Practical AI For Property Managers Without The Hype - with Clay Lehman

We catch up with Clay Lehman on how he scaled a property management company to hundreds of doors, sold it, and rebuilt his focus around practical AI that gives real estate pros real time back. We dig into tech stack discipline, eliminate-automate-delegate thinking, and where AI voice agents and agentic workflows can improve service without eroding trust. 

• how Clay stumbled into property management during the 2009 fallout and chose to scale intentionally 
• the difference between growing and scaling and why door count alone does not create profit 
• a “zero hype” approach to AI focused on saving minutes that stack into hours 
• why fundamentals matter more than tools as the AI ecosystem changes 
• tech stack audits and why adding logins increases training cost and cognitive load 
• “keep things as simple as possible, but no simpler” as an ops principle 
• eliminate before you automate and examples like outdated reports and misfit clients 
• Google Workspace AI with Gemini and NotebookLM for SOPs, transcripts, and HOA documents 
• recording conversations with disclosure to build a searchable client memory 
• agentic AI workflows and where to be cautious 
• voice agents for repetitive tenant questions, maintenance troubleshooting, lead screening, and language support 
• using AI to role-play pricing objections and refine messaging while staying authentic 

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Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

Tony Cline 0:00

Welcome to the Property Management Success Podcast, where we interview leaders in the industry to uncover the secrets to profitability, efficiency, and achieving true freedom, whether it's your time, money, or lifestyle. I'm your host, Tony Klein, and I'm here to help you build a wildly successful property management business. Let's get to it. Welcome back to another episode of the Property Management Success Podcast. Today we have Clay Lehman with Lehman Strategic Partners. And uh, Clay, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me on. It's great to see you.

Tony Cline 0:32

You and I met uh I don't know, years back, years back at a uh a NARPAM event, and we've stayed connected. You're doing some pretty interesting things. I wanted to bring you on. But before we dig into what you're doing now, let's talk a little bit about what you were doing in the property management space. So share with our audience a little bit about how you got started in property management, what we grew it to, and then uh we'll we'll kind of take it from there.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

I think I got started in property management the way everyone does by accident. I had worked for two companies in my area that had effectively gone out of business. It was 2009, so I think that says it all. And a lot of my friends had to move to find new employment, but couldn't sell their houses. And so I said, Well, you know, I just got my real estate license and I said, Hey, I'll I'll help you rent them out. And I that was my kind of, if you want to call that, an approach to property management for the first five or six years. And then I started to recognize one, that property management is hard at any door count. It's hard at 10, it's hard at 100, it's probably hard at a thousand. I never got there, I couldn't tell you. But I decided if I was going to do something hard, I'd rather do it at 100 or 500 or whatever than 10. And I knew that I couldn't do it in the same manner I had been doing. I was probably around 60-ish or 50-ish doors at that point, and we weren't really making any money. We're kind of doing it as a side hustle. And then about 2018 or 2017, I kind of got real serious about it. Uh we probably met not too long after that. That's when I started going to NARPAM events and things of that nature. And eventually we had a great strong operations, strong business development, grew it to about uh 475 doors, which in our area made us one of the larger players. And um, and then I ended up uh in 2022 selling it to uh to Pure.

Growing Vs Scaling The Right Way

Tony Cline 2:28

And you know, it's interesting. You you talk about it being hard at any size. You know, what what I always say is if you're gonna manage 10 doors, you might as well manage 100 because you have to have a lot of the same systems and structures. But when you get to 100, if you haven't structured it right, you're still broke. You still haven't made any money. And so it's it's growing, but growing intentionally and then stacking those pieces. And a lot of times we'll work with clients that get to that three, four hundred range, and they have built this structure around them that we have to basically take those pieces, yeah, dismantle it, and then reassemble in order to give that owner some some flexibility and some freedom.

SPEAKER_00 3:09

I I say uh I say the exact same thing. What you're describing the way I think about it is you're describing the difference between scaling and growing. Growing is painful and hard, and and scaling's not easy, but it's not as painful because you're it to me, scaling is intentional growth where you're building the pieces as you go versus what most of us do, which is we get to a certain point and say, Oh my gosh, I wish I had built things, you know, 300 doors ago.

Building An AI Community Grounded In Fundamentals

Tony Cline 3:36

Yeah. So you you built it up to 400 or so doors, is about right? And then you wound up selling to Pure and and uh full disclosure. I mean, I think everybody's on the podcast, if you've listened to more than a few shows, you know we sold to Pure 2. I I had uh an experience with that and learned a lot about going through that process. You know, at this point, now I've moved on and I've been doing coaching and consulting in the property management space since about 2017. And I know that you have transitioned from selling your business into doing something. So let's talk a little bit about that. What are you now doing as you've sold and transitioned? And you mentioned this is 2022, I think.

