Eric Bramlett: The Vibe Coding Brokerage Owner Building His Own Tech Stack

Eric Bramlett founded Bramlett Partners in Austin in 2012, growing it slowly and deliberately from one agent to 156, all required to have done at least $5M in production before joining. 

In this episode, Justin and Eric talk through that growth arc, a goal-setting framework borrowed from Bill Gates, and Eric's deep work in AI, including a full staff management dashboard he built himself through AI-assisted coding without being a developer. They also cover how any agent can start using Claude or ChatGPT projects today, and why local independent brokerages may be where real innovation in real estate actually happens.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It's a quote that I love to share with our agents. It's from Bill Gates. And he says that everyone overestimates what they can achieve in one year and they underestimate what they can achieve in 10. So if you think, Justin, about where you were 10 years ago, I mean, you've had phenomenal, phenomenal growth and made a lot of gains in that amount of time. I mean, like almost unbelievable, right?

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Welcome to the Justin Landis Show, your real estate podcast about having conversations, building relationships, and creating freedom. And today I've got a special guest with me, Eric Brandlett. Eric is the founder and CEO of Brandlett Partners, one of the fastest growing independent brokerages in Texas. Eric, thanks for being here today. Justin, thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

I'm very excited to be on the show.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

Yeah, man. We got a chance to meet at a couple conferences and meetings recently. And I've just letting to know you, hearing your story, and I'm excited for you to be able to share it today. So for the audience, why don't you start a little bit with like what led you to real estate and to do brandless partners and kind of bring them up to date to where you are?

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Yeah, thanks, Justin. And absolutely have enjoyed getting to know you and excited to know you for a long time. Watching your success is inspirational. And yeah, I feel like we have a lot in common. Definitely. Yeah, so so I'll try to be brief on the history. I I sort of fell into real estate in 2003. I was pretty young. Uh I joked that I didn't get serious about it for eight or nine years and kind of decided like this is my career and went all in and call it 2011, 2012. Founded Brandley Partners in 2012. The entire goal was look, I feel like real estate is very lucrative. I want to just sell as many homes as I possibly can. And I always focused on the number of five-star reviews that I could get. It was sort of my scoreboard and and didn't really look at, you know, the sales volume. It was really like how many folks can I help make sure that that I'm providing an amazing experience. And, you know, in retrospect, that was a great business plan. And yeah, and it it just worked. When you focus on that, the money sort of comes. You know, grew. I think we had, you know, one agent besides me within a year. And then I think we had two agents besides me uh two years later. So obviously very slow growth. We grew into a small team, then a mid-sized team. Uh, we ended up becoming the number one team in Austin for a while in our size category. And then in in 2020, I I remember it very distinctly because I was on a ski trip with a good friend. And uh I said, yeah, I think I'm gonna scale this. We had around 20 agents at the time, and and I thought, like, hey, since we have these great systems, we can open the doors and and start recruiting in some agents. And at the time, I was like, look, if I can just hire a manager, it'll it'll make my life easier and things will things will work. And good friend of mine, kind of a mentor, and he said, Well, how long do you think it's gonna take you? And I was like, I don't know, man, four or five years, right? That was obviously six years ago. And you you kind of learn along the way that it's a little bit more involved than just, hey, let's recruit in 20 or 30 agents and hire your manager, and everything just goes. But we did learn a lot as we went and we have built a lot of systems, and then what I say is that in call it 2023, 2024, uh, we sort we we built a reputation that agents started finding us. And so we went from 20 agents in 2020 to I think we were 70 agents in 2024, and and now we're 156 agents. And we what differentiates us is that we have pretty high standards. We we will only hire agents who've done uh at least 5 million in production the previous 12 months or or the or the year before. I'm not saying that's the only business model, but it works really well for us. And yeah, and that's that's kind of that's kind of where we are, and there's a lot we can talk about in the way of brokerage and how I've done it wrong, and hopefully some of the things we've done right and whatnot along the way.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

So dude, I want to dig into working with experienced agents only, but first I think there's just like so much to learn from the story because it's easy to, you know, you hear, oh, Eric Brandlit's coming on here, fastest growing independent brokerage in Texas, but it's a 15-year journey that led to that, right? You're like, hey, there's one agent and then there's two and then there's 20. And it takes a little bit of time. It's the same thing for a real estate agent business, right? Too, because you come into the real estate agent business, you're like, oh yeah, I'm gonna sell a hundred houses a year. And then in that first year, you're like, I sold four, you know, but that doesn't mean you're a failure. It's just it's hard to go from zero to a hundred in two years. There's like a progression to it.

