How Real Estate Agents Use AI to Scale | Sunder of Market Better

Sunder Somasundaram (00:00)
Now you can have actually a human like AI agent actually responding to any questions about the property.

about financing, about multiple things. And the beauty about this, this is not a script villain. It can actually, so you can upload everything about that property into a database or a knowledge base and the AI agent will actually consult that and will learn about it and respond on the phone. And this all happens in real time. In our sort of experience, our customers have told us that in some cases it’s way better than even having somebody like a real person on the phone because the AI can look up that information

like 10 times faster than somebody can actually go and look it up. So there’s no like hold time, I cannot put you on hold while I look up that information. None of that stuff is happening,

Dylan Silver (00:42)
Yeah.

Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is based in Dallas and runs Market Better, helping entrepreneurs and real estate agents utilize AI agents and automation to scale their business. Please welcome Sunder Sunder, welcome to the show.

Sunder Somasundaram (02:35)
Dylan, great to be here.

Dylan Silver (02:37)
It’s great to have you. I just moved from Dallas to Santo Domingo, actually two weeks ago. So it’s still fresh in my memory. And I have actually quite a bit of love for Dallas. I kind of think maybe selfishly that it’s the best city for the middle class and for people who are investing in real estate specifically. How long have you been in Dallas?

Sunder Somasundaram (02:58)
For about 10 years now. we. It is, I mean, it’s just grown incredibly fast. ⁓ I think, you know, honestly, if anybody had gotten into real estate here 10 years ago, it’s just. I’m a big believer in the in the whole return on the stock market, but just looking at places like Dallas, it’s just blown everything else out of the water. So, yeah, it’s it’s just an amazing place to be. Raise your family and yeah, the growth has just been incredible.

Dylan Silver (03:00)
It’s the place to be in Texas.

Yeah.

I want to say as I was in the process of identifying how I was going to move, they announced that there was a Disneyland or something like this that might be coming to Frisco. I don’t know if I’m butchering the explanation there, but there’s so much that’s coming out there. And even if you compare it to the other large cities in Texas, it’s definitely got what feels to me to be a super vibrant and strong middle class, lots of jobs, lots of opportunity, tons of investors, which…

Brings me to my next question, and I often ask this at the top of the show, Sunder, is how did you get involved in the real estate space?

Sunder Somasundaram (04:05)
You know, just ⁓ being involved with a lot of friends that are in real estate. And actually, it’s an interesting intersection because they are both in real estate and technology. And it’s really amazing to see some of the best.

folks that are in brokerage and in real estate are actually leveraging technology to scale their business. So that’s really how I got introduced to it. Just talking to people, learning about their pain points and how they’re using technology to scale their real estate business. So that was really it. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (04:36)
I didn’t mention this before hopping on the podcast here, but I’m actually in a software engineering boot camp. It’s like a year long course where you get a certification and then maybe you can use that afterwards. Maybe not with how AI is advancing so quickly. But I think it’s almost…

It was counterintuitive for me, maybe not for some people, but real estate agents, real estate brokerages, real estate investors seem to adopt AI almost more so than any other industry. said, wow, everybody is talking about AI. What do you think it is about real estate that has so many people talking about AI?

Sunder Somasundaram (05:11)
I think it’s just the dynamic nature of the industry and real estate in general from a technology perspective actually adopts technology from an early adopter perspective. So even when the web was launched, some of the first properties that you saw going up was actually for real estate use cases, right?

Some of the original sort of like web 2.0 companies that made it huge are

companies like ⁓ Redfin, right, that actually embraced technology and went out there and started creating ⁓ all of these assets out there. So I think now when it comes to AI, what we’ve really seen ⁓ with, especially in the real estate industry is they, everybody’s, look, real estate is all about scaling. If you can’t scale, then you’re always going to be not a big player, right? And what a lot of the smartest players in real estate have figured out is how they can really leverage AI to scale their business.

Dylan Silver (06:24)
Yeah.

Sunder Somasundaram (06:52)
across the board, right?

and the ability to kind of multiply and the one to many and the automation that AI brings in and automation with personalization is how I call it. Right. Anybody can automate. mean, we’ve all seen that you can sell 10,000 emails. Nobody’s opening it. It just goes to the junk folder. But if you’re able to understand each buyer’s sort of mentality, what they’re looking for, if you’re able to go across the board to other companies that are looking to invest in something, but you’re able to identify those specific pain points and address those

now you have somebody that’s really interested in what you’re offering, right? So I think that automation with personalization is really where we’ve seen a lot of these real estate folks are adopting and super early in terms of AI adoption.

Dylan Silver (07:28)
Yeah.

I want to get a little granular and ask you about the use case for AI agents and what does that exactly mean when it comes to individual realtors like myself. And also at what point would it make sense for someone to use this technology? Do they need to be selling 25 homes a year trying to scale to 50? And then also is it them putting out advertisements online and engaging with the advertisements? Is it like an inbound phone service? Help break some of this down for me in the audience.

Sunder Somasundaram (08:04)
Yeah.