AI Buzz And The Tech Stack Audit

SPEAKER_00 4:24

So in 2022, I sold. What I'm doing, like a portion of what I'm doing now predates that sale, which was I started a title company in 2021, and I'm still involved in my title company where I do business development. But where I've shifted more of my time towards um developing a community online for real estate professionals to learn more about how to implement AI in their businesses. The one thing that I try to distinguish myself from kind of the noise is it's a zero hype community. You know, these are tactics that you can implement immediately to improve your business. I mean, my whole thing is I'm not trying to like make you give you all these great tools that you can turn around and then make thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars doing nothing because that doesn't exist, that's fake, that does not exist. But what I do want to do is give you tools that will take a thing that you know maybe takes you 30 minutes that you do three times a week and makes that a two-minute exercise. And so all of a sudden you just saved an hour and a half a week. But when we stack 20 of those things on top of each other, all of a sudden you've got a substantial amount of time back. Uh and not to dismiss the idea that you can use these tools to help you make money. I'm just not that person that's gonna be like, oh, come to this community and you're gonna get you know filthy rich. My idea is you come to this community and you'll experience what I did towards the back half of my owning the property management business. I had set it up to where I was only working in it a few hours a week. Now, obviously that wasn't due to AI, and that's my point. When I first talk with people, I let them know I'm gonna work with you on your fundamentals before we're gonna look at what AI can do for you. Because there's one thing I can guarantee you the tech will change. Whether that's today, tomorrow, a year from now, the tech will change, but the fundamentals stay the same. So I want you to be really strong on the fundamentals because that's the other thing. I don't want to coach people forever. I do some coaching, I don't want to coach them forever. I like to get you set up and then I move on and then we touch base from time to time for me to help. But I want to teach a man to fish, so to speak. So that's what I've been working on. I'm doing it in a community setting now, and then we do uh monthly trainings and just different opportunities for people to dive in deeper.

Tony Cline 6:46

I think AI is like the super buzzword of 2025, 2026. And we talked a little bit about this in our pre-show, about the correlation between the dot-com uh boom and and AI. Back then, everybody took a crappy piece of software and said, well, we it's now powered by the internet or it is web enabled, and they slapped that on there, and that became the pitch for a while. And that lasted for a few years, and then it just became an assumption. Like if if your property management software or whatever software you were using, if like if it wasn't powered by the internet or if it wasn't web enabled, yeah, it was like you're the you're the outcast. You weren't in business anymore. And I kind of feel like that's where we're going with AI. Well, right now everybody's talking about, oh, it has this AI tool, or it's it's enabled by AI. But it's not going to be very long into the future where it's just assumed that your product has AI built into it. And when that happens, one of the things that I'm looking at in the future is as an entrepreneur, we're going to have to get better and better about saying no to things because every single tool that is available is going to seem like, wow, that's amazing. And as entrepreneurs, we get that shiny object syndrome where we're just chasing.

SPEAKER_00 8:14

And AI ramps that up to the nth degree. And I mean, in part because the tools are so amazing. But you know, you kind of hit on another one of my hot buttons, which is when people come to me and ask, I hear it all the time, what AI tools should I do X, Y, or Z with? And I say, Don't get consumed by that. The first thing I tell them is I have a I have a two-page document where I have them fill it out with, you know, what's your email service, what's your CRM, what's your, you know, if it was a property management, what's your property management software? You know, I call it their tech stack audit. And the reason I tell them to start there is because they probably have a ton of AI and automations that they could take advantage of in their existing tech stack. So say start where you live. Don't go out. And then when you do add AI or go to look for a tool, start with one tool and kind of master that tool before you start gloming on everything else. I because I'm in this space, I use a lot of different tools. And I am happy to share with people what tools I use for what and how I use them and all that good stuff. But I feel like for most busy property managers, people in the real estate space, they just don't have the time to get into everything. So focus first where you live, what you've already got in your in your back pocket, that you, you know, fully utilize that, not just from a from a cost standpoint, but that's important. We're not all, you know, especially in property management. I remember um, what's the guy's name? Scott Brady one time said that, you know, we don't we don't want to nickel and dime people, but we are in a nickel and dime business because you got to watch every nickel and every dime. So that's one concern or one consideration. But the other is, and this I learned a long time ago, well before AI, when you build this tech stack that is just a mile high, it's hard for me as the owner, but it's even harder for my employees to keep up with where everything lives. The thinner you can keep your tech stack, the more successful you and your team are going to be. So yeah, you know, you you're nailing it.

Tony Cline 10:14

I want to touch on that because that's one of the things that we talk about all the time when we're going through our coaching program is that every time you introduce a new login, you are automatically doing damage and harm to your team. Now, hopefully, you have enough benefit that you make up that damage and then see some additional benefit.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

That's a great way to articulate it.

Tony Cline 10:35

Just because somebody has a product that can like for for showings, you know, there's a ton of self-showing software out there, there's a ton of inspection software out there. Just because one has a little bit of a different feature that you want to implement, and so you roll out a new login, now your team has to learn how to use that software. And no set of software developers think just like another set. So features are in different places, and and then now I've got to log in here and I create this information here, but now how do I get it from here over to there? So now we're using implementing zaps or zaps, yeah. And and so we're doing all this stuff.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

Yeah.

Tony Cline 11:17

When it breaks, so my philosophy is keep things as simple as possible, but no simpler. Meaning if you took something away from it, it breaks. But if you add one more thing, then if it doesn't drastically improve the outcome, stick with what you've got and figure out how to leverage the tools you already have.

SPEAKER_00 11:34

Say that again, as simple as say that again, as simple as keep keep things as simple as possible, but no simpler.