SPEAKER_00 4:28

I mean, I could strongly argue that it's very hard to go from zero to 10 in a year, right? And yeah, and so uh one of my mentors, Russell Shaw, who's an amazing human being, uh, he's out of Phoenix. And what he always says is that, you know, success, you improve on a gradient and and don't beat yourself up for not being the number one agent next year, right? You started, and if you did 10 homes, if you did take it down a step further, if you did five homes in 2025, if you do eight or nine in 2026, that's that's a pretty big improvement. You know, okay, great, you do eight or nine in 2026, like let's get to 15 the following year. These are steps that are they're achievable. So goals should be they should be aspirational, certainly, but they also need to be achievable. And I don't think it's super achievable to say, well, you know, I'm a brand new agent and I'm gonna sell 50 homes next year. It's probably not going, probably not going to happen.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Yeah, I mean, to go to five from five to nine is 80% growth. What businesses, you know, if you grow your business at 80%, people are like, that is amazing. It is amazing to do, you know.

SPEAKER_00 5:30

Well, it's funny too because it's it's super fun to talk about percentages whenever you're growing and the numbers are small. And then at some point you stop talking about percentages because it's hard to go from you know, 50 to 60 doesn't sound super amazing. You're like, we had 20% growth. Actually, that is pretty pretty dang good. But but yeah, you have to you have to, I guess the point of that is that you you have to really celebrate to really celebrate the wins. And not not to beat a dead horse on this, but the the second part of this, it's a quote that I love to share with our agents, it's from Bill Gates. And and he says that everyone overestimates what they can achieve in one year and they underestimate what they can achieve in 10. So if you think, Justin, about where you were 10 years ago, I mean, you've had phenomenal, phenomenal growth and and made a lot of gains in that amount of time. I mean, like almost unbelievable, right? But if you look at, you know, where were we a year ago or the year before that, it's it's just it's just not as it's not as impressive. So flip it the other way, and you say, great, like where do I want to be in 10 years? And you set your big goals that far out, that's gonna help you then figure out where you want to be in five. And then you use you use those two points as a trajectory on where we need to be a year from now, three years from now. And that's how you can put together goals that are very meaningful in my head.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

I was actually working with a group of agents on what is their five-year ideal future, like ideally things you stack five great years together. And from a frame of perspective, bolst didn't exist five years ago. I had never said the word bolst five years ago. And you know, there's 310 or 20 agents here now, and who even knew it was going to exist? So my point is like you can have things happen that they didn't didn't even exist. And in five years, you know, you can you can make it into a reality. So, well, Eric, another thing that I want to get into with you today, and I want to spend a lot of our time on this because of all the brokerage owners I have met, you are in the got to be in the one-tenth of one percent of AI usage. And so AI, a lot of talk about it. What is it? What are the different types of AI? Tell a little bit to the audience about what you are working on, what you're using AI for in your brokerage and for your agents. And let's get into what that could mean for the future of real estate agents and brokerages.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

