The Future of Real Estate Advisors: Why AI Will Replace Traditional Brokers with Louis Baker

Louis Baker (00:00)

they’re all coming out of being in a commission
basement is just having clients. So they’re going to have to take people
to Lakers games and know people’s last names and feed dogs just like
everybody else because all the transactions are going to be done through
AI. So

Scott Bursey (01:44) Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast,
powered by Investor Fuel. I’m your host, Scott Bursey And today, pros,
we’re sitting down with Louis Baker of LAMP Portfolio, based out of the
vibrant market of Costa Mesa, California. Louis is a multifaceted
commercial broker.

Who has mastered the art of managing complex asset placements, diverse
client portfolios, and high-stakes property acquisitions across some of
the most competitive markets in the country? Pros, you’re in for a treat
today as we pull back the curtain on high-level commercial brokerage.
Louis welcome to the show.

Louis Baker (02:23)

Thank you, Scott. Good to be here.

Scott Bursey (02:27)

It is just outstanding having you here and help our
listeners get up to speed. Please give us the ninety second highlight
reel of how your career ignited and where you’re pouring your fuel now.

Louis Baker (02:40)

Sure. So ⁓ my background is in more of the financial
services side, ⁓ companies like Roth Capital, which is an investment
banking firm, Mercer Global Advisors, now known as Mercer, and Merrill
Lynch. I also founded a multifamily office out of Montecitos,
California, called the Enidas Group. And through all of that, I
discovered that the ⁓ the advisory tools, the advisory ⁓ resources that
are available for real estate are just not there. So what we have is a
lot of

Transaction type people that are trying to execute transactions in order
to create revenue. And what is needed is advisory conversations about
what’s best to do. And that could be anything from highest and best use
plans, feasibility studies, transferring assets between generations,
holding property, having conversations about optimizing property, but it
wasn’t all just about purchase and sale. So I knew there needed to be

a platform just like you have for your equities and your stocks there’s
platforms that can that can help you to organize and structure those
things and have an a ⁓ asset allocation and so we created ⁓ a platform
to do that to organize and structure ⁓ real estate assets create a
strategy for every single asset create a value for every single asset a
highest and best use plan a budget for that and an after renovated value
and that’s called land portfolio

and taking a lot of the stuff that you learn on the financial services
side and moving it over to the real estate side.

Scott Bursey (04:10)

That is incredible, Louis. Thank you for sharing
that journey with us. It’s always inspiring to hear how focused strategy
leads to such consistent results. And you know what really caught my
attention about you was the way you’ve been able to navigate such
diverse and highly competitive commercial markets so successfully. And
on that note, wondering if you could tell us what was the specific shift
in your approach.

That allowed you to start securing these larger high stakes acts
acquisitions.

Louis Baker (05:33)

it’s very specific. ⁓ when AI came onto the scene, ⁓
to build a platform where you can have all of a client’s assets and then
in every asset all of their documents and then have those assets shared
with professionals multiple. So you can have the whole portfolio shared
with the estate planner, the tax planner, the investment planner, the
insurance planner, his brother and his sister.

whole portfolio then each individual asset shared to different people
and having everyone I think I had budgets that were like in the million
and a half to to three million dollars to build something that could
execute that. And so it was a bottleneck. ⁓ I had created a a a a really
robust Excel spreadsheet that was attached to all of those things that
I’m saying. And I used Evernote as a back end. But I couldn’t have a ton
of clients because to build that

Cost $250,000. So we had a client with 77 assets, 44 cities in 15 states
that we were doing that for. But the cost was you know, it’s $250,000
just to organize and structure the 77 assets. That’s just to get
everything organized. My platform for like a loan broker or like a real
estate agent or is $79 a month. Not to mention that we built the
platform with four vibe coders in about two and a half months.

I mean, I think the real cost might be, you know, maybe a half a
million, but two hundred maybe two hundred thousand dollars real cash.
And we already have a billion one on platform because it’s become cost
effective to have real estate assets ha have exposure to to AI very
quickly. And so that transition has fueled this movement.

