The Rentish Podcast

Revolutionizing Real Estate alongside AI with special guest William Hollis

• Zach and Patrick • Season 2 • Episode 39

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In this episode of the Rent-ish Podcast, hosts Zach and Patrick welcome William Hollis, founder and CEO of Raise AI, to discuss the intersection of artificial intelligence and real estate investing. Hollis shares his journey from coding at a young age to realizing the inefficiencies in capital raising within the real estate sector. The conversation explores how AI can streamline processes, the emotional aspects of real estate transactions, and practical advice for first-time investors. Hollis emphasizes the importance of personal connections in residential real estate while also highlighting the potential for AI to revolutionize the industry.

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SPEAKER_00

What's going on, everybody? Welcome to season two of the Rentish Podcast. I'm Zach, and I'm here with my co-host Patch.

SPEAKER_01

We're two rookies chasing the dream of real estate investing. In this podcast, we'll talk about property management, wild stories, and everything in between. We don't know it all yet.

SPEAKER_00

That's the point. We're learning as we go, just like you. We'll bring in the experts to educate and inform us, hint hint, about what's about to happen here in the next five minutes, and we'll figure it out together. So let's laugh, learn, and dive into real estate side by side. Patch Yeah. You know what it is. We've we've been doing this show for a while now. Everyone, this episode's probably coming around around the holidays. You're nestled up in your home with your favorite candle and a blankie and a cup of hot cocoa, and you're down to listen about property management and real estate, huh?

SPEAKER_01

I'm aware of the situation.

SPEAKER_00

Uh very aware. Well, everyone out there, thank you for listening to this episode. It's gonna be a really fun one. We do have a very, very special guest that we're gonna get to here in just a second. But remember, follow the show on your podcast platform of choice if you're on Spotify, if you're on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcast, you can find the Rentige Pod there. Be sure to like us, rate us, review us, leave us a comment, tell us how much you appreciate the show, or give us a topic suggestion for what you want to hear us talk about. And you can do that by sending an email to questions at the rentigepod.com and tell a friend, tell a friend that might not know about the podcast. And we'd love for you to share the goodness, share the share the cheer, the the warmth and cheer of our of our lovely show here. And we have to talk about this randomly. If we appeared on your Spotify raft, I don't know if there's anybody out there, but if anybody out there had the Rentish on your Spotify raft, tag us at the Rentich Pod on socials.

SPEAKER_01

I I I do not listen to podcasts on Spotify, but I had listened to like an episode of The Rentich Pod on podcast. It was my number one podcast, and I hate that so much.

Meet William Hollis: The AI Innovator in Real Estate

SPEAKER_00

That's great. You should you should uh post that on social media. It gets some buzz going. You're like probably in like the top.001% fan joke. Uh all jokes aside, all jokes aside. All right. Enough enough sitting around, enough goofing off. Ordinarily I'd ask you about like what movies you've seen or if you're having a good time, but uh right now we have to just get into it. We got to talk uh to our very special guest who are here with William Hollis, the founder and CEO of Raise AI. If you're new to real estate or just starting to raise money, this is a guy that you want to learn from. Hollis comes from a rare mix of worlds. He taught himself software engineering, worked on AI systems for brands like Disney and Nike, and jumped into real estate and realized something most people don't want to admit. Raising capital is way too manual, way too messy, and slows down deals that should be moving. So instead of complaining, he built tools to fix it. And now he helps real estate investors communicate with their investors faster, stay organized, and all that good stuff. William, thank you so much for joining us and thanks for being on the Rentish Pod.

SPEAKER_04

Thanks for having me, guys. I love the uh tag team vibe you guys have going on. This is yeah, this is probably one of the only uh shows I've done that have two hosts. So it's pretty nice. Did we botch your intro, by the way? That was that was you guys nailed it. I feel like I was taking notes. I was like, wow, did I do that?

unknown

Did I do that?

SPEAKER_00

It's cool. No, it's it's it's awesome. Yeah, we're with the tag team of podcasts. I think uh we're gonna officially quote that on the back of the on the when we release the show on the album art. We're gonna say tag team of podcast duos, quote William Holland. Try to get some fame going. Well, how's your day going? Thank you for being here. You're you're excited to be on the show.