Yeah, it's one of my favorite subjects. Um, I always like to start, and I'll I'll borrow from Mike Delpredi because I think he's done a really good job of defining this. You know, we are we're in the early internet phase of AI right now. It's very exciting technology. I think that it is, you know, it's a truth that this is going to revolutionize a lot of things, right? But we don't really know where it's going to go necessarily. You know, in 1993, 1995, whatever you want to call it, we just knew that the internet was exciting. Nobody knew that the internet was going to upend the music industry. And then I still remember freshman year in college when Napster came out and I was like, oh wow, music is free now. It turned out it wasn't super legal, but you know, regardless. In Georgia Tech, we were downloading every piece of music ever made. Oh, yeah, I was right in that same era with you for sure. Right, 100%. But but you go back to like 93, 95, and it's like you knew, yeah, encyclopedias are probably out of business, right? That's it. But you never would have thought, oh, like this this thing called streaming, which didn't even exist, you know, is gonna come in and just revolutionize the music industry. And and so that's where we are right now. Um, you know, a couple of years ago, we knew that it was going to up-end search, like like Google needed to play some defense there. Probably didn't see agenda coding coming along, probably didn't see, you know, how how much it has revolutionized like the legal industry and what it can do for medicine, things like that. Anyways, I can be long, I can be long-winded. The second piece to this is that anybody that tells you that they have it figured out is either selling you something or they just want to sound important, one of the two. So you have to go into this with a lot of humility. You have to go into this with like, hey, this is my best guess, this is what I think. I could be wrong, and I'm open to other interpretations. So, so that's anybody out there who feels a bit confused, like, that's totally fine. It's a very confusing subject. There's a lot to learn, and and just stay away from the folks that tell you that they have it figured out. They're selling you something or they just want to feel important. One of the one of the things, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

You were you were a speaker at the further conference a couple weeks ago, and I attended it. And one of my takeaways was there are so many things that people are doing, and any one of them could be like end up being the thing, but at this point, you just don't know. So, you know, which why Mike named it that way, but it's like we've got to go further. Like, we know we need to do something, so we got to go further on what we're doing, and tell a little bit about what you've been doing because you have been going further, especially over the last six months, year.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So to I I started, you know, using AI pretty, pretty heavily in 2022, like early 2022, I think maybe in 2021. And and when I started using it, it was simply because you know, a guy that that I look up to a whole lot in the tech space, we were on a trip and he would not get off Chat GBT. And he kept telling me how amazing it was, and he was showing these goofy pictures he was making. I mean, we had six fingers in them, three eyes, things like that. Um but it was it was really it was really impressive. And so I said, Oh, cool. Well, I should probably start using this. And I love to learn by having fun. And and so I like hip-hop a lot, and so does my son. So we started like writing hip-hop songs on Chad GBT, and then like my wife couldn't find her yoga pants one morning, so of course we wrote a hip-hop song about like Allie's missing yoga pants, and she gets Oh man, I wish I'd heard that one. I love it. I'll find it and send it to you, man. But um, so so yeah, just a just a lot of play. And then along the way, well, you know, it's like wow, property descriptions are super annoying. And we used to have our VAs write them in a very formulaic way. It's like, okay, well, this is like this is gonna be obviously a pretty easy application. So you you go there and you do that, and then you find these really basic applications for it. Anyways, you're asking me about the new stuff, which all of this is boring, but to give you kind of a background, I've always played around with AI. Year ago or so, I heard about vibe coding and and we call it agentic coding. If you if you tell a lot of developers, if you call them a vibe coder, it's like it's like a slur in their in their world. So, but I I downloaded Replit, which if anybody wants to get into vibe coding, I think Replit's a really great place to start. So is lovable.

SPEAKER_01 11:44

Give a quick description of what what is vibe coding for the person that's like, I've heard this term, but I honestly don't know what it is. What is that code?