It’s across the board, but ⁓ where we have really seen the best effects is when somebody has multiple sort of assets and they’re really doing that sort of scaled out outbound, right? A couple of great use cases we have seen is where, ⁓ you know, they can have like, like you mentioned, like maybe a Google ads or maybe, ⁓ you know, different types of advertising. And then somebody calls in. Now you can have actually a human like AI agent actually responding to any questions about the property.

about financing, about multiple things. And the beauty about this, this is not a script villain. It can actually, so you can upload everything about that property into a database or a knowledge base and the AI agent will actually consult that and will learn about it and respond on the phone. And this all happens in real time. In our sort of experience, our customers have told us that in some cases it’s way better than even having somebody like a real person on the phone because the AI can look up that information

like 10 times faster than somebody can actually go and look it up. So there’s no like hold time, I cannot put you on hold while I look up that information. None of that stuff is happening, right? And.

Dylan Silver (09:13)
Yeah.

Sunder Somasundaram (09:18)
It personalizes the conversation depending on who’s asking and based on the questions, it will qualify them. Here’s what it gets really good, right? It can answer all those questions and if it senses that, you know what? Right now on the phone with Dylan, he’s asking a lot of the buying questions. It’ll actually transfer you right then to a live person with all of that information, you know, to the broker, for example, who can then take that call over and then only attend to the ones that are super qualified.

Think about it, right? I mean, now you can literally handle hundreds of customers in a day and you can really do that as a one-person team, which was not possible before.

Dylan Silver (10:32)
have some granular questions. Maybe don’t give away all the gold, but give away some nuggets here. So let’s say I’m an agent and I’ve been in business for, let’s call it three years. I’ve done well. I’ve scaled. First year I did 12 deals. Second deal I did.

Sunder Somasundaram (10:37)
Sure.

Dylan Silver (10:46)
Second year I did closer to 23rd year. I’m trying to get to you know, 30 deals and I’m thinking well What what else do I need to do to put myself, you know to the next point? I’m full-time in real estate. This is you know, all my eggs, know, I don’t have a backup plan So what else is it that I need to do and I’m thinking well, you know cost-benefit analysis I can put more marketing out there. I can put more paid ads. I’ve heard about this AI agents thing, but you know, I’m basically a solopreneur I think I can handle it all myself. Is it valuable for someone like that?

Sunder Somasundaram (11:15)
That’s exactly kind of the use case because now you are, you’ve managed to scale the business up to where you are, especially with these sort of multiple properties. So 100%, you can use AI agents to basically welcome visitors to your website and actually provide them that concierge service throughout your properties and answer any questions that, ⁓ you know, your ⁓ prospects may have.

That’s that’s one. Two, now you can automatically qualify them and if they are a good fit, actually send them the most relevant information based on the questions they asked and the information that they asked. Three, I mean, and this is a big pain point that we have seen. Sometimes people come in, put their information and somebody doesn’t get back to them for like four days. Right. All of that is now automated. It’s a personalized response that goes out to that person within like the first 10 minutes. Right. And it also consults the

Dylan Silver (11:58)
Back to them. Yeah.

Sunder Somasundaram (12:10)
dynamically and proposes times for a deeper consultation or any sort of ⁓ meetings or things like that. On the other side, you can also leverage AI agents to, for example, do cold calling. You can actually upload a list of your contacts and then based on their ⁓ persona, based on their profile, for example, information that it can find on LinkedIn, it will actually create a pitch and basically call them. Or nobody is interested in

just opening up a generic email these days, you can send each one of them a personalized video email. So when they click that email, they actually see you, but it’s not really you. It’s your avatar that’s talking to them, but it’s very real, right? It’s amazing. look, I think everybody says, you know what? I don’t want to talk to an AI agent, but it’s amazing. Once they see it, they’re like, wow, this is way better because it’s actually personalized and

Dylan Silver (12:56)
personalize about their business.

Right.

Sunder Somasundaram (13:09)
99 % of the cases, people care about their pain point and how you’re going to solve for that and how your ⁓ properties can solve their needs. That’s what they care about mostly.

Dylan Silver (13:23)
want to play devil’s advocate for a second here. So bear with me here, because I’m a big supporter of it. But I want to voice maybe some of the concerns that people may have when they’re thinking about this kind of thing. So for instance, with the voice, mean, sometimes we get calls and it doesn’t sound like.

in line with what it is that we’re saying, we may be giving a response and the other line it may not understand. Is that kind of an inferior type of AI model that other people are using or has it evolved over time to where right now where we’re at with voice technology that AI voice agents can truly chat with people?

Sunder Somasundaram (14:00)
Yeah, so I think we’re…

at the point now where AI voice agents can truly actually provide information and chat with people in almost near real time, all right, for the most part. Where we have seen that work really well is when somebody calls in and the AI responds and it works amazing when it has to look up information like I mentioned before, or if it has to look up a schedule, for example, right? Those are all dynamic pieces of information where it can actually set the appointment for you, it can look up information for you.