SPEAKER_04

Absolutely, man. Uh, appreciate you guys for having me. Um, love to uh talk, shop, and just have a good time. Cool.

SPEAKER_00

Well, we'll keep it simple right out the gate. I mean, we'd just love for you. I mean, I gave you a little bit of an intro, obviously, there, but we kind of just want to hear it from you. Like, what's your story? Like, what tell us about how you got into the industry, you know, why what makes you tick?

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, for sure. So I'm I'm Hollis from Hollis Queens. My first name is William, but my last name is Hollis. Believe it or not, I grew up in Hollis, Queens, two blocks from Hollis Avenue. Oh no way. And so everybody just calls me Hollis.

SPEAKER_01

Oh, that's cool. That's a kill. That's awesome.

Hollis's Journey: From Coding to Real Estate

SPEAKER_04

You're like me, you die in Hollis. I I wish one day I'm gonna own some uh own some property there, right? That's the that's the goal. But I bring that up because that's really where kind of my real estate journey began. You know, growing up in the 90s, rented a house with our family, family of five. So my brother and my sister, mom and dad. And uh, we had our landlord, he's coming by every first of the month. Um, and you know, in the 90s, everyone paid their rent in cash. So his name is Mr. Carter. Every first of the month, Mr. Carter's just shoving hundred dollar bills into his wallet. Like I have the a very clear memory of being around five years old and seeing his wallet so fat that he couldn't fold it. It had so much money in it, he couldn't fold his wallet. And he would put try to put it in his back pocket, and he had uh one of those four toruses with the cloth seats, and he would sit on his wallet, and the wallet was so big that the seat would just kind of buckle underneath the five-year-old me, you know, we're like scrounging together two nickels to keep the lights on. And I see Mr. Carter, and I think to myself, I've got to figure out how to do what Mr. Carter is doing. I don't know how he owns all these houses, but he's doing something right. So um that's what kind of gave me that early bug for real estate investing. I didn't actually take any action for many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many years after that. But that's what uh gave me the bug initially.

SPEAKER_01

Okay. If if you were if you were five years old in like, let's say 2025 and you just saw like Mr. Carter's phone screen and just saw like a big number on his bank account would have hit the same.

SPEAKER_00

That's cool though. So at what point, at what point did AI into the mix for you? Because that's one of the, I think that's the probably one of the biggest things that we're I would want to hear about today from you is that that's the buzzword, right? In in the world. That that's the word. People want to talk about it changing the way that we look at just about every part of our lives. But when did that come into the picture for you? And how tell us a little bit about that.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, sure. So I started learning to code when I was probably 11 or 12. Um, I was playing Sega Genesis, and then my my mind was blown that I was pressing the buttons on the controller and Sonic was moving back and forth on the screen. Absolutely. I was I always from then I had this kind of curiosity of how do I make these games? Like how does this all of this stuff work? You know, in the late probably probably 90 1997, we got our first computer and I took the whole thing apart, got my butt beat because it was our computer, family computer. I did put it back together successfully though. I did put it back together, but started teaching myself how to code. I didn't have a professional job in software until I was uh like 23, 22, 23, 24, something like that. But I had taught myself all these skills up until that point, just traveling around doing odd jobs before I came into the professional world. But the first job I got sitting behind a desk was an answer to a Craigslist ad that said make computers talk. Um and it was an ad for a company called Creative Virtual, I believe they're still around, but this was an enterprise-level AI company way before AI was cool. This is 2012, maybe 2013, something like that. And I got an entry-level position at this company doing uh a knowledge as a knowledge-based engineer, which basically meant meant I programmed our internal large language model through data entry. Like as boring as you can think. Data entry. But it was at an AI company, and I, you know, slowly but surely over the years, kind of with my own curiosity and staying in the CEO's face all the time, um, kind of worked my way up to being the senior uh software developer at that company. And then um And you said this was sorry, this is like 2012, 2013, just so I can. But I got started, yeah. But I got started there. Yeah, that company had they had been around already for maybe 10 years though. Um so AI is a lot older than me too.

