How AI Is Changing Real Estate Forever | Rick Gray

Rick Gray (00:00)
if we just offload everything to tasking AI to write our listing descriptions, well, so a consumer can do that too. If I’m gonna sell my house as a for sale by owner, I can do that too. I can go into chat dbt or who’s he and say, hey,

Here’s my property, write a listing description for me. Where else should I advertise it? Write social media content for me. What should I be saying? I if we’re just gonna offload everything like that to AI, what’s to stop the consumer from doing that? Nothing. So as an end, they are doing it, as a matter of fact, already. So as an industry, we need to figure out how to use AI, not just for the tasking of simple things, but being more creative in the long run and thinking bigger.

Michelle Kesil (02:04)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Investor Fuel podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil Today I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Rick Gray, who’s been making serious moves in the AI space for real estate brokers. So really excited to have you here on the show today, Rick. think, yes, absolutely. I think the listeners are really going to take something away from how you’re approaching learning how to use AI in order to help people leverage.

Rick Gray (02:22)
Yeah, thanks, Michelle. Glad to be here.

Michelle Kesil (02:33)
the real estate businesses. So let’s dive into all of that.

Rick Gray (02:36)
Yeah, well, so the company, Huzi we started huzi.ai back in 2022, right after ChatGPT was released in November. It was literally the next month that Eric Post, the founder, was sending his daughter to college and she was asking him like, hey dad, what should I major in? And he’s like, that’s a good question, I don’t know. And so he started using AI to think of ideas. She actually went to the website of the college and wanted to figure out how to add a class to her schedule and how to drop a class.

So he created a little mini AI, what we call a mini GPT. It crawled the website and it just gave her instructions. One, two, three, here’s how you add a class, here’s how you it. It was so useful, he immediately thought, okay, this is something that can help us in a lot of different areas of life. So the first thing we did was we’ve been talking as he was a former broker and an owner as I’ve been in real estate, I’ve been a 31 year broker. I can really see that the industry needs to level up.

and the industry needs to do better. It’s like Steve Murray, Michelle comes out with a threat report every year in real estate. So the threat report is what’s the biggest complaint about real estate from consumers. And forever for the first, you I started in 1994 as an agent. The first 20 years of my career, it was lack of communication, right? I tried to get ahold of my agent. I couldn’t get ahold of them or I listed my house and I haven’t heard from them or they don’t answer their phone. It was a lack of communication thing. But in 2019, this is before AI.

In 2019, that changed to, I know more than my agent. And I thought, isn’t that interesting? For the first time now, consumers are worried about how much their agent is actually providing value and helping them. And in this day and age with AI and everybody having access to AI, it’s even more important than ever that agents learn how to provide value. As an industry, we need to step up to serve our clients. And that’s the whole point of the company is how to serve buyers and sellers.

at a higher level. If we don’t have them, then we don’t have an industry.

Michelle Kesil (04:20)
Yeah, absolutely, that’s so important. So tell me a little bit more about how your platform works and how it benefits the real estate space.

Rick Gray (04:22)
Yeah.

Yeah, well, a couple of things. mean, we have a user interface. If you’re familiar with ChatGPT, you’ve got your two dimensional kind of prompt response format where you type in a sentence or you talk a sentence and it gives you a response. We have ChatGPT built in. We also have Cloud Sonnet built in. We also have Gemini built in. We also have Grok built in. We also have DeepSeek. have a lot of different models. So you don’t have to have five subscriptions.

to different AIs, they’re all in Huzi and you can pick and choose from them or let Huzi pick and choose because we’ve trained Huzi on real estate. you know, the different people say, well, tell me about your user interface. The basic difference is chat GPT is going to give you a general answer.

If you’re a realtor and your client says I need to have a home inspection, would you recommend a general contractor or would you recommend a home inspector? You’d probably recommend a home inspector. That’s

That’s the difference between specialized knowledge versus general knowledge. And Huzi understands, if you ask it the same exact question as chat DBT, if it’s real estate related, you will get a better response from Huzi. So the first thing is it’s been real estate trained. The second thing I think about our platform is really cool is security. If you go entering, we’re fiduciaries in the real estate world, right? We have confidential information. We have finances, all kinds of different things, Michelle, that we shouldn’t be giving out to other people. And legally we can’t give out to other people.