Scott Bursey (07:15)

That’s a fantastic perspective. Thank you for
sharing that. And Louis, curious to know, what do you view as the
primary strength of the current LAMP portfolio model that separates you
from other brokers in the Costa Mesa area?

Louis Baker (07:33)

So yeah, ⁓ I mean, ⁓ it’s a couple things. first
off, we’re the platform’s finished, so we’re not in beta mode, we’re not
trying, ⁓ and we’ve had plenty of time to look at what’s working. And so
what we’ve discovered is finance is the fastest onboard potential. So
when ⁓ a portfolio of let’s say 12 properties and the person wants to
either refinance or pull debt out.

We have discovered that they are very willing to go onto a platform and
put all their assets in and let us review them to try to deliver cash.
And because we can deliver cash very quickly, it puts us in a highly
competitive advantage. And in the like coastal, you know, Newport Beach,
Laguna Beach, these coastal high-end markets, ⁓ we’re going after the
classes to get the masses. So our first clients that we’re going after
often have 50 properties, 30 properties for finance. So what happens is
that leads to a lot of other business outside of the original request of
finance.

And because our platform is completed, they share their portfolio with
their advisors, which then we follow up with that lead to other people
saying, Well, hey, I also want this. So what’s happening is we’re seeing
a a ⁓ mass onboard of real estate assets right now, which is putting us
ahead of our competitors who are having more linear conversations. Also,
we are congrating commission-based people to clients. So

Just like in 1982, there was a stock broker and that guy’s gone. Now
they’re all financial advisors. Well, all the brokers are going to be
gone. You’re going to be a real estate advisor and you’re going to have
clients. So what happens when you call for finance? You end up becoming
a client of ours because you’re on our platform with all your assets,
all the documents and everything like that. So this is our strategic
advantage. It’s working and we’re moving very quickly.

Scott Bursey (09:17)

That makes total sense. Thank you for sharing. And
Louis, we’d love to hear what is the one area of the commercial market
where you feel there is a significant friction point and how are you
adapting to it?

Louis Baker (10:06)

I think, you know, for what I’ve discovered and and
and I mean, this is probably a broader question than the platform, it’s
more just about me personally. it really comes down to finance on on
commercial deals. I mean, there’s some high net worth families that are
going all cash for cash flow, and there’s some people that are buying in
A markets because they want capital appreciation of land. ⁓ but on the
traditional people that are putting together syndicated deals to like
developers and stuff like that, it really comes down to finance.
Obviously, we know rates are higher.

land is more expensive. So ⁓ again, not to like go back to it, but if
you’re a private hard money lender and you lend against an asset that
you want anyway, and you’re at 70 LTV, that gives you enough discount
for all of a sudden your deals to start penciling. So it’s the the
friction is there’s nothing to buy. And I think BlackRock getting
however many billions they get every month that they have to deploy
because money flows, they’re buying everything above market because they
have to, because our 401k.

It is giving them so the the money the the real estate values are just
it’s funny money and and it’s not going down because the there’s just so
much cash going into these assets. But if you’re on the lending side at
a discount, like I’m gonna give this guy 60 LTV or 55 or 70 LTV, I’m
gonna get 11% and all my interest for a year because the guy, well,
okay, there’s a partnership at least with that client. If for some
reason he’s hurt, I can say, Hey, why don’t we go into a partnership
whether then you pay me back?

Let’s build this asset. So what our platform develops is a lot of that
because we’re talking about finance from even really wealthy people, but
they still want to borrow for whatever reason. And it leads to strategic
conversations. And I think for commercial real estate to move forward
for the average person, not for BlackRock or State Street or but like
just for regular investors, you got to be on the, I think you got to be
on the finance side and you got to pick up or you got to go to markets
that are.

That the land values substantiate what you’re doing.

Scott Bursey (12:03)

I love that transparency. And Louis, thinking about
the horizon, where do you see the biggest untapped opportunity for
investors looking at California commercial assets today?

