How AI Agents Are Transforming Real Estate Lead Follow-Up

Jordan Fleming (00:00)
And I plug in an AI over here that can do an immense amount of volume, but my business can’t support that volume. Am I actually benefiting from it? Right? I’m I’m adding a certain element and I’m potentially fooling myself into thinking that because I now have an AI agent that can make you know 20,000 calls a week, that that’s giving me leverage. But if I can’t execute the next stage of 20,000 calls a week.

I’m not getting leverage, I’m getting chaos.

Freddie Steen (02:04)
Hey everyone. Welcome to the Investor Fuel Podcast by Real Estate Pros. I’m your host, Freddie. And today I’m joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting with for quite some time, Jordan Fleming, who’s been making serious moves in the real estate AI tech space, particularly in providing a solution that helps real estate investors and agents reach their target markets.

It’s automated and it’s amazing. Jordan, I’m glad to have you here. And I think our listeners are really going to take something away from how you’re approaching real estate and artificial intelligence. Let’s dive in. So, first off, for people who may not be familiar with your world, give us the short version. What’s your main focus these days? And what markets are you operating in?

Jordan Fleming (02:59)
Absolutely, Freddie. It’s great to be on the podcast with you, and I appreciate you having me. So, smrtPhone is an agentic conversation platform. Now, what does that mean? Very simply, conversations are still how real estate investors close deals. The phone is still how we reach sellers, it’s how we reach buyers, it’s how deals are done. And that hasn’t changed in the age of AI, it’s just gotten better, faster,

and more advanced. And smrtPhone combines three amazing things that all real estate investors need. Number one, their phone capabilities. So that’s phones, text, power dialing, video calls, all of that. Number two, very intelligent agents. That’s AI agentic workers that are trained and can make calls, receive calls, send texts, receive texts, and work your leads for you. And finally, we connect with the best in class CRMs

that real estate investors use to make sure that all conversations and communications, whether it’s human or AI, are seamlessly synced to your CRM.

Freddie Steen (03:59)
Jordan, what was the gap in the market that you saw that led you to found smrtPhone? I mean, you bootstrapped this thing, right?

Jordan Fleming (04:09)
Yeah, we did bootstrap it. The honest truth is it was a perfect storm, including accident, happy accidents and luck. But the the truth is we were all myself and my co-founders, Vlad and Alex, were all working inside of a platform that a lot of called Podio that a lot of real estate investors were using. And at the time, and there was no phone system that connected to Podio. I saw an opportunity, I said to my co-founders,

We should build it. We built it. And because it was a perfect storm of opportunity, you know, timing, platform and sector, everybody needed it. And so we were able to bootstrap and grow very rapidly because of that and we never have looked back since.

Freddie Steen (05:40)
So, Jordan, we talked earlier and you’re very humble. I mean, we are on today with the real estate tech guy, someone who also has his own podcast. But I also wanted to give you space to talk about how you embraced AI centric communications as a business, and then also are now bridging that with a new book on AI framework. I mean, the real shared responsibility, the human in the loop,

if need be, can you talk about that?

Jordan Fleming (06:12)
Absolutely. You know, it all started where the conversations around AI have been very superficial for the last year or so. And you know, everybody talks about tools and prompts and you know, but the problem is all those things change, right? New tools come out. That’s not really the fundamental issue. And I only came to that realization is I had to realize in my own business smrtPhone,

what would it mean to have an agentic AI working in my platform? What does it mean if I’ve got an AI worker who can make decisions and take action? We’ve never had that before. We’ve had systems that can automate things. Sure, we’ve had that for years, but we’ve always relied on a human being making a decision with those systems, whether that’s

in a manufacturing plant or a real estate investment business. But with agentic AI, you have the capability for an AI agent to make a decision, to take action, to share responsibility for the work your business does. So, what does that mean for my company? Like, what does that mean? And what I found as I started to underdeep dive into that, I realized that everybody was talking about tools and prompts.

And they were talking about what they could implement without thinking at a much, much more fundamental level, what does it mean for my business? I’ve got a team of 60 people. What does it mean for them? What does it mean for how we process work, for how we do the day-to-day? And what I found is if you simply think of AI as something you plug in everywhere, that’s fine, but it doesn’t give you leverage. And to get leverage,

you need to redesign how you work as a company so you can share responsibility between AI and people. And that’s what led me to developing my own framework for doing this called the AI Workforce Framework. And that’s what’s led me to launching and writing this new book called The AI Workforce. Of which, by the way, I’m happy to give you a link after this. And anybody listening can get a free copy themselves. It’s going to launch at the end of July.