But if you’re putting data into a public model like ChatGPT, which is owned by OpenAI, I always ask people, what do you think OpenAI actually means? That’s how, where does it get its training data? It gets it from us, us putting things into it. So if you’re constantly putting confidential information, you might be breaching things that you shouldn’t be doing. Huzi is a secure platform. We are type two and SOC two certified going through that right now, which is the highest level of security you can have. So our stuff pulls things from the internet.

but it never gives it back. So security, think is a really big issue and going to be going forward. And then the third thing I’ll say, Michelle, is the interface. We have another board called, we just launched our Satori board, which is a visual AI. Most of us, at least my people around me in real estate are more creative types. And we don’t think like an Excel spreadsheet. We think in terms of like a vision board, for example.

And if you, always use the analogy of Tony Stark from Iron Man, how he has this like hologram board, he’s dragging things into it, and he’s putting them together and talking to them all on one visual board. That’s what Satori is. We’ve developed that, which has been our most popular product, because you can drag in books, videos, contacts, files, anything, and then have a canvas that has chat interface with every single element you put on there. And people have just loved that. So that’s been our claim to fame lately is our Satori board.

Michelle Kesil (07:49)
Amazing. Yeah, that’s so valuable. So how exactly are you like supporting real estate agents through this? Like what are they specifically using this for when it comes to like helping them with their businesses?

Rick Gray (07:50)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s it’s interesting. Ask that, Michelle. Most people that we so I do presentations all over the country and ask people how are they using AI? How are they interfacing with it? And it’s pretty standard, you know, content creation for social media, for example, writing listing descriptions, doing research, data and information research, maybe creating workflows. And that’s that’s all good. There’s nothing wrong with any of that. And AI is very good at that. But AI can do so much more when you think of it as a thought partner and.

That’s where I think people miss, like they need to read the book, The Feeling Economy. I mentioned that to you earlier. The Feeling Economy talks about what tends to become rare, tends to become more valuable. And as everybody’s going to have access to AI, and we’re going to be seeing all, we already are. I am in my feeds. Everything is written by AI already. Give it another year. All the ads on TV, all the ads in your social media are gonna be written by AI and people are gonna get sick of that. And we’re gonna want actual human.

contact and human interface. That’s going to be really valuable. So it’s your personal ability to connect. Somebody said, this is a true story from an agent I coach. They said, well, what’s the value of a realtor now? If me as general Joe Seller wants to go sell my house on my own and I have access to AI, what do need a realtor for? I can have it write the documents. I can have it review everything, which you can. Well, here’s a real example. So we had a local person here wanting to sell their house and our agent knew this person and

they were gonna get about 1.2 million. That was what all the cops were saying. It’s kind of an area that gets about that much, but it was on five acres. It was a $1.2 million property. And they were pretty much set on that. This person though, this agent has done a lot of flips herself. And she has kind of been in the investing industry, small family investments, fixing flips, as well as regular residential real estate. Well, she knows several people in the development world. So she reached out to some of her contacts.

Long story short, they sold the house for $1.8 million.

So $600,000 more than what the seller was anticipating they were going to sell their house for. That they would not have been able to get without this agent’s expertise, her knowledge, her connections, her ability to network with the right people. That is the value of a good realtor is your wisdom. ChatDB doesn’t have that. Large language models don’t have that. You they have some generalized things, but…

I think as we move forward, it’s gonna be that relationship’s gonna be even more more valuable. And that’s what we at Huzi teach people how to do. We have live calls regularly. We do live webinars regularly. We do live classes regularly. We have a community, a database of knowledge board where you can watch videos anytime you want, a forum where people ask questions. And we’re teaching people how to use AI to be more creative, not just to be more efficient. Efficiency is the, it’s like the tip of the iceberg.

but there’s so much more you can do with AI if you use it correctly.

