The Norris Group Real Estate Podcast

Real Estate Through Data with Sean O'Toole | Part 3 #947

• The Norris Group, Craig Evans

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In Part 3 of Bruce Norris’ conversation with Sean O’Toole, they explore how autonomous learning and emerging “world models” could reshape artificial intelligence, the true impact of robots on the workforce, and what technologies like 3D-printed housing and blockchain may mean for the future. Sean also explains why AI should be used to amplify human potential — not replace it. 


Sean OToole is CEO & Founder of PropertyRadar, the property data and owner information platform real estate pros have trusted since 2007 to do billions of dollars in deals.

Sean got his start with data in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. After the dot-com bubble, Sean flipped properties for five years, and with data-informed insights, got out right before the housing bubble burst.

Sean launched ForeclosureRadar in early 2007 before anyone had heard of the foreclosure crisis.

In 2013, he relaunched ForeclosureRadar as PropertyRadar, a greatly expanded property data and owner information platform serving a broad audience of real estate professionals and property-centric businesses.

Today, PropertyRadar remains the go-to platform for data-driven real professionals intent on leveraging comprehensive property data and owner information to grow their business directly.



In this episode:

  • How autonomous learning and “world models” could push AI beyond today’s large language models.
  • Why early breakthroughs in AI are already outperforming expectations.
  • The real impact of robots on the workforce — separating hype from reality.
  • Exploring the future of housing through 3D printing and manufactured homes.
  • Sean’s take on Bitcoin, stablecoins, and blockchain technology.
  • Why AI should be seen as a productivity tool, not a replacement for people.


The Norris Group originates and services loans in California and Florida under California DRE License 01219911, Florida Mortgage Lender License 1577, and NMLS License 1623669.  For more information on hard money lending, go www.thenorrisgroup.com and click the Hard Money tab.


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Narrator:

Welcome to The Norris Group real estate podcast, a show committed to bringing you insights from thought leaders shaping the real estate industry. In each episode, we'll dive into conversations with industry experts and local insiders, all aimed at helping you thrive in an ever-changing real estate market. continuing the legacy that Bruce Norris created, sharing valuable knowledge, and empowering you on your real estate journey. Whether you're a seasoned pro or a newcomer, this is your go-to source for insider tips, market trends and success strategies. Here's your host, Craig Evans.

Joey Romero:

Welcome back to the last installment of our interview with Sean O'Toole, CEO and founder of PropertyRadar. Hope you enjoy.

Bruce Norris:

How far are we away from autonomous learning so computers just exceed human abilities and learn beyond that?

Sean O'Toole:

You know, I think that's, that's kind of the world model idea. So we have large language models today. World models are you develop, you know, an AI that learns kind of the way a child does it, goes out and has experiences and uses those and it's self referential learning, right? And, you know, there's many that believe LLMs will never get to AGI or super intelligence, but that World Models could and are self learning. I think there's a lot of work going on around that right now, a lot of money going in and on that it. You can think of it as an expansion on machine learning, which we've been doing for many, many years, which PropertyRadar has been doing, like to figure out, find patterns and data improve and make things better over time. So yeah, that's 100% of thing, and 100% happening, and will continue to happen, and will be the source of whatever probably replaces all apps.

Bruce Norris:

There's a lot of money explosion. If you look at a chart, from 2010, to 2020, is a very gradual process, and then all of a sudden boom. And maybe we solve some things that we didn't solve before, and or there's more, there's a lot more billions of dollars interested in it, but there's a lot of money chasing the end result now, for sure.

Sean O'Toole:

My guess is the folks first working on large language models were astonished by the results. Like I read a lot of the early papers, I kind of understood what they're doing, you know. I didn't expect the results it gave like it was kind of mind blowing. It wasn't like, 'Okay, I understand the tech. I don't understand the result'. It's like a lot better than I would have thought like.

Bruce Norris:

Okay.

Sean O'Toole:

Is to like, like it was, you know, it it was, it was surprising to me, at least maybe others got it from the first minute they started working on it. But my guess is, even the folks that you know did that early work, wrote those papers and the rest were like,'What? Like, How is this even possible?' Like, I think it surprised everybody, honestly. But...

Bruce Norris:

Is that a progression that accelerates?

