Revolutionizing Real Estate with AI

Quentin Edmonds (01:31)
everyone, welcome to the Investor Field podcast. I am your host, Q Edmonds. And listen, I am joined today by someone I know you want to take value from. And I say it all the time, and it’s true each time, right? I know you’re to get value from this person. This is my guest today, Mr. Dalton Brewer. How are you doing today,

Dalton Brewer (01:51)
I’m doing great, Quinton. Thank you for having me today.

Quentin Edmonds (01:54)
Absolutely, absolutely and everyone he’s making moves in leveraging AI Right, so I cannot wait for you to get to get his perspective and his lens on what he’s doing I know you’re gonna find a great value because we all know AI is not going anywhere if anything it is ramping up and it’s expanding and so what other way than to bring somebody who was in the field who knows how to use it and so I’m just so excited for you guys to get to know

Mr. Dalton’s perspective today. So Mr. Brewer, if you don’t mind, man, I want to dive in. I would love for you to tell the people that’s not familiar with you. What is your main focus these days? And if you don’t mind telling what market you’re operating out of.

Dalton Brewer (02:37)
Yeah. So just a little quick background and it’ll, it’ll answer a lot of those questions. So Dalton Brewer based out of Kansas city on the Missouri side, actually. So we’re the chiefs and the Royals and all the good things about Kansas city are probably get some flack for that one. But I’ve been in the real estate industry for 10 plus years. I’ve been a broker all of that time. I’ve done, you know, several residential commercial multifamily deals, working with investors.

I’m an investor myself, we own doors, so we own short-term rentals, long-term rentals, and we actually own sober living homes as well. But the last few years I’ve been working in technology side of things and the last nine months been kind of working on a tool that we’re going to be talking about today in SetWave. But the tool is kind of designed as from the investor side.

We created this tool because I messed up, right? So that’s how all great things come to life. You know, kind of backstory is, you know, buying a house, a long-term rental in Kansas City. you know, I’m pretty good at knowing what things cost, you know, how, what, how bad things are when it comes to an inspection report and, you know, small bunch of little things, know, leaky pipe, loose toilet, bad outlet, things of that nature.

You know, it’s like, this will cost a couple thousand, you know, whatever we’ll move forward, closing the house, handyman goes over and I get a bill for $10,000. And, know, I’m punching myself in the head because, you know, I got a closing this next week and the extra $8,000 is supposed to go towards that. So, you know, we had to kind of do some things and finagle that situation, but as a one man shop, we just kind of said, all right, Hey, I need to.

Find something. so AI kind of, you know, I’ve been working in technology. So AI has already been something that was a part of my life and said, Hey, why can’t I use it here? And, know, story started is started using AI to help kind of give me cost estimates on. On inspection reports and you know, like anything had a couple of guys that are like, Hey, this is very interesting. Love to take advantage of it. So, you know, that kind of set off a little trigger in my head that

Hey, this is a pretty great tool. should, we should build this. so set off building this, pulled in a partner, to kind of keep me straight. Cause you know, I get a little squirrely sometimes. And

so, you know, built a big long language model to parse the inspection report, find the defects, you know, tie a cost estimate, but then also put a high, medium, low priority of, know, where is this that safety expense wise, for

perspective buyers and or even sellers in this landscape. that’s where Setway was designed. And so now it’s, we’re up and live, you know, been live for a couple months now. And so we’re starting to get some traction, getting a couple of brokerages that are signing up and contracts. And, you know, we’re getting inspectors and buyers starting to use the tool.

Quentin Edmonds (06:13)
Absolutely, absolutely. Now I just want to make sure I got, cause I wrote it down different ways that I’ve heard it. I just want to make sure I got it right. It’s set way. Yes.

Dalton Brewer (06:23)
that wave like you’re surfing.

Quentin Edmonds (06:24)
Set wave. Okay. Got you. That’s the other way. Set wave. Absolutely. Just want to make sure I heard it right. And what I love with quote my extension is one of the things you said is being able to use set wave as a negotiation tool, right? Based on really good data. That way the person has something they know what they’re looking at because of set waves. Something like that’s the opportunity that set wave provides for, you know, that you provide for your clients. Right.