SPEAKER_01

I was about to say, like, I've I like I would have thought back then AI is just like a science fiction movie thing. You know, I didn't know they were real companies.

SPEAKER_00

Like oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah. Well, it's funny that you mentioned the the video game aspect of like with that being like a starting point for you. Like I also got into tech as a young age because of like playing Sonic on the Sega Genesis. I love that stuff. But like the first time I remember hearing about AI, other than like science fiction movies, was AI characters in the video game. Like you have program AI to like be the enemies. Like if you're going into a room in a video game and there's like a bunch of enemies that are gonna attack you, those things have an AI programming associated with them. So um, that's cool that you got that too.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, man. That was uh making video games. I remember designing my own version of uh Mario, Super Mario Brothers on ActionScript. So for any nerds listening will know what Action Script is.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, plenty of those listening.

SPEAKER_04

Early 2000s, early 2000s tech that we thought was groundbreaking and doesn't even exist anymore. So all right.

SPEAKER_00

So then what made you look at real estate and think like raising money shouldn't be this manual? Like there's got to be some sort of way to automate this. Like, was there a specific moment that really stuck out where you were like, I can take this technology, I can work with AI, and I can bring it into the world of real estate?

The Role of AI in Real Estate Capital Raising

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, absolutely. It was after I'd been in real estate for a little while, I was wholesale in real estate. So for those who don't know, that's basically when you find, you kind of point out deals for people who actually have money to buy those deals, and they give you a little cut of the deal for that, right? So I was doing that for a while, tried to go and buy my own uh multifamily building. I think it was uh two seven, like 34 units if I remember correctly. It was like two 17 unit buildings next to each other, something like that. Um, and then I tried to raise the money. We had to raise about four million dollars in equity, um, meaning like cash to uh be able to get qualify for that loan. Um failed miserably in order to do in that attempt because raising money is hard. Um so I joined a mastermind for specifically for raising money, for raising capital for real estate. It's called uh Raise Masters. I get in this mastermind and I'm learning, you know, how do you raise money, right? All the ins and outs, and how do you build an investor list, how do you find, you know, investor leads, et cetera, et cetera. And they were fairly technology forward for the time, right? But when I spoke to the actual operators, the guys who were doing deals, and you know, try to learn straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak, it was kind of like, yeah, I got this Excel spreadsheet over here, and I just kind of call down the list and I try to make a note, or you know, I've got this Gmail blast that I do and I BCC every contact so that no one else knows who's on who's on the thread. Uh or um some guys, actually, some of the larger operators had a physical paper rolodex. Wow. That they were just like, yeah, I've got this name, this, these names, and you see this one's got a little star on it. That means he's a good guy. He's a good investor. The guys who don't have stars are just okay. And as a reveal comes in, I just flip through this bad boy and start working the phones, you know? And so this is, I'm I was still working for the AI company at the time. Okay. I mean, AI had already made a lot of leaps and leaps and bounds. And coming into this, I was like, guys, what? Are you really doing this? Is this how this actually works? Aren't you all rich? Like you haven't easy you don't know what technology is available. So that was kind of an aha moment for me when I saw really behind the scenes, there's what was being taught, which was great, but like behind the scenes what people were actually doing. And I said, This, we've got a lot to a lot of room for improvement here based on the available technology.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. Cool. So raise AI. Yeah, I wanted to make sure I was like, what? No, the dramatic pause was totally on purpose there. Yeah, yeah. Everyone listening, that was the joke. Yeah. So uh, so I mean, like, what's it what's your day-to-day look like now with the with the company? Like, I mean, like what what like where can people find your your product? Like, you know, just kind of give us the rundown about about what Raise I can offer for customers out there.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, so to do that, I'll give you the background of how Raise AI came to be. Um, it was really simple. I was in Raise Masters and I had started building out some of these automated systems with some light AI tools and things like that. And uh because I was part of this community and people were helping me out a lot, I did it for free for them. I was just like, hey, if you want to be on like an office hours call, like we had this little like hangout call we used to do, and if people wanted to see what I had done or they wanted to learn how to do it, I would literally just share my screen and walk them through and be like, yep, download this, click this there, boom, boom, boom. The whole idea behind it is how do you find investors faster, how do you build their trust faster, and how do you nurture them all the way to the point that they actually put the money into your bank account so you can go spend it faster. Right. And that's the problem that uh Radio solves to this day. But initially it started out as just doing it for people on these coaching calls every other week. And then one day I'm working on it for a guy and he's like, Man, Hollis, it's taking you a while to do this. Like it took me like a month or something like that. And he's like, Would you go faster if I paid you? I probably would go faster if you paid me.

