How AI Is Changing Real Estate Lead Generation with Sheldon Wolf

Sheldon Wolf (00:00)
Imagine Zillow mixed with Uber and Match.com, thrown into a blender with a shot or two of tequila. This thing is a beast. What it does is it actually gets the customer in real estate.

For mortgages, insurance, the real estate obviously is the root of it all. It it lines up the customers, it qualifies the customers, and then what it does is it matches and dispatches it with the right professionals.

Scott Bursey (02:09)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast, powered by Investor Fuel. I’m your host, Scott Bursey And pros today we’re filling up the tank with a true titan of the industry. We have Sheldon Wolf from Intellitary in the house. Sheldon is bringing three and a half decades of high octane tech expertise straight to the real estate world. This is the kind of fuel that doesn’t just power a business, it launches it into a new dimension.

Sheldon, welcome to the show.

Sheldon Wolf (02:41)
Thank you. Thank you very much for

Scott Bursey (02:43)
It’s just a pleasure to have you here. And to get our pros up to speed, please give us the front row seat and how your career ignited and where you’re pouring your fuel now.

Sheldon Wolf (02:53)
Well, as as you mentioned, I’ve I’ve I’ve been in this industry for decades and and and at at large scale, I mean we’re talking thousands of transactions and ⁓ and I’ve always ran a system. So people say, How did you do so many transactions? And one is I had a good team around me. Number two, we always ran a system. The system was kind of a conveyor belt system, and that’s exactly what I’ve built here with Intellitary.

So Intellitary, maybe I can describe it a little bit for your listeners so they understand what it is I’ve built.

Imagine Zillow mixed with Uber and Match.com, thrown into a blender with a shot or two of tequila. This thing is a beast. What it does is it actually gets the customer in real estate.

For mortgages, insurance, the real estate obviously is the root of it all. It it lines up the customers, it qualifies the customers, and then what it does is it matches and dispatches it with the right professionals.

So, example, it’s talking to a customer in Dallas, Texas, it pre-screens them, finds out who, what, when, where, why.

Why they need to buy, why they need to sell, if they currently rent all, all the right questions that a champion, person who’s experienced in real estate, the guy who I’m talking asks always the right questions, never forgets to ask the right questions, is never afraid to ask the right questions, gets them on the phone, off the website, then calls them, finishes the call, transfers the call directly to the realtor in the area, and and

passes you literally the live customer, not not a lead, but an actual live custom live customer who’s got full intent of buying, selling, doing whatever it is that they plan to do. So that’s kind of our system, all in real time and all completely AI generated.

Scott Bursey (05:46)
Well, Sheldon, that is really fascinating. You know, what really caught my attention about you was the way you’ve been able to integrate thirty five years of tech evolution with practical boots on the ground real estate application. It’s rare to find someone who speaks both code and contract so fluently.

Sheldon Wolf (06:05)
Absolutely. It certainly is there’s I I come across it all the time. I see a a company and I I I it leaves me scratch my head. built and developed as a software company and real estate experience is zero. Dealing with real estate customers is zero, dealing with realtors, zero. but he’s a great software guy. And some somehow, some way it ends up being something, but I mean it’s it’s destined to fail.

unless you know the industry. Real estate’s an interesting business, and there’s a reason why the people who are successful are hugely successful. That that represents the ones that are hugely successful are maybe the top two percent. but then there’s this 90% that struggles to find customers. So when you think about the industry, and you say, well, why would someone struggle to find customers? Well, it’s not even finding the customers, it’s getting the customers things like loyalty.

getting them to actually transact with you. It’s the customers are out there that you run run advertising, they’re out there, but getting them to meet with you, getting them to get on the phone with you, getting them to purchase through you, getting them to sell through you, all those things. so that’s where the guys who know what they’re doing, the two percent shine. There was never a question. Back back in the day, I’d walk into your house for a listing, I’d walk out with a listing every time. It wasn’t a question. if you were in my car and we were going to look at a home, you were buying.

Very simple. And and it’s mostly because I did my job. I did my job, asked the right questions and said the right things and got the right commitments. And and and I’ve built this program Intellitary to do exactly that. It is a champ. It is an absolute champ. It was programmed by me personally. So when you want to talk about AI to perfection, I’m not just a software guy. I’m a guy who knows a customer, a real estate customer and a mortgage customer, probably better than anyone on the planet.