Tony Cline 11:40

Meaning if you took something away and it breaks, then you went too far. Add that back. But if you add something into it and it doesn't drastically improve or increase the outcome, yeah, then get your basics down first. And we try to stack too many things and we don't do anything great. Exactly. We do a lot of things pretty good, and it just takes us in the wrong direction.

Eliminate Automate Delegate For Time Back

SPEAKER_00 12:04

You couldn't describe me as a small business owner any better. I've I've matured a great deal, but I do still have to every once in a while go, no, no, you can't do that. Don't buy that, don't do that. But and and the adding a login, you know, one of the things that I try to get people to think about is their cognitive load, which you you just like the whole idea that I'm gonna multitask because I'm gonna jump from here to here to here, and you gotta think about, okay, wait a minute, hold on. Whenever you change from one task to another task, you know, you're you there's brain issues and you gotta catch back up and all that to say like it's one of the things I I try to help people focus on. It's not just about saving time, it's not just about saving money, it's also saving cognitive load. Whether that's it reducing your decision making, doing a better job of uh delegating decision making down the organizational chart, or whether that's reducing the different tech that you're using, et cetera. Just reduce what how much thinking anyone has to do in your organization, and you're gonna make your life a lot easier. Yep, for sure.

Tony Cline 13:04

Okay, so let's dig in. One of the things that I I have been trying to say almost every podcast since the beginning of the year, because this is sort of my flag that I'm carrying this year, especially for property management entrepreneurs, is there's$10 an hour activity, there's$100 an hour activity, and there's$1,000 an hour activity. And we as entrepreneurs think that we we are the genius with a bunch of assistants in our company. And so we wind up doing a lot of that$10 an hour activity because we beat our check.

SPEAKER_00 13:34

Saving money, Tony. I'm saving money.

Tony Cline 13:36

Saving money, and nobody can do it as good as me. And uh and so we wind up taking that on. The burden is if I'm doing$10 an hour activity for an eight-hour day, I've contributed$80 worth of value. Or if I can remove myself from that, automate some of that, delegate some of that, elevate myself to the$100 an hour activity, and well, now I can generate about$800 worth of value for the company. But what I really need to be doing is figuring out how to keep my head up, evaluate all of these AI tools, evaluate where the market's going, and be focusing on that$1,000 an hour activity.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

One of the frameworks that I use in my engagements is eliminate, automate, delegate. And it actually starts with document, which I don't love because that makes it D E A D dead. But you know, what so um I heard that from uh it was a property manager in Atlanta, and it never left my brain. And it's that, you know, if you can't like so first thing you gotta do is look at can I eliminate this from what I do? And you know, you got to think broader than just tasks, you know, that you're gonna eliminate. Like I remember one time I went to my my operations manager and I said, Hey, why do we run this report? And she said, Oh, such and such client needs that report. And I said, But we don't work with them anymore. But we were just so in the habit of running that report. So you gotta look at things like that. The other thing to look at is, you know, your tax um uh clients. Sometimes clients aren't a good fit anymore. And and that's one of the most relief I ever felt as a property manager when it was I when I realized I'm not for everybody and everybody's not for me, and that's okay. You know, sometimes it's just not a good fit, and eliminating that client that you're reworking how you do things for, it's not worth it. So that's another area of eliminate. If you can't eliminate it, look at can I automate it? So this is more looking at your tasks. What can I do?

Tony Cline 15:33

I want to just I want to highlight that really quick because a lot of times in property management, we've we've been sold this automation software. We need to automate our processes, and it's not that that's not accurate, it's accurate with the appropriate timing. And something that you said that makes so much sense that people don't focus on is before you look at automating and delegating, we should look at eliminating. Yeah, absolutely. And that goes back to that keep things as simple as possible, right? We sometimes, and I've had people that have worked on software for me before, and they figure out what the software can do. And so they try to make our processes be able to take advantage of all these complex things because their job is to make the software do cool stuff. Where our job is to make it simple, effective, and and as streamlined as possible.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

I learned it the hard way. Not everything that automated that can be automated should be automated. And I mean, I think the obvious thing is anything that strips away customer service, you know, you got to be careful there. But I one of the things I laugh about is I would create these automations to save time, and it would take a task that normally took two minutes, but for the person to engage with the automation, it took three or four or five minutes. And it's like, okay, this is counterproductive. Or it wasn't worth the you know friction that it created in the system, or there's just a lot of different reasons why something might be able to be automated, but it you just you don't need to automate everything.

Tony Cline 17:05

That's what I like to phrase that as the juice ain't worth of squeeze. Squeeze, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 17:10

Agreed. Yes, sir.

Google Gemini And NotebookLM Workflows

Tony Cline 17:11

All right, so let's dig in a little bit. I know you've been spending a lot of time one of the pioneers in the property management or real estate AI space. You've you've sort of leveraged that and become an expert in that. So let's dig in a little bit. What is what are some of the areas that if somebody was coming to you, or just if if they're just listening to this, what would be some of the ways that you would say, here's some here's some easy pickings, here's some things that we could do to get started. I know you mentioned, you know, start with where you live. And for me, an example of that is I've been really interested in Clyde lately. I've been interested in Gemini. Even though I have a Google Business Suite uh about a year and a half ago, I signed up for the paid version of Chat GPT. Yeah. And now I have all these custom GPTs that knows me so well that uh like I don't want to let go of that because it knows so much about me, but it's only been a year and a half, and AI is gonna be around for the next, you know, forever. Absolutely. So do I switch? Do I not switch? And uh, you know, just what are some of the tools that you see?