SPEAKER_01

You're like, no. Actually, I'll go slower.

SPEAKER_00

So if you'd be surprised than that, I'm just gonna take my time. That's awesome. That's awesome. It sounds like it provides a really great tool for a lot of people out there.

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, it's it's really it's really good. I mean, um, we've got a lot of really cool case studies of people who've been able to, you know, raise money, close deals, find more investors. Because the interesting thing about raising capital for anything, but in particular for real estate, when typically you're not looking for one investor, right? So oftentimes when you're raising VC, you've just got to convince a guy or a board of guys, right? When you're raising capital for real estate, let's say you're buying a you know$20 million apartment building, you could have anywhere from you know 10 to 100 investors, LPs in that deal. So you've got to be able to maintain all those relationships and and you know find those people, first of all. Right. So which is which can be uh it can be daunt, it can be daunting. So adding in automation and AI into that just makes the process a lot smoother. Sure.

SPEAKER_01

Real quick question. So you said I think I heard an acronym there. And whenever whenever we hear an acronym, we're like, we gotta we gotta know what this acronym is for the listen for the listeners. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, just purely for the listeners, not for any other purpose, not so that we get educated.

SPEAKER_01

Did I hear LB? LP L P L P. Okay. What is that?

SPEAKER_04

Loss prevention? No, actually the opposite. Oh, really?

SPEAKER_00

Oh crap. I thought I had I thought I had to do that.

SPEAKER_04

Try again, try again, try again.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, that's not the what is an LP then?

SPEAKER_04

LP stands for limited uh partner. Uh basically, whenever you have what's called uh a syndication is uh one of the more technical terms, but it's basically a group of people that buy a property, right? You've got the operating team that makes the day-to-day decisions, hires the contractors, gets the loans, all that sort of stuff. That team of people can be anywhere from you know one to ten people, maybe more sometimes. It's called the GP, the general partnership. And then the partners that just bring equity, so they just bring cash to invest in the deal. Those are called the limited partners. They have no real decision-making power on the day-to-day basis, uh, but they also get the largest share of the profits from the deal, right? So they take more risk because they put in their own capital. Usually the GP, the LPs put in the actual cash. The general partnership puts in a little bit of cash, but their biggest contribution comes from the bank, which is gonna be 50 to 60, you know, 75% of the deal.

Understanding the Real Estate Investment Landscape

SPEAKER_01

This is ringing a bell. Because we we did have a tax guy on here like maybe two months ago. And now I didn't know it was LP was like the cool way to say it. So now I now I know. Um, that's it's so with what you're doing with with Ray's AI, because I I mean I feel like AI is kind of making its way into every aspect of our lives. Are you kind of like ahead of the curve on this one? Is this like a like is AI really booming in this area? Do you have like a lot of competition? Are you like still, are you still competing with like sort of the the manual way, so to speak?

SPEAKER_04

So it depends on where you sit, right? So from my perspective, I feel like there's a lot of competition, but that's because the algorithm knows what I do and shows me ads for my competitors all the time.

SPEAKER_00

Interesting.

