Mindset Shifts and AI Integration in Real Estate with Billy Morse

Billy Morse (00:00)
I started putting in AI into our business,
We started sending out our first messages and he’s like, what is this crap? What are you doing? And I’m like, well, that crap just saved us like two hours of time,
So the way I think about it is like, I don’t think it’s going to replace people. It might replace some jobs, but if you’re not using it, you’re basically going to kick everybody’s butt. who is using it? Like, so for example, if I’m using it and my competition isn’t, I’m going to, you know, smack them around.
It’s the biggest force multiplier.
We’re at the time in our lives, it’s the AI is the biggest gold rush.

Dylan Silver (02:06)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is based in Davidson, North Carolina, beautiful area and has short term rentals, high end fix and holds in the short term rental space and a property management company all while holding a W2 job in the high tech world. Please welcome Billy Morse. Billy, welcome to the show.

Billy Morse (02:27)
Thank you, Dylan. Wonderful to be here.

Dylan Silver (02:28)
returning guests on the show. So thank you for coming back on, Billy. I always like to start off at the top in case folks didn’t catch the first episode. How did you get into the real estate space?

Billy Morse (02:38)
Yeah, so I got into real estate because I read Rich Dad Poor Dad in 2000, gosh, I think it was like 2000, whenever my son was born, so nine years ago. And the day after I read it, I bought a house. you might learn through our conversation, I execute. When I make up my mind, I just jump in. So I took all the money that I had, purchased a $70,000 house that didn’t have a HVAC system.

And that was the beginning.

Dylan Silver (03:08)
Now do you come from a family of real estate investors or friends or a network of people who were heavily involved in this or was this something new to you at the time?

Billy Morse (03:17)
completely new to me. So I basically had to replace my DNA. So I come from a mindset where my parents are older, they’re 80, they grew up in a depression. Their parents were very poor. They came over here from Italy. So they basically had no money. They had a scarcity mindset in my entire childhood. I was told that real estate is bad, that buying more than one property,

⁓ It’s gonna cause you to go bankrupt and then you know and then rich people are there’s there’s something wrong with it and you know, it’s just a really Horrible mindset shift that I had to change ⁓

Dylan Silver (03:52)
Now you mentioned getting into this first property and kind of executing as soon as you read that book. Did you know that you were going to grow a big real estate entrepreneurial passion and was that the impetus for it or was this more of a let me dip my feet in and see what this is like?

Billy Morse (04:09)
For sure. Yeah. So there’s been fits and starts. This was definitely let me, you know, with like my analogy I was using at the time back then was like, all right, I’m on the ledge of a sidewalk, right?

And I’m just going to jump off. Right. So that’s not that big. It’s not like I’m jumping off of a skyscraper. So this was like, let me just try this out. And at the time I had to convince my wife, you know, and like her family, like this was like the biggest thing we took all of our money. So it was, let’s, let’s try this out. I knew that real estate was the way after I read rich dad, poor dad, my mind was completely blown to understanding assets, liabilities, and, know, in a way that my

poor dad never had taught me.

Dylan Silver (04:51)
Yeah, you know, I think a lot of people will look at real estate and it’s this huge risk. But I went through this exercise the other day in my own life of writing down the risks of not acting. Right. So it’s risk to invest in real estate, but especially right now, I’m 31 years old, so I’m a millennial. Right. And I think one of the things that we’re seeing now is people and are finding home ownership to be more challenging and more challenging.

Billy Morse (05:02)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (05:16)
home pricing is getting more and more expensive.

Where I grew up in Northern New Jersey, you mentioned Italian ancestry. I grew up in a heavily Italian American neighborhood, by the way. But Northern New Jersey, the price of those homes right now, with everything, in order to qualify, you need like 220 to 240 thousand dollars a year to qualify for those very middle class homes that I grew up around. And so I think, what’s the cost of not getting in, right? And so sometimes people don’t factor that in.

When you made that initial investment, it around the Davidson area or was this another area of the country?

Billy Morse (06:36)
No, it was close to where I lived. I was living in Charlotte at the time, so it was about 30 minutes away. It was in this really cool, I like location, so was in a walkable area to downtown. It was in an area called Belmont, North Carolina.

Dylan Silver (06:51)
You still have that one?

Billy Morse (06:52)
No, I sold it and I made a hundred grand and that’s like what completely changed my life. Like, I mean, just thinking about it, right? Because I remember when I purchased the house and I like put all my money in and then I found out I didn’t have an HVAC system and I thought every house has like air conditioning and I know. And so I was just like beating myself up, man. I was losing sleep and I remember just like thinking about like that $4,000 that it costs to get an HVAC system. I’m like,

man, you know, did I just bankrupt my family? then, but like fast forward two years ago, two years later, I sold it for 170,000. So like all of that just didn’t matter. Right? So was like, to your point, like, you know, what’s the cost of not doing that? Well, to answer your question, it was like $95,000. So that’s huge. And the, one of the things I always say too, and I think other people say it as well as like, all right, when’s the best time to invest in real estate? 20 years ago.