SPEAKER_00 11:51

So anybody out there, if you can describe what you want to build, you can code it now. So so you know what it's done is it's disrupted the the application development industry like coders, their skill is no longer valuable because AI can can just do it. Now they they have a lot of very valuable skills and it's very applicable, and those guys are not going anywhere. But I'll give you an example. So we were in we were on vacation, and my my son wanted to rent a golf cart, and he's 11 at the time, it was a year ago. No way is that gonna happen. Like my wife's not going to let him drive a golf cart in Mexico, it's just not gonna happen. So we're back at the condo, and so I sit down with him and we and we create a golf cart simulator, and and we just we just start telling it what to build, and and it builds it. And we create a game that you're on an island and you have to drive this golf cart around, and the and your mom is sitting next to you, and every time you hit a tourist or a dog, you lose points. And then if you hit too many of them, then the mom screams, game's over, you lose the golf cart. And we did that in about an hour, and it was super fun. And he thought it was amazing and it was great and cool. So I'm learning through play again. So we get back and I start working on prototypes with that are actually useful for the firm. So every contract that comes in, uh, we have to audit it for marketing compliance. Like what where did this come from? And we're looking at all these different data sources. We're looking at call rail, we're looking at follow-up boss, we're looking in my email. And and so we were able, it's a it's a tedious process, and we were able to bring all that into one place. And then I put an AI overlay on top of it where we had an AI determine what you know, what's the result? Where's the where's the marketing? And that was over a year ago that we built that. It was in use until about two months ago when we rebuilt it into our current stack. Um, I won't bore you with all the prototypes, but we built a lot of other prototypes we put into production with our staff uh to help them to help them save time. Fast forward to February of this year, and and Claude Opus 4.6 was released. And it's on 4.7 now, but it was 4.6 then. And it was such a leap forward that that you you had to move over to to Claude Code if you were serious about it. Today, I would tell anybody that wants to get into vibe coding, don't start with Cloud Code. Start with Replit or start with lovable. Start with something that's going to be less intimidating, see what you can do. And then when you're if if you get really into it, then you can consider like maybe I should go over to Cloud Code. But but where we are with it now is we're we're we're pretty far along. And I've always wanted a management dashboard for our staff, and we never had it because the the the priority has always been for the agents and the consumer. And we've spent a lot of money, a lot of money on a proprietary portal that is consumer-facing that the agents use. But the staff were on like 15 different dashboards. So in February, I was able to consolidate them all into one. And so this these are things like when they need to review a disbursement authorization. I think they call them commission disbursement authorizations everywhere else, the DA's often, right? If we need to look at when's the last time we reached out to a certain agent, well, there's CRM features that that do that. Uh, we have marketing compliance there now, we have actual contract compliance there now, we have lead compliance. Like when a lead comes in, was it entered into the CRM? How did the call go? There's call review. There's, I mean, it's so big. I don't want to bore you with with all the details. But that's what that's what I built. And and vibe coding is very You built this.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

You, not a coder, not a professional software developer. Built it.

SPEAKER_00 15:18

No, we have it, we have a team of devs, but but I don't touch their stuff, they don't they don't touch mine. And I don't want to get too too technical necessarily, but the the problem with vibe coding is that one person can can develop at about 10 to 15 times the speed of a developer. And obviously it's somebody who's non-technical that can do it, somebody that just has a bit of a bit of grit and tenacity. Um, now, whenever you try to collaborate with others and you try to build together, that's when it gets very problematic. And so that's what our developers are working on right now is a system that in hopefully in three months' time, we'll have a system that makes sure that everybody's uh it's called context is shared and makes sure that the QA process is good. And that should take our portal. Uh, it'll make it AI first, is what it's called. And then we can then develop AI first. And I'm not expecting 15x in terms of development, but I'm expecting somewhere between five and 10x the development speed.

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Man, so I mean, absolutely amazing what you have done in such a small amount of time. How do you think this is going to impact the agents? I mean, as you think, so this is obviously revolutionized your back end of your staff, but as you look forward for agents over the next year or two, how do you think the agent experience is going to change?

SPEAKER_00 16:32

So that's a it's a great question because okay, cool. Like you like to vibe code and you're building neat stuff, and like why do the agents care at all? And that's a it's a great question. So it's gonna make tech in general much, much better. I think that it's fair to say that for the past 20 years, tech has helped us, but it hasn't been great, right? Like, do you know anybody that loves their CRM?

SPEAKER_01 16:56

And man, yeah, think of all the real estate tools. I bet if we had people, and how many do we have? 10 or 15, but if people had to rate them on a scale of one to 10, how many you think would get out of 10 out of 10? Maybe one out of 15 or something like that? I mean, or maybe none, but like not many.