SPEAKER_04

But when you look at actual market share percentage of our when we did our last check, there were between 100,000 and 150,000 small to mid-size real estate private equity funds, meaning groups of people that go out and try to find buildings to buy, we'll call it for simple terms, not necessarily buildings, but for simplicity, try to find buildings to buy and then raise capital from the LPs, right? There's about a hundred thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand of those. Last we checked, I think we checked earlier this year. So I can have a very, very healthy business if two percent of those people are my clients. Right. So is there a lot of competition? Probably, but I also don't need all 150,000 of those people to be my clients. You know what I mean? Um, as far as being ahead or behind the curve, I think we're definitely ahead of the curve in that not only my own personal experience in AI, but my team's experience in the other side of this, which is marketing, right? How do you actually find high net worth individuals, accredited investors who are capable and legally allowed to invest in private placements? We have our our team has 15 years' experience doing that. I have about 15 years experience in AI. Now, the great equalizer is how fast this technology changes, right? So I do AI consulting for mid-sized businesses, meaning I'll fly out, give them a two-day session, how do we use AI in your business, and you know, walk them through really practical use cases for their business. The first slide I show them is I don't know anything. Because on the flight here, a new thing came out and I was on the plane, I didn't hear about it. Sorry, bro. You know what I mean? So there's that factor, like the the technology moves so quickly that you can't create a giant knowledge gap. There's no insane secret sauce that you can create, but the way you package to get packaged together and the experience that we bring to the table is definitely unique.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Yeah, and that learning experience I think is true for everybody in the or at least most people in the world that we live in now with AI, like people in different not even in just just real estate, in a lot of other general places are learning to like work with it and see how it, you know, balances out with your typical work and how it weaves in and in and out of your life. And so yeah, it's cool. That so, what what what is something that real estate people are still doing like manually that you think AI should just be taken care of instead?

SPEAKER_04

Oh, underwriting, right? So um, that's something that we use it for internally. Obviously, we use it for much larger properties with much more complex underwriting. But let's say you're an investor and you just want to buy single family or small multifamily, you know, two to four unit properties, and you're like, hey, I want to I live in Connecticut, right? So we'll take that market and say, Hey, I want to buy these kind of properties in Connecticut. I don't know where to find them. I'm kind of looking on Zillow and only as that thing. Pop my inbox and then I gotta put the numbers in the spreadsheet and like write some stuff down and then try to call the realtor and figure out AI can literally do that entire process. You can build a very, very simple AI tool that listens for Zillow postings and you give it your criteria. It's then you say, hey, I want these buildings with these kind of buildings with these kind of metrics or these kind of homes with these kind of metrics. Here's my buy box, and AI will find the deals that look like that as they come up. It can reach out to the realtor with your offer all ready to go. So we we built internal tools like that, and we're we're able to underwrite hundreds of deals a day. Hundreds of deals a day. Whereas, you know, that's somebody's job before was trying to underwrite five, two deals a day. Now AI can do that with real-time data on top of that, right? So we pay for a few different data sources from some you know data brokers. So that gives us access to a little bit higher level data, real time. But most of the stuff is available. You Google around, you can piece all the stuff together.

SPEAKER_00

So if you uh Patrick, I don't know if you remember this, but I think it was like a month or two ago, we did an episode where we covered there was a news article that came out about uh Zillow incorporating AI agents into their software. And Patrick and I, obviously, we just kind of joked around about a lot of it because that's the show. But one of the things we did legitimately talk about is like envisioning a world without the without needing a real estate agent anyway. Where it's like if you have an AI agent that can kind of help walk through the process, you have companies that are able to do the you said underwriting is the term that you used. Being able to actually compose and create these deals and then have it be sent to someone. It's like you could see, could you personally, from your professional experience, see a world where that kind of goes the way of the dodo?

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because it depends on what kind of real estate you're talking about. I think for residential real estate, you will always have a realtor because residential real estate is a very emotional experience, right? You're buying your home for your family or you're selling your family home. You're that's a it's a very emotional thing. Commercial real estate definitely could it could go that way because that's just a numbers game. Like, I don't care who you are or what the story is. Do the numbers work yes or no? And that's just a spreadsheet, right? And then the spreadsheet looks good. All my little boxes are green, and I send Zach an email that says, Hey, my boxes are green. Will you take 10 10 million dollars? And Zach's either going to say yes or no.

The Emotional Aspect of Real Estate Transactions

SPEAKER_00

Say yes to that amount of money. If anyone wants to go ahead and offer that. You know where I live at radio at the rentice pod. You know where to find me. No, that's cool. Uh yeah, Patrick. That maybe that goes to say maybe we need to look inward because in our entire conversation about that, we never we never thought about the emotional aspect of buying and selling, which say about us.

SPEAKER_04

Your inner your inner realtors.

