than ever. So any business that’s trying to create a machine to like set it and forget it.

Carlos Zamora (10:34.415)
So true

Carlos Zamora (10:52.879)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (10:57.134)
is probably missing the point because at the end of the day, whether it’s a mastermind, whether it’s you guys working with investors at Carrot, or whether it’s investors buying from sellers, like, you could find ways to like you said, utilize AI supplement it. And I’m sure it’s gonna take on more and more, more opportunities to fill that we don’t even know about right now over the years to come. But at end of the day, people want to work with people that they trust. And I think maybe eventually,

Carlos Zamora (11:23.119)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (11:25.346)
I mean, people don’t want to work with people in a call center, right? mean, I’m, I’m cool with AI attacking that industry. And actually I have some experiences lately where the experience of talking to an AI agent in a call center was like amazing compared to somebody that keeps putting me on hold. can’t answer my questions, right? But in terms of, how we work with people, whether it’s a service provider or selling a house or buying a house or whatever big purchases, I feel like people really crave those personal relationships.

Carlos Zamora (11:27.886)
Mmm.

Yeah.

Carlos Zamora (11:42.543)
Mm-hmm.

Carlos Zamora (11:54.736)
100%. 100%. And for the AI side, like diving more into the marketing, just as I’m thinking about it. And I’m going to give Mike this link just for anybody that’s interested more on like the AI SEO side of things. Me and Mike are just chatting for a few minutes, just as buddies here catching up, but Trevor, our CEO for anybody that wants to nerd out really on like the AI SEO and just what we’re seeing, because it’s so everything gets updated so quickly, like on a weekly basis. We do have a challenge that’s free, carrot.com/challenge. So it’s actually

Mike Hambright (11:55.342)
Yeah.

Carlos Zamora (12:24.247)
the first day is recording right now or Trevor’s doing it right now. That goes in just to the latest of what we’re seeing out in the marketplace. Our SEO strategists and Trevor, what they’re seeing, just what helps rank different LLMs, ChatGPT, Claude, Google, Google Gemini, but there’s changes all the time. So we’re doing that monthly now. It may increase by the time that it gets recorded, but we have that as a free resource for you guys too.

Mike Hambright (12:46.574)
Yeah, well, I’ll link down below. think that’s that’s one of the things that’s been so I’m in a we’ve got we have some friends that we both know that have like an AI mastermind that I’m a part of. And I don’t participate all that much. But they’re you know, guys like Brian Hansen and Francis like they’re on the cutting edge of like what’s going on. But it’s like every day. Look at this amazing thing everything I’ve ever talked about before. Forget it. This is the coolest thing. And then one week later, it’s like, forget all that stuff I told you last week. Here’s the next thing you know.

Carlos Zamora (12:56.591)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (13:14.358)
And it just gets overwhelming as an entrepreneur because you can’t really live like that if you’re trying to scale a business. you got to stay on the, you have to stay like your ear to the ground of what’s working, but you got to let stuff like, you don’t need to be a super early adopter as a real estate investor. you don’t really, real estate investors are never on the cutting edge of anything. like usually the tech, you know, other industries are ahead for a couple of years and then real estate investors kind of follow. And so if you feel like you’re missing out right

Carlos Zamora (13:18.692)
Yeah.

Carlos Zamora (13:34.862)
Mm-mm.

Mike Hambright (13:43.65)
You’re not really like you just need to work with companies that are figuring this out and you don’t have to necessarily figure out that’s that’s my opinion.

Carlos Zamora (13:50.308)
That’s, why people get into masterminds and pay for proven softwares and stuff like that to kind of shortcut that and spend time in their actual genius. Joan. like Trevor talks about a lot, like what’s actually going to give them energy. Like for me staying up late at night or weekends, just jamming on Claude, co-work that’s not necessarily for me, but I’m also grateful. I’ve had an amazing partner, John, on the tech side that I can go to him with any AI questions and tech stuff. And he can guide me in the right direction. But.

