How to Use AI in Real Estate Investing
AI is changing how commercial real estate investors find, analyze, and manage deals, but which tools are actually worth using?
In this video, I break down how AI is being used in real estate today, from market research and underwriting to marketing, leasing, and property management. I'll walk through the tools available, where they work best, and where they fall short.
I'll also show you how I'm using AI in my own real estate business, with real examples from my day-to-day workflow, and share a few practical ways you can start using it on your next deal.
Key Takeaways:
Use AI to reclaim time from repetitive administrative work so you can focus on higher-value activities like relationships and finding deals.
Tyler described four levels of AI use: chatting with AI, connecting it to existing tools, assigning recurring tasks, and building custom tools.
Good applications include organizing email and drafting replies, summarizing site visits and meetings, tracking deadlines, researching market and zoning information, and creating content.
Use AI to inform—not replace—underwriting and judgment. It can help gather data and pressure-test assumptions, but its conclusions may be biased or inaccurate.
Verify its work. Check numbers, names, facts, and sources; treat AI output as a draft that needs human review.
Tyler’s operating rules: AI drafts, he approves; AI doesn’t send, sign, or spend on its own; verify important details.
Start with a tedious, recurring task and test an AI workflow on it, while keeping sensitive information out of tools you don’t trust.
About Your Host:
Tyler Cauble, Founder & President of The Cauble Group, is a commercial real estate broker and investor based in East Nashville. He’s the best selling author of Open for Business: The Insider’s Guide to Leasing Commercial Real Estate and has focused his career on serving commercial real estate investors.
Tyler Cauble
This episode of the Commercial Real Estate Investor Podcast is brought to you by my CRE Accelerator Mastermind, where you'll get access to my step-by-step investment blueprint, essentially a library of resources on how to invest in commercial real estate. You'll get connected to a supportive community of other commercial real estate investors that are doing projects just like you. You'll get personalized coaching and feedback from me every step of the way. Go to www.crecentral.com to learn more. Welcome back to the Commercial Real Estate Investor Podcast. We might be having some audio issues right now, so I'm going to give it a couple of seconds, and that probably just Awesome. Good morning, guys. Welcome back to the Commercial Real Estate Investor Podcast. We are live from the Combo Group Studios here in Nashville, Tennessee. We're going to be diving into AI in commercial real estate. How I'm using artificial intelligence in my business. I really feel like this is becoming more and more of a game changer in terms of how we do deals, and it's going to really start to separate the who's going to be successful in this world compared to who's not, because it's just a tool. Like it's not going to completely replace everything that you're doing, but it is a tool that if you're not using, you are going to fall far behind. You don't want to be the guy that's still using a hammer when everybody else is using a nail gun, they're going to do it a lot faster, a lot more efficiently, and probably a lot better. Ooh, it has been a week. I've had corporate management in town for our hotel here in in Nashville. So Salt Ranch, we are budgeting for 2027. Been a lot of fun going through that process. Of course, you know you put together these budgets and forecasts, like as you are under construction and working on things. But now that we have real data from actually having the hotel open and operating, it's a lot more scientific. It feels a lot more real to see how we're going to perform next year and then the steps that we're going to be taking to get it. And that's, you know, it's kind of funny. I mean, that's I've used a lot of AI to make sure that we're getting that properly because the way that AI can dive into the data and parse things out in a way that I, you know, either wouldn't or just don't have the patient patience to is pretty incredible because I can go back and say, hey, I want you to go through every single email that I've had with our hotel management company since 2021. Pull together a timeline of events. You know what we've all said, what was said, when, who said what, and you know that way. You know, as I'm looking at the budget today, I'm saying, okay, well, actually, when you're you put your budget together last year, you said this, so why are we changing to this? That's all stuff that we could have done if I sat down and spent hours and hours reviewing everything. But instead, it can go through and pull all of that information together and just do a big refresher, which is really cool. I'm headed down to Chattanooga tomorrow. We're going to be diving into some more on Peerless Mail, and we've actually got another site that we are looking at out in the area. We'll be touring that as well. So maybe putting something else pretty exciting together out there, which could be a lot of fun. You know, I'm not taking on too many projects. It's a very interesting time in the market. We could talk about how AI is impacting that as well. We are largely focused on the assets that we have, and you know how I am. I'm an opportunist. We will take on a new project if the right one pops up, and I feel like this might be the right one. It's a pretty large, large property, 300,000 square feet, 32 acres. Definitely something worth working on, which is which is cool and a lot of fun, but you know one other thing that I wanted to put out in front of you guys before we dive into today's topic, I want to know what y'all are seeing out there.
