AI for Real Estate Agents:How Brokerages Can Automate Compliance,CRM, & Transactions

Biju Ashokan (00:00)
⁓ This is as a real estate agent. ⁓ What am I trying to

Scott Bursey (00:04)
Yes, yes, as a, as an agent, let’s, let’s put it in that content.

Biju Ashokan (00:08)
Okay, so if you’re a real estate agent and if you have $50,000 and you’re just starting off fresh, today, I think a year ago, two years ago, even five years ago, the answer would have been different, but today, I would invest in an AI software or I would learn to wipe code myself and try to get a contacts database.

and set up your marketing automation. I think that would be the first thing.

Scott Bursey (02:08)
Hi everyone and welcome to the Real Estate Pros Podcast. I’m your host, Scott Bursey And today I’m joined by someone I’ve really been looking forward to speaking with. Biju Ashokan

who’s been making serious moves in the property technology space. Biju is the CEO of Radius, the first AI-powered platform built for team leaders and broker owners. Radius helps brokerages automate compliance, transactions, CRM, and operations in one unified system. Based in San Francisco, Biju has spent over 13 years driving technology innovation in real estate. Biju, welcome to the show.

Go.

Biju Ashokan (02:47)
Thanks Scott, thanks for having me. Excited to be on this podcast.

Scott Bursey (02:52)
I think our audience is really going to take something away from your vision of AI, the AI native agent, proving that technology doesn’t replace human elements in real estate. It actually empowers it. Let’s dive in, shall we?

Biju Ashokan (03:07)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, 100%. That’s exactly how I think, too.

Scott Bursey (03:09)
So.

Okay so first off for people who may not be familiar with your world give us the short version what’s been your main focus recently.

Biju Ashokan (03:19)
Yeah, so at RADIS we are focused on making real estate brokerages sexy again ⁓ because traditionally real estate brokerages spend a lot of money on operations to support their agents. ⁓ We are making multiple AI agents to go and optimize different departments in a real estate brokerage.

mainly marketing, lead nurture, client relationship, documentation, auditing, accounting, team management. Traditionally, brokerages assign people and spend on third-party softwares to make these departments better and have them support their agents. We’re trying to create an AI agent in all of these departments that can efficiently replace the operational… ⁓

burden on these brokerages, thereby reducing their expenses, but at the same time, making their agents more productive with AI, because AI can help agents manage more clients at the same time, more searches at the same time, more documents at the same time. So if we can make every agent more productive, then revenue goes up, and also we’ve managed the operational expense down, so which would make the brokerage profitable again.

and profitable by a huge margin, right? And that’s what we want brokerages to experience.

Scott Bursey (04:43)
What markets are you operating in?

Biju Ashokan (05:33)
⁓ All markets. Our software can be used in all 50 states in America. ⁓ There’s obviously limitations when it comes to MLS feeds. But if we have an MLS feed, we can integrate with any team in any city, any state in the country.

Scott Bursey (05:52)
What caught my attention about you was the way you’ve been able to leverage high-level AI automation to handle the busy work without ever losing sight of the fact that real estate is at its core a relationship driven business. That’s not easy, especially in this climate.

Biju Ashokan (06:07)
Yes. Yeah. It’s not

easy to be a real estate agent, especially when, like you said, in this climate when the transactions are not just coming in easy. I think the dependency on a relationship goes up even more.

So the way we deal with that, even today, we had a call with a bunch of teams, agents in our mastermind, where we said the goal of our AI assistant is to help you manage more clients at the same time. But it kind of gets you to a point where you have to meet the client. You have to show the property.

and then you come back and then let AI help support them, but at the same time, you have to do your bit when the client comes to a certain level of priority or importance so that the relationship aspect doesn’t go away. And agents absolutely want that and love that because at the end of the day, they chose this profession because they’re good with people.

and they appreciate relationships. That’s why they chose this profession. If they don’t have that quality, then they probably are not going to be successful in this profession and probably won’t be in this profession. So I think AI helps agents have more human connections. It’s kind of ironic. Everyone says the opposite. But I think it can get you more meetings, which means it can make more connections happen.

