Adapt or Get Left Behind: How AI, PropTech & Marketing Are Reshaping Real Estate Investing

Bob McIntosh (00:00)
AI is allowing investors, if they want to, to do two major things. Number one is

move at a speed that they couldn’t before. In fact, I host a weekly webinar right now already. I talk about this like ⁓ a good, a single person with a good fleet of AI agents can 10x their productivity ⁓ easily. And at the same time, ⁓ AI is ⁓ increasing the quantity of information flow and marketing that’s out there, which mean, but it’s also simultaneously reducing the quality ⁓ at the same time.

Quentin (00:10)
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I am your host Q Edmonds and I’m excited to be here today. I have another fantastic guest and listen, we’re going to talk some technical stuff, pun intended, cause he’s a tech guy. So we’ll talk some technical stuff, but man, I love the way this gentleman thinks. And so I really believe this is going to be a great conversation and y’all know this is what I love. I love when we can peek through the eyes of someone new so we can learn their experience at what they do.

We can literally be literally doing the same things, but because we are separate people, separate individuals, there’s always going to be something different that we can learn from each other with processes, techniques, and even mindset. And so I am truly excited to introduce you all to Mr. Bob McIntosh. Mr. Bob, how you doing today,

Bob McIntosh (02:57)
I’m fantastic. Thank you for having me queue and appreciate each and every one of you listening to this. ⁓ You know, your time is valuable and I endeavor to make it worth it.

Quentin (03:06)
You already see, y’all see that alignment, right? Y’all already talking about time being valuable. So this is going to be great. This is going to be great. So Bob, I am the type, sir. I love to dive right in, So what I would love to do, I would love for you to tell the people what’s your main focus these days. If you don’t mind, give us a little bit of an origin story, man. Kind of how you got to the space that you’re in. And then man, tell them what part of the world you’re in. They love to know where people are geographically. So what you’re up to, your origin story, and sir, where you are.

Bob, you have the floor,

Bob McIntosh (03:37)
Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. I’ll

actually start with the origin story. Started as a real estate investor, flipping houses, figured it out. We bought our first house back in 2008. So it’s been a hot minute of doing this and, ⁓ you know, grew the business from there to, you know, done. don’t even, I’ve lost track of how many deals to be honest. ⁓ built a small portfolio of rentals, which is 31 doors for some that might be huge, right? You might be going, my God, I’d love to have that for others. I might go, that’s, that’s tiny. So it’s like, it’s, all relative. ⁓

Quentin (04:00)
Yeah.

Bob McIntosh (04:05)
And what I actually got good at was I got good at marketing. When we started to be, were doing everything in Buffalo, New York, and I lived in New York City and then ended up moving to LA. And so I had to figure out back in 2009, 10, how do I add value from 3000 miles away for context, right? Virtual stuff wasn’t the thing. Like Zoom didn’t exist. Like we were Skyping for things like that was like where we got Dropbox had just released. So the idea of like sharing files without paying for like an expensive server was a

whole new idea, so was a very different time. But yeah, got very good at digital marketing, because it was something I could do from far away. And then was invited to basically build and teach a digital marketing program for investors for many of the largest ⁓ coaching companies, real estate events and coaching companies in the world. And did that, have over $4,500 on stage, teaching more than 15,000 people how to do digital marketing in their business. And from there have just been, ⁓ you know,

Quentin (04:36)
Yeah.

Bob McIntosh (05:04)
continuing to build in the real estate space, helping companies with marketing. And now we work a lot with, we’re based out of Florida, but our team is fully remote near Sarasota, Florida. And now we help companies, real estate investors themselves directly with marketing. And we also help coaches and service providers to the real estate investing space with their marketing efforts as well. And of course, like any good marketing company today, we’re heavy on the AI side.

Quentin (06:18)
Man, as you was writing, I was trying to keep up. I’m actively listening. I know, actively listening, writing things. ⁓ no, yeah, but it’s good, though. It’s good. So I was writing as you was talking, actively listening. And I would love to give you a brief summary, and then I’ll make a statement to ask you a question. All right? So I started out as an investor in 2008, doing fix and flips, built a small port. Well, relatively, you know,

Bob McIntosh (06:21)
I talk fast.

Quentin (06:44)
whatever, know, some small, some big, you know, but you build a portfolio of rentals, got good at marketing. In 2009, 2010, you figured out like, you how do I add value from far away? And so you got really good at digital marketing. And you, right now your team is fully remote. And so now you help invest with market ends and you gave some specs of, know, how much you did on stage. And so.

⁓ really good, man. I thank you. Thank you for, for taking us on the ride of your journey. And so Bob, I make a statement probably every podcast. say destiny has no wasted moments, right? Destiny has no wasted moments. mean, as we journey through life, we’re borrowing from each leg of the journey. We’re borrowing from the success. We’re borrowing from the failures. ⁓ that the journey kind of reshapes our mindset. It kind of reshapes our strategy. can actually reshape our business processes.