Tyler Cauble
You know, we talk about this in the accelerator every you know twice a week. What's going on in the market? What are you seeing? How are your tenants feeling about the economy? Because you know it feels like for the last two years, if you take AI out of the stock market, then we've been in a recession for two years, which is kind of scary to think that one industry has kind of been propping everything else up. It feels a lot like the.com bubble, and if that bursts, what happens? But you know, for the first time in in years, I mean, even since COVID, to be honest with you, we're having to deal with more tenants. You know, I've got over 100 tenants in my portfolio. We're having to deal with more tenants that are either asking to move out early, they're bringing in a new business to take over their lease, they're just shutting their doors down completely, they're selling, and it's not like we've got a ton. It's probably three or four right now, but that's a pretty interesting indicator that we that we try and pay attention to because, look, it's not uncommon. You know, once a year, typically, maybe twice a year, we have tenants that will reach out and they will ask, you know, hey, can we get out of our. East Early, you know, can we sell to this other group? You know, whatever that is, and we're always fine working with them. But it seems like it's starting to speed up a little bit faster right now. So I want to know. I mean, if you're if you're joining me live, let me know in the comments. If you're joining us after the fact, you know, let me know. I guess in the comments below. But you know, what are y'all seeing right now? How are your tenants feeling? How are their businesses doing? Because as landlords, we're really only as good as the business that our tenants are doing. Very, very important. All right, let's dive into today's topic. We're going to talk about how to use AI in real estate investing. It's a very, very important topic today, and as we're getting into this. I want you to first think: What is your most tedious task? What is the thing that you are doing repeatedly every day, multiple times a week, even if it's once a week? What is the most tedious task that you are having to do on a daily basis? And I want you to think about that because as we go through this conversation, you will probably think of ways that you can automate yourself out of that. You know, back when Tim Ferriss wrote the Four Hour Work Week, it was all about how can we leverage VAs, and so VAs became this really big thing of okay, well, I can, you know, hire people in in you know Honduras or the Philippines, you know, from all over the world doesn't matter, and you know they can knock out a lot of the the admin type of work for me. Well, today AI is the new VA. It's substantially cheaper, and there are a lot of administrative tasks. I'm not an admin guy, you know. And and if you're listening to this, you're probably not either because you're interested in investing in commercial real estate. Most of y'all, you know, everybody that I've talked to, you know, at least you know to start $10,000 a month in passive income, and and build up a a you know commercial real estate portfolio that they can leave a you know legacy behind for their family. Getting caught up in paperwork and admin and emails and stuff like that is is not really that is not conducive for that type of life. So I just want you to think about that as we're going through this. The investor down the street is doing in an hour what takes you a week to do. Sit there and let that sink in for a second. The investor down the street is doing in one hour what is likely taking you a week to do. Now that doesn't necessarily mean everything that you're doing is is taking you a week, and you know everybody else is doing it substantially faster.
Tyler Cauble
Even if it takes you a couple of hours, maybe there's an investor that's doing it in five minutes. There's a lot of my day to day that I have now automated out, thanks to AI, thanks to a lot of the stuff that I'm going to show you today, that has allowed me to go back and focus on what I am best at, what makes me the most money, which is building relationships and finding the next deal. As commercial real estate investors, like again, getting caught up in the administrative day to day, getting caught up in the actual management or running things, getting caught up in all of the conversations or the paperwork, whatever that is, that is not the highest and best use of your time. If you can automate that out and get yourself to a point where you are focused almost exclusively on just underwriting and finding the next deal, that is where you should be. If that investor down the street is automating their business in that way, and you are competing against them, they are going to beat you every time, every single time, because they have an army working for them, and you might still be, you know, on level one of utilizing AI, which I'm going to go through the levels here in a second as well. All right, there's four different levels that I've seen for real estate investors in utilizing artificial intelligence, and it is very important that you start to think through how you can build this out and close that gap. All right, so AI buys you more time; it just does. I mean, the the tasks that it takes off my plate, y'all know, I talk about this all the time. I can't stand email. I'm not a big email guy. I don't like sending emails. I don't like checking emails. I would rather just hop on a phone call, which you know we could have a whole tangential conversation around how I think that's actually going to be more and more of the future of communications and doing business in a world of AI. Um, but more time because I'm not having to sit there and read all of my emails and more follow up, right? That's number two. Those kind of go together. So you know, my my AI is actually connected to my inbox. It will go through, read all of my emails, draft responses for me based on historical information that it's able to grab out of all of the emails that I've ever written, all the conversations I've had with that person that that sent that email, any conversations I've had around that topic that that person sent me an email asking about or inquiring about or whatever. It will draft a response for me for my approval. I'm going to go through the rules that you have to set up around this stuff as well because that is very important. You have to have the right rules, or else you will royally screw all of this up. And I'll walk you through how to set that up as well. The so so more time, more follow up, and the number three, fewer mistakes. Now that's not to say that AI is perfect. It is far from it. I like to tell everybody that AI is like a summer intern from college, they will you know it's it's relatively cheap. They'll work a whole lot. They'll put some really interesting stuff together, but you still have to review and fact check it. Just because AI put it together doesn't mean that it's right. AI can hallucinate. AI can pull data from incorrect sources. You still have to have critical thinking skills, and to be able to review the work that it puts out, edit it, and then you're good to go. There's still a decent amount of like you know. It's look, computers fly airplanes. That doesn't mean that we should just eliminate pilots. There is a reason that the pilots are there. It's for when things start to go wrong. The pilots know exactly how to handle all of that. Okay, if you do not adopt AI, you are going to get left behind, really substantially left behind. I'm not a fan of data centers. I think that there are places that data centers can and should go, and I think there's places that they shouldn't go.