Dalton Brewer (06:28)
Yes, sir.

without a doubt. mean, take me back to that house that we bought, right? Had I had a report that told me it was going to be $10,000, I would have negotiated, right? I’d have asked for a closing cost, asked the seller to fix a couple things, maybe taken some of the numbers off of the total price to kind of give myself a nice one to offset some of the back end costs that I, you know, I didn’t know what was going to happen. you know, that’s, that’s our big thing is, you know, for me, it’s transparency.

you know, to any buyer, hey, here’s what it’s going to cost to fix all these things, because, you know, we get inspection reports. These are quality assessments that say, hey, this is good, bad, or, you know, not operating. And I’m providing you a quantified report. So we’re tying dollars to what’s wrong in the inspection report and give you a separate report that has dollars. And unfortunately, at end of the day, dollars are mean a lot. So it’s kind of kind of a big deal, especially in this market. So.

Quentin Edmonds (07:47)
The dollars make sense. Absolutely dollars make sense. No, absolutely So what I appreciate What I heard you say before and also what I’m out is that of course a specter inspectors do things differently, right and so, know, like Sometimes what well not even sometimes I’m talking about them. That’s focused on you what I like what I’m hearing you saying is that integrity is a big part of what you do and so

And you want to give somebody a tool will not want you have given you are giving somebody a tool to help with negotiating That way things negotiating can be done with integrity And so let me ask you this like what keeps you running smoothly. Is it that integrity is that consistency? What keeps what you do kind of run is moving?

Dalton Brewer (08:32)
Yeah. I mean, consistency is the big thing, you know? So, you know, when I first built this tool, right, I was manually doing it every time, you know, we’re always having to take the inspection report, parse through it myself. Well, now we’ve built it, you know, so now it’s AI does the whole thing. There’s no, there’s no touch by me, you know, we’ve, and it takes less than five minutes to produce that report. Right. So there’s, you know, we’re providing time and value and that, that, you know, to me, I,

Like, you know, we talked about, I’m married with three kids, right? And so time is a very important thing that I try to keep mindful of, you know, time off. So, you know, and I think a lot of other people are in that case. you know, if you had to call five contractors to get estimates on any of these items, that’s going to take, you know, a full day’s worth of work. Plus most of them like to lay eyes on it before they give you an estimate. So then you got to coordinate. It’s a lot more work than.

Hey, here’s a document. Here’s an estimate. Run with this. Negotiate on this and just go. So.

Quentin Edmonds (09:28)
Absolutely, but you mentioned you’ve mentioned before, know if you had set wave It would have saved you some money, right? If you had it with what’s the money though?

Dalton Brewer (09:37)
without a doubt.

Quentin Edmonds (10:12)
And so you’ve already some you’ve used somebody who already face adversity And so I just kind of want to pick your brain a little bit for people that’s listening Like what was your motivation your motivation to pivot right? Like how did you decide to hey listen? I came out I hit this ball

But what was your motivation to pivot and keep going? You know, because we got people out here that, know, listen, everything gets real at times. You know, things go sideways and you got to pivot that. So I want, I want to, want to, I want to help people out, you know, using your mindset, somebody that had to do it, help somebody that’s trying to pivot today.

Dalton Brewer (10:47)
Yeah. Well, unfortunately, I didn’t play basketball, but I pivot a lot. I’ve been forced to not a lot of choices and pivots, but, get, know, you know, I’ll kind of go back and, know, different scenarios than the tool. Right. But Kansas City, we had actually had Airbnb’s here in Kansas City in residential areas and that got banned and that put us in a huge hole. These were homes that were bought to be

Airbnbs. It was, know, we were cash flowing amazingly. mean, better, you know, we have short terminals in Gatlinburg and Asheville, North Carolina, and we were crushing it in Kansas City. But with that band, were, you know, we’re we had 30 days, you know, or something like that to stop business. And so we had to, you know, we ended up selling one, but that’s where we found the sober living.