SPEAKER_00

I hear it. Yeah, Patrick and I have both never gone through, but both of us are renters too, which is an interesting thing why we've been having a lot of really great guests that know a lot about real estate because they've been able to kind of educate us on how that process looks from the ground level to people that have no experience in in property management or buying property at all.

SPEAKER_04

So that's actually why I bring I brought that up, is because so my for our our family home that my wife and my son and I, we all we live in now. We this we bought our house um kind of in the middle of COVID when interest rates were super low and prices hadn't like gone crazy yet, but they were definitely on their way up. And we're reliving Connecticut, uh, hour and a half from New York, hyper competitive market. A lot of big money was coming from New York into Connecticut. People were offering a hundred grand over asking on how on properties. I mean, insane bidding orders. You'd go to an open house, just 30 cars down the street, like crazy, right? So me and my wife and I, we got our house, not because we had the highest offer. We actually didn't have the highest offer on our house, but the woman who was selling it, it was her family home. Her mom had passed away. And you know, her mom had been living there. That was the house that this woman had grown up in, and she wanted it to go to like another local family. And just so happens that the timing, we were just we were that family, right? And so I think that's the emotional component where the realtor kind of gave us that insight, and we were actually gonna offer more on the house, but our realtor said, you could probably get away with a little bit less because this seller kind of likes you guys based on you know these these these factors. So that's kind of the that emotional component. That's why why I said that, because that that was our experience.

SPEAKER_01

Wow. That's yeah, and honestly, that's that's great to hear that that Zach and I are coming from a place like we were we work in for a real estate related company, you know, but we're we are both renters, but we're both kind of on our way toward, you know, potentially investing or buying our our first property ever. So, like what would what would your advice be for somebody like us, like who's who's not maybe like a a big investor yet and and doesn't know a ton, but like from your perspective, like what would your your best advice for like somebody just starting out be?

SPEAKER_04

You mean as far as like an investment property?

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, like get a first investment property, you know, with to get a renter, you know, we're like super, super mom and pop level sort of thing.

SPEAKER_04

First investment property should be one that you live in.

SPEAKER_01

Okay.

SPEAKER_04

By far, hands down, that is free money that you will never, ever, ever in your life be able to get again. Okay, so owner-occupied homes have the best terms of any deal ever. It's like you're never ever gonna find lower interest rate with a lower down payment than an owner-occupied property, right? So if you can get you a four-unit, it has to be a residential zone property, right? So get you a four-unit. You live in one of the rooms in one of the units, don't even take a whole unit for yourself. If you're a single man, you don't need a whole apartment, you don't even use the kitchen. You just live in a room, rent out the other rooms. I know. I was that was me. Yeah. Rent out the other rooms and then rent the other units, the other three units, and that's like wealth secret trick that every everyone I know who has done that has propelled their journey forward. Because you think about it, you don't even not only are you making enough to cover the mortgage, but you're making it that then and then some, right? You didn't have to come up with a lot, a lot out of pocket. So your ROI is gonna be insane on like your cash on cash return. On top of that, if you super house hack and live in one of the rooms in one of the units, I mean, price per room is is greater than price per unit, right? So, I mean, depending on your tolerance for dealing with tenants, you could rent all the rooms in the whole house and go crazy. But the leg up that you that the leg up that that gives you, because you'll have built equity, you'll have had cash flow, you'll have had experience dealing with tenants. When you go buy your next property, you're gonna be on a different level than if you had just saved up, scrounged up money and tried to buy one. Um, it's there's no no better way. I didn't do it and I regret it to this day.

SPEAKER_01

Wow, okay.

SPEAKER_04

Wow.

SPEAKER_01

We we've heard we've talked about because that's called house hacking, right? Yeah, we've we've talked about that a few times. That seems to be kind of like a recurring theme, is is everyone kind of recommends doing that.

SPEAKER_04

So if you are single, there's no reason. And you if you're single and you're not doing it, you you're I don't want to name call anybody, but I want you to name, I want you to name call him.

SPEAKER_00

He's right there, he's wearing a hat.

SPEAKER_04

Come on, Patrick, come on.

