Top Ways AI Will Change Real Estate in 2026 | George Knowlton on Investor Fuel

Mike Hambright (00:00.802)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. I’m excited today. We’re talking with George Knowlton, who’s a member of Investor Fuel. We’re gonna be talking about kind of business innovation, like where we’re going. Obviously AI plays a heavy hand in that. And quite frankly, if you’re not making steps to innovate more, use more technology in your business, you’re gonna get left behind. And so we’re gonna be talking about where we’re at today and maybe a little bit about where we’re going. So George, welcome to the show.

George C. Knowlton III (00:24.572)
Thank you, Mike. I appreciate it. I’m excited to be here.

Mike Hambright (00:27.446)
Yeah, you and I were supposed to start a podcast 45 minutes ago and we’ve been talking about all the cool stuff you’re working on. So I know like we could talk all day. So we got to get a podcast in here. But hey, before we get started, you obviously have a rich background, but includes a lot of real estate as well. So maybe just share a brief version of your background that got you up to this point.

George C. Knowlton III (00:49.926)
I’ll be happy to do that. Mike, thank you for inviting me to do that. Yeah, I started out my first foray quote into real estate was industrial arts. And, I think I was in sixth grade, 10, 10 years old and had to design my house, my first house before I could do any woodwork projects. I think that’s where I really got into housing and real estate. Of course, my dad was a real estate broker at that time. So I was definitely immersed in real estate and a little later.

I got into restaurants in that and again, that was real estate. I want to spend some time with my dad and I was trying to sell a restaurant that had no processes. So he built in some processes and of course I had to take over for him when the buyers came and the buyers bought the restaurant, but only if I went to work for them. So I went to work at a very young age learning to franchise restaurants and from some bankers from Chicago and that kind of got me into franchising and into systems.

And I took that into construction and real estate as a general contractor. And then now as a tech entrepreneur, I brought those franchise skills to a system that will basically franchise any business. You don’t need a whole bunch of people. It just is one system that will help you run your business.

Mike Hambright (02:07.437)
That’s awesome. So let’s talk about like what’s going on right now. Maybe kind of just start at a high level about the importance of innovating. And we’re going to get into a whole bunch of stuff here, but just the, lot of people are, you know, there’s always people that when some new technology comes along or a market changes or something that just stick their head in the sand. And there’s some that embrace what’s going on and they lean into it and they find silver linings and, and things like that. So just maybe talk kind of high level about what’s going on with innovation.

and kind of state of the union if you will.

George C. Knowlton III (02:42.042)
You know, from my perspective, Mike, we are in the biggest change and the biggest part of innovation that I’ve seen in my lifetime. think, I mean, I wasn’t alive in the beginning of the industrial revolution. I think we’re going to be very close to that kind of growth, except for with AI actually is causing another industrial revolution right now.

I think everything is going to change from the way that we interact with the people that work for us to the way that we interact with our own selves to the way that markets work and cycles work to the number of hours that we work. think innovation is essential. It has been for many years. The first adopters of computer programmed equipment in their shops put every other shop out of business.

And I think that’s going to happen today with AI. Those who are afraid and wait will end up being caught behind the curve ball and you know, might, might be getting less for their company than they ordinarily would, or might be put out of business by somebody who early adopts.

Mike Hambright (03:51.704)
getting nothing for you.

Yeah, yeah. So I guess really now is the time for people like, if you’re afraid, like, don’t shy away, like, look in, start start finding out ways you can implement it in your business. And we’ll kind of talk about some ways to kind of steps to get started with that if if people are, you know, some people are, maybe they feel like they’re pretty good. And it’s like, here’s how to lean into it. If you feel like you’re way behind, and you don’t know how to spell AI, maybe then it’s like, okay, here’s where to go. Here’s here’s

George C. Knowlton III (04:20.21)
Right?

Mike Hambright (04:23.895)
to get started but let’s talk about it you know just like some of the impact that it’s having already and where you see things going over the next few years.