Sean O'Toole:

Most things do, but most things do until they don't right, like, you know, Gordon Moore, Gordon Moore, Moore's Law Intel, right about the the acceleration of, you know, compute capacity well at some point, finally, Moore's Law hit a wall, right? And we just, we got to five nanometer scale, or whatever in chip design, where they literally are having a hard time getting below that, and they're making improvements another way. But the compute power of a chip, you know, slow down from those early days. And I expect, you know, that'll happen. You know, large language models are going to kind of hit their peak here, at some point where they're probably as good as they they're going to get and then world models, or something else will come along and replace them. You know, that's, that's pretty typical in tech. But for a while, I think it's going to continue to like to blow our minds.

Bruce Norris:

Okay. What part do you think robots play in replacing workers?

Sean O'Toole:

Yeah, I think that one is both under appreciated and overstated, you know. My guess is, you know, we've obviously seen musk and in his humanoid robot. If you haven't watched the Boston Robotics videos on YouTube, that's a must watch. It was like, just crazy. The stuff they get these robots to do. And, you know, robots in like, manufacturing and that thing are just amazing. But there's a lot of things robots can't do, like for sewing garments, like this shirt, robots are really bad at, like, feeling what's happening with fabric as it gets sewn. And just do a terrible job there, right? So, there's things they're good at now, and there's things they're not, and I think that will continue to improve.

Bruce Norris:

Yep.

Sean O'Toole:

You know, like, if I'm a planner now, I'm not super worried, right? Because, okay, humanoid robot could get in there and do all this stuff. But, like, you know, if you've done much of that work, and I think a lot of our viewers, or your viewers have, because they've been out rehabbing houses, and sometimes just have to fix the darn thing themselves. You know, there's a, lot to that. And I think even if we get really capable humanoid robots, I think the other thing that is the overstated part is the power requirements, right? So, if you look at Battery technology and stuff, where that is today, you know these robots that they show off in these great demos and like, okay, you're going to have a household servant, or somebody's going to do your work for you, you know, that's going to work for 45 minutes, and it's going to go need to recharge for two hours.

Bruce Norris:

Right.

Sean O'Toole:

You know, it's kind of where we are today with battery tech, right? So to get that to the point where it can put in a 14 hour day like a human can, unless it's hooked up to power and it's fixed in one place, but a true humanoid that can walk around and do different things. So, yeah, fixed very repetitive things. Yeah. You know, flipping a burger, McDonald's burger bot, for sure, is going to be happening, taking in somebody's order, you know, voice AI and the rest, you know, order taker at Starbucks, those days are probably numbered, right? Unless they just do it, because that's what they want to do. They want to have people, and they want to have that experience, but the need to have people won't be there probably isn't there already. So, you know, winners and losers there, but true humanoid robots going out and putting roofs on and and plumbing and that kind of stuff, if you want a pretty safe business right now, that's probably, you know, anything like that, that has people out in the field doing real work probably get probably a long time.

Bruce Norris:

You mentioned the houses, automated houses, you know, that type of thing. Have you seen that? And what do you think about the future of that?

Sean O'Toole:

Yeah, you know, I think I talked to you about 3d printed houses pretty early on.

Bruce Norris:

That's right.

Sean O'Toole:

And I, I was actually in contract to have the first 3d printed house in California, and then they said they couldn't meet the snow load. And So Aaron, your son, and I worked on trying to donate that to wounded warriors and unfortunately, the board that wounded warriors was worried about, you know, like it collapsing in on one of their people, or something like that. So ultimately, they said no, but we tried to have the first 3d printed home in California, which would have been super cool and you know, so I've been following that space for a really long time. I think overall, I would say I'm disappointed where both that and manufactured housing still are. There's a lot of progress been built there. If you've seen an apartment go up, almost for sure that apartments been modules shipped, you know, on a truck, rather than stick, built. So there's a lot of progress going there, but, you know, not to the point where it's helping with affordability or fundamentally changing things, you know, back to, you know, Schiller's chart, and this big drop in cost back in 1920 a lot of people think that was the depression, but it was actually the Sears and Roebuck catalog home as you know. And we haven't had that moment, and I think that's the next big moment for housing, like, at some point here, somebody's going to come along and say, 'You know what? I could build a 1500 square foot, you know, nice three bedroom house that,' you know well in California right now, here in Truckee, you couldn't, you couldn't build that for $600,000 but they're going to come in and build that at such an affordable price that we're going to think about tearing down existing houses and replacing them with that. I believe we're going to have that kind of technology moment here at some point, whether it's through 3d printing, advanced materials, something, you know, we're going to have that Sears and Roebuck catalog moment that just totally transforms how we build houses, that we still build them with sticks and drywall, even in the modulars, blows my mind. It's so outdated.