SPEAKER_00

Uh well, along those same lines, like keeping it uh like uh go bringing it back around to the AI stuff, like do just in terms of like even people that aren't trying to like raise capital, like maybe just like first-time investors or property buyers, like people that are interested in buying property. Do you have any AI specific tips for those folks out there that may not be like trying to like raise capital or get like signed deals necessarily all the time? But is there some basic AI tips that these people can use on a day-to-day?

Advice for First-Time Investors

SPEAKER_04

Yeah, so here's an interesting little thing, and this works with any, you know, chat, claw, gemini, whatever you want to do. Again, buying a property, especially one property, is usually an emotional thing. And there are usually emotional cues in at least the realtor's description of the property, right? So you go to Redfin or whatever, and you've got that little box of text. You can look at that and give that to chat, right? You let's say you found that the found the property you like, you're like, okay, cool, this looks like a good candidate, and you got that little description in there. Ask chat to pick up on any cues for you that will give you a leg up when you send your offer email or your offer letter to the realtor. Um, try to respond to them in their own tone. And it's a this is what we do with brokers. So I don't know if you for people who know Crexy and LoopNet are basically Zillow for commercial property. Okay, same craft, same thing. And they also have a little box, and the broker is over there describing the property in that box, and his personality is showing in that box, right? And whenever someone mirrors our affect, we tend to respond more favorably to that person.

unknown

Okay.

SPEAKER_01

So have AI mirror their affect for you. Whoa, that's something I've never even thought about, and it makes so much sense, and it sounds so simple.

SPEAKER_00

Thanks for the sound effect effort. Yeah, I like that. Yeah. I like the uh I like the idea though. It's like also you'd like to decipher what they're saying in the in the description, because like a lot of those you read, it's like a rustic something home or whatever. And it's like, hey chat, tell me what they're hiding. What are they hiding? It's like it's like by rustic we mean it's a chat. Barely standing. Yeah. All right. Well, uh this has been really fun. Paulus, do you have a couple extra minutes that we can play a little quick game with you before we let you go?

SPEAKER_04

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. So our producers wrote this into our script here. So we're gonna we're gonna try this out. All right, Patrick, did you pre- did you read this?

SPEAKER_01

I I totally missed this page.

SPEAKER_00

I'm like getting it. Don't worry about it. Okay, don't worry about it because uh we're gonna make fun of producer Mousse if this doesn't work. And that's just gonna be the way that it goes. So we're gonna play a game, real skill or AI. Uh simple fun game where me and Patrick are gonna say an activity and you are gonna tell us whether it's a task that humans should focus on, a real skill, or if it's something that you think AI should take off their plate. So real skill, AI skill. So it's gonna be a little goofy, but uh, I want to see exactly where you come down on this. And and if you feel like elaborating, please do. Okay, all right, here we go. The first one remembering investor birthdays. Real skill, AI skill. AI skill.

SPEAKER_04

Remember anybody's birthday.

SPEAKER_00

I do it, it it is kind of it's not sad, but I remember like when I was a kid, I used to have my planner, like, and I would write down my friend's birthdays on the planner every year to make sure that I told them happy birthday and that I didn't forget. But now the other day I woke up and Alexa was like, It's your brother's birthday. You should make someone say something to them, and I was like, dang. You've gotten so lazy. Alexa, order flowers, yeah. Press this button to send them a nice greeting or something like that. Yeah. Okay, that's a good one. Writing deal, writing deal summaries, real skill, AI skill.

SPEAKER_03

AI skill.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, pretty simple.

SPEAKER_03

It's a better writer.

SPEAKER_00

Okay, good deal. Following up after a webinar, real skill, AI skill.

SPEAKER_04

AI skill. Dang, we're throwing out. You're gonna forget, like, or something will slip through the cracks. Like AI skill. Especially on a webinar, it's not as personal, right? It's not like you sneak some personal details in there, just like, hey, thanks for coming. You know, okay, got it.

SPEAKER_00

Explaining an investment strategy, real skill, AI skill.