In terms of outbound calling to it’s actually proven out to be a great assistant to call give them an intro find it You know pitch your pitch your property and then set up an appointment right if need be right so Look if you are waiting for that perfect model to come along you’re gonna be waiting forever But if you’re if you leverage it right now You can use these learnings and then as the models get better and better You’re gonna see that at some point that you know you can just scale thousands

Dylan Silver (14:35)
Yeah.

Sunder Somasundaram (15:02)
thousands of these agents and they’re doing way better than anybody that’s that would be doing outbound calling for you. Exactly, exactly 24 seven.

Dylan Silver (15:07)
They don’t need breaks, right?

I want to pivot a little bit here and ask you about what I would call is kind of like the expected time frame that you need to, I would say, work with ⁓ an AI agent or any kind of potential lead source in order to see results. I think sometimes people are like, hey, I’m…

just bought this new service or AI agent and I’m expecting results in like a week, two weeks, three weeks. But in my head and having done ⁓ real estate in general from a wholesale perspective and then as a newly licensed agent, I generally know that very rarely do people call you on the phone and like, hey, I’m selling my house today. I want the money in my pocket in 30 days. And so even if that was the perfect case scenario, which it is not, I still think you have to have some reasonable expectations as far as how

long you need to be working with a potential lead source to see, you know, of fruits of your labor. What’s your perspective on that? How long do people really need to be testing something out like, you know, a market better in order for them to see results?

Sunder Somasundaram (16:54)
Yeah, so in most cases we’re seeing results in a matter of weeks. Look, everything in real estate, the one comes down to touches, right? So you send them one notification, like 90 % of the people, that’s what they’re doing out there.

They’re not going to remember Dylan from Brian from somebody else, right? But if you give them multiple touches, let’s say that you leave them a voicemail that’s automated again. I mean, and some of these voicemails are exactly human like, right? So you left them a voicemail. Now they get a video email from you, right? Three days later, they see a personal message on like, for example, maybe LinkedIn or maybe a different, you know, social platform. Right. Now they’re registered across four different channels. And guess what? When they’re thinking of

Thanks

selling their property or buying a property, they’re going to think of Dylan first because you’re constantly on top of their mind. So anytime some transaction comes along, that’s basically how it works. The more touches you have with the prospect, the better your chances. And what AI agents enable you to do is exactly that. They allow you to scale these touches multiple times so that their first thing that comes to mind is Dylan. So we see results in a matter of weeks. I can even tell you, I mean, we’ve had one customer, I’ll tell you the age

What the agent does is it wakes up every morning, it scans your mailbox and anything that you’ve not responded to in the last 24 hours, it will find the information about the property or asset and then put that into the email and draft it for you. You just wake up, hit send, send, send. That’s it, right? So, I mean, this has just changed the game for this person because sometimes they actually were hiring people to just respond to this. They were like, no, I don’t even need to because this is amazing.

Dylan Silver (18:25)
Click.

Sunder Somasundaram (18:38)
spending now 90 % of the time actually doing the real prospecting versus just responding to busy work.

Dylan Silver (18:44)
No one has a crystal ball here, Sunder, but I’m curious to get your perspective on maybe the next six months, nine months. I think any further out than that, have no idea what it will look like. What maybe do you see, ⁓ again, without giving away all the gold, what maybe do you see some possible innovations that might be coming down the pike in the AI space?

Sunder Somasundaram (19:08)
I think we’re going to definitely see a lot of innovation happening in video.

And I think combining your sort of lifelike avatars with like, for example, property videos with like, think about it, right? Where somebody can imagine exactly how they’re gonna fit into a community or they’re gonna fit into a property, right? Think about an actual personalized video and advertisement that you can send. Some of the big guys are able to do this, but they’re making a stock video for the same video for like, know, 5,000 folks.

But now if you’re able to create a…

5,000 unique advertisements for each one of your customers. Now that is something amazing, right? Now you basically already put the thought in their head in terms of how the vision’s gonna play out, right? So I think we’re gonna see a lot of innovation in terms of video. And I think we’re also gonna see a lot of innovation just in terms of how people are gonna find information. And I think the ones that embrace AI and can give the right information to the right prospect at the right time will be leapfrogging

Dylan Silver (20:06)
Yeah.

Sunder Somasundaram (20:14)
and bounds ahead of anybody else that’s just still just only has a website and expect people to go find it on the site.

Dylan Silver (20:20)
That’s right. That’s absolutely right. mean, I can speak for myself and a handful of other people when I say a lot of people, including me, used to say Google it. Well, now you say, know, chat GPT. What does GPT say? So we’re probably on the cusp of maybe another ⁓ change in the jargon, the vernacular here. But Sunder, are coming up on time here. Where can folks go if maybe they’re interested potentially in an AI agent for themselves or if they’re in the greater Dallas area and they’d like to reach out to you?

Sunder Somasundaram (20:49)
Yeah, so you can just go to our website, which is ⁓ marketbetter.ai or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn at talk the number two, S-U-N-D-E-R. So either of those works or you can just email me, Sunder, S-U-N-D-E-R at marketbetter.ai. ⁓

Dylan Silver (21:07)
So, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Sunder Somasundaram (21:09)
Absolutely, Dylan, it’s a pleasure. Thank you.