And so I would love to know along the journey, what has destiny taught you about yourself? What has the journey taught you about you? Has it you discipline, resilience? Has it changed the way you think with innovation? Like what has the moments taught you about yourself?

Bob McIntosh (07:54)
Yeah, that I think the single biggest thing over, you know almost almost two decades of doing this has been There’s there’s ups and downs. There’s good moments and low moments and It’s easy to Think that the ups will never come again when you’re in the down and it’s easy to think that when you’re in the up You’ll never you know, things will never go bad and you just

You got to stay prepared for what that looks like and know that whatever this season is for you, it will be different later, better or worse. And that’s okay. That’s just part of the journey. And I think that’s sometimes I have to remind myself of that as I look at things, depending on again, where we’re at. Like either I need to humble myself or I need to lift myself up and either way it’s a good thing to remember.

Quentin (08:41)
Ooh, sir, talk, listen, before this, before we got on this part, I was having a prep talk with myself and I was reminding myself that very thing, you know, the ebbs and flows. And, you know, one of my favorite books is Atomic Habits. And I can never get the quote exactly right, but it says, fall to the standards. We don’t rise to the level of our goals. We fall to the standard of our habits. Something kind of like that. Meaning like when you, you know, build a habit perpetually, it kind of.

You fall to that. That’s the floor. That’s what you fall to. And so just listening to you talk is just a reminder that, you know, we got to remind ourselves like, hey, there’s highs and there’s lows. You know, but what is my mindset when I’m in both? Right? I can’t get too off the cliff when I’m in my highs and go spend all the money. And then when I’m in my lows, can’t, you ⁓ know, be all the way thinking that this is always going to stay this way. And so, I appreciate your answer, sir. I really do.

Speaking of just some lows, I know, you know, 20 years in the game that adversity shows its head. So I would just love to know how does adversity show up in your world and what have you done when the adversity showed?

Bob McIntosh (09:51)
Yeah, the most common thing ⁓ is just external changes that influence our internal business that we have no control over. ⁓ so adversity always looks like something that like either A, I won’t always say that we never saw coming, but ⁓ it shows up and then we just have to figure it out. And that could be changing marketing methods, that could be changing government regulation, that could be changing local, local or federal regulation.

Particularly obviously do a lot of marketing. So, you know, we think about

you know, cold cold texting cold calling You know is hitting a lot of changes right now ⁓ Airbnb’s how many cities are either banning or changing the laws on Airbnb’s to make that harder So now we got a you know switch to this, know, it’s there’s always there’s always something happening ⁓ and because of that, know, we always we always just have to stay on top of things one of the I think it’s interesting it’s an interesting dichotomy of

Real estate is the same as it’s always been. The way you close a property and deal in any given city is the same as it has been for hundreds of years, right? Maybe there’s a few extra tech pieces involved, but the process is the same. And yet, everything else that we do in business changes on a year-to-year basis as a real estate investor. So it’s like this weird, this interesting, like a very fixed point with a bunch of things moving all over around it.

Quentin (11:48)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, man, I’m glad you were there because I want to talk about those changes a little bit. And I think I want to ask you kind of maybe two questions back to back. So of course, AI is changing the landscape of the way people do business. So I kind of want to hear your philosophy on AI and the integrating of it all. But then also, I want to hear what’s next for your business. Like, what are your goals? What are you looking to solve at scale next?

So hopefully that’s not too much to put on you at once, but I would love to hear those two back to back.

Bob McIntosh (12:20)
Yeah, so I mean, the real idea is AI is changing everything because as real estate investors, what we really are is we’re marketers. That’s the core of the business. It’s not about anything else. The process and all of that is fine. It’s definitely a part of it, but we as investors have to market more than anybody else because we’ve got to market for buyers, market for sellers, market for private money lenders, market for contractors. We have to be in front of an

a larger number of people than almost any other industry that exists. And because of that, ⁓ we’re always marketing, and marketing is always changing on us, again, whether it’s regulation or things of that nature. And AI has a huge influence, at least right now, on marketing itself. Not just how we’re marketing, but what we’re marketing, the quality of the marketing that’s out there. I know we talked about this earlier, right?

Infinite marketers, is what real estate investors really are, good marketers always break good marketing. And it gets to a point where we all latch on to something because it works so well we do it so well until finally something changes, again, whether it’s an external force or an internal force, changes it and then it doesn’t work anymore and then we gotta move on to the next thing. so

AI is allowing investors, if they want to, to do two major things. Number one is

move at a speed that they couldn’t before. In fact, I host a weekly webinar right now already. I talk about this like ⁓ a good, a single person with a good fleet of AI agents can 10x their productivity ⁓ easily. And at the same time, ⁓ AI is ⁓ increasing the quantity of information flow and marketing that’s out there, which mean, but it’s also simultaneously reducing the quality ⁓ at the same time.