Michelle Kesil (11:19)
Yeah, I think that’s so important because human connection just cannot be replaced and it’s so necessary, especially in this industry. So yeah, what are some ways that people can leverage AI to be more creative and support them without it kind of like taking over and putting on that mask?

Rick Gray (11:36)
Yeah.

Well, one thing we have is what’s called Spark Mode. We have a Spark Pad, which our general interface, not the Visual Satori board, but our general more ChatDBT style interface is called our Spark Pad. We have what’s called Spark Mode, which is so cool. So if anybody’s ever used ChatDBT or any of the others, you might have a thought and you ask it a question and you iterate this down. Maybe I typically get like three or four questions deep and then I kind of get stuck.

I’m not sure where to go. I’m not sure what to ask it next. I mean, I don’t know what I don’t know, right? So Spark Mode in Huzi, you click Spark Mode, it suggests things based on the conversation you’re already having. Hey, here’s some things you should be thinking about. Here’s some questions maybe you want to ask. And I promise you, some of the best things that I’ve ever done in Huzi were its ideas, not my ideas. I start down this one road and then it says, well, what about this? I’m like, ⁓ I never thought of that. That’s the power of AIs. If we’re just tasking it,

to do things, that’s just our brain. But AI knows more than our brain does. So we need to tap into what else should I be thinking and what else should I be talking about? And Spark Mode, I just love that. I don’t know if you saw that article, Michelle, it came out, two, three weeks ago, there was an article from MIT, they did a study with 59 people and they talked about using AI. So they had three groups of people writing three different essays. So one group of people used ChatGPT. The second group of people used Google Search. And the third group people couldn’t use anything. They just had to use their brain.

and he had to write three different essays. And then they had to write an essay summarizing the three, like what they wrote about. And pretty obviously, I think as most would guess, the group that actually wrote the worst essays were the chat GPT people. The people that wrote the best essays were the ones that just did it on their own. And as far as recall goes, your ability to remember what you wrote, the chat GPT users did the worst, and the people that didn’t use anything did the best because they were using their brain. So that’s.

really underscoring you asked me earlier about strengths and weaknesses. ⁓ big weakness of AI is it’s being used wrong. It’s not that AI has the weakness, it’s the way people are using it to do things. It can actually, in his other studies, it show how much more creative and better we can be if we learn to ask it questions. If we learn to treat AI as another voice and another mind in the room that we’re talking to, not just tasking it with.

things to do, but asking it, what should I be thinking about? What else should I be doing? Here’s what I’m trying to accomplish. What else do you think I should be doing? And I’ve given a lot of different examples to this with people with health and fitness as well as real estate. Cause I’ll give you example from a class I did the other day. A person said, I said, what do you use AI for? He said, meal planning and exercise plans. I said, okay, cool. Give me like an example. He goes, okay, I’ll go into chat WT and say, I’m six to 250 pounds. I want to lose 20 pounds in the next 90 days. Help me create an exercise and meal plan.

I said, I’ll bet you got a very generic plan, right? He goes, yeah, it wasn’t all that great. The first stab at it wasn’t very good because it doesn’t know anything. AI doesn’t have context, right, Michelle? So it’s like, it doesn’t know if you’re vegan, are you paleo, are you keto, are you vegetarian? Do you have access to weights? Do you swim? Do you run? Do you bike? mean, if it doesn’t know any of this stuff, it’s just going to give you a very generic idea of what to do. I said, here’s a much better way to approach AI. Just say, hey, I’m 6’2″, 250 pounds. I’d like to lose 20 pounds in next 90 days. What?

Michelle Kesil (14:20)
you

Rick Gray (14:39)
do you need to know from me to create a custom exercise and meal plan? So we did that in front of the class and it was like, wow, it asked 12 questions. So then we answered all 12 of those questions. It asked four more questions. We answered those four and then it gave this like really good, much more personalized and realistic plan for this gentleman for what he was trying to accomplish. And that’s the point of if we just tell AI what to do, it’s probably not gonna do that greater job. But if you ask it what it needs to know,

to do what you’re trying to do, that’s a much better way to approach it.