Agentic AI That Executes Whole Projects

SPEAKER_00 19:59

Based on what you just said, the one thing that I would encourage you and and anyone else listening that is a Google Workspace user is to explore the Gemini and the Google AI ecosystem because their tools have gotten so incredibly good, but not the the thing that really pushes them over the edge for me is uh they uh integrate so elegantly with the existing workspace tools you're already using. Google Sheets, Google Docs, Google Drive, Gmail, everything, they integrate really well with that. So, what I would tell you, and for somebody that's building custom GPTs, you can take the exact same guts of your custom GPT and build a Google gym from the same exact thing. And the advantage being because it's a Google product, you can very easily call in the documents from your Google Docs, your Google Sheets. And then the really like piece de res de resistance is Notebook LM, which is a Google product that is effectively like a filing cabinet that that you can turn into a chat bot. You put all these documents in it, and then you can chat with it. Well, now you can call it into your Gemini chats. So, for example, you might have all your processes in uh Google Notebook LM. You can then call that into a Google chat or a Gemini chat or even into a Google Gym where that could be a basis that you give your team to equip them to make decisions faster, better, easier. Another thing that I've been talking a lot about that I think we'll start to see more get adopted more and more throughout this year is um, you know, I think recording conversations. So, like we're on a Zoom call right now, this is going to be recorded and create a transcript. I take all my transcripts and I put them into Google Notebook LM. And so anytime I'm meeting with somebody, I have a device, you know, this is a applaud P L A U D, and I record the conversation. I disclose that to them. And I feel like every property manager, every realtor, every every real estate professional should be at the greatest degree possible recording their conversations. Not now, not from a legal liability standpoint. And again, I want to emphasize disclosing to whomever you're speaking to. And you what you do is you say, I want to be fully engaged in our conversation, but I also want to know every single thing that you said to me so that I could serve you to the nth degree. And I've not had one person say to me, Oh, that's creepy. I don't want you to record our conversation. I just say, I've got my AI note taker. This will help us keep track of everything you want out of me. You know, if I'm a property manager and I'm talking to an owner, I would say, this is gonna help me communicate to my team everything you want done for your property, et cetera, et cetera. Then I would take and I would create a Google Notebook LM, a Google Notebook where I put all those transcripts into it. And that you have every single thing that they've ever said to you. So when you go in, you say, Did did they say they're okay with pets? What did he say I needed to do with the the AC filter? But not only for you, you hand that off to whomever on your team, your your repair coordinator. Everybody can have access to that notebook where they can ask those questions. So I'm a big proponent that if especially if you're a workspace user, you should definitely explore Gemini. It competes very well with both chat and Claude. So if you're in workspace, I'm a I that's a big one for me is to encourage people to mess around because even just in the tools themselves, like let's say you don't even want to go in Gemini. So Google Drive, a great example of a use case for Gemini is if you have a, let's say you're managing a property that's in an HOA and they have a 375-page HOA declaration. You can put that in your drive and then use the Gemini function in Drive to say, uh, what are their restrictions around pets? What do I have to do to have a rental in this property? What's the deal with their trash collection? Whatever questions you have, instead of and especially because a lot of those HOA declarations you get, they're not searchable because of the way that they were scanned in, you know, or whatever. AI can read those and then you can just communicate with them. So Google Workspace is a big one.

Tony Cline 24:25

It's great. I like I like uh notebook LM too. I I haven't dug into it as far as you have, but one of the things I like doing is taking documents that we prepare, whether they're training documents or some other document that we're going to use, and feeding it into the notebook LM and then creating a podcast around that where I will create and then but I will give it custom instructions in that podcast. And sometimes I'll do the one where there's the two people, then they I'll make them debate over it, and one will pick the pros and cons. So when you're when you're looking at maybe rolling out a new pricing model or you're looking at it increasing, I don't know, something in your management agreement. You can feed it in, feed your management agreement in, and then have it debate itself as to whether or not you know whatever changes you want to make makes sense. And it's it makes it entertaining. I can listen to that while I'm driving down the road and learn and be entertained at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

And that's one of the things that I do with it is very similar, is I'll use the discover feature in Notebook, which is where it allows you to search the web for sources. So the advantage of Notebook over chatter claude is it's a walled garden. It only works off the information you allow into it. So you don't get the hallucinations and stuff. Well, you can use the discover feature to go out and say, I want to learn more about how to use Gemini in my business. And it'll bring in sources. So, like if there's something new that's just come out and I'm about to head to the gym, I'll plug that into a notebook, click the audio overview, and then when I show up to the gym, I can listen to it while I'm working out. It's incredible.

Tony Cline 26:01

Yeah, love it. Okay, so we've got we've got something that we can interact with where we can put our policies or processes or documents into Notebook LM. One of the things that you hear a lot of chatter about right now is the difference between just AI and agencai, agents that are basically online code robots that are doing things on your behalf. And there's a lot of talk about it. And just like anything else, there's a lot of hype, and then there is the actual what is usable. And so have you dug into much of the agentic AI?