Tyler Cauble
I think that AI. There's some things that AI should replace, and I think that there's some things that AI should not replace. So we could get, you know, again talking about tangential conversations. We could have, you know, a three-day discussion around AI and you know ethics and morality and all of that kind of stuff. But if you do not adopt this tool, you will get left behind. Everybody else will be substantially further ahead than you, and it's just going to make your life a lot harder. So the earlier that you start to adopt this, the more you start to implement it in your business today, and and just start testing it out. I'm not saying like you know you've got to have it on level level 12, you know tomorrow where it's running a business for you, but just start implementing some of the things I'm going to tell you about today to make it take it step by step. How about that? All right. So here are the four levels that I was telling you about that I see. Like this is where I see a lot of investors. Level one: most investors are stuck here. This is chatting with AI. Most investors are stuck at this point. They treat it like an advanced Google, which is great. Like it is better than Google for a lot of things. But this is where most people stop, and I don't know why. Maybe it's just because we're so used to utilizing search engines that that's how we feel like we should be utilizing AI, but you there are several new levels that you can take it to, which is which is really interesting. Level two is plugging it into your tools, right? So I mentioned to you guys earlier that we have my AI plugged into my Gmail. Now you know I get the like we I presented on this at the in person mastermind event here in Nashville a couple weeks ago and by the way we do have that page live if you are interested ever in coming into any of our in person events they're a lot of fun crescentral.com/events the page is live the next two events are already posted would love to see you guys here in Nashville, but you know I got asked at the in-person event like, how do you feel about privacy? Like, are you worried that the AI is going to have something in your email that you wouldn't want anybody to know? Well, first off, there's nothing in my email that I feel worried that it's going to ruin my reputation or something like that. I've always taken the approach that every email I send could be read in a deposition or in a court case one day, and so write it as such. That's how that's how every business person should take professional emails. This is what you should do. Two, I'm pretty sure that these big AI companies have bigger things to do than to worry about, you know my little piddly real estate investment portfolio, right? Those guys you know are buying buildings that are worth more than my entire portfolio. I can't imagine anything that I'm working on would be of value to them. I just don't see it, and I and I feel like for the most of us out there, that's how it is. So I don't really care. I mean, yes, I don't want my privacy violated. Clearly, obviously, but at the same time, there's nothing that I'm giving AI access to that is sensitive. So that's that's one way to look at it. Is like if you feel that this is sensitive information, just don't give AI access to it. My business email, do not care. I need help with that. I would give that access to a human, like a VA to help me with all of that stuff too. So really, at the end of the day, what's the difference? So level two is plugging it into your own tools, like my Gmail. All right, so I can actually have it, you know, organize my emails, go through and unsubscribe from things for me, start to draft replies, all of that kind of stuff. Okay, and that's you know level two is when you kind of use it once, right?
Tyler Cauble
So maybe it's plugged into your Gmail, and you go and you say, "Hey, draft some emails for me." Level three is where it starts to get really fun. You give it standing jobs, so recurring weekly tasks as if it was an employee on your team, and this is where things get you know really really kind of wild. So every morning, it's I don't know this is interesting, but I basically have like a quote unquote standing meeting with my chief of staff of AI, which is a bot. It's just an AI bot that we've created, and I'll go over that here in a minute. And that AI, you know, chief of staff goes through all of the tasks that all of the other AI bots that we've created, what they have done in the in the last you know 24 hours, what's on the docket for today, what they need from me. It is almost exactly as if I was running a team meeting with my team. It is the same thing, and so we'll have those standing meetings every day. All of those AI bots are giving all the various tasks that they need to do. I have a chief of staff bot that oversees them. I know that sounds crazy, and they go off and operate, and then come back to me whenever they need need my input. I mean, it is it is as if I have a human team that is doing all this stuff for me. Now, level four is where most of y'all will probably never get to this point, or never need to get to this point. But it is really, really interesting that you can do this. But that's build your own tools. You can build your own tools with AI. So most of my website has been completely redone. Like we've worked on a lot of that into new styles of coding, so that the pages are just more beautiful. Whatever, like I have Squarespace for Tyler Cobble.com. It's nothing fancy, and I always hated kind of how it looked. Like it was fine, it looked okay, but it's like a standard template. Well, now I have AI go through every time we write a blog post, it'll generate you know graphs and charts, and it also stylizes the entire blog, so it's just more interesting and entertaining to look at. You could like all of our CRE Central Pro. Like if you are using any of our software suite, that was developed with AI. We built all of the tools to do that. I worked with Claude and with Grok to build the deal analyzer, the deal desk, the cost estimator, the you know buy box tools. All of that stuff was generated in AI, and it took us. It took me probably 120 to 150 hours to pull all of that software together. And now we're like, even though I had AI working on it, like it still took me that much time of going through, making sure I was getting the prompts correct. You know, every time we launch a new update to the software, something might break, so we've got to go back and fix it. So we still have a lot of the shipping issues, just like you would if you had a normal team. But I don't have to understand coding. All I have to understand is, here's what the software currently does. Here's what I need to add so that you know users can do this, or this is the type of experience that I want to add to this software, and we're able to go in and do that. It's pretty outstanding. There's all sorts of tools that you can do. I've got a buddy that's building a commercial property management tool, completely replacing Yardy, Buildium, all of the other things, because you know those companies take they take a lot of money from you. I mean, it's like 20 to $30,000 a year for memberships to these companies, and they charge you a percentage of the fees of the rent that's like collected through them. Right, so if you've got hundreds of 1000s of dollars a month in rent coming through, like we do, and you're paying, you know, a half a percent or whatever Yardi or Buildium or whatever these groups take.