When’s the next best time? It’s today, right? So because in 20 years ago, you’re going to be wishing you had done it.

Dylan Silver (07:54)
I get a lot of, I shouldn’t say a lot, I’ve had quite a few guests from North Carolina, from the Virginia area. And as a New Jersey guy now in Texas, probably somewhat, I would say a fair level of ignorance. I never thought about North Carolina and Virginia outside of like the beaches, right? I’ve heard of Virginia Beach, guess lots of nice coastal areas in North Carolina. But now there’s so much, and there probably was even more than so much opportunity.

Billy Morse (08:13)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (08:21)
for investment out there and it’s a great area for families. I routinely hear this, the Carolinas great area, great area for families.

Billy Morse (08:30)
Sure. Yeah, no, absolutely.

It’s a wonderful place for families and that’s why people are moving here. The cost of living is a bit lower. There are beaches and then people are so nice here. I travel all across the United States and I can go for a walk down the sidewalk and nine out of ten times people smile and say, hey, but you go to any other big city or other areas, man, it’s like you’re staring at your shoes.

Dylan Silver (08:54)
the other place.

I know, you’re preaching to the choir here. I wanna pivot a bit here, Billy, and ask you about growing the business, right? So you’re involved in property management now, short-term rentals, high-end fix and holds, you’re buying out of state. Before we hopped on here, you mentioned a deal in Georgia. What were some of the pivot points from that first deal, some of the crucial moments from that first deal that you did that made close to 100,000 to where you are today? What were some of the pivot points?

Billy Morse (09:02)
Yeah.

I I failed several times. like understanding the business a bit better, being crystal clear. think one of the, there’s been several, I mean, think one of them is being clear, right? Like when I first started out, I was just.

kind of just flailing like buy a house here, I buy a house there, but I didn’t have any sort of method, right? I was just like, okay, I’m just, buying houses, man. I’m doing good, right? But that’s not really a business.

So I was like.

let me, let’s, let’s think about this a little bit more. So I partnered up in 2020 with another investor and we, we, we purchased, we put it in about a million dollars in capital and we purchased 25 houses and we fixed them up. And like I was saying before, we created this business, but it was so dependent on us. Right? So like,

I had never created a business before. like I had learned like, dude, I can’t pedal any faster, man. Like I, you know, my, family needs me. and then my business needs me. And so like, what I found was like, I just create another job. I’m like, dude, I don’t, I don’t need two jobs. So

Dylan Silver (11:06)
Yeah.

Billy Morse (11:06)
That was another precipice. It was like, all right, well something has to change because like I said, I can’t pedal any faster and I’m starting to deteriorate with my family. So I took a, I took another look and was like, all right, so what am I doing here? and I just became very much more crystallized in what I wanted to do. I figured out, know, my why behind it. Cause I always say like, you know, if you know your why, the how is easy. So I figured out what my why was. I crystallized.

my core values and my mission. And then, you know, obviously centered around God and faith. And then I

I have an amazing partner who absolutely believes in me. And like when I leave the door in the morning, you know, she believes in me more than I do. So that in itself just freaking pumps me up. It’s like, dude, I will, I do this brick wall behind me, you know, because of that, right? Like because, you know, that they’re counting on me. So I did that. and then I implemented this entrepreneurial operating system. Gene Wickman,

Dylan Silver (11:52)
Yeah, that’s a miracle,

Billy Morse (12:07)
He created it. He talks about it in traction and in rocket fuel and then implementing that into the business has been just amazing because it’s just given everybody accountability, their own lane and has allowed me to focus on being like the mouth from the South and doing all the talking and being the sales guy, right? It’s like I’m able to load up the boat and now I have like the operations team that can handle, you know, some of these deals that I’m closing.

Dylan Silver (12:35)
I wanna ask you about that. In the tech world, and I talked about this a little before hopping on here, I’m a software engineering student outside of being involved in the real estate space. It seems like right now, more so than maybe ever, and there’s always been, but right now more so than ever, there’s so much overlap between tech and real estate, specifically in AI. I’m in software engineering school and I feel like there’s more utilization use cases for AI in…

real estate, then there isn’t almost anything else. And mass adoption everywhere and all different types from calendar booking tools

AI agents to, you know, that will help you find properties and so on and so forth. As a tech guy yourself, are you seeing more and more people kind of overlap and more people from tech go to real estate and vice versa? Or is it still kind of two totally different sides of the brain?

Billy Morse (13:25)
Mmm, so I mean that’s a really good

and the way I think about it

Gosh, yeah, that’s, that’s super good. ⁓ I do still feel like it’s separate, but I want to give you like kind of analogy. So, when AI was coming out and I had that other partnership, right? He had that, we had that scarcity mindset. Well,

I started putting in AI into our business, right? Because I’m like, man, dude, and this was like, this was January of 2023.