Voice Agents For Calls And Maintenance

SPEAKER_00 26:39

I have. I haven't messed with the new Clawbot or whatever it's called. I'm a little I I'm gonna say I'm scared of it only because of my limitations. From what I understand, it can do amazing things. But I'm just I don't know if you heard the story of the uh Facebook uh employee that I mean, she was a high-level AI director. She used Clawbot to do some things for her and said she was using it in a test environment. So let me see what it could do with my emails. And she put in a command asking it to help her um archive and delete emails, but not to do anything just to tell her how best to do it. And it ignored that part and started deleting emails and it went crazy. So that one I'm not into, but I use manus quite a bit, and it is very incredible. I totally know where you're coming from with the hype. I think what I do with it probably doesn't scratch the surface of the things that it's capable of, but it is tremendously helpful for me. So to help people understand, if you were to go into chat, and let's say that you wanted to write a blog and then use that blog to create Facebook posts and then use a different AI engine to create images to go with your post, and then you wanted to create some scripts for uh reels. If you were to do that with ChatGPT or Gemini or any of the non-agentic AI, you would go in and you would say, I want to write a blog and I want it to be this and it would write the blog. Then you would take the blog and you would say, Okay, now I want to turn this blog into Facebook posts and it would do that. And then you would you have to tell it every step that you want it to take. With Manis, I can say, I want to write a blog on this topic. I want the blog turned into Facebook posts, I want images for the Facebook post, and then I want you to write me scripts. It does all of that in and I snap my fingers. It doesn't do it instantaneously, it does it very quickly, but it does it with no further commands on your part. It's an agent and it does all of those things. Now we've we've moved even a step further, both with Manis and Claude. Claude has co-work. So one of the big um advancements with co-work is that it doesn't just work on your online apps, it can actually work in your computer like an employee, like you can work in your computer. So you can tell, hey, go to my downloads folder and and clean that up for me, or whatever. You give it folders, it'll go in and it'll clean them up, it'll do all kinds of stuff. The other thing, like I had Claude, um, you know, I have a Facebook group, and when people join, they get asked questions. And, you know, one of the questions is, do you want to join our email list? So to add them to the email list, obviously Facebook doesn't make that easy on you. You can't export it or anything. So I trained Claude, co-work, to go in, capture the information, and then add everybody to my Go High Level account. And, you know, it's one of those things where did that take me four hours every day? No, but it probably took me 30 minutes every two days or so. That's time that I get back to do something else.

Tony Cline 29:38

And and there's and and you had to remember to do it. You had a schedule to go and do it where this is now it's happening.

SPEAKER_00 29:44

That's exact, and that was the lesson I learned when I implemented automation. I was worried that when we automated certain parts of our business, that we would reduce our customer service, but it was the exact opposite for that very reason. We always intended to send out an email to say, hey, we rented your property, isn't that wonderful? Aren't we all so happy? But property managers are busy and they would forget or they wouldn't say the thing that I wanted them to say or whatever. And then once we implemented automation, it happened every single time, exactly the right way. And this is very similar to that, where you don't have to remember, it remembers, it does it, you can set it up on schedule. So there is a lot of hype, but I think that by the end of this year, we're gonna see some. That's to me, there's two big stories that I think we'll be looking back on in 2026. One is the rise of agentic AI and everyone's kind of everyday work and personal life. And then the other is voice agents. I think by the end of this year, it will not be unusual for us to uh have conversations with customer service voice agents. I think one of the industries that's going to be the most disrupted is gonna be customer service. AI voice agents are incredibly powerful and incredibly easy to set up. I set one up in about 15 minutes. It wasn't, you know, it was on uh go high level. It wouldn't fool anyone into thinking they were talking to a person, but I don't think that's the point, honestly. What I what another kind of lesson I've learned over the years is people don't care, like they they'll say, Oh, I don't want to talk to you know a computer or I don't want to talk to somebody over there or whatever. What they're saying is I don't want to talk to somebody who can't answer my question. Right, exactly. If they call and talk to a computer or an AI or someone you know that they can barely understand, but they get their question answered, they're generally happy. And and but not only that, the AI is getting so I went to a conference where that was the topic was AI voice agents, and they demonstrated some tools that you'd be hard pressed to know that you were talking to an agent agent because very little latency that was always the giveaway was you'd be like, Hey, how's it going? It would go, Hello, but no, it's it's like, hey, I'm doing good. How are you doing? Let me talk to you today about blah, blah, blah. And and like what's beautiful about it, like my my boys just start a concrete business and they want high-end concrete work. They will do junk removal, but they don't want to necessarily make their business around it. So we're building them a voice agent that when they when they're not able to take a call, it takes the call. But what's really nice is if somebody says to that agent, I'm looking for junk removal, then it can route them to the website to fill out a form. But if they say, I really need some high-end concrete work, it goes, okay, hold for the owner. I'm gonna get them right now. You know, so it can make these actions and decisions a lot easier for the owners.

Tony Cline 32:40

So you mentioned uh high level. So we we use high level. I have not got into the voice agents just because as a small company, you know, as a as a coach, I'm I'm pretty much handling the calls as they come in. Most people will send through our community and communicate that way, anyways. But I have seen the ability to create voice agents. You mentioned you set one up fairly quickly. How could a property management company use that voice agent? You mentioned there's some decision trees and conditional logic. So walk us through that a little bit.