Tyler Cauble
That really starts to add up, and so he started looking at it, going, "Well, we would save, you know, two to $300,000 a year by building our own commercial property management suite, so that's what he's been working on for the last six months. He's probably he's just put his first property on it last week, and they're testing it out. And then they're going to put the second property. They'll continue to test it out, but they'll slowly roll it out to the entire portfolio. Pretty interesting to think about. So for everyday work, this is why I wanted you to think through. Like, what are the those like just mediocre tasks? The tasks that keep coming up that are persistent and annoying. There's just busy work because AI can take over a lot of that for you. If you're looking at your inbox, AI can sort it and draft replies. All you have to do is approve it. If we're talking about site visits, you can record a voice memo. As you are walking through the property, you can then transcribe that that voice memo into into a transcript. Give it to AI. Have it draft a recap of your entire. Site visit, and then you can review it. You can send it to teammates. You can do whatever you want with it. I mean, that's I did that yesterday. I did a site walk with with you know one of our on one of our properties. I recorded everything, transcribed it, and then one of my partners who wasn't there, I put together I put together an email of like, hey, here's everything that we covered, bullet pointed out, and send it to him. I didn't have to sit down and think about it. I just reviewed the email after it put it together and sent it out. And it's far better. Like, look, I'm not a notes taker. I'm just not. I don't want to sit down and write on a notepad as we're walking through a property. I want to be paying attention and be engaged in the conversation because that's just how I retain more. If I start taking notes, my brain shuts off to everything else that's going on, and so by being able to do that, I mean my notes are better than they've ever been. Deadlines AI will watch every single date for you. It'll if you've got it plugged into your email or your calendar, it will actually pull all of that out for you and send you notifications. All you have to do is act on those alerts. You know, think of it like a human assistant, like the best assistant you've ever had, because it has access to all of your information. You know, every the issue that I've always had with hiring, like just getting a an A plus plus personal assistant, and not just for like personal tasks, but like within the business as well. You know, like that like Hollywood level, you know, type of assistant that's just on it. The reason I've never been able to do that is because so much of this stuff is in my head. I don't have the time to sit down and just train them on every single thing. Like I need somebody that can pick it up in like a week or two weeks, and like we're going. That's tough. But for AI, it can come in and it can read my entire Google Drive, my entire Gmail. It sees my calendar. You know, I can have conversations with it if if there's any other questions that are going on, and we're done. Pretty amazing. For meetings, it'll take notes. It can create some action items for you, and it will help you follow through. I mean, all of this can just be so simplified so quickly, and make you more organized. And then the more of this stuff that you have as time goes on, the better. You know, I mean, you just have so much data. I mean, now you know, with with with all of these emails that I've got in my system that I've had back and forth with contractors and management companies, and you know whatever we have a treasure trove of data that we can go back and reference.
Tyler Cauble
That you know either I couldn't have found before because I don't know if you guys have ever tried searching for anything in your Gmail, but geez, it is awful. It is funny that the company that has created the best search engine in the world has like the worst search engine inside their own emails, but two like just having to sift and sort through hundreds, if not 1000s, of emails, it can be painstaking, and AI will do it in minutes. The D risk is pretty big. It is really good at catching some things before it can cost you money. Now, what I will say again is like I treat it like a college level intern. It's not perfect, and it's and it's not going to be the most advanced thing in the world. But it's interesting. So you know, before before it goes, you can fact check. So like, it can look at valuations. It can look at rent models. It can look at offering memorandums. Pull Out inconsistencies, it can go through you know like your local business journals to see like hey what's trading here recently, like you know I just just so that we could update our our K ones for our investors, I had it go out and pull all of the boutique hotels in Nashville that have sold that are similar comps to Salt Ranch, you know I mean, that's something that I would have done myself, and but it would have taken a couple of hours, and it did it in five minutes. And then, so then, I have it just bring in like a reference sheet, right? Like a bibliography of all of its sources, so that I just go through and look directly at the sources instead of having to find the sources. I can just go and verify. You know, it's so much easier to edit than it is to write on a blank page, right? And so that's kind of how AI can help you get going. As far as your documents go, leases, purchase and sale agreements, loan documents, we know that these can be 10s, you know, if not hundreds of pages sometimes. All right, that does not mean that you should upload everything in AI. Not read it. Forget about it, and you know, just let it go. You still need to make sure that you understand how your leases are structured. You need to read them. You need to have a templated purchase and sale agreement that you fully understand backwards and forwards. Same with loan docs. But in the future, when you're going back to reference it, like for example, you know we we had a this is this is a joke. I had a lender try and put us in default because they the we it's a long story, but really we went through and I did a 1031 exchange to do a tenancy. Common with a property that I already owned, so I'm I'm the owner of both of these entities. But when you do a 1031 exchange, you have to own it outright. All right, so we did what's called a tenants in common. Well, entity A owns 99 percent. Entity B owns 1%. It's just how I decided to structure it. So when that lender, like our actual banker, our contact, left the company, but she like signed everything. She set up closing. We did everything like the right way. The next guy that took over didn't have any record of that, so he tried to put us into default of the loan and tried to call our loan. Well, I just dropped our loan into. I mean, you know, there's a couple layers here. I dropped the loan into AI, had it review it, and figure out when they could actually put us into default, so that I didn't have to go and find that. I mean, of course, I could have just gone to the default clause, but while it was doing that, I had to go back and pull all of the emails that I have with the previous contact at that bank to show everything, and I just sent all of that over to him, and he ended up apologizing and saying, "Yeah, you're right. Okay, you know, it took me five minutes to get that situation handled.