Bruce Norris:

I remember you and I talking about that a long time ago, and it like you said, it hasn't. It's not here yet, but I think that you're correct now, someday they'll figure out a much better process and make it affordable. I think that was what your point is, that making housing affordable for people would be, the would be quite a gift.

Sean O'Toole:

Yeah, yeah, yeah,you know, 1500 square foot house, that is, you know, that your average teacher, you know, etc, can afford. You know that that's what we should be pushing for. And this comes back to the dream of AI and robotics and those kinds of things, right? Is we should be able to bring everybody standard of living up while doing a lot less work individually. And that should be something that we're all excited about and working for, rather than terrified of. And I think the reason we're terrified of is we haven't yet seen the leadership that makes me feel safe, that an either party, right? So, oh, we're going to go eliminate coal, but we've got no plan for the coal miners, we're just going to leave them there to rot and die, right? Like, that's not going to work, folks. Like, you're going to have people really upset, and they're not going to vote for you anymore, right? Like, you know, and they're going to vote in something else that's not that. And so, you know, like, we need to think about, okay, coal is not great, like it's not great for the coal miners. We need to get rid of coal, but we need to take that next step and go,'Okay, what happens to the coal miner?' Now, think about that on every job. And that's the conversation we need to be having as a, you know, as a country period. That's what I want to hear in the next presidential debate. And only that. I don't give a shit about anything else.

Bruce Norris:

What about national debt? Are you concerned about that doing any damage?

Sean O'Toole:

It's a fiat currency, in a fiat world like just give people confidence in your fiat currency and your national debt. And what does it matter? Print googles of money. It doesn't like these things don't matter. It's like all this money going into AI is going into AI because, you know, is there going to be a return on all these companies? Most of these people are going to lose their money. Some are going to make turn out really well. There isn't this lack of money is this artificial mindset? It's very real, right? If I got to pay rent this month, but on these bigger scales, right? Is that really the thing, right? It's something the dollar bill is just something we made up and decided to believe in, right?

Bruce Norris:

Well, we were hoping other people continue to believe in it.

Sean O'Toole:

I mean, the other side of that right is you have pensioners and other people that want to give their money and want to get a fair return.

Bruce Norris:

Right.

Sean O'Toole:

You know? And I think that's an important thing to think about, right that we didn't think about when we went to 1% mortgages.

Bruce Norris:

Right.

Sean O'Toole:

1% return isn't a fair return on loaning somebody money to build a house. So let's stop doing the sways both ways. Let's say, 'Hey, here's what the fair return is', right? And put capital into that, make it available like that, even mortgage rates. That's the way we should be thinking about what's a good two sided marketplace that's fair to everybody involved. It doesn't swing around all the time based on policies that are outside of most people's control.

Bruce Norris:

Right. Last question, Sean, it's just in in this world of Bitcoin, Stablecoin, what's your what's your thought about that category?

Sean O'Toole:

I think they are very high risk to our current monetary system and an unnecessary risk.

Bruce Norris:

Okay.

Sean O'Toole:

Like so. And you kind of need to separate out Blockchain, you know which I think is a good technology for, like countries that need to trade with each other and have a secure mechanism for recording, you know, what's going on, or untrusted parties like to have a distributed ledger to record these transactions on that no one person has control of. I think that has a place in the world and has needs. Some people are pitching it for property, but I think the county recorder's office probably works just fine. I don't even know that it's necessary there. Would it be an upgrade the county recorders? Maybe you should think, oh, sure, like that wouldn't be a bad idea. So that's the Blockchain. Then put crypto on top of that. You. And you know, Blockchain is the key feature there is this distributed ledger. Still today, it's mostly used for illicit transactions, right? It has no, nobody's buying groceries with Blockchain. They may buy money with the money they made off of Blockchain, but they're not going down. And using Blockchain, it has real no use for most people in the world today. So it's simply today a gamble. And you know, Stablecoin, you're gonna start tying it to these other things and yet let people gamble on them like that just doesn't end well. I think our next financial crisis is most likely around something going wrong there.

Bruce Norris:

Okay.

Sean O'Toole:

And infecting the broader monetary system.

Bruce Norris:

Joey, you have a question?