I mean thousands of transactions behind me. I think I know I think I know how to get a guy to work with me, right?

Scott Bursey (08:03)
Talk about a systematic approach. That is just wonderful. What’s the number one tech asset every real estate pro needs right now?

Sheldon Wolf (08:11)
Well, there’s a lot of AI floating around every day. You can’t go through 10 minutes a day. You can go into any coffee shop. Someone’s talking AI, AI. And if you hone it into realtors and mortgage specialists, they’ll say, yeah, I got this new tool. It follows up on my customers. It’s this, it does that. These are all workflow tools. And not to say that they’re not great, but go back to the beginning of this. When you’re in an industry where ninety percent of the

Of the industry is struggling to get customers and put deals together, it’s not because you it’s this is what they need. They need customers who are ready to buy, full intent customers ready to buy, ready to list their homes. Instead of going in cold, you already know what they want, what their plans are after they sell. It’s it’s those details. so it’s it’d be different if I was to say.

To an average realtor who’s in the 90% and say, Hey, Joe, here’s my customer. I’m literally handing you this guy on a silver platter. All you gotta do is show up and list the guy’s house or meet the customer at this address, show him the house, he’s probably gonna buy it. they’re what I call warm handoffs. So one of the things that I when I originally said about Intel being like a Zillow Uber and match thrown in a blender.

It literally dispatches realtors the same way Uber dispatches rides. That’s what this thing is designed to do. Just show up, open the door, show the guy the house and and write deals. You’re you’re you’re batter up. And I’ve I’ve already pre-talked to the pitcher. He’s gonna throw it nice and softly for ya.

Scott Bursey (09:50)
Prospects are one thing, but qualified prospects are another.

Sheldon Wolf (09:55)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Scott Bursey (09:58)
Sheldon, let’s shift gears here a little bit. Where do most investors fail when trying to implement new systems, in your view?

Sheldon Wolf (10:40)
Well, I think a lot of it is people are good at one thing, but that’s where it ends. They’re really, really good. so as far as investors go, like I’m seeing a lot of a lot of prop tech, a lot of fintech, and it’s getting funding. But like I said, when you dissect it and you dive deeper, you go, Okay, really, the concept’s good. It’s just no one knows what they’re doing. once again, my my s my

thing is this I’ll never ever ever mention another company. I’ll never mention a name. I don’t think it’s fair unless they were on the podcast, but but I could tell you there’s a company and they lost $1.2 billion last quarter. The last quarter of 2025, 1.2 billion. And I was talking to because I I you know I look at these guys as possible synergies or possible partners or maybe there’s some kind of reverse acquisition or something involved, right?

So I always look for something. And they didn’t think there was a problem. I said, well, I said, if hypothetically I was able to do this and that, we can do this and have this kind of synergy. Nope, there was no problem. They just this is their third round of executives. The first two rounds of leadership they had were tossed. And then they just brought in this new round. Then I’m looking along going, hmm, this is supposed to be a real estate company, yet this guy’s got zero.

This new CEO has zero real estate experience. That could be the problem. If you don’t know the industry, I don’t care how good your software is, I don’t care how good your formulas are. But in the meantime, you look and say, well, behind the scenes, there are a group of investors that have no idea that this thing is running like a like an insane jungle. They don’t see the day-to-day. They just they just wait till the quarter finishes and they read a report and go, hmm, gee, I wonder what’s wrong here.

Scott Bursey (12:31)
Spot on. Execution and experience is everything.

Sheldon Wolf (12:36)
Absolutely. It’s all you know, to me it’s always about the founder. It does it almost doesn’t matter what the what the vertical is, what industry is, it’s always about the founder. If if you’re dealing with a guy who I’m I look back over the decades and just the changes alone to the industry, and what’s funny about is there’s some real estate companies out there that are still kind of running like it’s year two thousand and they still have the same technology and the same old and there’s nothing wrong with the old school, but

you’re gonna get beat by these tools that are out there and and getting a customer is completely different. What what a the customer behavior is completely different today than it was twenty years ago, twenty five years ago. You know, how they’ll communicate is different.