Quentin (13:44)
Mmm.

Bob McIntosh (14:10)
And so because of that, there’s a huge opportunity for folks to take AI and not to replace what they’re already doing and the people that they work with, but to improve the productivity ⁓ and increase the quality if they want to. But most people are not doing that. They’re taking an easy route. Most people are replacing people with AI, which doesn’t actually improve quality, it just improves quantity. And that has worked for probably about a year and a half or so, but it’s beginning to fail now. Why? Because when everyone’s producing at the same quantity,

Right, now quality begins to matter.

Quentin (14:42)
Yeah, yeah. I love it, man. So I would love to know, because I don’t think we’ve heard it yet. So what’s the name of your business? And is there a story behind the name?

Bob McIntosh (14:54)
yeah, there is. So our company is called three degrees consulting. ⁓ and the, the, short version of the story is my business partner or I were down in New Orleans. That’s where, she’s from. We are there from Mardi Gras. I’d never been, and I was drinking on the street. I don’t know if you knew this or not, but in New Orleans, you can, know, you can walk around and drink on the streets. Fine. But during Mardi Gras, there’s only a couple of rules, ⁓ no fighting, no pissing in public. That’s about it. Everything else is fine. Right. Or I shouldn’t say fine, but they’re not going to, they’re not going to, they got other things to deal with it that are not.

Quentin (15:10)
Thank

Mmm, nice.

Yeah,

yeah.

Bob McIntosh (16:04)
And I was like, I gotta go to the bathroom. And so we’re walking by in this kind of like remote area. was like a park and there was no bathrooms around. She’s like, if I gotta pay someone to let a unit when there are RVs, we’ll figure it out. We walk by this college and she just starts chatting somebody up. And in like not even two minutes, he’s like, yeah, go in and use our bathroom. So I go in go to the bathroom and come back out. So we’re at no more than five minutes tops of total time that she’s had to talk to this person. And not only did we get the end to use the bathroom,

We’re invited to come back and party with them for the rest of Mardi Gras that year and invited to come to the next year. And I look at my business partner, said, you know how we all joked that we’re all six degrees from Kevin Bacon? I said, that’s BS, we’re all three degrees from you. And so the company name was born from that moment. And then we’ve taken it and applied it to other things, right? But the way that I like to think about it is not just that, but our three degrees is us, our client,

Quentin (16:47)
There you go.

Bob McIntosh (17:00)
and their market, their target audience, right? Those are the three things that make up what you do. ⁓ when you think about those three things and you think about a small three degree shift, it might seem very, very small. But if you’re sailing a boat from New York to London, for example, and you’re three degrees off, you end up in South America instead of New York City. So ⁓ little things like that can shift a lot of what we do.

Quentin (17:23)
Yeah. Man. So, so, sir, it’s almost like you walked me right into my next question, man. I absolutely love that story. I love how you said it’s us decline in marketing and the three degrees. I love this. So I ask everybody comes on this, pod, cause I want to hear their unique answer to this question. So Bob, when you think about the word relationship, what comes to mind to you?

Bob McIntosh (17:48)
Relationships are…

messy, complicated, necessary, and beneficial.

⁓ Right like we we we often like to think of relationships as this general idea of like I have a relationship with that person whether it’s business, you know a professional relationship a personal relationship or whatever the reality is You know even like take my business partner for example. She is all of those things There’s there’s just last week. We had we got in a huge fight Like we’re like yelling at each other on a zoom, right and then the next day it’s like, alright We’re good again. Like sometimes just like a relationship is never about just one-sided conversation. It’s about ⁓

holding each other up in whatever thing that you’re doing and building that. And it can be a massive holdup as in, hey, I literally need you to support me through this. And it can be a small holdup as in, hey man, I got this little deal for you. Oh, I’m gonna be five grand, but I’m throwing it your direction, right? So it can be that range and relationships are all those things. so live in the moment of what the relationship is, but realize that it’s so much more than that individual moment.

Quentin (18:44)
Yeah.

Yeah, man, I love it. I don’t know if I hid everything, but I wrote down, said messy, necessary, and complicated. Those are the three that I synthesized from what you said. And man, if that ain’t true, and even everything you said, because we have to determine what type of this relationship is, right? It could be a friendship, right? We can be acquaintance. Now, it could be a marriage. Now, if we move into marriage territory, we’re talking about the merger.

We’re talking about the merger of assets and liabilities, right? And so when I’m looking at how we’re going to relate to each other, have to realize, depending on the degree of the relationship, it could get messy, definitely necessary, and it definitely can get complicated, like for sure. And so I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody put those three words together when it came to the word relationship. But I thank you because that synthesized exactly how relationships operate. And I love, know,

Bob McIntosh (19:49)
And by the

way, the more that a relationship is all of those things, the bigger, the deeper and the more meaningful it becomes to our lives.