You know, and then all of sudden now we’re in this business of sober living that kind of blew up out of nowhere. And now we have, you know, eight sober living homes. And so, uh, you know, that pivot at that time, I mean, we were, you know, we did go months losing money and that was, you know, you know, when you have multiple homes losing money and, it makes it very hard at home. makes it hard and every, every scheme of life, uh, and, know,

that that pivot was just you had to kind of fight through a break through that wall of you had to, or, you know, you’re going to go bankrupt. So there is there’s a lot of negativity, you know, but then that changed our mindsets that that you how we viewed what we’re buying next, you know, it’s like, okay, not that we weren’t buying to have multiple, you know, avenues, but, know, hey, for short term rentals, we have this, we have to really think, hey, what is the city? What is the county?

What is all the legislative items that may go into potentially not being able to be a short-term rental? And so that kind of almost put a pause on how we viewed short-term rentals today. So definitely a different pivot than the technology side, but that was a hard one. That definitely served a couple of years of pain.

Quentin Edmonds (12:48)
No, thank you, man. I thank you for sharing. mean, honestly, we have to normalize not just talking about the great moments, but also talking about the journey and the process it takes to get to the great moments. Right. We got to normalize talking about hardships because hardships is kind of what builds us to keep going to get to the times when it’s it’s when it’s less sorry. Right.

Hard never goes away. It’s just sometimes things are hard. They are times it’s harder than the next

Dalton Brewer (13:18)
We, my partners, a couple, one of my partners, she and I, we joke all the time. Anytime something’s going good, we just, we know something bad’s about to happen. So, you know, it’s, always, you know, unfortunately in this business, you kind of got to prepare for the worst. And, you know, I could, if we wanted to talk hardships and pain, I could, I could give you a lot of examples.

Quentin Edmonds (13:38)
But that’s the thing, man, they’re growing pains, right? They’re growing pains. Like there’s, know, and I mean, this may sound a cliche, but I guess I would say it’s mindset. There’s no losses, just lessons. You know, like, you know, it’s just, it’s just a lesson, you know? And that’s, that’s it. And like I said, I know that’s cliche is, know, you know, I’m not trying to undermine anybody circumstance, but what, what doesn’t kill you is going to make you stronger. That’s what they say. Right.

Dalton Brewer (14:01)
It’s all about how you look at it. it’s all about.

Quentin Edmonds (14:04)
And I’m glad to talk I love talking to people about this because again, I want it to be normalized I want you to understand our listen understand. You’re not the only one that hit adversity It doesn’t mean your failure. It doesn’t mean you’re necessarily

Doing everything wrong. It just means this is a space that you can grow in and it’s normalized when you’re doing business

Dalton Brewer (15:06)
And yeah, I can tell you, I’ve done a lot of things right. So only a couple.

Quentin Edmonds (15:10)
Listen I know three three things you did you did perfectly right 11. Yeah

Dalton Brewer (15:15)
Yeah, 11, nine and seven. got three.

If you ask them, they may say something different. So don’t ask them.

Quentin Edmonds (15:21)
I know what you’re talking about man. I know what you’re talking about. So listen, let me ask you this man You’re doing great set wave is a great negotiation tool. You’ll make great pivots in your life You you’re staying in the game. You’re projecting the head. So let me ask you What are you most focused on solving right now? Like what’s the next next scale up? Like what’s your next goal?

