How AI and Tract-Level Data Help Real Estate Investors Find Growth | Morgan Weiss

Morgan Weiss (00:00)

I think based on my interactions with investors, a lot of the times they’re just looking at numbers on an Excel spreadsheet, but I don’t feel like it gives you that big of insight when you’re not really considering the map component, if you’re gonna do an investment in some department complex, you might be able to know if you Google search, where’s the nearest trader draws, where’s the nearest Whole Foods, or where’s the nearest restaurants or schools and what is their rankings and things like that.

So I wanted to take away all that legwork that they’d have to do on their own manually and just have it in one place.

Issa Hanna (01:02)

Welcome to another episode of the Real Estate Pros Show. I’m your host, Issa Hanna, and today we have Morgan Weiss here to share his knowledge and a revolutionary new software he’s created. Morgan, welcome to the show.

Morgan Weiss (01:12)

Thanks for having me. Happy to be here.

Issa Hanna (01:13)

Super excited, man. We were talking earlier off camera, and you were telling me all about Verus- AI. And man, you’ve thought of so many different things. It’s such a useful tool. but before we get into that, I want you to give my viewers a day-to-day in your world. What does your day consist of?

Morgan Weiss (01:29)

my day consists of mainly doing a lot of development. I try to gather more insight in terms of how I can build the product to make it stronger. I’ve been able to partner with a lot of real estate investors that do this for a living to try to design the tool, how they would want to use it and what would keep them coming and using the service. but now as a entrepreneur, have to wear multiple hats. So

I do come from more of a development and mathematics background. So that’s my comfort zone. But now I’m trying to move into more the marketing, sales, and business side of things where I can branch out, get the product tried out and take off from there.

Issa Hanna (02:02)

I love that man. you started off in private equity. you’ve had a mathematical background. You guys are lethal in the real estate game because you can do underwriting, you can run numbers, you can look at analytics like no other people can, So you’ve brought that knowledge with the investors that you’ve designed it with too, done hundreds of deals. you’ve brought that knowledge into a website, a software that

runs numbers so granular that I’ve never heard anything like it. And I’ve heard a lot of apps come out in the last few years, man. I’m gonna let you take the floor. Kind of explain how it works to us.

Morgan Weiss (02:34)

essentially what I’ve noticed is when I was working in private equity, I was building various quantitative models to assist the investors, at least the owners of the private equity company in terms of making decisions. They were trying to look for areas where there was certain growth in certain demographic areas where they think that would be correlated to a higher value. they’d buy maybe a commercial building, apartment building, or even houses,

has some type of quantitative metric associated to that. And once they started drilling down into the data that they were looking into, that’s where I came up with this idea where you can map this data down onto the tract level and you can gather all these data through various API providers that do this. what I do is I try to first understand if someone is looking to do an investment in say Austin or Orange County or Los Angeles County.

There is a certain finite amount of tracts within those counties. So, how do you compare one tract to another tract in that particular county? Well, you can look at things like median age, household income, median gross rent, what kind of degree they have, whether they’re a bachelor’s degree, graduate degree, what the demographics of that particular tract is. You can look into how many Whole Foods or how many Trader Joe’s are nearby within a certain radius.

these can all give you information on what’s the growth rate or what the actual overall health of that tract is in terms of how much money they’d be willing to spend in housing or other things. And that can give you an indication of which tract to be more competitive to another tract. So that’s one aspect from an analytics perspective. You can also use AI tool to have a

large language model that I fine-tuned on all of this data so that you can actually interact with it as a chat bot you may have a certain preference in terms of how you want to make an investment in maybe a home or an apartment complex or something like that. So you can use this chat agent and it will direct you via the maps on those particular areas that’ll be based on your preferences and it’ll make suggestions for you. And then from there you can drill even

further down. So maybe if you have an address like a house or an apartment complex that you’re wanting to do an investment in, then you can drill down on what the estimated value is, and you can look at all the comparables relative to that investment. And then once you’ve inputted certain things about the investment that you might make, you can use another AI tool which will gather everything that is similar to your preferences, similar to other investment opportunities relative to the one that you’re

potentially doing. And then it will make a suggestion whether you should proceed or look elsewhere because there might be a better deal nearby that has that same type of preference. It might be a little bit cheaper in terms of investment that you could buy. So it’d be a better profit for you. So that’s how I do it. I start off more macro and then try to drill it down micro so that each layer that you go down it’ll provide more information to the investor to make the best decision that they can.

Issa Hanna (06:01)

Amazing man. I know a lot of investors watch this show. Our ears are up right now. Everything you just said. you’re doing all the grunt work, the stuff that takes hours for us to just cycle through our mind and look up and put the report together and do all this. And we’re usually doing this in our heads, a lot of us, right? We’re usually looking it up. We might be writing it down. You’ve got it all on an app, has a chat bot. You can talk to it, you can tell the chat bot.