George C. Knowlton III (04:33.032)
Well, right now, one of the biggest impacts is in little small applications. And I think everybody can see it in the marketplace. You can hear ads for this tool and that tool and they’re popping up, you know, hundreds a day are popping up and it is getting flooded. So right now it’s all about implementation is where AI is at today is which tools are actually functioning, which ones are going to work and which ones are cost effective. Right. So you really need all the tools in one place.

having 25 tools out there to use is really not going to be cost effective or be time efficient. So I think over what’s coming is this time efficiency. Jensen, the CEO of Nvidia, put a call to action this last week that the Chinese are early adopters of electronics. We’ve all known that for years. They always do. And what I didn’t actually equate was the arms race in that. he’s

He actually put a call to action and asked us Americans, say, get over your fear and start using all of the applications that you can because it makes the applications better. And that’s what helps us in our arms race. Cause AI has caused not only a new industrial revolution, but our arms race as well. And if the Chinese are all using the applications at a much higher rate than we are, then their learning curve is going to be much faster than the Americans. And so I’ll second Jensen’s call to action.

that don’t be afraid, actually fear will cause detriment. You want to step out in this and embrace it with safety and caution as well.

Mike Hambright (06:11.021)
Yeah, so let’s talk about some of the pushback to people that are, some are just not using it, but some of the things you just said like safety, like privacy issues, there’s a lot of issues kind of facing the AI world. And so sometimes that causes people to just not get involved. I don’t want it to know what I’m doing. It’s like, well, I mean, it’s gonna find out anyway. Just talk about some of the, maybe some of the concerns.

George C. Knowlton III (06:38.354)
Yeah. Okay. I’d love to talk about it. So, so they are, it is going to find out eventually if it doesn’t already know it will at some point that said, I think it’s very important to keep your stuff private. So you’ve really got it. More and more companies are coming out with complete systems that you can use the power of chat GPT and the power of AI without putting your stuff, all of your, your business information.

out where people can see it because we need a lot of doctors, have HIPAA requirements, finance people have all kinds of different requirements to keep stuff safe. So all of these things are important considerations that are being dealt with and you really have to pay attention. Like if you go into the chat GPT and ask it what its security protocol is, it will tell you it is proprietary. You can pay for extra security protocols.

But then it’s still proprietary in the backside. So what does proprietary mean? I know I don’t, I don’t take proprietary blend pills. So I definitely look for that security part and I think that’s important. And then also it gives rails. So one of the things that I think is a misconception is chat GPT has different levels of intelligence. Number one. So if you don’t pay at all, you get a semi-intelligent GPT. And if you pay $200 a month and get the pro version, you get a much smarter GPT. That said.

those GPTs do not have any guardrails. So when we build a GPT at our company, we put guardrails on it. In other words, it can only, it is a lawyer GPT, it’s only looking at the bar. It’s only looking at what, what, the particular information we want it to look at. And it’s making all of those decisions based upon that information. When you ask a chat GPT to do it, it’s also including that blog post from the 15 year old kid that told you that Elon Musk is an alien.

Mike Hambright (08:30.189)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

George C. Knowlton III (08:31.782)
Right? And that doesn’t help you, right? That gives you a wrong answer. And so really finding the guardrails and finding companies that are really focused on that piece, I think is very, very important.

Mike Hambright (08:36.706)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (08:45.291)
Yeah, I use Claude a lot for some things and it’ll just make up some crazy stuff. like, you know, I give it some guardrails and next thing I know it’s way off the reservation. I’m like, so it can go down a rabbit hole for sure.

George C. Knowlton III (08:55.934)
Right.

George C. Knowlton III (08:59.976)
That is absolutely true. And these are things that we don’t want in repetition, right? When I’m doing my business and I’m writing emails and I’m doing that, that is very annoying. I can’t be having that happen. Or if I’m doing research on a construction project, on a real estate project, which is one of the ways that I use AI a lot, it has to be accurate. I can’t be having it make up false comparisons. It needs to tell me the correct information.

