How do you teach an assistant?
Someone in the audience at Inman Connect San Diego asked Judd Hoffman a sharp question: is this a full assistant? Counter offers, requests for repairs, everything?
He didn't oversell it. He described how it's being taught.
"You guys ever hire somebody? What do you do? One task, next task, next task."
That's a more honest answer than the one the question invited, and it's worth noticing what it rules out. A form-filling interface either supports a form or it doesn't. There's no learning curve, because there's nothing to learn. Ship the field mapping and it's finished.
An assistant is different. You hand it one job, you check the work, and when it's reliable you hand it the next. Ethica learned the BRBC (Buyer Representation and Broker Compensation Agreement) first, then the RPA (Residential Purchase Agreement), then the RLA (Residential Listing Agreement), each one until it was right.
The AVID (Agent Visual Inspection Disclosure) is next, and the example Hoffman gave for it is the one that shows what he means by assistant.
Walk a property and you write things down. A pad, a notes app, whatever's nearest. That list then has to be typed up somewhere useful. Hoffman's version: photograph the pad, and every line on it lands in the AVID.
Nobody would call that filling in a form. It's closer to what you'd expect of a person who was there with you, which is the whole distinction.
The full conversation with Phil Hawkins is on the blog.