SPEAKER_00 17:11

I would guess zero of them would. I think I think that we have, you know, we we've used it. I think they're they're best case, like a C plus product for the most part, but they do help. But what anytime you have to remind somebody, hey, you really should be using the CRM, that's not a good app. Like people should use it because they want to and they it's easy. So what's going to happen is that you're going to see things just get a lot better. That is by way of you know looking at what Protesh did in at Reel, where they're processing thousands of disbursement authorizations a day and they're doing it with a lean staff. Well, why does the agent care about a lean staff? They don't at all. What they do care about is they care about the fact that those DAs are processed correctly and quickly. So a bad experience is you submit for a DA. And I was I was with Kelly Williams back in the day, 20 years ago, and you would submit a paper package and then you would hear back five days later and it'd be marked up. And that's a really bad experience. The other flip side is you upload it, and then within 30 seconds, it shows you, are you missing anything and it helps you just become, you know, more efficient, better. So that's that's a pretty, that's a pretty obvious, a pretty obvious one. But it's I'm not saying I'm not minimizing it all. It's just it's just one. You say, okay, great. So compliance is going to be better. Well, CRM will likely get much, much better. CRM is really helpful whenever the agent, whenever the agent, whenever the the user updates it. Here's their time frame, you know, here, here's all the the profile of their family, you know, here's their price range, things like that. Most people don't do that. I would say the minority, like maybe 10% of agents, are pretty consistent about updating it. Well, what you'll see is that you'll see that AI is going to be able to run in the background. This is where it gets into agentic AI, where an AI agent will be able to scan all of your communication, will be able to auto-update your CRM. Just take it a step further. Once that's once that's all been auto-updated, you know, what's the job of CRM? CR CRM is supposed to tell you who do I call today? Full stop. Like if in and it's really confusing, you have to go log in. But once it has all this data, another agent can deliver you, Justin. Hey, here's who you need to call today. And that's the direction it's going, in my in my opinion. Again, could be wrong, but in my very strong opinion, you're just gonna see tech get a lot better really, really quickly.

SPEAKER_01 19:28

What do you think this means for? I think you actually shared an example, and I can think of a lot of examples. Agents have been in business for years and they're doing awesome. They never even logged into a CRM. They don't have a CRM. They're like keeping track of their contacts in their head. Is that still gonna be available? Is that gonna still gonna work in this industry? Or is the power of the CRM gonna get so strong that it's gonna be a huge disadvantage to operate the way so many people have operated for years?

SPEAKER_00 19:55

I I don't think those agents are going anywhere because we're in a relationship business and relationships are the most important thing. They they certainly have an opportunity to operate more efficiently and either get more time back or sell more or sell more homes. But no, I don't think this is gonna displace. I, you know, when you hear things like AI is not gonna take, you know, AI is not gonna take the job of agents, but it's but AI agents who use AI will replace those who don't, I don't agree with that. I think, I mean, I had lunch with you know one of our team leads and her team a couple days ago, and hugely successful. Carol's not going anywhere. Like that's not like she has such strong ties to the community and people love her, and that that's just that's just gonna stay the way it is. But you know, hopefully if the tech becomes so much better that it kind of runs in the background and it's not burdensome for her, then maybe she gets to, maybe she adopts it, maybe, you know, maybe less things fall through the cracks. That's what I think happens. On the flip side, you have an agent who is newer to the business and trying to build their business, right? They're hungry. Yes, that agent is going to vastly outperform another agent who that agent using AI is going to vastly outperform any agent who's not who's not using AI. So it's very exciting for those that want to leverage it from the get-go, or for those that that are just obsessive about organization and they really want to have a business and great systems and they just haven't been able to put it together because it's really hard to, you know, spin all of the plates that we're always spinning.