Mike Hambright (09:26.349)
Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about what are some of the, just in the real estate world, like what are the top, you know, handful of things that you see that will be impacted by AI and, and other, you know, I guess innovation, other tech innovations.

George C. Knowlton III (09:43.743)
Yeah, I think marketing, I think everybody’s seeing that marketing is being is being impacted greatly by AI because now like a real estate agent can take a listing. have a one page listing and they can drop it into say Sora or drop it into another tool and they can create 15 different social media posts for it. So that advertising expense is going away. Right. And also AI can answer emails for you.

Take all your incoming phone calls and that. it’s really going to reduce the amount of administration, probably about 80 % of the administration of just about any business, including real estate is very heavy laden and phone calls, information, contract writing, all of this stuff. These are all things that AI does very well. And that does it repetitiously. And it does it without error if it’s put with the correct guard rails. So.

Mike Hambright (10:28.311)
Yep.

George C. Knowlton III (10:42.204)
these are the ways that real estate is really going to change. And I think that ultimately what’s going to change is that AI is going to enable us to tokenize real estate. In other words, we’re going to be able to have real time valuations of real estate and so that unsophisticated investors can actually buy shares just like they can buy shares in the stock market. And I think that’ll release trillions of dollars of investment money in America.

Mike Hambright (11:04.418)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (11:09.857)
When you, so the administrative stuff is obvious, right? Like that’s gonna free up a lot of the administrative burden and the labor type stuff for all entrepreneurs, but let’s kind of just talk about real estate investors and real estate entrepreneurs.

When it comes to analyzing deals and data to find deals and stuff like that, how do you, mean, you know, it’s like when everybody has the same tools, like what’s the advantage if everybody, you know, there’s always this like period where.

George C. Knowlton III (11:41.278)
You

Mike Hambright (11:42.195)
Somebody has a tool that other people don’t have and they can exploit that opportunity, right? But then everybody has the tool and it’s like, okay, well, what does that do to the marketplace when everybody has everybody has ray guns, you know?

George C. Knowlton III (11:57.145)
Right, right. So that is a really, really good question. I’m glad you asked that question, Mike, because right now there’s a million different people out there that think that they can vibe code and build a little micro sass. And it’s going to be really effective. And I can tell you right now that your micro sass, your agent is only as good as the brain that it. Right. And so it’s really going to differentiate. And that’s where it’s going to be. A lot of people are going to spend money on GPTs that do not work.

that don’t actually function at a level that they need to function at. And it comes down to having the soft skills. So, you know, our GPTs are built by experts in their industry. And that’s the only thing I’m gonna accept for our agents because they need to perform. Like for instance, my construction agent that I use as an example, I had to do a takeoff on my plans on HVAC. Now I am not an HVAC guy.

But this is the way that it can be used. Okay. So I kind of know generally and I could guesstimate, right? But I’d be guesstimating, but I was able to have my AI actually go through, tell me exactly how many linear feet of pipe, figure out all the pricing from four different distributors in my town, and then go to all of the guys who provide the service and tell me what their average bill was to their clients. And therefore give me.

a range of exactly where my HVAC should be and it did that all in about 30 seconds. Right? That’s the power of having a very powerful GPT. Excuse me.

Mike Hambright (13:29.517)
Hmm. That’s like make you’re saying to make a to make a to make a quote You’re saying to make a quote like on a system replacement or something

George C. Knowlton III (13:38.023)
Yeah, it gave me an exact range of where the quote should be. Like based upon if I got an unsophisticated contractor, a sophisticated contractor or a large, what I call a large contractor. Right? So I, again, to answer your point, it depends on who’s building your GPT, right? Cause you’ve got to have all of the right things. everybody’s not going to have the same tool. Everybody’s going to have an AI employee.

But the performance of the employee is going to be based upon the brain that was put in it. And that, so we’re never going to take the human out of the loop ever. And it’s always going to be about the command that you give to the AI employee. Cause depending on the command depends on, and you notice I said command and not prompt because a lot of people treat chat GPT as if it’s your friend. You’re at a, you know, hello, please. And thank you and all this stuff. But,

Mike Hambright (14:08.482)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (14:33.465)
Hahaha.