Consumer Expectations And Channel Switching

SPEAKER_00 33:13

So, first of all, I would encourage you, even if you're not going to use it, to just play with it, because I I did the same thing, uh, meaning I set it up but then decided not to use it. I don't think the, you know, I live in a relatively small town. I don't think the Marion County real estate community is ready for an AI voice agent quite yet at their title company, but I would see it as a huge, huge benefit for a property management company. Think of all the questions that you answer that are so repetitive. How do I pay my rent? How do I make maintenance um requests? How do I fill in the blank? You can program that knowledge into the knowledge base of the AI agent. And instead of like press one if you have a maintenance issue, press two, you know, no, it's hey, this is, you know, this is Clay. I'm a resolute property management voice agent. How may I help you today? Well, I'm the tenant at XYZ property and I have locked myself out. Okay, well, our procedures when you've locked yourself out of the it's this, this, this, and this, would you like me to alert someone? Or I mean, like, to me, that's a huge advantage. The other would be like, I would probably have my business development guy have a voice agent. Now, to be clear, my and I should say my business development person would have a voice agent, not to rely on for all answer, you know, all every call. Like just if they're in meeting with someone, it would roll over and say, you know, hey, this is Clay. I'm the voice agent for, and you don't have to disclose the one thing you would want to disclose is this call is being recorded, but you know, you'd say, I can answer many of your questions and make sure that we're ready to help you, or what you know, you frame it that you're you're providing a value to them. And I think people will appreciate not hitting a voicemail. I think they'd rather hear that voice than receive your voicemail. It can also help you screen out people. Like if you were, you have some non-negotiables where you know you're you know you're not gonna let them do their own repairs or whatever. Not saying that the AI agent needs to go down that path, but if they're getting, you know, there's certain triggers, you can program that voice agent to qualify that lead for your business development person. So I think that's a huge opportunity. I feel like on the maintenance side, the troubleshooting of maintenance, you can program a lot of that. Honestly, you can train the voice agent with just about anything. You could train your employees to work through logic-wise. And the other thing that, like for us in my title company, one thing I have considered implementing is we don't have a Spanish speaker in our office. I wish we did. We do not. But AI can speak Spanish, it can speak 80, 100, 150 languages. So setting up a voice agent to, you know, help people that maybe English isn't a first language and you don't have somebody um that speaks that language, I could see that as an opportunity. I just I think there's a number of different ways a property management business could use a voice agent.

Tony Cline 36:07

One of the things that when I first started learning about voice agents, one of the things that stood out to me, and and I don't know why it took me so long for me to realize this, but if you have an employee and they pick up the phone and they're talking to somebody, they can't talk to two people at one time because they're talking to somebody. Or the voice agent, they can talk to a thousand people at once. Yep, that's right. They're always available. And I don't know why, again, I I was just so trained that when you have an employee doing something, that employee can only do one thing, talk to one person at a time. And so by rolling out this voice agent, not only are you able to get to the next call that might come in, but you're able to get to the next 10 calls that come in at the same time.

SPEAKER_00 36:50

Yeah, I think you said something earlier that is very it has broad application, which is at the end of the day, is the benefit going to outweigh the cost? Because is someone gonna say to you, I don't like talking to that thing? Maybe. But if 10 or 15 or 20 or even five people get a better experience with your business because they were able to reach the voice agent, get their question answered, get their problem resolved. Can't remember the name of the book. I got to figure out what it is. But I read a book on customer service a while back. It was a big one that was talked about in the property management circles. You may have read it too. And that's where I learned that people don't get upset about who they're talking to or what they're talking to. They get upset about channel switching. Like you'd say, go to my website to get your answer, and they can't find their answer on your website, so they have to call. Then they get a recording, and the recording directs them to five different people. And those people, you know, that's where they get frustrated. Where if you have a voice agent that can address their call, people aren't gonna bat an eye. And especially that's the other thing that I'm keeping in the back of my mind is maybe my audience isn't 100% ready for it, but I can guarantee you that when they call Bank of America a month from now, they're more than likely going to be talking to a voice agent. And the more ubiquitous it becomes, the easier it is for us to move people in that direction.

Tony Cline 38:06

We talk about that a lot, where it's not necessarily the change in the property management industry that's going to drive change. It's change in the world, it's the change in the consumer expectation. Yep, that's right. You know, you used to be able, I don't know if you can still do this, but they're used to be able to order a pizza with an emoji. You could send an emoji to Domino's and and it would order a pizza. And I mean, I've called Amazon customer service a couple of times just because I order stuff like almost every day. Sure. But you you almost never have to because they've made it so easy to get what you want. Yeah. And if you want to return something, you return it and there's no hassle. And so those expectations are moving into our industry. And and I hate when people quote Uber because it's like, oh yes, Uber transformed one single industry. But the fact is, AI is doing that same thing in every single industry that you interface with, and it's changing expectations. So, yeah, if they're not ready right now for speaking to an AI agent or dealing with a chatbot or whatever, they will be soon because the things that they interact with more than their property manager are going to be implementing those things.