It’ll ask you questions, you can answer those questions, and that’s gonna be the difference between people being successful in the future, in my opinion, Michelle, is mindset. The last competitive advantage we’re going to have is mindset, because everybody’s gonna have the tools. So who’s using them right and has the correct mindset is going to win.

Michelle Kesil (16:05)
That’s so important and valuable. Yeah, I think that’s not talked about enough. So it’s such a good tip. So yeah, go ahead.

Rick Gray (16:11)
Yeah, I was

gonna say real quick, the other thing is not talked about enough, especially in the real estate space. People say all the time, well, should I be worried about my competitors getting good at AI and me not? Well, well, maybe. Your competitors are probably gonna take some business from you if they’re better at AI. But here’s the thing people don’t think about. How about the AI-powered consumer? That’s actually the biggest threat to the industry, not your competitors, right? It’s like, what does the consumer expect from us? And…

As an industry, we need to understand that. I mean, when I started in real estate in 1994, we didn’t have the internet. Date myself a little bit here, Michelle. We didn’t have the internet, we didn’t have DocuSign, electronic, anything, right? So everybody said, my gosh, every single time something new like this comes out, it freaks everybody out. And they’re like, my gosh, am I going to have a job? Is our industry gonna be valuable? Yes, it’s just going to evolve and change what we do for our clients.

Michelle Kesil (16:57)
Yeah, can you expand on that, like how the consumer becomes more of a threat?

Rick Gray (17:02)
Yeah, so Steve Murray was a guy who did a book, he still does every year for the NAR, for the National Association of Realtors. He studies what the biggest complaints are. And I think I mentioned that earlier, the biggest complaint was lack of communication. Well, now it’s I know more than my realtor knows. the biggest threat for, for example, if we just offload everything to tasking AI to write our listing descriptions, well, so a consumer can do that too. If I’m gonna sell my house as a for sale by owner, I can do that too. I can go into chat dbt or who’s he and say, hey,

Here’s my property, write a listing description for me. Where else should I advertise it? Write social media content for me. What should I be saying? I if we’re just gonna offload everything like that to AI, what’s to stop the consumer from doing that? Nothing. So as an end, they are doing it, as a matter of fact, already. So as an industry, we need to figure out how to use AI, not just for the tasking of simple things, but being more creative in the long run and thinking bigger.

Like for example, I think ⁓ with agents.

I always teach, there’s a famous article by David Knox. I used to look at David Knox back in the day and old time realtors would know Howard Britton, David Knox, the superstars, this is back in the late 80s and early 90s. But he had a really neat graph he used to talk about, the networker, marketer, prospector and converter. Like all real estate is basically fall into one of these four categories. You’re either a networker, marketer, a prospector, a converter or a combination thereof. So when I coach agents, I always talk about that and I ask them a lot of questions to figure out, well, which one are they? And then I helped design.

plans like lead generation plans based on who they are. AI can do that really well. It can really help agents step up their game, stay in their lane and be better and more creative at what they’re doing. And that’s gonna give them an advantage to gain more market share. So clients using AI is always gonna be there. But if we can, again, like that story from that agent earlier, if we have the right connections, we can do things they can’t do on their own.

Michelle Kesil (18:42)
Yeah, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. So what is the next big goal for you and your company?

Rick Gray (18:49)
Well, we really want to disrupt the industry as they say, we want to get involved in real estate and we, you know, it’s interesting because when we first started this company, we thought what’s going to happen with real estate and AI. That was our first thought. Our second thought was, why don’t we dictate that? Why don’t we determine what’s going to happen with real estate and AI by creating a company that’s going to help the industry and not go around. We’ve all seen advertisements now from other AI companies that are like,

Use our AI to write your offers and our AI passes the national real estate exam at 96 % and can do anything you can do. It’s like those are companies that are side-skirting. We’ve had some executive level calls with big companies that one big company that everybody is familiar with in real estate space actually told me on a Zoom call that they messed up because they tried to sidestep the real estate industry and go direct to the consumer. They undervalued that relationship between the consumer and the agent. Well, who’s do we get that?