Tyler Cauble
That could have been a very stressful thing, but I basically had this, you know, high-powered assistant walk through everything with me. It's really good for pressure testing deals. I wouldn't say that it's good at underwriting. I haven't really seen that yet. But what it is good for is market data. Okay, so we're talking about demographics, traffic counts, things that will help inform your underwriting. I haven't found it to be decent at underwriting yet because here's the thing: AI is only as good as the prompts that you give it, and it will be biased depending on what prompts you give it. So if you say like, "Hey, I'm trying to buy this building. Help me underwrite it, and let's you know, I want to make sure that it's going to be profitable." It's probably going to underwrite it in a way that's going to show that it's profitable for you because that's what you told it you want it to do. So it's very, very, very, very important. I see a lot of investors right now that are out there, you know, saying, "Hey, I'm using AI to underwrite deals," and I'm like, "Holy cow! Call me when you hit default. I will buy your building from you at a very discounted rate because you're going to miss something, you're not going to underwrite it properly. It's going to be biased, and it's not going to take into account everything that you should be when it comes to underwriting. That is why we built out the deal analyzer. That's why we had the spreadsheets that we had, so you could follow the same process over and over and over again, so that you can get familiar with it and you can know it. If you have AI underwrite a deal for you, you have no idea how it came to the conclusion that it did. So just keep that in mind. But things that I do love it for, like zoning. I mean, is this property under a specific plan? Can you go pull that specific plan for me? What is the you know what is the you know like in Nashville we have the Nashville Next Plan. Where does the city see the zoning of this area going in the next five or 10 years, and what are all the recent rezonings all around it that we could use to pull our case together? The amount of information and data that it can pull together that you would probably never have done before in situations like that, just to give you evidence or backup for your cases, outstanding, absolutely outstanding. I mean, to be able to say, "Hey, pull together every rezoning on this street in the last two years." I mean, again, a human could do that. It might take a couple hours. AI will go and do it in five to 10 minutes. That's not something that we necessarily need a human to be doing, right? What a human needs to be doing is to be able to take that data, review it, distill it down, and figure out what's important, and then have a conversation with the council member. Here's you know all of the rezonings that have happened on your corridor. Here's why my property should get rezoned as well. What do you think? Right, none of the other stuff matters. Kind of, kind of wild. The the other thing that I do like to do is is play a little devil's advocate. Now, this is a practice that I love doing with my friends that own their own businesses, as well as you know, with other members in the inner circle or the the Siri accelerator, is play devil's advocate. So, like somebody gets picked, even if you like the business, even if you like the deal, your entire role is to go against it, and AI can do that really well. It's like, hey, here's the deal. Here's everything that I like about it. I want you to play devil's advocate and tell me and make the argument as to why this deal will not succeed. Because sometimes just having that in the front of your mind as you're going into a deal, so that you know what you're what hurdles you're going to have to jump over at some point or may have.
Tyler Cauble
To jump over at some point, at least you won't be surprised if something like that happens. You'll know, like, okay, yeah. I mean, I was kind of expecting that you know rents were going to be 5% lower than than what they were going to be. How are we going to fix that? How are we going to handle it? We've talked about this a little bit, but the research is is outstanding. It can do research in minutes. I mean, we're talking about comps, absorption rates, permits. It will give you incite sources. Be sure to check everything because you know those sources may not necessarily be accurate. It could still come up with some bad data. We have found this to be unbelievably helpful in putting together brokers' opinions of value. So I get reached out to all the time because people don't want to pay for a full appraisal, and you know they want a valuation of their business, so we just did this for for a business like right down the street for a building, and I have an entire database of all of this market data that we've been collecting for the last eight years that we've been in business. So all the transactions that we've done, plus all of the stuff that we've seen, and in combination with that, it will go out and it will find other deals that we might not have found, or other buildings that have sold that it thinks are cops or whatever. It's really, really outstanding. I mean, it's it's made our reports to clients far more sophisticated. It can also watch news in a submarket or on a specific owner. So I have a Grok bot called Overheard. It's just a it's like a standard Grok bot that you can go and download within their like Grok bot marketplace or whatever. I think it's Overheard, but it will you can give it a couple of prompts like it knows like hey if Tyler Cobble gets mentioned if Salt Ranch Hotel gets mentioned if the Wash Nashville gets mentioned if you know whatever it is, it will bring up like, hey Tyler, you got mentioned today in this article, and Conde Nast for Salt Ranch. Here's a link to it. Cool. I go and click on it. I'm like, this is great. Let's share it on social media real quick. It's really really awesome for having stuff like that. Now I know you can have like Google Alerts and all that kind of stuff set up, and and I have in the past, but I don't like emails. They send those send you emails. I'm already in my dashboard utilizing my AI. It's kind of nice to just have that. You can also like have it go through and do some deeper research to like find decision makers behind LLCs or to find you know the best email contact or or whatever. It's been really good for that. I have had it go out there. You know, I mean, I've got a prospecting bot that just goes out and finds businesses that check the criteria for the types of spaces that we're trying to lease, so that you know I don't have to sit down and think through that. It just goes out and finds it for me. It looks through the the business journal to see who's expanding, who's made announcements, who's growing, whatever. It goes through Instagram. It goes through, you know, like association directories. It's pretty amazing how sophisticated it can get. Another thing is broker touches. We talk all the time about how you guys need to be talking to brokers every few weeks. The same broker every few weeks. You can give AI the list of all the brokers. You can even have it go and research for brokers for you. By the way, that would be the best fit for you in your market. All right, I have investors reach out to me all the time because they've gone to Grok and they say, "Hey, I'm looking at selling a property in East Nashville. Who should we call?" And Grok is like, "Obviously, your boy Tyler." All right, pretty cool, but do that for your market. You're trying to find commercial real estate brokers that you should work with.