Staying Authentic While Using AI

SPEAKER_00 39:20

And if I could say one more thing on this, what I don't want to have happen to people that are listening to this, to think to themselves, oh great, one more thing I got to figure out. I can't tell you it's like I said, it's it was so easy to set up the agent. Like I use Go High Level, but there are a bunch of different services. It's really easy to do. Don't stress out about it, you know. It and and the other thing, like I when I talk to people, I'll get this sense of them feeling some degree of almost shame or like they're behind. We are so early in all of this still, it's moving fast. So you use the analogy back to the internet, which I uh think is the best, especially for people of our cohort or whatever.

Tony Cline 40:01

Um, you know, you can use ARA, that's fine. That's fine. We R age. The ones that remember back in the old days.

SPEAKER_00 40:08

Back in the 1900s. So any, but yeah, it's the same sort of feeling. Now it's moving faster. AI is definitely being adopted. It's one of the fastest adopted technologies in history, but we're still so early. So, you know, if anything, I would tell people don't put pressure on yourself that, oh, I gotta figure all this stuff out today. I would just, I would encourage you though, you know, start messing around with it. What is something that you know you do that takes? I think one of the things we lose sight of, and this was true when we're trying to pursue automation, when we're trying to pursue AI, whatever. We're like, what can save me 10 hours a week all at once? Don't don't think that way. What can save you one minute, two minutes, five minutes? Like, what can save you just little bits of time and then build on that? Stack those, and then eventually you'll be like, ooh, this I could save an hour, but don't go for that big fish, go for the small things. They're usually easier to implement and and easier to wrap your brain around. And then as you sort of build that skill, you'll start recognizing things in your business that ooh, you know, AI could help me with that.

Tony Cline 41:14

I want to get uh get one last piece of nugget from you, and then we'll talk about the community. So if people want to be able to connect with you more. But before we do that, before we jump into those two things, I want to I want to give you a perspective and get your thoughts on it because I've been trying to think as a coach in the property management space, what do I need to see three years from now where I can be guiding my clients to being able to take advantage and and stay in business? And you know, I I used to do this presentation called 36 months to extinction or evolution, and that was before AI. And now with AI, I don't think it's 36 months. 36. I think if if you're keeping your head down and operating your business at 100%, you're already falling behind. Like if you just keep doing what you're doing, you're falling behind. So you got to be looking up and seeing what's the future look like. And I think that's where we talk about doing that$1,000 an hour work, creating space where you can stay focused on the most important thing. So, what I see as the most important thing for a property manager is we're gonna be going to become so used to talking with technology and bots and AI agents that it's gonna become easy for everybody to be able to implement. Now, how you implement is gonna be a differentiator and all of that. But the one thing that I think makes you stand out is people are still going to long to do business with people. They're still gonna long for that personal connection. And so, from my standpoint, what I want to do is have our clients figure out how to leverage, automate, eliminate, delegate all of the routine stuff that happens in the day-to-day operations of a property management company, because I guarantee you there is going to be some very large organization that figures out how to automate all of the stuff that needs to happen. And so, what makes us different, what gives us the ability to survive into the future, is that we become the known authority in the marketplace. We become the person above all the technology that allows us to stay relevant. So maybe maybe you agree with that, maybe you don't, but I wanted to get your take.

Role-Playing Objections With An AI Avatar

SPEAKER_00 43:27

I do, I do agree with it. I agree with it more strongly today than I might have 90 days ago. And there not that there was a definitive event 90 days ago. I've just come to recognize that we're starting to almost get like uh things come, we'll call it full circle because of how early we are with AI, but people are pushing back against some of the AI garbage that's posted. And and like at first it's like, oh, that's cool and whatever, but now it's getting to be like, oh, you know, that's so AI, oh, that image is so this and so that. And what I think we're seeing is that what's there's there's there's a right way to use AI and there's a wrong way to use AI. And the wrong way is when you hand over your you seed authority, you seed authenticity, and you seed, you know, your connection with people to AI. But it doesn't mean that you can't leverage it to you know grow your audience or to to um participate authentically. The the best example I can use is I use AI quite a bit to write blogs, to create social media posts. But the way that I do it is I don't say write me a blog about this new tool. I say, okay, I want to write a blog. Here's what I think about the blog, here's how I would say it, here's what I would demonstrate for someone. Have like, you know, I I go through a pretty decent process, not a I would never write a blog if I were just writing a blog, but I also don't just say do this. I put my own voice in it. I also do what you do, which is I invest time in building tools that I can leverage that save me the time in creating those things. So I think what you're saying is spot on that we can't let it goes back to kind of those fundamentals of being in business or being in relationship. One thing that won't change is people want to do business with people that they know, like, and trust. And and what you want to do is you you're gonna start eroding that if you do things the wrong way. And that's true whether it's AI or anything else. But you can leverage AI to increase your ability to do the things that grow the know, like, and trust. You know, there's so many, like almost every piece of what you're doing, you can enhance with AI. What what I think people get wrong. And and what people get disappointed. And I actually would say I was here too. When I first started engaging in AI, you hear all these amazing things that it does and it will do and it's going to change everything. And then you start engaging with it and you realize, well, I mean, that's kind of neat, but it didn't like make my life better overnight. And it's just because that's not what it does. What you'll find is you can use it in every piece of what you're doing to make that either a little bit better or a little bit easier or a little bit better or a little bit more thorough or a little faster or you know, but it's a you should lean into it, but you don't want to let go of what makes you authentically you.