SPEAKER_01 21:21

Yep. I think one of the challenges for agents right now is where we are, where you're, like we said at the beginning, we're still figuring things out and what works and what doesn't, is that you can find the line of it is a huge efficiency gain and it's also a time suck. It can be if you're not using it for the right things. Because just like on a lot of like just like you're scrolling on Instagram or Facebook, it always asks me questions at the end. Do you want me to do this? Do you want me to do this? And it's like, oh, well, I'll just stay on here and just like talk to it forever. So, how do you help agents figure out hey, what are the best uses or where do I start? Like, you know, where do I start with this? This, if I want to be an AI-powered agent, but I'm not sure what to do yet, what advice would you give to people when they come to you with that?

SPEAKER_00 22:07

Yeah, so that's another really great question, right? Like how do you make it approachable and adjustable? And what the very actionable advice I would say is that use use projects. If you're not using projects yet, and and this is in chat, so it's in the base chat feature, it's in Claude, it's in ChatGBT has a projects feature. I think that perplexity does. I'm not, I'm not sure. Most of them do. But but if you start using projects, you will you will leverage it in a good way. And a great way for an agent to use projects is to literally title a project that's like your business. And then in that project, every chat, think of it as a think of it as a folder. So you have an a new client that comes in, you've signed a listing agreement, upload the listing agreement. Okay, great. Now you have the pictures, you've got the tax profile of the property, upload it. It's all it's all there. And then when you do that and your five, 10, 15 clients you're working with, you now have individual chats for all of them. You know, it's perfect memory. And and this is a great tip that I personally do, and I would recommend everybody do it. When you meet with people and you're gonna have a meaningful discussion, record it. So record it with Otter or whatever your favorite app is, and you upload it. Now you can go ask Claude or ask ChatGPT, hey, tell me about this. When you're in the project, you can actually have a separate chat that says, tell me, like, what should I do with all of my sellers right now? What are the priorities? And since you have it all in this one project, it's gonna reference all that information. It's gonna, it's gonna help you. You know, at worst, it's you're just gonna have everything really, really well, really well organized. But that's a great way to get started with projects.

SPEAKER_01 23:44

Man, I love that. Eric, I was talking with an agent at Volst this week, and she is using, I think it's called Plod to record all of her conversations. She's got a wearable, and so that way when she goes on the listing appointment or she has the conversations, she has all that transcript so that she can then put it in and you know, even from like the original basics of like summarizing a listing appointment or conversation, but over time, she's gonna have hundreds of listing appointments that she's done in there and she's gonna have hundreds of amendments to address concerns where she's negotiated the inspection. And if you put the inspections in there and you put the quotes in there, it's gonna have all that. And I'm like, man, if I had the last 5,000 contracts that we did in the 5,000 inspections and all of that, like think how valuable in the future that's gonna be to make the job make you so much better at the job.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

I nailed it, right? It can do a lot. So if you if you from from start to finish, if you if you put all that information in there, so like at the listing appointment or the buyer consult, for example, you're gonna learn a lot about them. And you know, one thing that I've always lived by is that the client's priorities and expectations are arguably the most important thing to know whenever you're helping strategize like the sale or the purchase. And that's gonna live in that transcript. Now, fast forward, and you're negotiating repair inspection. Well, if you need help strategizing, how do we respond to this? You can ask it those questions. The key is like there's an old office, the office, right, with Steve Carell episode where he drives his car into the lake because the nav tells him to drive his car into the lake.

SPEAKER_01 25:21

Oh, I love that one. So good. That is so good.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

Don't don't do that. Don't do that. Yeah. But but if it gives you, if it gives you some advice, give it some feedback, and then it can draft emails for you or whatnot. But what happens is over time, as you give it feedback, it learns about you. And the next time it gives you advice, it will it it learns what your priorities are as an advisor, and it'll only get better and better and better. So, yes, 100%. It's a great way for agents to use it. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 25:48

Eric, last thing I want to hit on is we both have local independent brokerages. I mean, I've made the case many times for it. I'd love for you to make the case for why are you local and independent and what do you think that means in the brokerage world? Why am I a local independent?