Freddie Steen (08:31)
I love it. Can you dig just a bit deeper on the word leverage and how real estate pros like our audience that’s listening can utilize AI to gain the leverage that ultimately leads the profits to their bottom line? Jordan, can you go deeper?

Jordan Fleming (08:50)
Absolutely. So leverage is not the same as speed or volume. And people usually conflate those concepts, right? They conflate the idea that just because something’s faster or I can do more of it, that I’m actually getting proper output from it. And that’s not always true. In fact, a lot of times it isn’t true. And AI is a good example. If my business works like this over here

and I plug in an AI over here that can do an immense amount of volume, but my business can’t support that volume. Am I actually benefiting from it? Right? I’m I’m adding a certain element and I’m potentially fooling myself into thinking that because I now have an AI agent that can make you know 20,000 calls a week, that that’s giving me leverage. But if I can’t execute the next stage of 20,000 calls a week,

I’m not getting leverage, I’m getting chaos.

And so for me, when I look at leverage for AI and a real estate investor, I look at what are the ways that AI can plug into my business that can be brought into my business, whether it’s agentic AI or you know, you know, just LLMs giving better information or anything like that. What what am I doing that actually increases the output of my business

in a real way not just increases the activity because if activity doesn’t lead to result who cares

Freddie Steen (10:25)
Yes.

Yes. Love it. What caught my attention about you, Jordan, was the way you’ve been able to manage the ever-changing landscape of compliance while managing multiple markets and still keeping your margins strong. That’s not easy, especially in this climate. Jordan, what’s been the key to keeping that machine running smoothly?

Jordan Fleming (11:25)
Well, compliance, you know, we’re an FCC regulated telecoms business, smrtPhone is. So compliance is at the core of everything we have to do. There’s no choice. The FCC sits over my shoulder and all my company’s shoulder. And and they are be being honest, the FCC has never been as active as they are right now. And now let’s take this to

a real estate investor’s point of view, right? Because who cares? Not every real estate investor has a business like mine. But we work with thousands of real estate investment companies every day. So what matters to them about compliance? And the honest truth is that being compliant as a real estate investor is not that hard. You just have to do a few things correct. You have to abide by the DNC list if you’re doing cold calling,

you have to make sure you get consent if you’re doing texting. And you have to make sure that you are tracking the relationships properly so that if someone moves, changes, dies, or you know, some other thing thing happens, that you’re able to remove them from your list properly. If you do some basics right as a real estate investor, then you can

probably get about ninety percent of your compliance burden taken care of. And it’s not that hard and it’s critical because we’ve never as as many TCPA lawsuits and fines as we do right now.

Freddie Steen (12:56)
Now every operator I know has a moment where things got real, Jordan. I mean, maybe a deal that went sideways or a time they had to pivot fast. You mind sharing one of those moments for you?

Jordan Fleming (13:08)
Yeah, I mean, the honest truth, AI has been, you know, as a technology company, AI has been a pivot moment for us. You there is from a technology point of view and and honestly from everybody’s point of view, real estate investors as well, I’m old enough to remember the dot-com boom of 2000, right? I remember that kind of the hype around the dot-com boom and then the bust of the dot-com boom. But

the internet stayed. And the internet changed how every business operates. There is the internet was a paradigm shift. There’s before the internet and there’s after. And it affected all our businesses. Well, AI is the same level of paradigm shift. And as an operator, as a real estate investor, what you need to be thinking about is I can’t

I’m not gonna be able to run my business as a pre-internet business now. There’s not a single business in the world that does like that. And in a few years, there will not be a single operator out there that doesn’t have a business that is run thoroughly with AI at its heart. It’s a paradigm shift. And for us as a technology company, we had to understand that that was true early and pivot very fast on how we embrace that so that we can empower our investors

to embrace it in their businesses as well.

Freddie Steen (15:14)
Paradigm shifts, I have to acknowledge the great writer Thomas Kuhn who talked about the paradigm shifts.

Jordan Fleming (15:21)
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, great book.

Freddie Steen (15:24)
That’s right. And in that same frame, I wanted to give you space to give us another paradigm paradigm shift that you and I talked about that Kuhn would be proud of, I believe, as well, if we could be so sly to say that. And that is the first recruiting center for agentic technology that can improve real estate investment. Can you talk about that as much as you can?