Scott Bursey (13:21)
It really is. And could you walk us down that path and elaborate a little bit more on what you’ve seen evolve over the years?

Sheldon Wolf (13:29)
This this is too funny because I always explain the real estate industry this way. It’s like the Flintstones meets the Jetsons. We have these old school legacy brokerages. And and anybody who’s watched the news lately or even followed any of the any of the markets, you’ll see that there’s these new companies that have been around for a handful of years and they’re buying up these big, massive old relic.

real estate companies once again, I’m not gonna put names to nothing, it’s not fair. But probably a good thing because guess what? The old guys, the legacy models weren’t making money, but now you have all these new cloud brokerages, which are all tech based and and realtors sit at home in your bed with your laptop and and you can log in, you don’t have to come into the office, you don’t have to do any of that. Your deals just get uploaded. and they’re not making money either. And the reason they’re not making money is because

I come from the era where a brokerage made good money. You took enough of a deal fee that it actually made sense. The only problem with that is these new guys figured out and said, well, we’re not going to be able to recruit realtors if we’re charging the same thing. What if we come up with a plan where we charge them almost nothing? Almost nothing per month and then a deal fee. I don’t know, let’s just take $275 per deal. Well, you can keep increasing the amount of bodies. That doesn’t mean you’re going to make money.

Just means you’re gonna either lose that much more money or and once again, not to mention these, but if you follow the markets, you’ll see there’s some massive companies out there and their losses are staggering. And at the end of the day, it’s almost like the legacy companies made money once upon a time, but now they’re losing realtors to the new guys who are recruiting them with cheap, cheap fees, but now they’re not making money either. So we have a whole industry where the only person who’s really making more money.

Is the realtor. And he’s not making money, more money because he’s doing more business. He hasn’t gotten smarter. It’s not these magic tools that are out there. He’s making more money because a $300,000 house several years back is now $600,000. And when you take a five or six percent commission and you multiply by two, simple math. Didn’t mean he got better, just means he’s making more money, but paying his agency, his brokerage less.

And that’s the problem. So what we’ve done, we’ve built the brokerage partnership. And what we do is we actually there there’s situations where we’re paying the brokerage more money than their own realtors are paying them.

And that’s the funny part of it.

Scott Bursey (16:45)
That is just a great blueprint right there in some of your market strategy. Now let’s pivot to a a little bit of a different angle. What emerging tech you know should we be watching to gain an edge in a tight market right now?

Sheldon Wolf (16:59)
Well, I kind of pitch it this way. I see things, my strong point is I’m I’m here today, we’re having this conversation. I’m already five years from now. I’m already 10 years from now. What I what I’m planning is not based on today. Today’s easy, you’re dealing with today. But take for example, where I see things going. so what I see today, I see

All these cloud-based brokerages just trying to increase their body count. So they buy up all these, they buy up all these local offices and say, hey, we just picked up an office with 200 realtors. We now have this many realtors, and we just picked up another one. And it’s almost like an increase the body count is their recipe. The future is this. What is Intellitary What’s the difference? Why am I not a brokerage? Why don’t I want to be a brokerage? I call us an unbrokerage. We don’t want agents. Agents are out there.

We partner with agents. We don’t need to have them under our roof. There’s there’s 1.3 something million agents across the US. They can be at the brokerages. We don’t need to have them in-house. They’re our partners. So here’s what I see. I see a company like us in Telitary being a manufacturing of transactions. We get the customer, we cultivate them, we get them geared, ready to do the deal.

And we hand them off. So, from our perspective, my point is: would you want to be a brokerage that buys a company, hypothetically speaking, with 14,000 agents in it that in turn does 50,000 transactions, or would you rather just buy 50,000 transactions from a company like mine and not have to deal with crappy old leases that you adopted, not have to deal with taking over?

liabilities and whatever messes were on the, you know, that kind of thing. And that’s what we want to do. We want just be the harvester of transactions and hand them off to our brokerage partners and their realtors and feed the industry. We’re we’re an ecosystem is what I see it as. And and and we just want to grow and dominate more and more market share. And that’s the way I see it going.