That whole world is moving super, super quick and super, super fast, but I agree. think it’s just in our lifetime like that and the internet are probably the shiniest of shiny object syndrome items that someone could have. And then just being in a container or social media where everybody’s like kind of talking about it and bragging about what they’re building and stuff like that. It can be, it can be a lot, but yeah, keep, keep the main thing, the main thing of whatever’s going to generate you revenue is at least inside your business.

Mike Hambright (14:47.936)
And one of those things on the marketing side probably is using AI to follow up. I mean, that’s one of the main things, right? Organize data, maybe have a follow up in a way that’s unique where every message is not just a canned message. Like you can actually create, you know, AI systems that have a unique follow up based on where that last conversation left off. I mean, would you agree with that? There are some other things you can do in marketing, but I think a lot of tried and true marketing platforms

Carlos Zamora (14:54.66)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (15:17.28)
are still working and many of them always will, but it’s how you follow up and how you manage those relationships with leads that you have generated more so than generating more leads, although you can do that too.

Carlos Zamora (15:29.987)
Definitely. So I think one of the coolest use cases for AI in the acquisition space is being able to score your leads automatically and in real time with AI based off of how valuable a lead is for you in different categories or different variables. Like if how communicative a seller is, like you could have sellers that respond within 24 hours. They get a slightly higher score than sellers that don’t respond for a few days or aren’t responding at all.

If there’s any mention of equity or any potential distress, those get a little bit higher score. What marketing channel they came in from, if they came in from an investor machine, SEO lead, for example, that might be higher than a cold calling or an expired listing lead that you got. So all that can be automated with AI, depending on the tools you’re using. I know we have it and depending on other tools, they’re going to pay AI lead scoring to a certain extent.

But I think one of the biggest benefits there is keeping the morale of either yourself, if you’re a solo operator or if you’re managing acquisitions people. If I was managing acquisitions people, I would wanna keep their morale as high as possible. So being able to let them see the leads that are most likely to pick up the phone and actually be receptive to talking about an offer or buying their house, anything like that, even to hear from you. I think that’s one of the biggest things is you’re setting your acquisition manager up to spend less time following up.

keeping their morale high and overall making them more money. Cause they’re talking to leads that are actually gonna be ready. So I think that’s the biggest thing. And the way getting more into like a technical answer, how we have that strung up is inside the base caret CRM, we have AI summaries and AI lead score. And currently we integrate best with a tool called smartphone, which has AI voice functionality and AI agents. So the cool thing there is if you want to go full AI, let’s say you send out a piece of mail with investor machine, for example, that AI agent can have a

conversation with the seller, can fully transcribe and take notes automatically, come to the CRM and then update the summary and lead score without you even touching the lead yet. So you, your acquisition managers could log into work that morning, that afternoon, whatever, and have your leads just ready to go as far as ranking of what’s the most likely to close, generate you revenue. So that’s probably the thing I’m most excited about, Mike, is the…

Mike Hambright (17:34.37)
Mm-hmm.

Carlos Zamora (17:50.929)
technical backend, how good AI lead scoring is getting. And I think the CRM is always gonna be there. If we wanna talk like long-term AI, some people are like, what’s gonna happen with CRMs? I think there’s gonna be some level of a database always that like an operator is gonna wanna log into and just see all the data and see all the KPIs and stuff like that. And the AI lead scoring is really exciting because it’s just automating the value of the data set that you have as far as seller leads and property data. that’s.

Mike Hambright (18:15.744)
Yeah. And for your sales team, it’s it’s narrowing down what they have to do today. Like, because historically, like all leads are kind of the same in the CRM, unless you tag it or you drag it to some category or whatever, like otherwise, people just treat them all the same. And they’re clearly not all the same, you know, they never have been. Yeah.