Jordan Fleming (15:48)
Absolutely. Well, so and it goes back to what I said about the book, you know, I had to think really deeply. What did it what does it mean? Like, what is it? Everybody talks about AI, but what does it mean to implement it? Right. And when we started to think of smrtPhone as a business, well, we know our customers, they’re real estate investors, and we know what they want out of their phone system. They want deals. And so when we think about AI agents, we had to think about, well,

what do they need? Do they need another tool that they can configure? No, they don’t because they don’t want to spend all their time being a technology business. That’s our job. They want a tool that’s gonna implement. And so what we realized is that we had the opportunity to build the first role-based recruitment center where people can actually hire trained agents that can be brought into their business, agentic workers, AI workers that are trained in a specific role. And I’ll give you an example.

Almost every real estate business in the world will have some element of an appointment setter or an intake agent, a qualifying person, someone who, when leads, whether whether they’re calling leads or or they’re speaking to leads, they’re qualifying if there’s an opportunity here, and then they’re setting an appointment for someone to go and close that deal, right? That is a very standard model. And so we built a recruitment center where people can go and hire these role-based agents.

For example, in an acquisitions appointment center, and they can hire them that are trained by different experts. So they can hire them that are trained by some of the leading coaches in the United States on their processes, on how they speak to people. And that means that people are able to hire agents through our platform already trained and up and running in 10 minutes instead of having to worry about,

what prompt should I use? How do I keep making this agent better? We take care of all of that. Just like an employee, you hire the agent, you onboard them into your business, and they perform for you.

Freddie Steen (17:54)
Jordan, let’s dig just a bit deeper on that for our audience. And can you speak to a question that I can hear the real estate pros’ minds churning right now, clamoring for attention? What do you say to the real estate investor, the real estate pro who has not yet embraced AI, who may be concerned about compliance married to risk, married to what could come with litigation

if an AI agent did something untoward? Maybe that’s a concern. Can you speak to how you all have designed out the risk and improved a real estate pro’s ability to increase their profits?

Jordan Fleming (18:39)
Absolutely. And and that’s a great point you make, Freddie. The truth of the matter is, who you partner with on this matters a lot. And there’s a lot of people out there that are vibe coding solutions that have no guardrails to them. And no guardrails is just letting yourself open for a world of pain. You know, anytime I have people who say, man, I want an AI agent that can cold call everybody, I say, “No, you don’t.”

Because cold calling with AI is illegal right now. And if you do it, you are opening yourself up to a world of pain, lawsuits, and fines. The truth is, number one, it matters who you partner with. Research the companies, whether it’s smrtPhone or anyone else, research their approach, research how they do it. For instance, for us, do you know that when you call like if you’re calling someone, whether it’s a someone who’s asked to be contacted, you cannot

call them outside a certain time period, right? You can’t call them at 11 o’clock at night, right? You can’t do that. We all know that. Well, our infrastructure stops you from doing that, stops the agents from doing that, right? Our agents can’t do that. Things like honoring do not call requests, do not text requests, those should be automatic. They shouldn’t be optional. Because if you make them optional, then you are opening yourself to a world of pain. So the short answer is,

it matters most who you partner with. And there are a number of people out there, including ourselves, who are very good players in this game and understand compliance and take it seriously, but there are also a number that don’t. And you have to be very careful about that.

Freddie Steen (20:16)
Jordan, that’s the kind of stuff when you talk about compliance that people don’t talk about enough. I mean, honestly, it’s what separates the folks who just dabble from the ones who stay in the game long term, like you. Let me ask you this. What are you most focused on solving or scaling next? I mean, what’s the next real goal for you?

Jordan Fleming (20:37)
I have a personal goal by the end of the next two months to kill off the idea of a follow-up cadence for good. You we if every investor will know if they’ve used a CRM or whatever, they have a cadence tool, right? Day, you know, five days plus five days send this, you know, but plus ten days send this, plus twenty, you know. In a world where agents can make decisions

and can be trained to take action and make decisions based on context, based on information, knowledge, CRM activity, everything. Why in the world would we ever have another static cadence again? The an agentic system should be able to decide what is the best appropriate follow-up method and timing based on lots of variables, and we should never ever have stat.

Dock static cadences or standard text message bl sent out ever again. Because with agentic workers there’s no need. That’s what I’m

Freddie Steen (21:40)
Jordan, you’re flipping Madison Avenue in New York, Michigan Avenue in Chicago on its back when you talk about the eradication of drip campaigns. That’s the stuff that our real estate pros can really sink their teeth into. That sounds very exciting. Can you dig in just a little bit more on where you saw the gap and why you have decided to go after that cadence?