Louis Baker (12:18)

Yeah, I’m gonna go with the same same answer. I
mean, I’m just sticking with my guns. You gotta get on the finance side
of real estate. ⁓ ’cause you gotta get opportunities. I just think going
out in the middle of nowhere and hoping that that city grows.

I mean, people do it. I think there’s more risk than people think. I
mean, there’s places in the middle middle United States where the value
of the land’s the same as it was 60 years ago. So it you can miss. You
know, now if you got a bunch of billionaire friends and you’re gonna go
make it happen, you can jump on that train. And there’s a couple of
places in Florida that’s happening. But ⁓ on California real estate, I
think you’re best ⁓ becoming a f you know, getting a non traditional,
non, you know, non QM hard money bridge debt.

And getting into deals and looking for opportunities there. I mean,
there’s always a vacant land play in Corona, or there’s always a vacant
land play somewhere where you can re-entitle it for homes, you know,
sell it to Lenar or DR Horton or John Lang. And there’s still some good
stuff out there. ⁓ you know, outdoor industrial storage occasionally
still has a pretty good play, but ⁓ I think for the most part, ⁓ I’m
pretty much convinced at this point. I have a client last year got a
property for three million that he financed.

And we sold it for seven million to a church. And the the the property
owners had no, there’s nothing they could do. I mean, it had
environmental problems. It wasn’t like a punitive, angry type thing. It
literally we we took it off their hands. They weren’t gonna do any work.
We did a bunch of work on it. We got it re-kind of structured, had new
conversations, and it ended up being a really great property for a
church. It’s had tons of parking and and ⁓ we were able to get a good
margin on that. So I think.

Just you have to really search for opportunities in California. They’re
not just like and and there’s a lot of smart people going after the same
deal. So ⁓ being on the finance side is probably the best play.

Scott Bursey (14:08)

Well, thank you for expanding on that. And Louis,
where do you see LAMP portfolio in the next, let’s say, twelve to twenty
four months?

Louis Baker (14:18)

Yeah. So like I said, we’ve had about a billion one
on platform in the ⁓ in three months. ⁓ I’d like to have two at least
200 ⁓ loan advisors on platform using it. So when someone calls, the
first thing you say is go on platform, put all your real estate assets
on, put all your documents, your appraisals, your title report, your
insurance documents, your loan docs. And so that happens pretty quickly.
So we’d like to see that happen. Like to have about 20 ⁓ private
clients, which are high net worth people with large portfolios of real
estate.

And I’d like to see LAMP Portfolio start to become a bigger conversation
where what I was telling you earlier, Scott, when we were chatting was
originally we said LAMP Portfolio is a is a portfolio optimization tool.
So we go from here’s your real estate assets and here’s the strategy,
buy, hold, sell, renovate, improve, finance for every asset. And then
here’s the value and here’s what you can do, and here’s the budget, and
here’s the after renovated value. What we discovered in our learning was
that people love sharing it.

So we’re creating a sharing culture around real estate. So, yes, those
two KPIs of advisors using platform, high net worth clients with large
portfolios optimizing, but now I would like to see thousands of people
sharing their portfolios. And so we’re going to go from to consumer,
it’s free to the client. the advisors pay to build a CRM with their
clients, but it’s free for clients to use. So I would like to see that
piece of the that part of the market open up and have advisors.

Be onboarding clients and clients going on directly and sharing their
portfolios with their financial advisors and their CPAs and people like
that and their brothers and sisters. We also have a wish list. So if
someone doesn’t own any properties, you can log in, you can create an
account. It’s lampit.ai, and you can just go down, like create account,
go down to your wish list at a property and then share it with whoever
you want to say, hey, let’s someday buy this.

Scott Bursey (16:50)

And Louis, thank you for sharing that. That was an
excellent breakdown. And interested to understand what external market
threat is currently keeping you up at night, let’s say, and how are you
hedging against it?

Louis Baker (17:06)

Well, it’s very similar to like ⁓ a financial
advisor. So when you have a bunch of clients, well, what could happen?
Who could take these clients from me? It’s a bit more challenging
because our product is very sticky. So once a client has all their
assets on, their tax returns, all their stuff, it’s all hundred percent
c confidential. We’re on Amazon web servers. So if Amazon gets hacked,
we get hacked. But and they’ve shared it with their brother and their
people. They’re not so far we have zero people that have deleted it.
However, our competitors actually excel.