Dalton Brewer (15:42)
Yeah. So, I mean, you know, set wave is a, is a child company of, you know, our main company, which is CD technology. So that, you know, that’s all it’s an AI company. So we’re focused on building, you know, tools that, you know, involve lots of research, right? So anything that AI can kind of help solve. you know, one of the big ones, you know, I had, again, it was, this came out of helping a friend as movie scripts. So, you know, there’s thousands of movie scripts that get read a year and, uh,

you know, my buddy works at a studio out in LA and he’s just like, man, I can’t keep up. getting five scripts a day. said, Hey, I built this one for inspections, but I think I can do this for you. And so helped him out. You know, that, that kind of helped him get going. And then it was like, okay, Hey, again, that, that trigger, you know, the trigger moment, this is a way cooler than I thought it was that, you know, this is a problem across the board. And so, you know, we’re having.

you know, now we’re in talks with studios about, you know, bring in AI into their business. you know, basically, you know, we assess, provide, you know, type of comparables costs, you know, kind of bring in a little bit more of a financial take to the studio industry, which is that that one’s been super fun because that it, you know, I know nothing about, you know, I can watch a movie, but I don’t know anything about the movie studio.

But we’re also going on the legal side where we’re actually working with a couple of patent lawyers on doing the discovery of patents. So they have to do the search to go look through the United States Postal or Postal of Patents and search for like patents. So we can do that with our AI models. just have, you know, kind of finding all these things. And so our focus is really just finding these little niche markets where

Quentin Edmonds (17:16)
office.

Dalton Brewer (17:29)
There’s, you know, I would say an issue or a need or want potentially that we can solve with AI that’s that’s meaningful and save someone time. So, you know, kind of going back to everything is everything’s about saving time so we can bring time to value to people. That’s that one. I love that. You know, that means somebody gets to go fishing with their kid, somebody gets to go do stuff. And so that’s that I like hearing about that stuff. So, you know,

We’re, we’re Lake people. love to be at the Lake swimming in the Lake and all that jazz. so anytime I get to do that, that’s not at work. That’s, that’s more time in my pocket. And that’s, know, at the end of day, that’s what all of us strive for, but we don’t always get it. So if I can provide people that kind of time, that that’s what we want. So that that’s kind of what we’re building and striving for at CD technologies.

Quentin Edmonds (18:18)
No, man, so CD, I missed the name, so I’m glad you said it, CD Technologies, So it sound like, man, it’s like y’all got a lot going on. I this is big, man.

Dalton Brewer (18:28)
There’s a lot going on. we’re very busy right now. And we’ve got a lot of things in the, know, irons in the fire right now. And it’s a little bit of a mess. You know, we’re trying to keep getting pulled in different directions. which is fun, you know, but I will say they’re all great. They sound great. None of them are, we’re not making a lot of money off of it right now. So there’s a little…

You know, there’s the pain point for sure there, but we can see the of the light at the end of the tunnel of the direction that we’re kind of putting ourselves in. And we’re happy to at least have just the opportunities we’re getting right now.

Quentin Edmonds (19:02)
Absolutely. listen, I think you’re really going to, this is going to hit you well. When I say this, like either the next move can compound things or it really can create chaos. That’s depending on how you play it. Right.

Dalton Brewer (19:13)
Yep, yep. Well, can… Unfortunately, it’s always chaos.

Quentin Edmonds (19:18)
Right, right, but that’s beauty in chaos, right?

Dalton Brewer (19:21)
There’s beauty and chaos. you know, like you said earlier, those are all they’re learning moments, right? So we, you know, we’ve, we’ve had a lot of chaos moments and it’s, know, we, you know, we take it, we learn from it. We, and we build, you know, we, you know, was set wave, especially we’ve had plenty of chaos moments and thankfully we, know, instead of, you know, kind of crying about it, we, took it, we ran with it and we said, okay, Hey, how do we make it better? Um, and so that, that’s,

Quentin Edmonds (19:35)
Yeah, yeah.

Dalton Brewer (19:49)
That’s just kind of, know, my partner and I, that’s our mentality is just, it’s just really, yeah, it sucks. Um, you know, um, but, Jocko willing, you know, one of his books, he’s got, you know, he says something like, you know, if something bad happens, he, you he always says good, now we get to learn from it kind of situation. we, that we kind of take everything in that capacity.