George C. Knowlton III (14:34.566)
Okay. Right. But understand that the chat GBT was built upon human nature. Right. So the brain built the chat GBT architecture, built it on human nature and human nature. We take commands much better than we take requests. So if you request chat, GPT something, it has almost no guardrails. If you command it to do something in particular, it will do exactly what you ask it to do.

So then it comes down to how good is your command, right? So there’s two answers to your question, Mike. Not one, not everybody will have the same tool. It’s going to come down to which developer you choose, which company you choose to build your agents, AI employees is what we call them. And number two, what is your skill level in giving the commands? And this is why just not anybody can command your agents or your AI employees. You’ve got to, it’s all about what goes in is what comes out.

Mike Hambright (15:32.792)
Yep.

So George, let’s talk a little bit about like disruption. I know this is something that you talk, you think a lot about and you talk a lot about is disruption of the workforce, displacement of the workforce. Like how do we not just create, I mean, the truth is, is I’m using, I feel like I’m still in its infancy, but I’m using it probably more than the average person by far. And I see the benefit. mean, there’s, it’s not like it hasn’t replaced anybody on my team, but there’s things that we’re doing now that we just couldn’t have done before.

without building a bigger team, if you will. so, and there’s clearly some people that will use this as a tool to minimize their workforce or their labor force or whatever, but it’s gonna happen, right? So what does that look like? And how, as an entrepreneur, how do you balance like putting the world out of work and taking over the world? Like, how do you balance those things?

George C. Knowlton III (16:14.952)
Huh?

George C. Knowlton III (16:25.47)
Well, for me, I named my company after my philosophy on this. I named a smile company for a reason. It is an acronym because I believe that every transaction we do in life should be safe, should be moral. It should be inclusive. It should be linguistic and it should be experiential for all stakeholders, right? Which means that if I’m employing AI in this particular instance in AI, if I’m employing that in my company and I can save

25 % of the time of my secretary say 50 % let’s say I say 50 % I want to take 25 % of that and add to my top line and I want to give 25 % of that in conscious investment I want to give that back to my secretary, right? There’s two reasons number one It’s the right thing to do right because the middle class has been crushed over the last since I’ve been alive The middle class has been crushed AI is the opportunity to rise the middle class

give them the American dream back. They can work less hours, get the same work done. That’s great. Right. So now we can actually talk about employee retention because now our employees, if I’m employing AI, I can have my secretaries work 30 hours a week and pay them for 40. It’s no skin off my nose. Oh, and I’m probably still going to add to my top line. So kind of in a nutshell, what I tell people is if you employ AI properly and innovate your entire company with it, you’re going to save about 80 % of the admin.

and you’re going to add about 30 % onto your top line, which is about 100 % improvement in your NOI. So if you can do that in your business, then you can have your employees work less. You can give the American dream back to people. Not everybody wants to be rich, right? Having a lot of money is actually a high velocity of money. Not everybody wants a high velocity of money. Some people just want the American dream. They want to go to work for 30 or 40 hours a week only, and they want to make enough money to go buy

groceries and go to the amusement park and spend time with their family. They don’t care about anything else. So, you know, that’s what AI can give us in back in the human sense.

Mike Hambright (18:27.201)
Yep, yep. So the people that you do have might be able to do the work of one and a half or two people by them utilizing AI and really help you kind of grow. So it’s not about, it’s just about a more efficient workforce, right?

George C. Knowlton III (18:40.54)
Yeah. And a more joyful workforce. mean, think about the stress of writing an email to a customer who is upset at your company and the secretary today, she has to write the email herself and then she’s going to be maybe thinking about the rest of the day. Did I write the right words? Did I not write the right words? But when we have a GPT that is trained in psychology and can, she can take her email and say, well, this is what I think I should write. Boom. And then she puts it into

her secretary, her AI secretary, and they rewrite it in such a way that it is going to be amicable to the person that wrote the email to them. Now that pressure is gone. Now we’ve released a little bit of stress from our employees workday, which adds joy to the workplace, which actually increases productivity as well. So where this goes, we don’t really know how much increased productivity we can get until more and more companies start employing it and do it wrong and do it right.