So currently, how people manage portfolios is they have an Excel
document with their schedule of real estate, and then they have a Google
Drive. Well, we have the Google Drive and Excel combined online with AI
talking to it. So other people can do that. And ⁓ and that might be
something that they’re curious about doing. ⁓ but I think we’re our
first to market mover and the clients that we already have, we’re
feeling pretty, pretty good about that. ⁓ we would like to have an
institutional client, someone with 500, a thousand ⁓

brokers that are all using it. I think that will create a little bit
bigger moat. We’re talking to Stanford Inst ⁓ Stanford Research
Institute about ⁓ creating a moat around our IP. So that’s coming up in
the next couple of weeks. And so once we have that moat, we’ll feel a
little bit even better just about competitors coming into the
marketplace. But overall, I think there’s gonna be I’m not stopping
financial advisors. Like when there was stock brokers, now there’s
financial advisors, there’s a lot of different companies.

doing. And I’m in a transition between this is how many people are going
to leave, are going to leave their profession. So loan brokers, loan
advisors, real estate agents, real estate advisors. Loan brokers,
finance advisors.

So they’re all coming out of being in a commission basement is just
having clients. So they’re going to have to take people to Lakers games
and know people’s last names and feed dogs just like everybody else
because all the transactions are going to be done through AI. So

I’m not i under any kind of illusion there’s not gonna be hundreds of
companies like ours.

Scott Bursey (19:03)

And that is powerful. Thank you for that, Louis.
And we’re keen to learn if you had to rebuild your portfolio from
scratch in today’s market, what is the first asset class you’d go after?

Louis Baker (19:19)

You know, it’s funny, pre prior to ⁓ to COVID, I
would just always say multifamily, you know. But it’s funny, you know
what was open during COVID was like Starbucks and like grocery stores
and like you know, what else was open during COVID? I mean walk-in
medical clinics. So I’m I mean, there you go. I mean, you know, having a
triple net on a Starbucks is pretty good. ⁓ a grocery store seems like
they’re gonna be paying their rent no matter what. I mean, I still think
multifamilies

like right behind these or if not on target with them. But ⁓ yeah, I
mean whatever was open during COVID is what the reality is at the at the
at the end of the like, you know, catastrophic situation. so I think
that’s pretty good. I mean, obviously vacant land leases are are really
good if you if you’ve got ⁓ if you’re in a good area. ⁓ I’ve got a lot
of friends that have just been clipping coupons for 20, 30 years on
like, you know, they’ve got like a

country club on it or a golf course, land lease, just different things
that they’re gonna pay for a long time. But you know, t jumping in the
easiest thing to jump into definitely is multifamily because you can
still get a cash flow based loan. ⁓ not so much in California, but
there’s a lot of places around the United States where you can still get
a a good amount of financing based on the income of the property. So
it’s a little hard to jump in if you don’t have a lot of money to a
triple net Starbucks lease. So

You know, so I still think I still I I still think multifamily is the
best starting. Get four units, go live in one, you know, and get you
know, that’s probably still the best way to go.

Scott Bursey (20:57)

That’s a sharp take. And Louis, if you could give
us the play-by-play, and what does your professional network look like
right now?

Louis Baker (21:08)

Well, like I said, we started with the classes to
get the masses. So ⁓ I don’t like to name drop, but ⁓ you know, one of
my clients, 77 assets, 44 cities, 15 states, over a billion. Another
client this morning we talked to is onboarding a half a billion to sell.
Another client I talked to this morning is gonna have about seven or
eight hundred million just to organize and structure. So that’s why I
said when I talk about private client, really 20 clients.