Quentin Edmonds (20:11)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So listen if I asked my next question I kind of want to encourage you because I’m gonna tell you what I hear when I hear you talking right when I hear you say You know, there’s a lot of different things going on right? It’s chaotic I’m not making a lot of money, but I want to encourage you because when I think about a sculptor I heard a sculptor say what’s my ex a sculptor question? They said you you look at a rock and like I would like how in the world Did you come up with? Carving that out of the rock

And he was like, the problem is when you look at the rock, all you see is the rock. This was the sculptor’s that you look at the rock. He said, I see a picture and I just had the chisel to stuff away. So the picture comes to focus for everybody else. So when you just see a rock, I’m seeing the picture. I just need to move the other stuff off the way. And I think with SafeWave, I think most of us is just looking at a rock, but I think you guys see the picture and you just got to skip, you got to chip it away. So everybody else see it.

And at that is putting in the work. I mean the sculptor still has a use His you know physical exertion, right? He would see he still has to use the work to bring out the product and that’s what I see what you guys is that you guys are doing the work so that the product comes to focus for everybody else and so I just want to encourage you man keep doing what you’re doing man keep doing what you’re doing

Dalton Brewer (21:29)
thank you for that. we’ll take that.

Quentin Edmonds (21:32)
Absolutely, absolutely. So let me ask you this man when it comes to building relationships and growing your network I know you talked about CD tech like how what’s the biggest difference for you when it comes to Relationships

Dalton Brewer (21:43)
Yeah. So if we can’t do something, we will tell you we cannot do that, you know, or, you know, Hey, this is hard and this is out of our wheelhouse, but I can go learn how to do it. You know, I can, I can do that.

but it’s going to take more time. Whereas you could go somewhere else. So, so building relationships, know, I, you know, I’ve, been fortunate enough. I’ve got a lot of friends that have been very successful, you know, and so I’ve been able to kind of leverage their networks. And, and, and so we, you know, we take advantage of that, but, you know, from my partner and I side, it’s, it’s the trust, you know, we, we, when we say we’re going to do something, we’re going to do it.

Quentin Edmonds (22:18)
Absolutely. Nope. Absolutely. I love it. Again. I love the integrity that you guys have. I love the fact that you are moving out of necessity, out of a need, knowing that what you have is going to help people. It’s just a need that they need. keep repeating me, but this is, they need it. you guys are doing it with integrity. And I love it, man. I love it. I just thank you for being here with us, Dalton.

This is before we wrap, if someone wanted to reach out or connect with you, maybe collaborate with you, maybe, you know, hey, say, SafeWave, how can you help me? What is the best way that they can reach out to you,

Dalton Brewer (22:52)
Yeah. So, you know, X Facebook, LinkedIn, feel free to always reach out to me. Dalton Brewer is the name. but CD technologies, ⁓ there, if you go to our team page, there’s a, there’s a link that’s got, you know, book a meeting with me. So you can always reach out to me. you know, we, all of our products are on our, our CD technologies website. we also post ideas. So there’s ideas that.

I’ve come up with that I’m not going to do, but I love them and I want people to know about them. And so we share those as well on our site. So any of those will work. You can always message me. I’m happy to always hop on calls and have chats.

Quentin Edmonds (23:32)
Absolutely. I love it, man. I love it, man. Well, listen, I appreciate your time, Mr. Dalton. I appreciate your perspective. I appreciate your story. I appreciate your integrity. We need more people in this space that’s doing it the exact way you’re doing it,

Dalton Brewer (23:44)
Well, thank you, Quentin. Thank you for having me on this. So this was, this was fun.

Quentin Edmonds (23:49)
Absolutely, I appreciate you sir. Well listen those that’s tuning in if you got value from this Please make sure you are subscribed You do not want to miss out on conversations just like that. We had today with mr Dalton Brewer Listen, we have a lot of good stuff coming up and you want to state make sure that you’re connected So thank you again, mr Brewer for the way that you’re building your business for the service that you are providing We really really appreciate you being with us today

Dalton Brewer (24:15)
Yeah, thank you, man.

Quentin Edmonds (24:16)
Alright, no problem for everybody else. We’ll see you on the next episode. Have a great one