Because that’s really where we’re at is in this experimental stage.

Mike Hambright (19:41.954)
Yeah. George, what would you say to the young people coming up right now? Because there’s entire industries that are going to be disrupted. Probably most industries, quite frankly, will be disrupted on some level. there’s a lot of roles that, you know, there’s some things that going to be that AI is not going to harm as much as others. And there’s some that it will.

Right. So maybe talk about that a little bit, just like people coming up where they should be looking to go into and things to avoid that AI does easily maybe.

George C. Knowlton III (20:13.67)
Okay, well I think that I may have a little bit of a contrarian view of this because I think that we still need to stick with the STEM curriculums even though we have AI and AI can do that maybe better and faster than a human and the reason I say that is this is that the only way that you knew Claude was being wrong was because you had an education and you could tell that it was the wrong answer.

So I think my warning to the young crowd is do not think that just because you can YouTube the answer and you can chat GPT the answer that you don’t need an education. I think it’s actually exactly the opposite. think that a vast majority of people are going to get lazy because that’s what humans do. We get lazy. And when that happens, the value of having an education or having a trade and a skill is going to skyrocket.

Because you’re gonna be able to tell when that computer is wrong You’re gonna be able to tell and you can’t you’re gonna be able to actually be able to give it the right Command because again these commands come from knowledge You can’t give it the right command if you don’t know if you don’t know how to do the engineering, right? It might be able to do all the math for you and shortcut that but you have to give it the right command to do it so that would be my biggest thing is stick with your math you’re all of your STEM courses and

Mike Hambright (21:34.381)
Mm-hmm.

George C. Knowlton III (21:40.9)
And don’t be lazy. Don’t be lazy. Use your brain.

Mike Hambright (21:45.9)
Yeah, you’re right. When I use AI, I was thinking of like, well, I have a son that’s 18, just got out of high school. Like I’m thinking about like, could he go into, could he, how could he lean into the AI kind of future that we have here? And on some level I’m like, but he doesn’t have the, he doesn’t have the level of expertise to know what questions to ask and build commands or prompts and things like that. You still need to know how to ask the right questions. You still need to know how to,

kind of set it up so that it’ll do what you want it to do. I mean, that’s very important,

George C. Knowlton III (22:20.922)
It is to a point, but he can start just by actually being honestly curious. So a lot of people make mistakes in chat. GPT by asking for the answer that they want. You know, like saying, you know, I am, I love skateboarding and I think I could be a great professional skateboarder. What do you think? And chat. GPT will come back and be like, yeah, you should definitely do that. How long have you been doing it?

Mike Hambright (22:47.255)
Yeah.

George C. Knowlton III (22:48.828)
give you all these, you know, it’ll blow sunshine up your rear end, right? Or let’s tell you, yeah, this is it. But if you honestly come to it with an honest assessment of who you are and say, this is who I am. This is what I like. This is what I don’t like. This is my weakness. This is my strength. You know, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, what do you think my best use of AI would be going forward? Which job should I do? Where do you think AI is going to take over? And you can start asking it these curious questions and it’ll get you started.

Mike Hambright (22:52.715)
Yeah.

George C. Knowlton III (23:18.398)
And then you really, I think you need to go to wisdom. You need to go to people like yourself and myself that have been around this world for, you know, a few decades and been around the business and say, okay, what do you see coming? What are you thinking might happen? Because within one of those conversations is a golden nugget. I guarantee you. Somebody who’s been around for a while has the next answer.

Mike Hambright (23:37.805)
for sure.