Now my loan brokers, I’ve got loan brokers that are working on a $240
million deal. We have a deal right now in New York. It’s on Fifth
Street. I don’t wanna give too much information away, but it was ⁓ $105
million loan that isn’t gonna go. So now we’re trying to sell it for
$116. So we’re so there’s some like very anchor ⁓ position A type
properties that we deal with. we’re gonna move down to everything, ⁓ but
we’re starting with some

named players in Newport Beach Market, Chrono Mar, families that have
been here for a long time that people know, ⁓ and onboarding them and
multi-generational too, our pr our company’s called Legacy Asset
Management Platform. It comes from a Bible verse, Thy Wears a LAMP Unto
My Feet. ⁓ and it’s about turning the light on your portfolio. And so we
we deal with high network families and we talk to their kids and their
kids use our platform to manage their properties forever.

Because the people are in the dark. So, like there’s a husband and a
wife, and the husband’s got 30 properties or 20. And if he gets hit by a
bus, right now these are on file cabinets and Google Docs, and it’s a
mess. But if he gets hit by a bus with LAMP portfolio, his wife goes on,
there’s all the assets, there’s all the documents, there’s all the
advisors, it’s right there. And she can easily take over, call us, and
we come in and say, Yeah, here’s everything. And the values are all
there, and all the loan docs and all the loans.

So legacy is important to us and we’re starting with legacy families.
And so we have a lot of really high net worth legacy families that are
ushering our product forward so that it’s very efficient and very
effective because they’re high maintenance and they want it a very
specific way. And then we know we can take that tool and offer it to the
masses for a huge value proposition.

Scott Bursey (23:18)

Thank you for that, Louis. And given your
experience navigating high-stakes deals, what is the most important
piece of advice you could give to a a serious investor looking to close
their next major acquisition in this market?

Louis Baker (23:37)

I say just don’t talk to people. It’s details and
documents. That’s what I built. Like people call me, like, hey, I’m
like, don’t talk to me. Go on this platform, put all your documents in.
I’ll AI it and I’ll tell you tomorrow how much money I’ll give you. Or
hey, you want, tell me exactly what you want to buy specifically. And
let’s get that in. Let’s go and let’s go talk to I I can share with 30
brokers exactly where you’re looking for. Let’s talk to less people,
know exactly what you want.

Make sure you have all its details and documents. That’s what closes
deals. That’s what gets stuff done. Everything else, people are in the
way. Blah, blah, blah. It’s not it now. It’s three months. It’s like,
no, I need these documents. I need this contract. I’m gonna record it on
your title. I’ve got three months to execute. Get yourself in a
situation where you can legally win. Don’t talk too much. You’re just
gonna get stuck and do nothing.

Scott Bursey (24:29)

Details and documents. Understood. Thank you for
sharing that. And Louis, you have shared a lot of really good advice
today. But is there any additional words of wisdom that you could leave
with the pros?

Louis Baker (24:43)

Yeah, I mean, well, I’m I’m on I’m on my little
soapbox over here, as you could tell. So I’m gonna I’m gonna say turn
the light on your portfolio. So if you don’t have an AI driven platform
for real estate assets with your clients, then ⁓ you know, light up your
portfolio, turn the light on your portfolio, go on to lampit.ai, onboard
your properties, take a look, ch check it out, like pop around, see how
it works, give me a call. I mean, I’m that’s the that’s the that’s what
I’m doing. So that’s what I think everybody should do.

Scott Bursey (25:12)

Thank you for that, Louis. And for 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?

Louis Baker (25:22)

Yeah, so ⁓ [email protected] is my email. So
I’m best with email. To be honest, if we move forward, it’s probably
gonna be on the phone because I’m a texter and I’ve masterfully learned
how to run everything on my phone. But ⁓ start on the email,
[email protected] Just say hi and I’ll get back to you.

Scott Bursey (25:42)

Louis, this has been an absolute master class.
Thank you for joining us here today.

Louis Baker (25:47)

Yeah, thank you, Scott. I appreciate it.

Scott Bursey (25:50)

And to our listeners, we appreciate you. If you
receive value from today’s episode, please subscribe. We’ll be filling
your tanks with a lineup of elite guest, just like Louis Baker, 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
on the next episode, everyone.