Quentin (19:58)
So always, not always, but I always break up the word, no, I keep saying, I say always, it’s not always, but I break up the word relationship, right? So how are we relating in this ship that we’re in, right? So where we’re on, if you can keep with the analogy, we’re on the water, we have a destination, we gotta get there, but is this ship a rowboat? Have we grown this ship to a yacht?

Have we grown this ship to what you know, to an actual, you know, kind of shipping container? Like, and so like you said, the degrees and the way that’s the depth of it, it grows depending on how we’re relating in this ship. Because in a rowboat, we’re right on top of each other. So we always got to relate to each other. We were rowing together. But if we in a yacht, you may have your own little quarter. I still have mine, but we’re still in the same ship. And so, yeah, man, I love that philosophy.

always equate community to the word relationship as well. know, community is common unity, people of common unity doing something together. so, yeah, man, I love the way you think, So is there any topic that I have not brought up that you would like to talk about? Is there any other words of inspiration, education, motivation?

Bob McIntosh (20:54)
Definitely.

Quentin (21:14)
Like maybe you came in with a specific thought in your mind. Like I want to make sure the viewers know this. I kind of just want to open up the floor that if there is a message like that, you get a chance to land it.

Bob McIntosh (21:25)
Yeah, I think the biggest thing that I can say right now is that a lot of things are going to shift in the next 10 years in real estate, right? Like I look back at the last 20 basically, and there’s been shifts, but nothing major, truly major, right? I think what we’re going to see in the next 10 is a lot of shift. And I encourage any investors listening to this, whether you’re…

you know, advanced investor, an intermediate investor, or just beginning your journey looking for your first property right now. Understand and stay aware and plugged into what that looks like. Those who can ⁓ not even forecast or foresee what’s coming, but just be the early adopter of the changes will always be the ones that receive the most benefit early on. And then like most things, the benefit wanes over time. And so just…

realize that you’ve got to be agile. There’s a lot of things coming from, know, prop tech to software to, you know, tokenization to AI and we’ll see a lot of shifts there. And I think those shifts are gonna cause a lot of people a lot of headaches. They’re gonna shift a lot of people’s systems that they have built over a long period of time and it will be resistant to change.

Those, again, those who can be flexible and adaptable to what’s coming will find the biggest benefit over time.

Quentin (22:48)
Yeah, yeah. One of my mentors said that ⁓ disruption always follows intention. So when you get attention about something, expect the disruption to come. And that’s what I kind of heard you kind of synthesize in a sense. Listen, you want to be intentional about your business, adapting and being prepared to pivot and change. Expect the disruption to come. But you know, but be intentional about it. Continue to build yourself up. Yeah, yeah. ⁓ man, listen, sir, if someone wanted to reach out to you.

connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing. How can I get in contact with you,

Bob McIntosh (23:23)
Yeah, the best way is to head to this website, is go3dc.com/BobMcIntosh and it’s G O the number three Delta Charlie dot com forward slash Bob McIntosh and my last name is M C I N T O S H on that page. You can book a call directly with me. I’ve also got my full contact card with my cell phone and all my socials in it. So it’s the easiest way. It’ll have everything that you need to talk to me.

If you got questions about marketing, about AI, about how to implement AI, what it’s doing, ⁓ anything in that nature, websites, anything in the digital space, ⁓ I’m probably one of the few guys that knows that space heavily and also knows real estate.

Quentin (24:03)
Yeah. Yeah. But Bob, sir, let me say three things to you sincerely. First, thank you for your time. Like, I think time is our most precious commodity. And so you could have been doing anything in the world, but you chose to spend time with us. And so I don’t take that lightly. So definitely, sir, thank you for your time. Secondly, man, thank you for your story, for your narrative, for your expertise. Would I even say the gift of your vulnerability, a transparency and authenticity? Thank you for showing up as your real self.

because I really believe that our stories plant seeds and we never know when those seeds will take root. We don’t know when they’re going to grow, but those seeds can take root and grow at any given time. And it could be two years, five years from now. So I really believe you planted some seeds that can course correct people. So thank you for your seeds. Lastly, man, thank you for your mindset. Thank you for the way you think and bringing that mindset to this platform. I greatly appreciate you coming on today, sir.

Bob McIntosh (25:01)
Thank you for having me and thank you all for listening.

Quentin (25:03)
Absolutely. Well, listen, you heard Mr. Bob. His information is in the show notes. So get in the show notes, get in contact with him. But definitely make sure you’re subscribed here, because I promise you, we’re going to continue to bring up amazing people just like Bob. So sir, thank you again. And everyone else, you’ll have a fantastic day.