I mean, I’ve been an agent for 31 years. Eric, the founder was an agent and a broker owner for over 20 years. I mean, most of the people that work on our team have lots of real estate experience. So we want to help the consumers by giving them tools and giving the agents tools, speed of information, speed of what they need to get done is one thing, but then quality of it is another to actually help them do a better job. The best form of marketing is your customer’s story about you. What’s your customer saying about you is,

really your best form of marketing. So can you really wow your customer and do a good job? And AI allows us to be more creative, smarter, think about things we hadn’t thought about before, preempt problems before they even happen. I mean, we can interface with files, Who’s interfaces with your calendar, your email, your contacts. So there’s a ton of different things we can do with Who’s to help the agent know what they should be working on.

Michelle Kesil (20:23)
Amazing. And when it comes to like building relationships and growing your network and building this business, like what has made the biggest difference for you?

Rick Gray (20:32)
Well, I think AI will give you ideas and then AI can help you find and research things that you have no idea about. It can help you target what you’re working on to the most important. Like if I have a neighborhood where I live, there’s like thousand homes in my neighborhood. If I was an agent, I said, okay, I want to market to this neighborhood. Well, there’s a thousand homes we’d have to market to. How about we use AI to do some data analysis and tell us the 200 homes that are most likely to sell next based on demographics, length of time at the house.

price point, I all these different things. AI can be very accurate and very good at telling us, okay, here’s the 200 houses you should market to instead of a thousand. So helping the agents not waste time, I think is a really big factor that AI can help you with. And I was around in 08, right? I mean, some of these listeners, I’m sure of your listeners, Michelle, were real estate agents in 2007, eight, nine. It was really difficult. And like the world kind of stopped there for a little while. And the problem was I kept thinking, I’m just gonna work harder.

I was playing an old game though, and the game changed. There was a new game in town. There were new rules, and I was still following the old rules, which was, I’m just gonna hit my sphere more. I’m just gonna work harder, talk to more people. But nobody I knew was moving. Nobody I knew was buying or selling. It took me two years of crying myself to sleep, literally, every night to think, short sales, distressed properties, this is what’s actually selling. Something is always selling in every market. So you just got to figure out, what is that?

So I didn’t want to, when AI came about, and I saw this in November of 22, I was like, okay, I’m not gonna do this again and be late to the game. I wanna make sure I’m learning this tool and learning how to use this tool and helping my clients learn how to use this tool so they can be more successful.

Michelle Kesil (22:06)
Amazing. Yeah, that is such valuable advice. And I hope people really learn how to leverage this tool instead of let it overtake them. All right, so before, it’s the challenge.

Rick Gray (22:14)
Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s the challenge, Is the user interface

not being super easy all the time? That’s what people love Satori. One of our members actually said, Rick, I love Satori because it’s like being in a room full of experts and just having a conversation with them. And you get to choose the experts. You just drag in the books, the videos, whatever you want to drag into this room, and you get to have a conversation with it. That’s just really cool.

Michelle Kesil (22:38)
Yeah, amazing. So before we wrap up here, if someone wants to reach out, connect, learn more from you, what’s the best way for them to find you?

Rick Gray (22:46)
Sure, my email is rick at huzi.ai, H-U-Z-I dot A-I, huzi.ai. You can go to huzi.ai and sign up. We have a seven day free trial. And if they wanna sign up right now, we still have some more seats left at $300 a year. It’s normally $99 a month, but since we rolled out Satori last month, we’ve been doing a special just to get attention on it. It’s $300 for a year, which is really cool. I I always tell agents all the time. I had Boomtown, which is a CRM for like 12 years, and I paid over a thousand dollars a month.

for Boomtown. So, and this is, you know, $300 for the year. And as compared to value wise, it’s not even close.

Michelle Kesil (23:20)
Amazing. Well, thank you. I appreciate your time, your story, and perspective. We need more people that are doing innovative things. So thank you for being here.

Rick Gray (23:29)
Yeah, thanks Michelle. I appreciate you guys having me.

Michelle Kesil (23:31)
And for those of you tuning in, you got value from this, make sure you’ve subscribed. We have more conversations coming with operators just like Rick who are building real businesses. And we’ll see you all on the next episode.