Scott Bursey (07:28)
Very unique perspective. Now Biju, every operator I know has a moment where things got real. Maybe a deal that went sideways or time that you had to pivot fast. Do you mind sharing one of those moments with us?

Biju Ashokan (07:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, but until three years ago, when we started the brokerage about five and a half years ago. So the first two and a half years, we built some basic technology foundational operating system for brokerages. And we made the mistake of investing heavily in like operational workforce in the beginning.

⁓ Which in hindsight was a good learning because that’s how we learn running a brokerage is not easy and it’s not profitable if we follow the traditional routes. ⁓ Which made us think, okay, there has to be a better way to do this. And we started developing technology for ourselves first. And then now over the last two years, we’ve built more and more for ourselves and gave it to our teams that we have as enterprise clients. That’s kind of how we learned.

to build the right product. the challenge was for those two and a half years I just couldn’t understand like why does everyone start a brokerage because it’s the unit economics of a brokerage doesn’t look good at all. So those two three years were a bit of a struggle to like figure out what do we invest, how do we invest something back into the business if the business is not making money.

Scott Bursey (08:50)
It’s incredible how the moments that feel like a disaster in real time often become the foundation for the next 10 years of growth. And honestly, that right there is the filter, Biju. It’s what weeds out the dabblers and defines the investors who actually have the staying power to weather the cycles. Let me ask you this.

Biju Ashokan (08:58)
Yeah, always.

Yep.

Yep. Yep.

Scott Bursey (09:16)
What are you most focused on solving or scaling next?

Biju Ashokan (09:20)
⁓ Just every single day, I’m learning more and more about what agents do. So let’s say we create a workflow for them and they start using it, then we start analyzing how they’re using it. And there’s always a next thing, right? There’s always something, ⁓ if we had this one more feature, we could save agents even more time. And then that keeps going. And that’s how we’re building our AI system, right? ⁓

When you see the data, when you speak to agents, they always tell you, I wish your AI assistant did this as well. And then we learned that and then we implement that and it makes things even better for them. And then this journey of building more and more features, it’s basically making agents do what they love doing and let AI take care of the rest. And that’s our focus.

Scott Bursey (10:09)
What’s the next real big goal for you?

Biju Ashokan (10:46)
⁓ We definitely want to expand to…

a larger user base and our total addressable market, like I said, is all across the country now. figuring out a way to get in front of all the teams, all the brokerage owners, all the franchise owners is our next big goal because we’re pretty confident and we have the data to show how we can completely transform a brokerage or a franchise or a team. So getting in front of them is our goal.

Scott Bursey (11:16)
That’s big.

That’s huge. That next move is where the leverage lives. It can either perfect your operations or, you know, it can detonate your workflow, depending on the strategy that you deploy.

Biju Ashokan (11:22)
Yes.

Yeah.

percent.

Scott Bursey (11:33)
interested to know how do you maintain your edge when things are going well? It’s easy to grind when you’re broke, but how do you stay hungry when you’re successful?

Biju Ashokan (11:43)
That’s a good question. ⁓ I think it’s always good if you’re going through challenges and you remember the time all the time. I think if it’s like just success after success, you never went through challenges. So that’s when I think you kind of become complacent. But I think if there’s you’ll never forget it. So you’ll do everything you can to avoid that kind of a challenging situation again.

That’s how I think people see it.

Scott Bursey (12:11)
with you on that. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Great words. Now I know a lot of our audiences either earlier in their journey or looking to level up and I think they’d benefit from hearing this from you. When it comes to building relationships and drawing your network, what’s made the biggest difference for you?

Biju Ashokan (12:31)
Just staying curious like I think everyone likes to talk about what they’ve done and what they’ve learned and So to network I think it’s really simple just ask them What makes them awesome and they just tell you? And I think that’s the best way to start networking

Scott Bursey (12:50)
Absolutely. That hits home. In an industry that’s so transactional, being the person who actually shows up when there isn’t a deal on the table is what creates that competitive edge around your business. It’s that unsexy consistency that most people aren’t willing to do.