Hey, this is my buyer’s net, right? every investor has a net that they buy with, every good investor. So you can tell this chap out, hey, this is my buyer’s net, find me something. And there’s nothing else like it on the market because you can get like they say, to the nitty gritty, you can go super detailed all down to the address. So it’s not just pulling the zip code for instance. This thing is pulling the neighborhood, it’s telling you so many different things.

you’re truly making it a lot easier for the real estate investor to do his homework. All great inventors, whether it was Tesla back in the day, whether it was Elon Musk with Tesla nowadays, right? You make things easier for people. and that’s a great invention this is what it is. And you’ve got some future plans coming up because you’re not sticking to the US launch. you’ve got plans to go abroad. Can you tell us about that?

Morgan Weiss (07:15)

I have insight because my wife is actually from Sweden and when we go there I’ve asked questions about what data you can get in these areas. And Sweden, I’m not sure about other countries, but I think the other Scandinavian countries like Denmark, you’re able to actually get people’s what job they have, how much money they’re making, how many cars they own, and even their address. So it gives you a assessment of

how much money are these people actually making. And instead of a tract, you can do it on a block neighborhood group. So they’re similar to the United States, but it will give you an indication of what people’s income streams are, what they’re willing to spend their money on. And that can provide opportunities on where you could potentially do an investment in Europe. per se. so that’s one area that I want to start expanding to. But right now I’m starting off the United States markets first just to get a sense

of what this product can offer to real estate investors. And I’m sure there’s going to be insight into other things that I can build from these interactions with these real estate investors further along once they’ve played more with the tool. I think one other thing I wanted to mention about the tool too is that it gives you a portfolio component. So if you ever have various rental properties that you own, a lot of people keep it on an Excel file in terms of information about their purchasing price, how much interest rate they paid, etc.

you can upload that to the app and it will give you a portfolio assessment also make recommendations based on what your portfolio holdings are and it could make suggestions on other areas of investment that you could make that could hedge your risk in other markets that might be a better opportunity or that could hedge you in terms of any risk that you could be associated with the properties you currently own.

it’s supposed to be a one-stop shop where you can get all the information you need on what kind of investment you want to make, or maybe even a house that you want to buy for yourself and your family, having a portfolio component it can constantly tract the changes in your real estate value and make suggestions on other areas that you can potentially do investments in further along to beef up your portfolio.

Issa Hanna (09:50)

Amazing, man. I wrote this down in the pre-conversation before we went live. I said, this is like having a realtor in your pocket, right? as a former buyer’s agent, a lot of investors, I get phone calls all the time from my investors. Hey, Issa, run these numbers for me. do this for me. What about this school district? what’s the income? All this and us realtors, we’d have to do our homework and we’d have to do a lot of digging for our client.

the investor can have it in his pocket, the realtor can have it in their pocket, they can bounce it off of them, they can pull this data from Vera’s. unbelievable, dude. Unbelievable how easy and how much you’ve taken the grunt work out. I’ve never seen anything like this on the market yet. I know you’re gonna take over. I want to rewind a little bit though. I want to get what made you decide, I’m actually gonna do this. I know you had the idea.

What made you say, I’m gonna get up and actually do this and launch it?

Morgan Weiss (10:40)

I think based on my interactions with investors, a lot of the times they’re just looking at numbers on an Excel spreadsheet, but I don’t feel like it gives you that big of insight when you’re not really considering the map component, if you’re gonna do an investment in some department complex, you might be able to know if you Google search, where’s the nearest trader draws, where’s the nearest Whole Foods, or where’s the nearest restaurants or schools and what is their rankings and things like that.

So I wanted to take away all that legwork that they’d have to do on their own manually and just have it in one place. there’s a lot of times people get a job offer to move to some place they’ve never been to with their families. And they may be interested in wanting to buy a house that is close to a good school, close to their work.

And my app can make those suggestions for you and it will show you where you’re going to be on the map. So you can see it from a real perspective of where you’re actually going to be living. it gives a more real component to people where they’ll feel more comfortable with either the investment decision they’re going to make or the place that they’re going to live with their family. So I think that’s the main driver of why I built this product.

Issa Hanna (11:44)

I love that. for the normal consumer, for the first time home buyer, I’ve had over 200 first time homebuyers. it’s the biggest purchase of their life. They’re very scared. They need to know all the information, right? Not every realtor is created equal, right? So not every realtor is going to be able to get you this type of information. with your software, with your website. dude, people can get this information just by zeroing in on these different neighborhoods.

you don’t have to ask the realtor, or if you do ask a realtor, you can know what questions to ask them based off of this. like I said, truly remarkable app. I’m super excited for when this actually hits and goes mainstream. and with that, I look you guys up in five years. What’s the five-year plan for this? Where do you see yourself?