Carlos Zamora (18:35.271)
100%, 100%. And even before AI, that was one of my biggest talking points or something I got most excited about is any interaction that you have with somebody that day, me talking to Mike on a podcast, you guys talking to a cellular leader, something like that, what can you do and how can you make that the most special interaction, most mental interaction that that person had that day where when that person’s at the end of the night, they’re like, man, that was great talking to that guy or talking to that gal. AI helps a lot of that with taking note with

helping you take the notes automatically and transcribing those. Like you guys see every Zoom or Google Meet you go in, everybody has their Fireflies or their Fathom or something in there, I use Green. So that’s there, but like how good are you at recalling something specific, like on a personal level on that conversation that you had, you know? So I think that’s a huge, huge way to stick out because where we’re at now with real estate, at least a lot of people that I talk to, those sellers are most likely not just talking to you.

Maybe if you can jump on that lead right away after like a foreign pill or something. But besides that, they’re probably talking to a couple other people. So that’s kind of one thing that’s always on my mind. How can you stick out when you’re having those seller conversations? And a lot of marketing channels, you’re gonna need to be able to talk with them multiple times. You’re gonna do multiple follow-ups. So the better notes that you can take and then surface those up in conversation, the more that you’re gonna stick out.

Mike Hambright (19:55.522)
That’s great. For years, like nearly 20 years ago, when I started as a real estate investor. That’s one of the things that I owe. And then eventually I got into coaching like a years later, after I’d done about 100 deals, I started coaching people. And that’s one of the things I always said is like, take note of something about the seller that you can remember, like they’re a Dallas Cowboys fan. God bless them, whatever. But or they like they they they really like cats or whatever it is just like, and put it in the CRM. And, you know, it was always it was always just a note, just a

Carlos Zamora (20:12.816)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (20:24.96)
a static note of some things about that person. So when you call them up for the 15th time, like a year later, you could say, you know, how are you cats doing or whatever? Like, you remember I have cats like, how could I forget that? Right? It’s just the personal touch stuff. And so I was doing that. And we were teaching that 20 years ago. But like, the technologies come a long way to allow you to remember that to summarize every conversation you’ve had with that person, where you left off the last time you talked to them instead of trying to remember that.

Carlos Zamora (20:35.536)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (20:54.296)
We’re trying to type in some static note that’s going to inevitably often get lost in the mix.

Carlos Zamora (20:59.472)
Mm-hmm. A hundred percent. That’s a, that’s a big thing with AI too is almost like bringing a level of importance to the foundations and fundamentals of conversations like Dale Carnegie stuff, you know, how to win friends and influence people and get, like I mentioned, like getting back to the in-person meetings and stuff like that. Like it’s crazy to think about the generation, the data on the generation that’s younger than me, how much they use LLMs like chat, GPT, Claude, and stuff like that, and their day-to-day usage.

Mike Hambright (21:17.133)
Yeah.

Carlos Zamora (21:27.412)
and just how much they’re on devices and stuff like that. It’s gonna be interesting 10, 20 years from now to see where that generation is at and how interpersonal they are and everything like that. Cause a lot of us are marketing to folks that are, like a lot of people’s target demographic are probably like 50 plus sellers and they probably aren’t gonna be on chat GBT. Like according to our data, I saw really good stats just from the data that we have where a lot of people would have thought that

Google search would be significantly down now with all the popular LLMs like chat, GPT Perplexity, Claude, everything like that. But it’s interesting. Google search for motivated house sellers is actually increasing significantly, which is cool to see. So more people are actually going onto Google. I’m not sure. I don’t know if there’s more motivated sellers.

Mike Hambright (22:10.232)
Hmm. Why is that?

Carlos Zamora (22:20.099)
The increase is there for chat GPT and we’re seeing like literally the source code inside Carrot, like more and more leads coming in from chat GPT specifically every single month. don’t know if there’s, I don’t know if it’s foreclosures or some type of demographic of motivated sellers, but there’s just more searches coming in overall and more on Google.