Biju Ashokan (13:03)
Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Yeah, being in the right place at right time is just a function of being in places.

Scott Bursey (13:17)
And this has been on my mind. What is your tech stack look like right now? Is there one piece of software or maybe another component of AI that has actually moved the needle for your team recently?

Biju Ashokan (13:32)
internally. ⁓ Internally, we explore all AI models to see what’s the best one to use for a certain functionality. So from an AI perspective, we use most of them. From an overall tech stack perspective, we have mobile apps, web apps.

Like once an enterprise client joins us, they get an iOS app, an Android app, they get a web-based app, and even their clients get a mobile app. So it’s like an all-around, all-platform system with a powerful AI assistant on top of it.

Scott Bursey (14:07)
Taking into consideration your success, I’ve also had this on my mind. If you were starting over today with 50K and 10 years of experience, but zero portfolio, what’s the first lead gen channel you turn on now?

Biju Ashokan (15:03)
⁓ This is as a real estate agent. ⁓ What am I trying to

Scott Bursey (15:08)
Yes, yes, as a, as an agent, let’s, let’s put it in that content.

Biju Ashokan (15:12)
Okay, so if you’re a real estate agent and if you have $50,000 and you’re just starting off fresh, today, I think a year ago, two years ago, even five years ago, the answer would have been different, but today, I would invest in an AI software or I would learn to wipe code myself and try to get a contacts database.

and set up your marketing automation. I think that would be the first thing.

It doesn’t even require $50,000. It’s free. It’s basically $100 a month with us. You have this product. So that would be step one. Step two would be I would increase my presence.

website, social media, again you can use AI to do all of this ⁓ so that if someone looks me up they know I’m legit. So I would create like online business cards right. Three, I think I would just go to all networking events in my area if I’m trying to like become a really good real estate agent in a zip code I would just go to all the

networking events which where people are there and just like talk to as many people as possible Because I think if you do these three You’re hitting up everyone ⁓ using AI So they see your name all the time in emails and social media and like online and then they also see you in person in certain events Very quickly you can establish yourselves as a brand ⁓ Today if you’re using the right tools

Scott Bursey (16:38)
And since your core business is AI, do you have any concerns down the road with where AI may go?

Biju Ashokan (16:46)
⁓ Yeah, so it’s gonna get more and more, it’s already there. Last year I used to say in interviews that AI is gonna get more proactive and I still say that. It’s already a bit proactive but now it can go to the next level of being proactive. It just like analyzes all your information and starts doing things on its own. ⁓ So I think it’s definitely going to be a…

in a situation where everyone leverages AI, everyone’s kind of built their own systems ⁓ that matches how they work and live. At some point, I think software companies would be the maintenance guys, like who…

So there’s gonna be like three, four different types of companies. One would be like people who maintain these systems for you, which are powered by AI. The other type of company is someone who goes deep into an industry and build the entire system, entire framework, like we do. We picked real estate and we picked all the departments that’s involved in real estate and we made a product with an AI layer across the thing. then our clients don’t have to invest their time into creating their own stuff.

I think the third is going to be just like native LLM model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Like those guys are going to keep growing. I won’t be surprised if they have their own kind of hardware because they’re still dependent on iPhones and Androids to like put these products out. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if they launch their own phone in the future. So things like that could happen.

Scott Bursey (18:21)
Thank you for your vision on that. All right, before we wrap, if someone wanted to reach out, connect with you, maybe collaborate or learn more about what you’re doing, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

Biju Ashokan (18:31)
Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn. ⁓ My name is Biju Ashokan. You can look me up, CEO of Radius. I’ll show up immediately. And my email address is [email protected].

Scott Bursey (18:40)
Perfect, well listen, I appreciate your time, your story, and your perspective. We need more people in this space who are doing it the right way. Thanks again for being here. Thank you Biju. And for those of you tuning in, if you found value from this, make sure you’re subscribed. We’ve got more conversations coming up with operators just like Biju who are out there building real businesses. We’ll see you in the next episode everybody.

Biju Ashokan (18:49)
Thanks, Scott. Lovely being here,