I Cut a $200K Payroll and Hired 57 AI Agents in My Real Estate Business

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I meant everything I said in my previous video about hating AI. I also have a massive love affair with it. Both things can be true, and you need to see how AI can actually change a real estate business when you use it on purpose.

Last year I had a fuller team. I was paying an ops person, a marketing person, a content person, a videographer, and I can’t even remember everyone else. I was paying out probably $200,000 a year in salary. At the end of the year I was significantly more confused about what I should actually be doing, and I was spending so much money. I just knew there was more to life than that, and that I would go faster if I slowed down and got rid of some of it. Slow down to go fast. That’s what I did.

I got rid of the excess. This year I started with just me and one virtual assistant in the Philippines, and we made it about six months before I brought on another. Today I run a very lean team: me, those virtual assistants, and about 57 different AI employees. I’m going to tell you what some of them actually do, and why I love this part of AI even after I spent a whole video telling you what I hate.

My brain was at capacity

My brain is full. I’m a successful real estate agent. I have a local team and a coaching business that’s growing, and each one has its own nuances. I’m in my late 40s now, and the capacity for what I want to do does not match what I wanted 10 years ago, or five, or even three. I don’t want to live the same way I did in my 20s and 30s.

Virtual assistants are a game-changer, but a VA is still one person. You have to translate your vision in a way they can execute at the level you expect. That’s hard in real estate, because most of us did not get into this to be managers. We got in to help people buy and sell homes, make a little more money, have a little more time. Then we find out that even as a solo agent, you still need partners.

The old advice, and I gave this advice, was to build SOPs. Before AI, I could film a task in Loom, get a transcript, and manually copy it into Notion. AI has taken that grind away. Today I have Claude skills built through the business, which is why I say I have a ton of AI agents.

What those AI employees actually do

One of them is River, a chatbot that can look at conversations in my DMs, emails, and community, then suggest a response. River did not get that way by magic. I extracted everything I know about conversations and converting people in DMs, because that’s how I grew my real estate business, and I plugged that knowledge in. River can work with John, my virtual assistant, on execution. Could it be fully automated? There’s a case for that. I don’t want it. Having conversations is something I do for a living and for fun, so I will not hand them off completely.

That is very different from how it felt when I hired people to set appointments and had to trust them to work off a Google Doc, reread scripts mid-conversation, and still sound human. There were so many gaps.

Content is the other extraction. Content is not just Instagram and YouTube. It’s mail, events, email, all of it. I can take a video like this, and an AI agent picks up the transcript and gets it platform-ready: LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads, my blog, Substack, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, email, my community, even Google Business Profile. Headings, photos, carousels, scheduled dates. Before AI, that was a human’s job, and it was not sustainable if you wanted to grow.

In a real estate business, that can look like recording a listing appointment instead of trying to take notes and listen at the same time. I built what I call the listing machine around that. It can build a buyer persona, marketing language, a pre-listing brief, a competitive read, and a listing presentation from conversations you’ve already had. Visibility trumps ability. If you can walk into a seller meeting and say, “I know who is going to buy this house, and here’s what will make them say yes,” you are in a different conversation.

It can also build the launch package: MLS descriptions, coming-soon marketing, ad scripts, hooks, copy, targeting. I used to have a VA running a giant checklist. I had 10 active listings at one point, and things slipped through the cracks. The first weekend on the market is still the most important weekend, no matter what market you’re in.

AI can also look at actives around you and give you data for seller updates, so the price-reduction conversation is built on facts instead of feelings. Facts make the business less dependent on my mood that day.

The same thing happened with follow-up. It used to live in my head. Now I can have something specific, targeted, and immediate, from the first conversation through closing and after, without hiring someone just to set that up by hand.

The human job gets better, not smaller in a depressing way

I have a VA who has been with me for two years. Watching her own an AI content workflow has been incredible. She used to have to check the script, the hook, the title, the thumbnail, the description, the links. Now her job is to make sure the AI is doing its job, and to own that part of the business. When a virtual assistant feels like they own it, they work better.

It has also taken tedious work off my plate. I hate admin. I used to write a script, read it off a teleprompter, download the video, upload it, email my editor a separate page of notes, and go back and forth. Now I can record on my phone, the editor can get in, and it can go to YouTube with almost no friction.

I used to work 70-hour weeks in my real estate business. Now I work about 7. That is the kind of leverage I wanted. A Claude subscription costs me about $300 a month. Last month I closed a house I didn’t have to leave home for, and it was a five-figure commission. That return is wild compared to what agents pay a big lead-gen portal every month and maybe get a deal.

I can brain-dump in the car, because these tools are on CarPlay, and in a 10-minute drive from the gym I can have content rendered before I’m home. We have never moved this fast. If you’re on the “I hate AI” bandwagon, I get it. I made a whole video about that. Use it in the right way, and it can give you massive leverage. Get visible, get listings, and sell them. That’s still the job.