And I remember we started sending out our first messages and he’s like, what is this crap? What are you doing? And I’m like, well, that crap just saved us like two hours of time, right? So that was like one of those little cracks that I saw in our partnership that like, man, this isn’t gonna go well because what’s gonna happen is this guy.

Dylan Silver (13:55)
Yeah.

Billy Morse (14:14)
he’s going to get left behind, right? Because he’s not keeping up with AI. So the way I think about it is like, I don’t think it’s going to replace people. It might replace some jobs, but if you’re not using it, you’re basically going to kick everybody’s butt. who is using it? Like, so for example, if I’m using it and my competition isn’t, I’m going to, you know, smack them around. It’s just like, it’s, it is such

Dylan Silver (14:16)
Yeah. ⁓

That’s exactly what I’m

Billy Morse (14:38)
It’s the biggest force multiplier.

we’re at the time in our lives, it’s the AI is the biggest gold rush. like, you know, talk about transformational, like, you know, you look at like the,

What is the era when it was like the industrial era, right? And then now, now you’re coming in like, you know, the internet. ⁓ but now this is just going to revolutionize it.

So we’re looking at, you know, I want to be in like AI first company too, in real estate. So we’re looking at how do we drive AI innovation at the spear at the front end of our business, right? So that like, then we can, cause I don’t want to

I want to use AI so that like that we can focus that my company can focus on the IQ or the EQ, right? Like the emotional quality. We can focus on things that you know that the AI can’t and then AI can help us with workflows, automation with our finance, with making sure that our owner statements are correct, making sure that like, hey, our pricing is right that we’re, know, yeah, it’s just it’s amazing.

Dylan Silver (15:28)
Highest tasks. Yeah.

Billy Morse (15:50)
⁓ And if you’re not using it, man, you’re get left behind. So we’re constantly researching it.

Dylan Silver (15:53)
One of the things that I’ve seen

that it impacts the most, and I had this conversation yesterday with a guest, if you’re kind of divvying your mental bandwidth between like logistics and more manual computing and then tasks and organization and that type of thing versus problem solving,

It becomes difficult, I’ve noticed this for myself, it becomes difficult to kind of switch back and forth. But then if you can offload a lot of that more, I would say menial tasks, important, but menial, to an assistant, to AI, and all of your energy and your focus is, hey, I gotta problem solve, hey, I gotta be creative. Then it just becomes like a muscle, and it’s like, okay, this is the best pound for pound, dollar for dollar use of my time.

And in my life and for my money’s worth, that’s the beauty of AI. It changes just the way that you approach things. You’re like, I don’t have to, you know, spend hours reviewing a budget because I can literally attach the way that I approach, you know, my cash flow to an AI, have it evaluate my incoming and outgoing expenses. And I can focus on X more important thing.

Billy Morse (17:02)
Absolutely, yeah, I’m totally with you on that. And the EOS system.

You know, it defines that it says, here, you know, Dylan, what’s your unique skill? Right. And it’s like, you want to be in that swim lane, right? It’s like, you’ve got your superpower. I’ve got my superpower. I know what it is. It’s sales, right? It’s like business development. It’s like big picture. It’s vision. Right. And that’s where I need to be focusing all my other time. and then, you know, if I’m in uniquely in that swim lane, like that’s where the business is going to be successful. And if I’m able to,

like kind of, yeah, use AI to supplement that or just say, all right, now I am founder CEO. I have people, systems and processes and places. Now I’m gonna work on the business instead of in the business and delegate that to either AI or your team is the way to do it. Cause then think about how happy you are, right? Cause like, if you’re working on the things that just feel so good and so comfortable, like that’s your superpower, right? Like other stuff.

Dylan Silver (18:01)
the prank.

Billy Morse (18:02)
feels so heavy man like you put me with like in a spreadsheet dude ⁓ man like that’s just the worst thing ever so i’ve built my life and my team and systems around how can i operate my superpower

Dylan Silver (18:15)
Yeah, 100 % man, I feel that exactly. Put me in a spreadsheet and we’ll see how I’m feeling in about half an hour. But Billy, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go if they’d maybe like to reach out to you, if they’re in the Carolina area, or if they’d like to learn a little bit more about your business?

Billy Morse (18:33)
Sure, absolutely. And I didn’t mention this, but we operate from coast to coast. So we’ve got properties from Nantucket to Naples and then from Naples to California. So we’ve got a business model and a system that allows us to operate anywhere across the United States. But to answer your question, we are about two weeks away from our website being.

Launched so in the interim you can find me at LinkedIn at salt and cedar you can also find me on LinkedIn at William Morse you’ll see me as founder and CEO of salt and cedar and Yeah, I’m on Facebook under Billy Morse. You’ll see a picture of me and my family so happy to connect and and grow the portfolio

Dylan Silver (19:14)
Billy, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Billy Morse (19:17)
Yeah, it was wonderful. Thank you, Dylan.