Tony Cline 46:18

Yeah, well said. Okay. I'm going to close out here. Is there any last nugget that you think we we didn't touch on that you think would be a great takeaway for us with the listeners?

Free Community Invite And Final Wrap

SPEAKER_00 46:30

Yeah, I mean, uh no, I mean this has been really a really good conversation. Uh I think that you, you know, looking forward, I I am obviously a big believer that, you know, AI is the lever that's gonna help you grow your business, take back your life. I mean, that's the thing that I was always after was getting my life back. And and I think that, you know, don't be afraid of it. Um, it's not gonna, you know, there's the horror stories of the day, it's not gonna take over your computer if you go on Chat GPT and say, help me write X, Y, or Z. One thing that you had mentioned earlier that triggered something that I did want to mention. You had talked about when you're making a price change or, you know, um doing something with your management agreement and having the podcast debate it. One of my favorite use cases for AI is I'll create an avatar of my ideal client. So I'll just describe my ideal client to AI and it'll help me develop what are you know who are they, what are their pain points, uh, what are what keeps them up at night? It creates a document for me. I take that document and I feed it back to AI and I say, I want you to act like this person. Then I put it in voice mode and I say, I'm gonna raise my prices by 10%. What are the objections this person's gonna have? And then I have that conversation to prepare for having that conversation. It's one of it's basically role-playing with AI. It's such a great thing because then you go in. I I do presentations from time to time. I've gotten so much better because I do my presentation to my AI, and it's like, Clay, what you did really well was this, this, and this, but what you could really improve is this, this, this, and this. And it's it's an incredible tool for things like that.

Tony Cline 48:13

We use that, we use it similarly on the the developing your target client profile and the objections. So I I've been doing presentations since about 2015 on pricing models, and I've got a list of about a hundred fees. It's actually right at a hundred. I kind of capped it at that. I'm like, a hundred is good. But a hundred different levels of service that we can provide and things we can be compensated for. And then I fed that into a uh a GPT that we had that was a custom GPT written. So it takes each one of the fees, creates legal language around it, creates three objections, and then creates uh three objection handlers for each one of those objections. Beautiful. And so it's a great tool for people who are looking to be able to increase their fees and be properly compensated for the value that they're already delivering.

SPEAKER_00 49:03

Yeah, that's that's an incredible use case.

Tony Cline 49:06

Yeah. All right, Clay, let's uh let's give people uh some information about your community, how to stay in touch with you. I know you're staying on top of AI and the property management and real estate space, and I want to if somebody is interested in being around other people who are also doing that same thing. Let's uh let's share with them how to perfect to connect with you.

SPEAKER_00 49:28

You said it perfectly. I launched a community on AI prompts for real estate professionals. It's on Facebook, 100% free. I'm partnered with one of the biggest names in the AI space, a gentleman named Jonathan Mast. He has a Facebook group, and I don't want to confuse people, but I would encourage you to join both. Uh, his is AI Prompts for Entrepreneurs, and our joint one is AI Prompts for Real Estate Professionals. Jonathan has amassed an audience of 500,000 people. That's the membership in his group. And then he, you know, he does trainings, and and this is who I've learned so much of what I know about AI. We're taking what he has developed, his frameworks, his trainings, his models, and we're you know reworking them or kind of just adding taking them through the lens of real estate professionals and our day-to-day. And so for just joining the group, you're in there and we're sharing prompts and tips and new tools and how do you get started and just all kinds of value. Then we're gonna, on a regular basis, hold trainings for the people in the group. And, you know, there will be a mix of paid trainings, free trainings. But what I've learned from Jonathan is you give away as much knowledge as possible, and that's what we're gonna do in this community. And it's exactly what you described. It's not just my voice. We have lots of people coming in that are, you know, hey, I tried this and this happened. What did you guys experience? Or who knows how to do X, Y, or Z? And that's what I love about being in communities like this is because people will ask questions that I didn't think to ask, but now I want to know. And so, yeah, I would encourage people to join. It's AI prompts for real estate professionals, easy to find on Facebook. I'm also very active on Facebook just under my name, Clay Layman. And I try to share not just AI-related things, but the the things that I've learned in business, because you and I both know there's a lot of hard knocks and a lot of hard lessons. I'd much rather you learn them from me than than doing them yourself. So yeah, man, that that's that's it. I appreciate the opportunity, but that's how I would con how I would love to connect with people.

Tony Cline 51:31

All right, perfect. It's been great chatting with you, great catching up. And uh, I don't know when we'll see each other live. I won't, I guess this is live. I guess I'm live or you leave. But uh, I don't know when we'll see each other again, but it's sure great catching up with you.

SPEAKER_00 51:45

Yeah, uh same. Really enjoyed it. Thanks, Tony.

Tony Cline 51:48

All right, take care. Thanks for tuning in to the Property Management Success Podcast. We'll be back with another value packed episode to help you level up your property management game. If you've got something valuable out of today's episode, please share it with a friend or colleague. And don't forget to subscribe and leave a review so you never miss out on future insights and strategies and tactics. Until next time, here's the YC.