Mike Hambright (22:40.12)
Yeah, I use Claude for a lot of stuff, but I find myself whenever I just have a random search, I don’t usually go into Claude. I still use Google, but I use Google AI search.

Carlos Zamora (22:48.847)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And that like, that’s another thing too. And why, Trevor is so excited about the AI SEO that we’re doing every month with, with him just teaching the latest and greatest. it’s like, there’s so much new stuff that changes, even if it’s something little interface, like remember six months ago where the, AI overview came out and people, least for us, where we’re in that, business of AI and SEO search, where the Gemini would show up with like three recommended companies and stuff like that.

then there’s rumors potentially of the AI mode becoming the default mode or, you know, Claude, I heard some people talking about where they may get rid of the chat and the default may just be cowork. So it’s just cowork and Claude code. So there’s always new stuff coming out and it’s, it’s good for the majority of folks. It’s not your best use of time to just be like in the trenches, 10, 20 hours, just seeing what’s new going on with AI. That’s, that’s, that’s why I’m pumped. At least for people like, you know, people listening to this and even myself, like,

Mike Hambright (23:20.119)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (23:29.134)
Yeah.

Sure, yeah, yeah.

Mike Hambright (23:40.065)
for sure, yeah.

Carlos Zamora (23:45.176)
I’m, you know, business development and marketing, you know, acquisition face type guy like, like Mike is. So it’s probably not best for us or some of the investors listening to show to be that, but to have those outlets is, good too. maybe that’s a good advice to like have a buddy that somebody that you can talk to about AI that’s kind of forward facing that you could have some level of partnership where you can jam with them on stuff may be helpful.

Mike Hambright (24:07.704)
they could create a shortcut. It’s like having a buddy with a boat or a plane. I don’t really want that. Just let me know when we can go out. I don’t want to have to do the cleaning or the maintenance or anything. Just let me know when it’s ready for prime time.

Carlos Zamora (24:11.499)
Exactly, literally. That’s so funny.

Carlos Zamora (24:19.767)
I’m I’m a hundred percent stealing that boat references. That’s, that’s how I am down here. Just friends with buddies that have boats. That’s so funny.

Mike Hambright (24:25.542)
Yeah. So let’s talk about kind of AI for acquisitions. Like what’s happening in the acquisition. We talked a little bit about marketing, but acquisitions. Obviously there’s all sorts of call analyzing stuff that guys like Steve Trang are doing. what kind of like where are we at State of the Union again for using AI and acquisitions specifically?

Carlos Zamora (24:47.565)
Yeah. Yeah. So I think we, so Lee, I think lead scoring some of the voices is hitting on some of the acquisitions. think with the marketing, what’s going on is we saw some people that like in general with Carrot, I’ll give a little bit of context. our content or our strategy typically over the last 12 years for getting companies ranked in different markets is what’s called like a content heavy strategy. So you could essentially see what keywords motivated sellers are searching on Google.

and essentially add that to different parts of your website, typically in blog posts. That’s why where you see Carrot sites in general have a lot, they’re very context heavy. That’s very intentional because typically the areas that have success with conversion, where there’s a lot of content on the site, like a lot of words on the site are around real estate and financial services and health decisions. Like if they’re getting like surgeries or medication, stuff like that, that’s because those two instances people want to be super, super well informed on what they’re selling.

the biggest asset they’ve ever had for 99 % of people is their house and then any type of medical decisions they wanna make. If you’re going to Amazon, for example, to get pens or something low cost, it’s just like, hey, let me just see the reviews are good, add to cart, buy. So in saying that, what we’re seeing AI SEO or AI in marketing, what we’re seeing is there were folks, which is good for us, there were folks that were essentially trying to launch a bunch of blog posts.

but Google was flagging them. If they see 50, 100 blog posts in one month and AI written, Google was flagging saying, hey, this company probably isn’t very legit. So what’s good for us is we can use AI to search what keywords sellers are ranking for, but then still coming up with the one month, we like that sweet spot of one blog post per month still for ranking organically for AI. And then getting your Google My Business profile dialed in as well.