Scott Bursey (19:09)
Shelton, that’s the high octane stuff right there. Staying ahead of the curve is how we win.

Sheldon Wolf (19:15)
Yeah, for sure. But even think about think about how customer behavior has changed. Forget the realtors, forget the brokerages. Let’s go right down to the root of it, which is the customer. Once upon a time, when I started this business, I’m saying, when I was your age, but I used to go to the customer’s house with a catalog, a catalog off the MOS, and then it went from catalogs to

Dot matrix printers, and we go to the customer’s house. Here’s what’s on the market. But what’s happened? Press fast forward, here we are. I don’t, if that was my job, I don’t really have the job because guess what? The customer does that themselves these days. The customer, by the time you even talk to them, by the time anyone’s going to talk to an intelligent customer, they’ve already done their research. They’ve already been online. They’ve already looked at the homes. They already know what they want. They know where they want. They know that they have to sell their home, they know that they are gonna need it, but they’re already prepped.

But they’ve done that work themselves. So you think about what a realtor or what a realtor does today, a realtor does today a heck of a lot less than they used to be. Take something like Intellitary, they’re just gonna be told, meet Joe Smith at this address. He’d like to see it and potentially buy it. back in the olden days, there was a lot of groundwork and legwork that went into even to that point. But everything’s different and and it’s gonna be even more autonomous as we move forward.

I see it where a customer literally writes their own offer, they press their own buttons and submit their own offer. It’s all field mapping. It’s all the customer knows what they want to offer. I mean, i it’s all due diligence and whatnot. I see realtors more of in an advisory role more than anything else.

Scott Bursey (20:55)
Sheldon, interested to know what’s the biggest tech risk that could stall an investor’s progress today in your view?

Sheldon Wolf (21:00)
The risks are if so I wear two hats because I’ve been the investor many times. half my life is in investment. And what do I do? I always say, well, do your due diligence. But you know, from what I see, I see a lot of people in the industry, they got a great idea, but they don’t have the experience. So to me, if you say, What is the most important thing? Putting on your investor hat, Sheldon, what’s the most important thing? Look at the founder, look at look at the leadership, look at the people that are in place.

dissect the system, find its bugs, find its flaws. Is it just more of the same? Is there what’s what’s unique, what’s different? what what will this company look like in five years? What will this company look like in 10 years? where it will fit in. Because an investment, you’re gonna you’re gonna throw doesn’t matter whether it’s 20 million, 200 million, whether it’s a billion dollars, the bottom line is is this thing going to perform? If it’s not designed to perform, it’s not going to perform.

It needs the it needs the horsepower under the hood. And that’s how that’s how you should look at it.

Scott Bursey (22:02)
Absolutely. And that is some severe rocket fuel right there. Sheldon, let’s let’s do a deep dive here. If an investor has five thousand dollars to spend on their tech stack today, 10 lock maximum advice in ROI. What should that high octane fuel, where should that be poured?

Sheldon Wolf (22:23)
Mm, I I look at everything as a as a times value. So let let’s just talk in general. Just someone’s gonna and simplify. Let’s let’s get away from the whole investment. Let’s just talk back to realtors here. A realtor is there looking to get customers. They need to spend X dollars a month and they want a certain rate of return. So for example, if they’re gonna spend five hundred dollars a month, it should bring back at least.

A deal, a transaction, and realtors get paid in transaction. A deal closes, they get paid. A listing sells, closes, get paid. Someone buys a house, get paid. what does that get you? Does it get you at least one transaction? Or the question is, how much does it cost to get a transaction? And then you have to look at the quality where you’re advertising. Then you got to break it down. you’re buying leads. Okay, well, let’s look how many leads do you have to go through to get one good guy?

And okay, you got one good guy, but does it monetize? And that to me, it would be everything. So from from putting on a different baseball hat and saying, okay, I’m in the market now looking to get more customers. What is my rate of return? Well, to me, I always say if you’re spending a thousand bucks, you should be able to say, If my advertising is free. Why? Because every time I do it, I’m getting my money back. I’m getting my money back in the form of commissions. So

To me, I’ve never understood realtors. And trust me, we’ve talked to thousands of realtors. How much do you spend on advertising? I don’t really spend anything. How many leads do you buy in a month? we don’t really buy leads. Okay, well, how many deals in a month do you do? Zero. Most people would be blown away to know that the average realtor and a lot of and I’m not going to blanket and say every company, but when you take the ninety percent that aren’t doing the kind of business they should be, they do something like I think two and a half transactions a year.