Mike Hambright (23:43.416)
Yep, yep. And George, for those folks that we talked about at the beginning that are…

you know maybe a little late to the game at this point the game truthfully is still just getting started so it’s okay but for those that want to start easing in maybe let’s kinda give a little a little guidance to two people like they’re dabbling in it and they need a little more guidance or they haven’t even started and they need a little more maybe they need a lot of guidance but just talk about those two those two kind of avatars

George C. Knowlton III (24:14.238)
Okay, all right. I think that if you haven’t started at all, probably the easiest way to start is to just get a free chat GPT account and just start playing. You can just play there, right? And it literally is playtime. Play and be curious and see what it will do for you. Check out the different applications that are available in there for free. Right. Sora, I think, has some free stuff in there that is pretty fun. You know, if you’re kind of videoy fun stuff. But again, it’s all playtime.

But I think it’ll get you comfortable and curious enough that then you can actually move to something like, an organized platform that can actually do some work for you, right? Where you can actually go in and investigate, you know, like an investigative type three 60, you know, go to their website, see what they actually offer. You know, if you have a business, it’s a service business and you, and you don’t have a customer relationship management system, you definitely, that’s the first place to start checking. Now is check into.

company like mine or, or a company like Fireflies. Fireflies is a great way to get into AI. I can tell you that’s, you know, it’s just a transcription service. It’s like it gets five or $6 a month, super inexpensive. Uh, and it will just record your meetings that you have and give you a transcript and give you an assessment of how often you talk and your tone of voice and all of these different things that are helpful in negotiation. Those are really good, quick wins that you can kind of get a little bit comfortable.

with the CHAG GPT and then definitely look for companies that have white glove onboarding or sandboxes where you can play a little bit.

Mike Hambright (25:48.418)
Yeah, yeah, that’s great. know, you know, we try not to like…

make the podcast a pitchfester, plug too many things, and we always kind of honor people by telling them where to go. for those of you that are listening right now, you know, George is doing some really cool things where they build a whole boardroom of agents for your business, different administrative agents, folks that can help with marketing, like lots of other things, and they can plug it into your systems and your tools to basically kind of plug in AI agents, it’s really cool. So you should definitely go learn more about that. George, if folks wanted to learn more about…

George C. Knowlton III (26:21.438)
Thank you for that plug, Mike. I appreciate that. That was very nice.

Mike Hambright (26:23.573)
If they want to learn more about you or the things you’re working on, where can they go?

George C. Knowlton III (26:28.382)
They can go to they can find find me on Instagram. George.knowlton I’m there on Instagram. I’m on Facebook. They can find me at tide360.ai. They can find me at nowitsdone.com. And of course they can always DM me if they’re part of Investor Fuel. Please just direct message me. I’m open. I’m an open book. I want to add value everywhere where I can. In fact, anybody watching this podcast you can

Direct message me on Instagram. I’d be happy to chat with you about where you are and what tools are available in the marketplace that might be able to help you. Because mine isn’t the only one. I think it’s the best, but it’s not the only one. And there’s other niche ones that are very good for different industries that I’m happy to help people find.

Mike Hambright (27:18.445)
Yeah, that’s fantastic. So George, thanks for sharing some knowledge. This is the tip of the iceberg. You’re going to have to come back sometime in the future, Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Looking forward to seeing you at Investor Fuel in a week and a half. So everybody.

George C. Knowlton III (27:25.778)
Very cool. Thanks, Mike. I appreciate your time.

George C. Knowlton III (27:31.794)
Yeah, we’re coming up.

Mike Hambright (27:33.345)
Hope you got some great insights from today. It’s still the early stages of AI, but you don’t want to get left behind. So make sure if you’re fearful of this stuff, start talking to people that can make you a little more comfortable. If you’re excited about this stuff, just keep leaning in because it’s a deep rabbit hole that’ll, you’ll start to find new use cases and everything for how to improve your business and maybe be able to do things that you just quite frankly couldn’t do before. it’s a really cool time to be alive and maybe a little scary too.

But everything, everything that is exciting probably has to have a little bit of an element of fear to it because there’s a lot of unknowns. anyway, appreciate you guys joining us on the show today. We’ll see you on the next one.

George C. Knowlton III (28:16.883)
whole new frontier. It’s great.