Tyler Cauble
Have you asked AI like, "Hey, here's all the here's all the types of buildings that we want to buy," or "Here's my current portfolio. Who are the best brokers for us to work with?" You can give you know that this all of this to AI, and it can go through and it can draft text messages for you. It can draft the emails for you. It can draft you know the calendar invites. Whatever you want to do to make sure that you're staying in touch with your brokers consistently, it will do it on repeat. And again, I always set mine up so that AI drafts it and then I approve it. It's very very important that you have those rules and those boundaries for follow up. I have it alert me on hot replies. All right, so like I've got several different inboxes that I'm monitoring, so it will tell me like, hey, by the way, somebody has responded to this inbox about this property that you reached out to. It's pretty nice. We do have the AI personalize every message. Now I don't want it to be like too much like, oh, we decided to reach out to Jim's Barbecue because we saw that you guys just put hot wings on the menu. Like that's you know AI will do that, and it's really weird, and you can definitely tell that it's AI. But it's it's like no, I want it to be personalized to a certain extent. Hey, we're reaching out to y'all at Jim's Barbecue because you know we think a barbecue joint would be great for this location, considering the visibility of the parking and the traffic. Are you guys available? You know, for a tour, stuff like that. You looking to grow? Whatever. There's so many things that it can do. It's pretty cool. We will have it take one YouTube video, so like it will take this video that we're doing right now, and it's going to create. LinkedIn post for us, so we just take I have AI go through and it will take the transcript out of this video, and then it will draft up 2346 LinkedIn posts, depending on how much different you know types of content that we talk about in here. So I guess that's a little meta. You know, we're talking about AI, and it's AI is going to come in and draft an AI post about all of this. Now, before I had it do that, I had it go through and analyze all of my LinkedIn posts from the past that I had actually written, and like what was successful, and so it writes it in that style. So it's it's really really crazy. It like I mean, nine times out of 10, you probably could not tell that I wasn't the one that was actually drafting these posts because I had. I mean, this is the nice thing about creating so much content is that it's very easy to lean on that now and say, "Hey, I used to draft a bunch of LinkedIn posts. Here's you know how they were done. I want you to write in this the same style and my you know writing patterns. Here's here's a transcript from a video that I'm doing live, so that it knows how I talk about things. Pretty interesting too. All right, so here are the tools that I use on the day to day basis. So Grokbot and Claude CoWork. Those are by far the biggest. Grokbot is the the number one right now. I look at Grok as like my daily AI staff. That is, I've got the the chief of staff bot that has all of these other bots below it that all report to chief of staff. That way, I'm not having to manage 30 different bots. I just give chief of staff like what I want done. It will delegate it to a certain bot. It keeps things cleaner, keeps them separated. We can create purpose-built bots so that because like the the thing that you want to be very careful about is kind of cross contamination. I would say of different skill sets within different bots.
Tyler Cauble
Okay, if I want a bot that is only good at you know taking YouTube videos and creating LinkedIn posts out of it, I also probably don't want that one drafting emails because it's going to have a different writing pattern for a LinkedIn post than it is for emails. And if it brings that LinkedIn writing pattern to an email, it might look weird, right? Because I mean, we don't write on LinkedIn the same way that we write emails, and we don't write emails the same way that we talk. So important to think through. So that's why I have them all do one job each. They all make drafts, and then I approve it. So I go through, I review everything, I approve it. I am management, right? They are, you know, all of the workers. They bring it to me, I approve it, and it goes out. Claude CoWork has built a lot of the software that we've done. You do not need a developer. It's really great because I just go through and review it, and we test everything first. What I will say is that there's a lot of things that I will do, like especially I guess in the software space, and there's probably things that y'all will be doing that aren't necessarily software where this could make sense. But I will, you know, create something in Grok, and then I'll actually go over to Claude and I'll say, "Hey, I want you to review and critique this. You know, check it for any factual inaccuracies, whatever." And then it will go and do that for me. So, like, the nice thing is, like, obviously, if you ask Grok to build something and then you ask Grok to fact check it. It might still miss the thing that it originally put in there because it thinks that that's factual. Claude was not involved in that on the front end, so it's that's kind of how I use them to play off of each other, which is really really cool. I still use ChatGPT a little bit. It's basically only for images at this point. It is like nothing else there I have found to be impressive compared to Grok or Claude, I think that that the images, on the other hand, it is outstanding. It beats everything by far, not even close. The so like what I'll do, like if you're going through renovations, take a picture of the front of your building, upload it into ChatGPT, tell it the style that you want, and it'll start to generate for you. It is it is pretty amazing how how well it can do that. And you know I've had it create floor plans and marketing collateral and all sorts of stuff for us, which is you know again really interesting. That stuff used to cost us a lot of money. It used to take more time, so either we just wouldn't do it, or we would do it on rare occasions. Now we can do it on every single one. So really, really neat to be able to do that. Now, here are my three rules for utilizing AI. Very, very, very critical that you get these right. Number one, AI drafts, and I approve. AI does not have the unilateral ability to draft and send without my review and approval. I just don't want it to start, you know, becoming sentient and doing weird things. Okay, I want to make sure that I am approving every single thing that it puts together. Number two, I never let it send anything on my behalf. Sign anything on my behalf or spend money on its own. I just don't. I don't need it to do any of that stuff. They're so like you could very quick like you can see on some of these like you can very quickly fall down a rabbit hole of like getting into trouble if you have AI doing this stuff for you. And then you know verify every number and name, everything that it's doing. Every you know, if if we're writing a LinkedIn post from a transcript, I'm still going to go and read that LinkedIn post to make sure that it's not creating some sort of factual inaccuracy or hallucinating. That happens. It happens. You have to make sure that everything is still accurate and and working for you.
