Where the hours actually go
We went looking for the best use of AI in real estate, and we found it in a parking lot.
I told this story to Jeff Fargo on Fargo Talks, because it's the moment the whole thing became obvious to me.
An agent I'll call Mitch, because that's his name, keeps a laptop under the passenger seat of his car. His wife doesn't know it's there. When an offer comes in he walks out to the car, pulls the laptop from under the seat, and hunts for a signal. If he can't find one he drives to a Starbucks and works from the lot. He does all of that because the form he needs is unmanageable on his phone.
How is that still a thing?
We deposit checks from our phones. We sign mortgage disclosures on them. Mitch can't finish the document that closes the transaction on his.
This isn't a hard technical problem. Nobody's waiting on a breakthrough.
Nobody built it because nobody looked
Most of the money in real estate technology went toward the visible things. Marketing, lead generation, CRM, getting to the customer faster. Useful work, and also the part of the business that photographs well.
Almost nobody looked at the unglamorous document and said that's where the agent is losing the day. It doesn't demo well on a stage. It just happens to be where the cost actually sits.
So the form stayed as it was, and Mitch bought a laptop and found somewhere to hide it.
Who pays for the workaround
There are roughly 220,000 agents in California and 2.2 million across the country, and most of them run some version of Mitch's routine. Driving back to the office at nine at night.
Every one of those hours is an hour not spent with a client. We handed these people a tool that makes them leave the room to use it.
What the technology should absorb
Not the conversation. Not the judgment, or the read on a room. The parking lot.
An AI transaction assistant should carry that side of the deal. It should handle the paperwork and move the deal forward wherever the agent happens to be standing, so the document stops being a reason to walk out of the room.
The AI assistant should help Mitch. He's been dealing with a broken thing for so long that it stopped feeling broken.