Morgan Weiss (12:26)

So five years I see that we’ve matured in the United States markets and we’re starting to really get into entronched within other European markets because there’s a lot of opportunity there because there’s so much data available that no one’s really leveraging that as far as I can see. So I think this will go international and I think it will be a great product to use. I think one thing to note in terms of five years is that

this is a little bit further down the line, but eventually we’re gonna be a little bit more integrated with AI in a sense that AI has been able to really help with a lot of things like development, coding, looking stuff up, providing summaries, writing emails even for us and stuff like that. But eventually, I still think that there’s still gonna be an application component where people are still gonna want to use the application, but the application will be merged with various.

agents that people use, people like Muse or other kind of AI assistant products. I can build an MCP server with my application to link up with Muse such that they could use the data that I have from a real estate perspective with their Muse chatbot and they can use Muse with my service to help them make decisions or help them stay up to date with what’s changing in the real estate landscape or what opportunities there could be for further

investments. because a lot of things stay sometimes on a county level. they’ll write up really large research reports about what they want the builders and developers to do. And unless you’re constantly scraping the web for that information with an AI bot that’s integrated with my business, you’ll be able to just get it right in your fingertips.

so that’s where I see it going. it’s gonna be an assistant, a real estate assistant, a personalized real estate assistance, either for you looking for other investment opportunities or for you when you’re looking to buy your first or second.

Issa Hanna (14:16)

like I said, you’re making it so much easier. so many questions answered with this one app, integrating with AI. I love that you say that because that’s the key, right? that’s the future. This is the new internet, right? Back in ninety eight, ninety nine, people were scared to death of the internet. The ones that didn’t touch it, that didn’t mess with it, were left in the dust in a few short years. You’re here on the forefront, spearheading

this and it seems like you’ve worked a lot of kinks out already, which tells me you’re a very forward thinker. And I know for a fact man, this thing is going to be huge in five years. I could just feel it. people wanted to get a hold of you. download this now, use it, ask you about it, where could they reach you at?

Morgan Weiss (14:57)

check out the website Verus-AI.com. it’s also going to be on the Apple Store and Google Play Store eventually. right now it’s just a web based application,

but it’s going to be available on iOS and Android as well. pretty soon this year. and you can also follow me on Twitter, verusai_re where I post about the product and insights in terms of different places like in Arizona or things that

the application has found good opportunities for. I do provide free data online as well. and you can get a free investment report if you go on the website as well. So you can see maybe you’re in a particular county that you want to see or attract that you may want to do an investment in it. You can get the insight right there in a PDF.

Issa Hanna (15:37)

Amazing. People at home, be on the forefront. Go get Verus-AI, revolutionary. It’s going to save you so much time. so much headache of just looking at different data. It already does the work for you. go out there and get it. I want to ask you and close off on one final question that I ask all my guests, right? Business relationships, growing your network, super important,

You’re already knee deep. You’re in private lending. you’re getting into the marketing aspect. You are marketing right now by coming on the show. if you had to give a new guy that’s a little hesitant about breaking into the professional world one piece of advice, what piece of advice would that be?

Morgan Weiss (16:14)

I would just look at what you think you can provide value to and also that you would actually enjoy doing because everyone has certain skills, whether it be business, marketing, sales, maybe development or more technical roles like mine. but I think you wanna make sure that you’re planning to provide a good value for a certain consumer base.

That you enjoy and are passionate about the product that you’re actually going to be providing, and that you see in the future how AI is going to be integrated with that product. Cause eventually a lot of app services are going to be integrated with AI. And you have to see how your business is going to fit with how AI is going to be growing in the next five to 10 years and making sure that is in sync with your vision.

Issa Hanna (16:55)

Make sure you stay forward thinking, right? all great entrepreneurs. It doesn’t matter what business it is. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You forward think. exactly what Verus-AI is, right? They didn’t invent the wheel. They took all the old school approach, the way we’ve done it for years and years and years, and they’ve modernized it, made it easier. truly unbelievable. Morgan, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a true honor to have.

Morgan Weiss (17:20)

Thank you. Pleasure being here.

Issa Hanna (17:21)

And to my viewers at home. If you enjoyed my conversation with Morgan and want to see more like it, make sure to hit like and subscribe. I talk to people every day that can bring us different knowledge on every aspect of the real estate industry. Until next time. The Real Estate Pros are out.