SPEAKER_04

Ooh, good one. I'm gonna say real skill. If we're talking about in a one-to-one interaction. Okay. Or any any kind of video or voice interaction, I'm gonna say real skill. I'm gonna say real skill. Because the way you explain the strategy is often very personalized, right? Like back, if let's say you both want to invest in my deal, but you care more about capital preservation and Patrick cares more about tax benefits or something like that, but you both want to invest in the deal. The way I frame my strategy will be focused on that. And that information may only become available during our discussion. You know what I mean? So um, I'm gonna go with real skill for that.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. Makes sense. That makes sense to me. I feel like there's a level of personability that you need to have if you're like doing something one-on-one with someone that maybe AI just can't replicate in that moment. So that makes sense. Okay, a couple more tracking who opened an email. Real skill, AI skill.

SPEAKER_04

I will say AI will give you some false positives there. You gotta watch out. But definitely AI skill.

SPEAKER_00

Okay. This one I feel like is just an easy gimme, but giving a first call to a new investor. Real skill for now, but watch out. Watch out. You think that eventually we'll get to the place where you could send an AI like focal bot to someone to be like giving that first warning call?

SPEAKER_04

Really? There's I know a company that specializes in doing that, and they raise millions and millions of dollars. Wow. Holy well. Interesting.

SPEAKER_00

So real skill now, AI skill very soon, probably. Very soon.

AI Skills vs. Real Skills in Real Estate

SPEAKER_04

You know what? The only um limiting factor will be there. It's not the technology, it's people's willingness to adopt it, right? So anytime you're dealing in large volumes of large amounts of money uh or anything in finance, like finance is a very slow sector to adapt because it's requires very high trust. A lot of people raising capital don't want to use the technology, and fewer than you think people receiving the calls also feel, you know, a little uncomfortable with it. But a lot of people are actually okay with AI interactions as long as they know it's AI. Okay. Yeah, okay. That makes sense.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I feel like people getting like tricked, quote unquote tricked is like a common thing of like the people that are a little bit more fearful of AI in the everyday life are people that are tricked into it. But yeah, being very clear and upfront and having that disclaimer is probably probably a wise place to be at this at this juncture.

SPEAKER_04

100%. Yeah. 100%.

SPEAKER_00

Cool. Okay. There's a couple others on here, but I think you killed it. I think you you nailed all of the all, I think you gave everyone the right answers.

SPEAKER_04

Except that email one, man.

SPEAKER_00

I probably should have gone with the tracking who opened an email. Real skill. Total real skill. All right. I think that's about all we've got. This has been a super interesting conversation, very enlightening. Uh Hollis, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show. Before we let you go, I mean, where can people find you online? How can people learn more about real AI? Give us the rundown. Raiseai. Yeah, right. Raiseai, my bad. And the producer will edit that one out. Raiseai.

SPEAKER_04

Hit me on LinkedIn, William Hollis or R-E-I Hollis on LinkedIn. Uh, very, very active there. Go to our website, tryraise.ai, or our other website, capitaladvisory.ai, and you can find me any of those places. Cool. Okay.

SPEAKER_00

Awesome, awesome. Patrick, anything else to say before we close this bad boy out?

SPEAKER_01

No, I think uh this is this is really interesting, really cool. Learned a new uh acronym, LP. Now I'm gonna go flex that. All right, awesome.

SPEAKER_04

At the next meetup, just be like, yep. I'm an LP.

SPEAKER_00

I know so much about LPs, all these LPs. Just say that in your next meeting, Patrick. I dare you. I'll give you 20 minutes.

SPEAKER_01

I'm gonna try to slip it in organically.

unknown

Perfect.

SPEAKER_00

Well, thank you all for listening. Thank you, Hollis, for coming onto the show. Remember, follow the show on social media on your podcast service of choice. Make sure to like and subscribe and leave us a comment. Tell a friend about the Rentish Pod. Email questions at the Rentish Pod.com if you want to submit a topic suggestion or a question or anything that you got. Uh, we would love to hear from you out there. And until the next time, I've been Zach. That's been Patrick. That's been our guest holist, and we'll see you guys next time. The Rentish Podcast is recorded in Cincinnati, Ohio, hosted by Patrick Giro and me, Zach Rotello. Produced by Mousse Gaber Mescal and Charlene Mulchendani, edited by Elliot Mongenes. Theme song by me, Zach Rotello.