Joey Romero:

Yeah, I wanted to ask one, one last question too. Well, two parts. The first part is, how much do you bring AI to the table in your company? And then the second part, what would you recommend real estate investors, how to use AI for their careers?

Sean O'Toole:

Yeah. Okay, so on the first one, it's really, I mean, that's been pretty much from the time they got useful. We've been encouraging it throughout our company, for all of our employees. For me, I see it as a way to grow faster, not to replace people, right? I want to grow as fast as I can as a company I want to build, I've got huge vision. I've got all kinds of things I want to do. So for me, it's not about replacing people or cutting costs. It's about making everybody more productive and doing more with the resources I have. I'm still a bootstrap company. I still have limited funds to invest. So for me, it's just a multiplier, and I love that.

Joey Romero:

Then I have a great book for you and anybody. It's called the AI Driven Leader by Geoff Woods.

Sean O'Toole:

Awesome. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I use it all day, you know, every day, and run ideas, back and forth, debate whatever. It's another sounding board, but it doesn't replace the need to go talk to people.

Joey Romero:

Geoff Woods says,"Make it your thought partner".

Sean O'Toole:

Yes, yes. I think, it's great to have those debates with that you're not yet ready to have with everybody else, but before you go put it into action, probably good to talk to a human too, right? Like, is kind of, it's the way I would take that, right? And so we've got more and more AI features coming out in our product. And I would say most of our roadmap is AI centric. So, yeah, super important for us as a company like key.

Joey Romero:

So how could real estate investors use it?

Sean O'Toole:

Yeah, so, you know, I think there's a lot of things out there right now, and it really comes down to how tech savvy you are, right? So one is just to wait for companies like us to bring you stuff that's cool, right, and use it as it comes available. That's super simple, you know, lets you stay in your lane, whatever. Two is, you know, one of the things I've always said is that, like these small local businesses got into it because they're good at doing X, right? A roofer is good, you know, maybe his dad was a roofer. He knows how to climb around a roof, pound nail. He's not afraid of heights, whatever, right? Somebody who got into flipping maybe came out of it, out of construction, or had some capital or whatever, right? You have your thing you're good at, but you're not necessarily good at everything, and now you've got this built in mentor, right? Instructor that you can say,'Okay, how do I best set up my chart of accounts so I know nothing about finance', right? What software should I use? How should I best go about doing this? You know, I've got a tenant with a problem, and how should I go about solving that problem? I got a tenant who's not paying me, like, what are my options, right? You know, it's pretty good at coming up and saying, Well, you got Cash for Keys. You could do an eviction. Here's the pros and cons. Like, it's really incredible how many of those questions you can bring to AI and get really pretty good answers. You know, Reddit still exists. You can still go there with your questions. You know, community.propertyradar.com, and other places that you can bring questions still exist. So, you know, you can still go get that human input on it, too. But I think that's the major thing. Like go, go, learn, explore, get good at the things you're not good at, right? Fill those gaps, we all have our lane where we're super strong, and we all have places where we're not. We can fill those with people, ultimately, right? And that's great. Build out a team. Still love that, but until you can afford that team, now you've got this resource you can use that really gives a lot of times world class advice, and as you build out that team, make sure that team is as good as that advice, or they're at least using the tools so that they're as good as that advice as well as doing the work.

Bruce Norris:

Yeah, good point. Well, Sean, thank you for taking time today and being with us. I enjoyed very much.

Sean O'Toole:

And not one foreclosure statistics, well, I guess we kind of did, like one plus one is 100% but yeah, no, no data. Pretty good conversation for us.

Bruce Norris:

What's funny is that, you know, you see a lot of that stuff about Florida, and you know, since you're familiar with the statistics, all of Florida last year had three quarters of a percent of the inventory sold via foreclosure, three quarters of 1% percent, yeah, it's not affecting anything,

Sean O'Toole:

Right. Yep, yep. And then...

Bruce Norris:

You're right. Your foreclosures have doubled. It's like, oh my God.

Sean O'Toole:

But it's still nothing, at least nothing compared to 2008.

Bruce Norris:

No, that was pretty crazy. All right. Sean, thank you very much good seeing you again.

Sean O'Toole:

Take care. Bye, bye.

Narrator:

For more information on hard money loans, trust deed investing and upcoming events with the Norris group. Check out the Norris group.com for more information on passive investing through the DBL capital Real Estate Investment Fund, please visit DBL capital.com

Joey Romero:

For more information on hard money loans, trust