Subscribe via:
Show Summary
In this conversation, Rob Thrasher discusses the transformative impact of AI on marketing strategies, particularly in the real estate sector. He emphasizes the importance of embracing AI to enhance business growth, streamline marketing efforts, and maintain a personal touch in customer interactions. The discussion covers various applications of AI, including direct mail campaigns, testing marketing strategies, and its relevance for service providers. Thrasher encourages business owners to leverage AI to optimize their operations and reach a broader audience without losing the human element.
Resources and Links from this show:
-
Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode
Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Rob Thrasher (00:00)
Yeah, ⁓ and, and really, all honesty, and and I ha- I’m a YouTube partner now. This just happened a few months ago. All of a sudden, I’m somebody. ⁓ but it’s AI. It’s all AI. Everything I do is my knowledge from the past applied to the AI of the future. It’s not hard. If you’re a real estate guy, if you want to be the main real estate guy, whether it’s upstate New York or where you are or what have you.You just got to embrace it. Don’t be afraid. So many people are afraid to embrace this AI. You know, hiring an AI is like having 20 Harvard grads who write 900 words a minute. That’s it. You want that for 20 bucks? Give me a break.
Dylan Silver (00:40)
Drain.Dylan Silver (02:20)
Today’s guest is returning guest from upstate New York who has a background in building MLSes for areas across the country. Please welcome Rob Thrasher. Rob welcome to the show.Rob Thrasher (02:35)
Thanks for having me. Happy to be here again.Dylan Silver (02:35)
Great to have you back on here. Great to have youback. Great to have you back. We talked the last time you were on and we were chatting a bit before hopping on here about the MLS and everything that you did building MLS for different areas across the country that didn’t have one. You know, for this episode today, I was thinking we dive deep into marketing.
Because of course MLS is a marketing strategy for realtors to showcase properties and for homeowners to have the most eyeballs on their homes. But what we see in the business landscape today is there’s so many ways for people to market themselves online. Billboards print mailers text message you have AI now. It’s almost overwhelmed. I’m curious to get your feedback on where people should start if they’re starting a business.
Rob Thrasher (03:27)
You know, this might sound weird, I say grab a hold of AI and jump on that. Jump on that like now, like yesterday. ⁓ AI to some people is a scary term. ⁓ I’m the kind of guy that, you know, I don’t get scared too much about stuff. Former military guy, right? But, ⁓When I saw AI was available for producing videos, I jumped on that roughly, I don’t know, about eight months ago. And what I found was that instead of being like, I’m the real estate marketing guy, I said, no, I’m not everything marketing guy now that I have AI. And I literally program my AI, Chat GPT, you if you if I can say that the one that I use is Chat GPT. I started testing it about a year ago.
and I started making videos with its partner, another video AI producing company. And I took my strategies from early 90s, mid 90s, 1996, where I had search engine optimization was my key back then I was in the New York Times for that. I took that and I applied it towards AI. And it’s like I hired 10 people.
Going on 50 million views and like I said that could be real estate views that could be selling Nike views Cheap plug sorry, but our sneakers, let’s say You got to grab ahold of this new stuff because if you don’t there’s already a million other people doing it ⁓ It’s not scary. In fact, the word AI means that it’s literally helping me.
It’s not something that
is an additional technology I had to learn. just had to learn. Sometimes you gotta learn how to speak to it, as you probably know. But marketing is getting eyeballs on your stuff. And I have kind of a Madden magazine kind of a style, kind of a weird publication, but it appeals to people like me.
And at any given point in your life you’re gonna buy a house, you’re gonna get married and maybe get divorced, sadly. But you have these milestones where you can hit everybody.
whether they’re buying a house or selling a house or what have you. so it’s all about really, if you’re a salesperson, if you wanna sell stuff, the first thing you gotta do is use this new technology to connect with people. ⁓ It’s all about connecting with people and it’s all about just, like I said, if you wanna sell your house, you have all these tools and I don’t mean to
I don’t mean to talk down about Zillow or these tools, but ⁓ that’s all kind of Y2K stuff, you know. We’re a Y2K plus 25. So 25 years upgrade yourself and just get everything, market anything, anything I want to sell, I can sell to millions and millions of people. And it took me six months to get where I’m at.