Tyler Cauble
So with that, I'm going to open it up to your questions. Let's dig into what you guys are looking at right now. How are you using AI in your real estate business? I mean, after looking at what we've got you know on the table today, how I'm utilizing it. What are you thinking about doing next in your business if you are not already using it? Let's get to your questions and see what we can do there? All right, Grant is saying great topic to cover. Grant, thanks for being here, my friend. SMG is saying I'm a real estate broker in New York, Connecticut. Now looking to start investing in commercial is definitely the way to go. Eric, Eric, thanks for joining us, man. Commercial is definitely the way to go. Ironwood saying, hey Claude, find me a triple net 12 cap, fully stabilized property in primary market with a credit tenant on a 20 year lease, no deferred maintenance, and a motivated seller. Make no mistakes. That is the best prompt I have ever seen. I'm going to copy that, and we are all going to get rich off of triple net 12 caps. That's awesome, dude. I love that. Jim is saying my low end residential tenants are feeling the slowdown and having to tighten belts, and are talking more about getting assistance. Still looking to get first commercial. Yeah, man. I mean, it's it's a it's an interesting economy out there right now. I got. I just think everybody should be prepared. You know, things are a little weird. Um. So you know, look, hoard cash. That's all that I can say right now. Save up as much cash as you can. Josh is saying I built a CRE database for all different classes, asset classes in the Greater Toronto Area, so I can quickly find an average square foot for each class. Should speed up transactions later. It needed a lot of checks. I love that dude. Think about the database that you can start to build. Hey, AI. Every time a hotel sells in Nashville, I want you to pull all of the information on that hotel and put it into a folder in Google Drive. Well, if you think about it, like over a year, two years, three years, you'll have all of this information on all of these hotels, and instead of it having to go through and search the internet to find the stuff, you've got a whole folder of it that it can very quickly reference and get everything done. I love that. That's a great way of using it, Josh. Jason is saying what platform is the best for commercial real estate and what level of subscription. So I think Grokbot is the best right now. Now, as of like last week, when Elon Musk got crushed in the midterms, he started throttling the speed on Grokbot. So I don't know what the deal is with that. As long as the speed is not throttled on Grokbot, it is by far the best. So as as long as that's good, I would say that's number one. Now I have the the $200 a month subscription to Grokbot, and I have the like overage set to like $200 a month as well. I've only gotten into that overage one time, so that $200 covers a lot for me. I love it. I think the Claude co work. I can't remember exactly which subscription I have there, but it's 100 or 200 bucks a month too, right? And you know, I know people are. There's people out there that are like, "Oh, well, I don't want to be spending $200 a month on AI." It's like, dude, this is replacing, or not? It's for us. It actually isn't replacing any employees. It's creating like new opportunities for us to like things for us to work on that we couldn't have hired somebody or wouldn't have hired somebody for before, so really really interesting. And ChatGPT, I think I just have the $20 a month one. Grant saying I've used Claude to set up tasks that run daily to identify new listings on Craigslist. Claude underwrites each deal based on criteria I have defined in the prompt. It works great. Sends me a summary every morning. That's pretty cool. My challenge has been creating agents. I have not been able to figure that out.
Tyler Cauble
He's saying, Tyler, what do you use to create the agents and bots? I did not think you can do that in Claude? So, Grant, you actually you can do it in Claude. I have the whatever level of Claude that I have, and I'll see if I can pull it up on my phone here real quick and tell you guys, you can create agents on there. What I will say is that as far as creating agents goes, Grok is far better. What I have found, and and guys, by the way, I'm not an expert on AI, y'all. I hope y'all know that. It is just a really good. I mean, look, it's a tool that I've been using in my real estate business. That's that's it. Okay, so what I have found is that Grok is far better with the bots because what Grok does is like when you set these bots up, it will act. They it runs on its own computer, so I can operate it from my phone. I can operate it from my computer, and nothing is like a problem. With Claude, what I've found is that it wants to use your browser. It wants to use your computer. So if my computer is not open and running 24 hours a day, it's not going to run some of these tasks. So let me see on Claude. I've got the Ultra plan. I don't know what that means. I don't know how much that is, but I've got the Ultra plan, and I do have agents in in Claude that are working for us as well. So Rockwell or. thanks for the super chat, man. Appreciate you. So, I would say, you know, like honestly, for bots, I would go with Grok. Go with Grok. Let's see here. All right, Rockweller is saying, how would you approach the CRE with 4 million liquid. If you're just starting, so Rockweller, that's a that's a great question, man. What I would say is, look, if you've got 4 million in liquid that that you are looking to to you know start placing into commercial real estate, I think it all comes down to how much cash flow you want or what your overall goals are okay. Like, what is your goal? If you are looking to just create cash flow, that's a very different approach than like, hey, I actually want to actively get into commercial real estate and start a value add portfolio. Okay, so you know, I think that it just all Depends. It all depends on what your goals are, man. Okay, so let's. I mean, let's break that down. If your goal is to generate as much cash flow and you don't want to be involved, then I would say let's go start buying single tenant net lease deals. All right, with 4 million liquid, you could get let's just say 50% debt on some of these assets. All right, so you're buying $8 million worth of deals. I would go for single tenant net leases. You could get four at $2 million each, and you know we're talking about like a Starbucks level type of tenant here. That's going to have a 10 to 15 year lease. You're not going to have to worry about a damn thing. And you know on that 8 million in total, you know before debt service, you should be bringing in you know 400,000 plus a year, all right. So there you go. I mean, that's a that's a pretty decent amount of cash flow, but again, that's before debt service, so that might get cut in you know slightly less than half. If you went to if you wanted to just paying cash on the single tenant at least deal side, you could buy two tenants or two deals. You know, let's say roughly at five caps, you're netting $200,000 a year out of that 4 million. All right, so roughly 20k a month, and then essentially every you know couple years, you could just take that cash flow and buy more properties if you're you know only using it 100% for investing.