SPEAKER_00 26:04

It's because I don't want to have a boss. That's the that's the um no, I mean the main thing is I like to I like to be able to move uh quickly. I like to be lean and and and agile, I guess, I guess you could say. I don't want to have to like get something approved by New York. I don't want to have to get, you know, I don't want to have to really think about that stuff. But, you know, I think another important question to answer is like, why should agents care about that? And why should the consumer care about that? I think agents should care about it because innovation generally happens in smaller organizations. And and we're in this sort of consolidation phase, not just in real estate, but in the economy in general, usually happens when the economy starts contracting. And a lot of these companies are just getting gobbled up. You know, Whole Foods, for example, it started in Austin and it was it was awesome. I mean, I I I know exactly where the first location was. I ride my bike by it, and they really built something that was really cool and different. And now it's Amazon, like quite literally, it's Amazon, and they really don't care about the food, if it's healthy or not, things like that. Something needs to come along and be kind of the next Whole Foods, and that's going to be something local and independent. Same thing with real estate. You're not going to see real innovation from one of these big corporations because they just move too slowly, they're too conservative. All they care about is a stock price. That's their job. Their job is to maximize, you know, investor return. That's what they want to do. Another reason, I mean, going along on that, on those lines, is that we can truly say, like, we're people first. We care about the consumer and we care about the agent, right? And here's and here's why. And I think whenever you look at some some of the bigger guys, it's hard to defend some of those, hard to defend some of those decisions. So for an agent and for the consumer, they're really close to leadership. You know, you they know me, they know what makes me tick, right? And I think that's why it's important. It's also really cool, right? Do you want to be, you know, do you want to work for Walmart or do you want to work for the, you know, the local kind of edgier company? And me personally, just for my personality and attitude, like I'd always go for the local. I'd always go for the local guy. So what about you? I mean, you tell me like why are you independent? Why are you not a franchise brand or anything like that? Why do you love it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:14

Well, when we started Bolst, I mean, we wanted to have a business that was doing good business and doing good. And back to the control standpoint, we felt like, hey, if we were able to control that, we could do more good by being able to make our own decisions, to be able to move quickly and to be here for the city. We always say we are for Atlanta. I mean, my vision for Bolst is that it is the Atlanta brokerage. And you're like, hey, what's the like local Atlanta brand? Oh, like Bullst is for this city, Bulls is for the community, Bulls has the best agents. And, you know, I think that the to your point, I don't think you can do that in a big national brand to be the brokerage that is the most for Atlanta.

SPEAKER_00 28:54

We've got to be local to Atlanta. What's your what's your tax status? I I didn't want to screw it up. What's the the tax status?

SPEAKER_01 29:00

So Bullst is actually a benefit corporation. That's the actual corporate structure. So it's taxed and governed like a C Corp, but it has an actual benefit listed in the corporate founding to decrease homelessness and increase the home ownership in underserved communities. And I wanted to make sure, back to your point on shareholder value, in the C Corp, you got to maximize shareholder value. And I wanted to make sure that those reasons that we started this company never got pushed below the top to in an effort to try to increase shareholder value.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

I mean, try to pitch that to shareholders. Hey, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna give back. That's our number one goal. That's not gonna happen. Just just period, that's not gonna happen. So I I mean, I think that you really embody, you know, creativity, different, like there's I I've I know a lot of broker owners around the country. I don't know anybody that has like put their money where their mouth is and and you know got this B Corp status that you have. Congratulations. And yeah, exactly. That's that's a perfect reason why people should care about local and independent because we get to sort of stretch, stretch the boundaries.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

So man, Eric, I have so enjoyed this. And I, at the speed you are doing things and the speed AI is developing, I'd love to have you back on later this year so we can see where you've taken it and what's happened, and we can update this because I mean, I truly believe you are one of the foremost pioneers and authorities on real estate AI right now. And I mean, it's already paying off for you, but I know that's gonna pay off big time. So I appreciate you taking the time today.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

Thanks, man. Well, I'd love to have you on our podcast again. I'd love to talk with you about it. I want to hear more about giving back to the community. We do, we're philanthropic, but it's something that we need to lean into a little bit more. And you are an inspiration whenever it comes, whenever it comes to that. So thank you for that.