Like that’s probably the lowest hanging fruit I could put on here is making sure your Google Business profile is up to date with hours, location, getting reviews to that. We see people getting leads and closing deals just from that and having your site link there. So Trevor does four whole days, but that’s probably the lowest hanging fruit that a good percentage of people listening to this probably don’t have dialed in. I think that’s that. I would share also as far as just in the marketing AI.

Mike Hambright (26:57.229)
Yeah.

Carlos Zamora (27:08.591)
Definitely be careful with AI cold calling. There are definitely some people that are getting jammed up for that. I would say some low hanging fruit more on the security side as well. Make sure if you’re doing any AI, even in the CRM, like if you’re having AI calls or anything like that, make sure that’s in your consent form on your website. And for those of you guys that doing like multi-channel marketing, definitely make sure that’s in that little consent box there that the person that…

Mike Hambright (27:15.341)
Yeah.

Carlos Zamora (27:35.181)
you have the right to reach out to that person via text, email, and any type of AI calling if you do that. That’s definitely just some pulse stuff. And then acquisitions, yeah, the lead scoring, the AI voice is big. I think what we’re gonna see come out, there’s some individual companies that are coming out for it. I don’t have one I recommend specifically, but I think some deal analysts with AI is gonna be really, really big that can help you write comps.

Mike Hambright (27:41.165)
Yeah.

Carlos Zamora (27:58.657)
I do see some people with some apprehension to that though, where they’re like, Hey, I can only run comps my way. Like I don’t trust an AI, but I think that’s probably the next level of product that we’re going to see some AI analysis, like comping and offer creation and stuff like that, that can go out. But it’s it, it’s an ever changing world, man.

Mike Hambright (28:14.382)
you know, I’m one of those that’s hesitant for that. when, you know, I’ve been doing this for close to 20 years, so when Zillow came out and people are like basing it off of the Zillow value, I was like, no way in hell does that make sense, right? And so I think it’s gotten a lot better, but I still always look at MLS comp, run MLS comps. And then even recently, I thought the Zillow values were getting better. you know, we a list of a couple properties here lately, and we listed them both for significantly more than what the Zillow value.

Carlos Zamora (28:25.996)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (28:43.66)
was so I was like, well, the good news is, they’re worth more than I thought they were because I was kind of relying on I think they’re worth what, you know, Zillow says these are houses that these are rental properties that were kind of owner financing off. And, but yeah, I think, I don’t know, I think people have a hesitant people want to push a button and have this all just figured out. But at end of the day, if you if you rely too much on that, and you buy one wrong, you’re going to get beat up. And if you sell one wrong, and you leave money on the table, like that’s not good either. So it’ll be interesting to see how that evolves.

Carlos Zamora (29:12.884)
Mm-hmm a hundred percent and then just my personal opinion I’ve said this on other podcasts, but I think with the AI voice I think it it could be a no-brainer I think some things that you need to look at is like What’s your lead volume and what’s the current team that you have in place to talk to leads? so for example if you’re doing PPC and it’s it’s expensive leads 400 500 bucks lead and It’s just you and you’re trying to get some deals closed like get some revenue in the door It probably doesn’t make sense to outsource that to AI voice where it

Mike Hambright (29:27.714)
Right.

Mike Hambright (29:40.174)
If I risk it,

Carlos Zamora (29:41.231)
Where it does make sense is if you’ve been in the business for a few years and you have a couple thousand leads inside your CRM, I think it becomes a no brainer if you can resurface some of those with AI voice, if you weren’t gonna touch them at all. That’s like where it first starts to become a no brainer. Like it’s better to follow up with them with an AI voice, call them all, than to just let them sit there. And then depending on your preference and how many people you have to work leads, you could do that. On the B2B side too, I didn’t mention this before, we went on air, but we have some…

Mike Hambright (30:02.382)
Yeah.