Dylan Silver (07:22)
ThankIt’s rain.
Rob Thrasher (07:35)
And I’m a smart guy, okay? I’m no Elon Musk. Maybe I am.Dylan Silver (07:42)
I think when people talk about the different marketing streams that they can have, there is a little bit of that overwhelm effect. when you have AI in play right now, it can make a lot of these decisions for you, even to programming a prompt for, hey, I’m involved in this business, in this vertical. What’s the best way for me to market myself with this budget?Rob Thrasher (07:52)
Yeah.Yeah, ⁓ and, and really, all honesty, and and I ha- I’m a YouTube partner now. This just happened a few months ago. All of a sudden, I’m somebody. ⁓ but it’s AI. It’s all AI. Everything I do is my knowledge from the past applied to the AI of the future. It’s not hard. If you’re a real estate guy, if you want to be the main real estate guy, whether it’s upstate New York or where you are or what have you.
You just got to embrace it. Don’t be afraid. So many people are afraid to embrace this AI. You know, hiring an AI is like having 20 Harvard grads who write 900 words a minute. That’s it. You want that for 20 bucks? Give me a break.
Dylan Silver (08:49)
Drain.Rob Thrasher (08:57)
⁓Dylan Silver (08:57)
I’ll take it.I do want to pivot a bit here and ask you about specific niches that people may be familiar with within the real estate space. So you have people who may do wholesale fix and flip, but then you also have ⁓ folks who may be looking for ground up construction opportunities, vacant land and the like, right? You may have investors that are looking at land for storage facilities. Sometimes I think
There’s a time and a place for direct mail, which is why we see so much of it. And I don’t think that that’s ever gonna go away. Is there a way where AI can improve even something like a direct mail cam?
Rob Thrasher (10:13)
Sure, absolutely. ⁓ Remember the old days? You may be not, you’re young. I’m an older guy. I remember using Excel spreadsheets to insert the person’s name into their letter. And that was like, ⁓ man, they celebrated that for years. And AI can do so much more than that. AI can just say, hey, I’m gonna put the guy’s name in here. Is that okay? And I’ll be like,Sure, Mr. AI, thank you for that idea. It’s not just like, blindly following you like the old software did, which was great. Don’t get me wrong at the time. Hey, Rob on a letter. That was a beautiful thing. But now it says, now the AI comes back and says, well, we also have his, you know, his address to further verify that we’re real people. Let’s use that too. And your AI says, we want to do that, Rob. I’m like, almost every time. Yes.
Dylan Silver (11:00)
ThankRob Thrasher (11:10)
please AI, let’s do that. It gives you ideas. like a communication between you and three or four, you you have a meeting, you get three or four people in the room. All the AI is the one that’s gonna come up with most of the clever stuff. It literally gives me ideas I hadn’t thought of. And I thought I thought of all of them. I mean, the AI told me to change my signature to say that I’m not just making you laugh.Dylan Silver (11:12)
youThank ⁓
Rob Thrasher (11:39)
We’re not just making you laugh. We’re going to sell you a house. And here’s the one that’s in your budget. And it’s just like, it’s, it’s literally automated, you know, the old Excel spreadsheet where you would put the name in. Now it’s now the spreadsheet talks back.Dylan Silver (11:46)
Peace.One of the things that this brings up when we talk about being able to have specific references to a seller or a property is this idea that you can craft ⁓ a synergy between tech and without losing that interpersonal edge. Right. So people sometimes worry well if I’m having inbound voice and A.I. is taking the calls from me are they losing ⁓ that human touch. There is a way to weave it in there.