Jordan Fleming (22:04)
I’ve always hated static cadences because they’re fake. And they end up like a plus two days send this text message, plus five days task an agent to call, plus you know, all that. We all know what it how it works. It is it’s fake. And it’s everybody, it’s the only way we’ve had for years to try and make sure that we don’t leave leads to die. And that’s of course very important.

Because too many investors focus on new leads and they don’t work the leads they have. And we all know that follow-up is where most deals come from. And if you’re not doing it properly, then you’re gonna lose. So of course we invented static cadences because we had no choice. We have a choice now. And the choice is to be able to do take all the information, knowledge, training, context, events, you know, all of that and give and train an agent

the same way I would train a human so that they can make intelligent decisions. Why am I following up with this person? Why is now a good time to follow up? And what am I gonna say? You know, I know that last time I talked to Freddie, Freddie said he needed to speak to his brother about the house. Well, why am I not referencing that in my reach out? But a static cadence doesn’t, because a static cadence just says, “Freddie, still interested in selling 123 Main Street? Let me know.”

Well, that’s not effective. When we can bring all that dynamic energy into a system that learns and flexes the way organically, the way we do as humans, that’s where true power can happen. And that’s what I’m focused on next.

Freddie Steen (23:46)
Jordan, that’s big. I mean, especially when you’ve already got a toehold in the real estate niche of AI, agentic technology that’s transforming the way in which we reach and bring people through a sales process all the way to signing that new client and closing that deal. Couple that with the fact that you’ve got your toehold in podcasting with The Real Estate Tech Guy.

And just make the whole peanut butter and jelly sandwich work with the fact that you’re also now going after the marketing cadence, of which we have not seen that. The next move can either compound things or create chaos depending on how you play it. Now, I know a lot of people listening are either earlier in their journey or looking to level up. And I think they benefit from hearing this. When it comes to building relationships

and growing your network. What’s made the biggest difference for you, Jordan?

Jordan Fleming (24:45)
There will never ever be a more important thing than showing up in the room. That’s just the truth. I live in Europe. You may not know this, but I live in Europe. I’m in Europe right now. I fly back and forth about 16 times a year. And I’m I at the end of this I just flew back last week and I’m at the end of this month, I’m off to San Diego for three days to speak at an event.

Nothing substitutes building relationships in person. And so I would encourage everyone, if you’re getting started, find those local meetings where you can sit down, look someone in the eye and shake their hand. Because that’s solidify. You can then move to Zoom and I speak to people all the time, right? And I or I call them or video call, whatever. But nothing can compare to being in the room, looking someone in the eye, listening to them, spending that time in the bar later.

Building that r relationship that can carry through. If you don’t do that, the foundation of your we relationships are weak. If you do do that, the foundations are strong enough to cope with me living in Poland and them living in San Diego.

Freddie Steen (25:57)
Relationships. I mean, Jordan, you can’t fake that. I mean, that’s everything in this space. All right, before we wrap, if someone wanted to reach out, connect with you, maybe collaborate or learn more about what you’re doing, Jordan, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

Jordan Fleming (26:15)
Yeah, absolutely. So I’m just trying to remember what my Instagram handle is because I know I I must admit I’m the worst of social media, but I do read the messages. So the best way, look, Facebook or or or Instagram, my profile is J Samuel Fleming. So J Samuel Fleming. Again, I can send it to you if you want. I will always give someone a bit of my time. Like if someone reaches out in earnest with a question or some wants some advice,

I will always give someone a bit of my time, because I pe because people have forever given me bit of their time. You know, anytime I’ve ever asked someone for some advice, some help, they’ve always been generous enough to give it to me and I feel I have to do the same. So they can find me on Facebook or Instagram, and as I say, I’m the one who reads those messages and I will happily give anyone the help that I can or that or at least point them in the right direction if I can.

Freddie Steen (27:09)
Perfect. Well, listen, Jordan, I appreciate your time, your story, and your perspective. We need more people in the space who are doing it the right way. Thanks again for being here, Jordan.

Jordan Fleming (27:22)
Thanks, Freddie.

Freddie Steen (27:22)
And for those of you tuning in, if you got value from this, make sure you’re subscribed. We got more conversations coming with operators just like Jordan, who are out there building real businesses. We’ll see you on the next episode.