Carlos Zamora (30:09.718)
And again, this is selling to like real estate investor software, but we use simple talk AI, which is pretty cool. That can call a couple thousand people. don’t max it out that much, but it does have the capability to call a couple thousand people at one time. And you can record your own voice. Like they do it that way where you can record your own voice. And it’s like an AI view calling people. And I think the best place it is right now is appointment setting. There are some products out there that, you know, they, they market it as nose to tail.

And I think that’s definitely what some people look for, just human nature. They’re like, Hey, like you said, if I can just press one button, it’s there in my opinion. I don’t think it’s there yet, but we’ll see AI is one of those things that’s exponentially grows and increases and trains itself. So I could see it. It’s obviously going to get better this year, but I think currently at this point in time, it’s better value for humans to be doing a lot of the negotiating and calling and stuff like that. And using the AI to tee up the lead scores for them is my opinion.

Mike Hambright (31:05.121)
Yeah. And quite frankly, there’s a lot of administrative things that AI is really good at. mean, there’s so many administrative things in this business, the real estate investing business, that it can make easier. I just, you know, for example, I just started using Claude Cowork last week to help me, help me get me to get me to zero inbox three times a day. And I get, you know, I’ve been around for a long time, so I get hundreds of emails a day. A lot of them are junk.

Carlos Zamora (31:25.069)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (31:30.152)
And it just helps keep them clean, elevate things up, auto respond to certain people, know, star certain ones that are like important to me that need to be addressed, and literally just push everything else to archive or delete. it’s like, again, it’s like caveman with laser gun right now. But for somebody that is drowning in email constantly, like, I’m pretty excited about having a zero inbox three times a day. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So

Carlos Zamora (31:48.206)
Hmm

Carlos Zamora (31:54.786)
That’s a perfect use case. That’s a perfect use case.

Mike Hambright (31:59.768)
Cool, well Carlos, if folks wanna connect with you or learn anymore, where can they go?

Carlos Zamora (32:04.93)
Yeah, so definitely check out Carrot’s Instagram, at GetCarrot on Instagram. You can reach out to me directly, 443-966-5158. And I know this is just kind of high level touching base. If you ever want to get on, no pressure whatsoever. I’m happy to just chat with you about your marketing acquisitions. Hopefully I’ll be at an Investor Fuel event there too. So for any members there, I’d be happy to connect with you. And you can also reach out to me via email. If you’d like [email protected], I’ll be happy to chat with any of your audience, Mike.

Mike Hambright (32:34.264)
Cool. We’ll add some links down in the show notes here. So thanks for joining me. Good to see you, buddy.

Carlos Zamora (32:39.222)
Likewise, man, gotta get you on the carrot podcast here soon.

Mike Hambright (32:42.018)
Yeah, I’ve been on a few times in the past, but always always open. Yeah. Yeah. Investor fuse has its own podcast. Okay. yeah. We’ve done a bunch of stuff over the years. So yeah, cool. Well, great to see you, buddy. Appreciate you joining me today. Yeah, everybody stay on the cutting edge. Start just make sure you’re listening to guys like Carlos, the folks at carrot. We talked about it a lot. In fact, probably the

Carlos Zamora (32:44.406)
and InvestorFuse.

Carlos Zamora (32:48.896)
No, I’ve had you on in the past way before, way, before, probably five, six years ago.

Likewise, man. Thanks, Mike.

Mike Hambright (33:08.686)
hottest topic we talked about in the last Investor Fuel was all about AI. We have some amazing practitioners that we had panels to kind of learn where to use it and where to like not worry about it for right now. So just make sure you have your ear to the ground with AI because it is going to play a significant role in our businesses going forward. But if you feel like you’re kind of getting left behind, just surround yourself with people that are a little bit more on the cutting edge like that friend with a boat. Like don’t worry about getting your own boat. Just follow your buddy with a boat and ride on his coattails a little bit.

But thanks for joining us today. We’ll see you on the next show.