Rob Thrasher (12:27)
⁓ for sure. mean, apps 100 % for sure. That’s a great, great statement. And the thing that I tell people is, look, I was a techie, I get it. But I don’t need to be a techie anymore to do my marketing strategies. I just, I literally sometimes will sit there without an idea in my head and say, hey, hey, Chat, what do you think we should do next? What did we do last week? How did we do it? And what do we do next?getting a consultant, a trusted consultant. By the way, if you have an AI, ask your AI about yourself. You might be surprised. It’s fun. It can be so fun.
Dylan Silver (13:10)
man.I’m curious to get your perspective. For folks who are scaling a business, have scaled some portion of it, have up to this point in time been very ⁓ strategic and systematized with their marketing. They may be using AI, for instance, to help them in a personal assistant capacity, but they may be concerned about, you know, I don’t want to suddenly adopt a…
AI centric approach to my marketing if it’s broke if it isn’t broke don’t fix it is there a way for them to maybe split test some of this rather than just go all in with a
Rob Thrasher (13:55)
Yeah, and actually, ⁓ it’s funny you mention that because I found out that my AI will say to me, ⁓ here’s your advertisement that you’re working on, and would you like to do an A-B split and test out another one side by side? And it literally created new verbiage, a new image. And I said, let’s test it, let’s A-B test it and see what we get. So I mean, when it comes toDylan Silver (14:20)
ThankRob Thrasher (14:24)
to testing it, you know, there’s no AI that’s afraid to say, let’s test this against another, maybe another ad, another image. It’s just, everything that you would want an employee to say to you is gonna come to you through the AI. So it is an absolute 100 % great way to do an A-B test because you can tell the AI to remember A and remember B and let’s test them and see what happens.Dylan Silver (14:27)
it.Thank
I would like to ask you about ⁓ some niches within real estate that maybe people would not immediately jump to thinking, okay, well, this is AI prone, but service providers, for instance, handyman, electricians, HVAC companies, many of these could have older owners and could have owners that have a very traditional system, like a brick and mortar system, and maybe thinking, well, what’s the use for AI?
Do you see a use case for AI either in marketing for them or in some way to facilitate some portion of their business?
Rob Thrasher (16:16)
You know, that’s a great question too. And my answer to that would be, and I don’t own any of this AI stuff. I wish I did, but I don’t own it. I don’t have a vested interest, but I will say that the minute that you draft, let’s say you’re, there’s a HVAC guy we work with up here in upstate New York. He’s pretty smart as far as technology goes, but I guess,I would say the fear of newness is really everybody’s downfall. I mean, I’ve experienced it myself. It is literally the fear of newness that keeps, just take your next letter that your secretary drafts for your customers, ⁓ offering them a free upgrade to their HVAC unit, and just.
run it through chat GPT. Just run it through an AI and see what you get. If you’re not committing anything, you can test. And the thing is too, is that I honestly don’t tell chat GPT this, but it’s really worth a hundred dollars a month and I pay 20. I did not say that.
Dylan Silver (17:27)
I know.They have a version that’s what 200 or something and I say, well, it better be printing gold, but.
Rob Thrasher (17:35)
It’s reallyliterally going to deliver gold nuggets back to your account if you pay the 200. It’s literally going to run your business for you. And it’s scary. I get it. It’s a little scary. I understand. But but you but the thing when you add the word eight, the letters A.I., you’re basically saying a dummy can run this business. I can go to Florida now.
Dylan Silver (18:03)
It’s a great point. I do want to ask you about ⁓ this idea of detaching from your business. You mentioned going to Florida. This is not just a trope. It’s not just something that people talk about. It’s actually happening. I’ve seen people with businesses in areas where you would think you can’t make it that remote. If you’ve got a distressed sales business in Cleveland, Ohio, how can you move to Fort Lauderdale?but I’ve seen more and more and more of it. Without abandoning these areas, that doesn’t mean that people have stopped investing in Cleveland.