Tyler Cauble
If you wanted to like get in and actively start building up a portfolio, like doing the active owner user type of stuff, then I would say jump in and you know you're going to be spending you know that money on buying like heavy value add types of deals. So Rockwell, what I would say, man, is it kind of comes down to your goals and just what you're, you know, specifically looking to to achieve there, for sure. Let's see, John Jordan is saying, "What do you like to use to record your notes?" Great question, John. I use Plaud, P L A U D. I'm not affiliated with the company. Don't have anything, you know. I probably should probably probably should go get some affiliate links for you guys on the stuff that I use, but I don't really care. P L A U D. It's great. It's a good little note taker. I like it. Oh yeah, Grant saying he uses the same thing. I use Plod and Whisper Flow to record meetings, and then use Claude connectors to integrate all of that information into Claude. Yeah, super easy, straightforward. I love that stuff. Jim saying he just purchased a Plaid device, hoping it it will be helpful once it arrives. Guys, I will say Plaid's pretty outstanding. It's pretty phenomenal. I've got the little like the card, the card one, and the little like I don't know, pill looking one. Whenever I've got both of them, they're great for all sorts of different situations. Jennifer is saying making a short on that zoning piece you just described that is huge. Yeah, oh Jennifer is is great. I mean, it makes it'll make your life so much easier. Grant, I also started using WhisperFlow on all of my computers. Phone. I also have Claude on my devices. Both record all of my Zoom meetings automatically. All of that is connected to Claude. Guys, the the like having Read AI or Otter AI in all of my Zoom meetings is outstanding. So you know, we used to have these meetings with our vendors or our team or whatever, and we would have these conversations around, like, okay, well, who's doing this? You're doing that. Okay, blah blah blah. Well, then I would forget to follow up because I'm not a good people manager. Like, I'm just not. It's not what I want to do. I if if somebody says that they're going to do something, I'm going to assume that they're going to do it because we're all adults, right? Unfortunately, that doesn't happen. And so, having a an AI in there taking notes on the meeting that I can then have, you know, Grok or Claude review, transcribe, bullet point, send out emails, and then follow up on. Outstanding! We've become like the best managers in the world. It's so cool to have that kind of stuff, or at least not maybe not the best managers in the world, but we can follow up, and we know what to follow up on. Jim is saying thanks, Grant. I will get connected to Pod and pull it into my Grok bots to make sure I keep track of ideas and things that are needed. I think it will be helpful for many things, guys. What's pretty cool too is that you know when you're driving, you can like there's a an actual conversational bot that you can have. So sometimes I'll just have it like, hey, what what's what's on the docket for today? What do I need to be aware of? You know, what questions do you have for me? So, like, as I'm driving into the office, I can get a lot of stuff knocked out. Again, it's like having a call with your assistant. Kind of wild. Grant saying WhisperFlow also has a great dictation software that you can put on your phone and computer. It flawlessly transcribes my voice way better than Siri. Also great for emails on my desktop. Looks like we're having some more conversations around that, around WhisperFlow. Jim is saying I've asked my boss to create an entire operating procedures manual and work on it in the background. Guys, if you if you don't know what to do with something, ask it. Ask AI. Hey, here's what I want to accomplish. What's the best way for me to go out and do this?
Tyler Cauble
Super simple and straightforward, and it will come up with several ways. It's it's really really really cool. Jim saying he's also got a Grok bot looking at the planning and zoning meeting minutes from the surrounding counties, so that I can see what is being planned. It also keeps track of upcoming meetings and agendas. I love that one, dude. I haven't even been. I haven't even been doing that. Now I need to do it. Go in and pull the the meeting minutes. Nashville actually posts every single council member meeting on YouTube. So actually, I should have Grok going in and pulling the transcripts from those videos, giving me the bullet points of the biggest, most important things that are coming out of that, and then just keeping tracks on a track on these projects. Never know where you can dive into. Scott saying, as always, thanks for your time, Tyler. This is great information. Absolutely, guys. Hope you guys enjoyed this. This was a little bit different from what we typically do, being more on the operational side of commercial real estate, but I figured this was kind of important for us to talk about. Everybody loved it when we were at the in-person event here in Nashville. If you guys ever want to come to Nashville and hang out with us for a couple of days, we dive into workshops. We dive in. We have guest speakers coming. It's a lot of networking. We typically have like 60 to 75 people in the room, so it's it's big enough for you to meet a lot of people. It's small enough for you to, you know, have all the one-on-one time with me or with you know the the speakers or whomever that you want. It's a lot of fun. That's crecentral.com/events. Appreciate you guys for joining me on this week's office hours. I'll see you next Tuesday, 8:30am. Central Standard Time. This episode of the Commercial Real Estate Investor Podcast is brought to you by my CRE Accelerator Mastermind, where you'll get access to my step-by-step investment blueprint, essentially a library of resources on how to invest in commercial real estate. You'll get connected to a supportive community of other commercial real estate investors that are doing projects just like you? You'll get personalized coaching and feedback from me every step of the way. Go to www.crecentral.com to learn more.
AI is changing how commercial real estate investors find, analyze, and manage deals, but which tools are actually worth using?
In this video, I break down how AI is being used in real estate today, from market research and underwriting to marketing, leasing, and property management. I'll walk through the tools available, where they work best, and where they fall short.
I'll also show you how I'm using AI in my own real estate business, with real examples from my day-to-day workflow, and share a few practical ways you can start using it on your next deal.