That’s what it averages. And to me, you should be able to do two and a half transactions a month by making wrong numbers, dialing wrong numbers by mistake. And there’s a very good chance that the guy you got on the phone might be looking to buy, might be looking to sell. To me, it’s I would find it impossible unless you are not answering your phone, doing things like that, not returning messages, you know, all those, all those bad habits.

I mean, I I built the purpose of building Intellitary was to take a good working system that made me millions of dollars, that allowed me to sell thousands of properties and put it out to the industry as an ecosystem. And it’s designed to do exactly that. If you are gonna spend money at my store, Intellitary store, well, you should be doing a lot of deals. Very simple.

Scott Bursey (25:04)
And that’s a huge distinction. Thank you for breaking that down so eloquently. And we just can’t let you go yet. We need more. We need more fuel from you, Sheldon. you’ve given us so much already, but what additional advice could you leave with our our pros today?

Sheldon Wolf (25:19)
I say this. If you say, what is the best advice I can give anybody? I give two different bits of advice. Advice for those that are doing well, keep on doing what you’re doing. go after more and more marks, keep that. If you’re not doing well, the usual problem is not always the customer. A lot of lot of people who aren’t doing well blame the customer, always say, well, these buyers, they’re liars. Well, not really liars if you didn’t ask the right questions.

Answer phone calls. Nothing is a waste of time. What’s what’s what’s not functional usually is the system you’re running. and I’ve talked to thousands. You’re talking about a guy who’s, like I said, over three decades in the industry, and I have talked to thousands of realtors over the years and it’s the same common problem. The customers are out there, even in the bad market. My best years were always in the bad markets. I I flourished because I knew how to communicate bad market stories to the, you know.

The the storyline changed, the pitch changed, the angles changed, the way structured deals changed. but I you know, I always say in in a cyclone even a turkey will fly. You know. But when the when the wind stops, you know, you find out who just the regular birds are, you know. But you know, as far as far as that, people who are doing the business keep doing it. they never worry when I was

doing thousands of transactions. I never worried about competition. I never worried about where the next deal is coming from. I was three weeks, three months in advance to get an appointment with me. So you know, but we just never think about things like that. But I’ll tell you, when you’re not doing the kind of business, you’re thinking about it. But sometimes your own worst enemy is yourself. So the the deals are out there. You sometimes have to just change your pitch.

Scott Bursey (27:02)
Sheldon, you really brought the fuel today. And for those of our listeners that want to keep this conversation moving, stay in your lane or collaborate with you, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

Sheldon Wolf (27:11)
They are best to reach me by email at sheldon at Intellitary.com. And Intellitary is spelt I-N-T-E-L-L-I-T-A-R-Y. They should check out my website. have a conversation with Chloe. Chloe’s my rock star. She’s make sure your microphone’s on because she’ll be able to communicate with you. I forgot that’s probably the most important part of the show, but

Chloe is proprietary two-way audio video AI technology. The way you and I are having this conversation right now, and I’m here, you’re there, she is as live and animated as me. You cannot tell her that she is anything but a human. And she’s smart as a whip and knows real estate equally as good as me. And she’s the girl who’s going to be lining up the customers.

whether they’re buying, selling, she’s absolute brilliance. Absolute brilliance.

Scott Bursey (28:11)
Sheldon, thank you for joining us today, my friend.

Sheldon Wolf (28:13)
Thank you for having me. I appreciate this. A lot of fun.

Scott Bursey (28:15)
It was an absolute pleasure. And to our listeners, we appreciate you. If you got value from today’s episode, please subscribe. We’ll be filling your tanks with a lineup of elite guests just like Sheldon Wolf, who are accelerating and setting the pace for the rest of the industry. Until next time, keep your standards high and your vision clear. We’ll see you in the next episode, everyone.