Rob Thrasher (18:41)
You nailed it right there buddy. 100%. It makes two, three, or even 10 of you the business owner. We’re busy. Business owners wear so many hats. Why not let the AI wear a couple of those hats? It’s just a no-brainer for the cost.Dylan Silver (19:01)
I want to ask you about various different online marketing strategies which people may be curious to get your perspective of, especially as someone who’s built MLSs, right? So if you have a marketing budget and you’re a smaller company, you may have a handful of employees and to use real estate as the example here and you’re trying to acquire distressed property, that’s the background that I have. And so you’re thinking, okay, I’ve got to get in front of people who…Maybe you need to sell their home quickly. You’ve got Facebook. You’ve got Google. You’ve got your own website But then you also have other streams as well that you could you could tap into online YouTube And you’re trying to identify where do you spend your energy? But also where do you spend your dollars? Do you have any feedback for those people?
Rob Thrasher (19:52)
You know, I would, actually this hits upon another like key point that I make ⁓ is that not only are you making four of you or a dozen of you ⁓ as the business owner and the manager. And if you’re selling distressed properties, this is actually a great example because you’re kind of hitting a niche and the, you know.Again, the AI for $20 is gonna help you. And it’ll actually say if you write a letter to a possible investor in distressed property, you’re gonna get asked at the end of that sentence, you know, your human employee, and I’m not against humans, I’m one of them, I think. ⁓ As I’m told. But when it’s done writing the letter, it’s gonna analyze the letter you just wrote.
Dylan Silver (20:41)
HeheheheRob Thrasher (20:49)
and say, know what else you should do? You should do this for this particular investor who’s looking for distressed property in the location. it’s just really taking that, and you mentioned computer programmers. I didn’t ever need more than, we had close to five programmers at one time. ⁓Dylan Silver (21:05)
Right.Rob Thrasher (21:15)
And they were all good at what they did. But to be honest with you, I know enough about coding to be dangerous. I can actually tell the AI what to do program wise. I mean, I can write a program.Dylan Silver (21:23)
I know.I know, it’ll do it better than you. I have a specific example of this. So aside from the real estate, I’m involved in a software engineering certification. And the interest, the most interesting part of this is not just learning about it. It’s seeing how much it has evolved since I started. So for instance, the program that we use Visual Studio to write some of the code in JavaScript, HTML, CSS,
Rob Thrasher (21:38)
NiceDylan Silver (21:57)
is now super predictive. Like you can just basically prompt it within Visual Studio what you’re trying to do and it’ll almost to a T identify it. And this is not just in Chat GPT we’re talking about. This is in the actual tools that engineers are using to speed up their entire design process.Rob Thrasher (22:22)
Sure. Yeah, it makes everything faster. multiplies by a factor of five to 10 everything you’re doing today. I wouldn’t need an investor and 10 people to get to 50 million views on YouTube. I really truly could not have done it. ⁓ I programmed my own secrets of the search engines that I did ancient days in the 90s. And I took that knowledge. I applied the AI.and I’m pumping out a 10 person company right now. I mean, it’s, it is absolutely phenomenal. I hire 10 people with $20.
Dylan Silver (22:57)
I won her!I want to ask you about that. are coming up on time here, Rob. I do want to ask you, with all the marketing expertise that you have, I imagine you have people coming to you. Are you involved in coaching? Do you have folks who you’re thinking about, say, hey, I can assist them? How are folks able to reach out to you?
Rob Thrasher (23:18)
⁓ It’s like literally if you type my name in Google Rob Thrasher, know, you’re gonna find you folks first You guys are amazing in what you do Congratulations on that ⁓ But yeah, my name Rob Thrasher. It’s at Rob Thrasher on YouTube. You can’t you can’t avoid me if you want to ⁓ So I appreciate that but yeah at Rob Thrasher Thrasher’s like the Atlanta Thrasher’s the hockey teamthe magazine from cal from the west coast Thrasher magazine same spelling Thrasher Thrasher now it’s Rob Thrasher like i said you can’t avoid me even if you want to
Dylan Silver (23:56)
Thank you.Rob,
thank you so much for coming on the show here today.
Rob Thrasher (24:02)
Take care, and it’s been a pleasure. hope to come back again someday. Take care.
