I believe that my constituents, which is the real estate agent, deserves the same belief that I do, and no one's giving them the opportunity. I believe AI is something so helpful because I've seen it in my life. Now I don't use Google. I use chat. I get into my Tesla and it drives me places, and I can do work like it's actually done things for me. But I have a belief that others are not giving this subset of people the same belief and opportunity.
That's a piece of a conversation I had as a guest on the You're Gonna Die A Renter podcast with Brandon and Bill, and I want to expand on it, because the belief gap I named on that show is the single most important thing happening in real estate technology right now.
What I mean by belief
Start with what I mean by belief, because I chose the word deliberately. I believe in AI the way you believe in something you've experienced, not something you've read about. I stopped using Google because asking a question and getting an answer is better than getting a list of links. I get into my car and it drives me. I hand work to AI and the work comes back done. None of that is theoretical for me. It's Tuesday. And once you've lived that, you stop asking whether AI is real and start asking who else should have it.
Which brings me to my constituents. The real estate agent.
Agents get the leftovers
Here's the pattern I've watched for years from inside this industry. Every wave of technology arrives everywhere else first, and real estate agents get the leftovers. The tools built for them are the afterthoughts, the ports, the shrunken versions of something designed for a different job. And the reasoning, when anyone says it out loud, is always the same tired line. Agents don't want technology. Agents can't learn it. Agents won't adopt it.
That line is the belief gap, and I want to be blunt about it. It's not an observation about agents. It's an excuse for underinvestment. Nobody who says it has watched an agent run a full-service business off a phone in a car. Agents run marketing, prospecting, negotiation, client psychology, and a legal paperwork operation simultaneously, alone, every day. That is one of the most demanding small-business jobs in the country. The idea that these people can't handle good technology is absurd. They've never been handed technology that was actually built for them.
And the proof sits in everyone's pocket. Agents already use AI in their personal lives, the same way I do. They ask chat instead of searching. They talk to their cars. They live in the future everywhere except at work, because at work, the industry decided decades ago that agents weren't worth the belief, and the tools have reflected that decision ever since.
It's a belief gap, not an ability gap
So the gap is not an ability gap. It's a belief gap. The people building and funding technology believe in AI for themselves, for lawyers, for bankers, for developers. They stop believing right at the edge of the real estate agent, and that's exactly where I'm making the opposite bet.
What changes when you flip the belief
Because here's what happens when you flip the belief. You build differently. You don't bolt a chatbot onto old software and call it innovation. You start from the agent's actual day, the car, the phone, the moment a client says go, and you build for that. You assume the agent is smart, busy, and worth first-class tools, and everything downstream of that assumption comes out different.
The agents aren't the ones who need to change first. The belief is. Give this subset of people the same belief and the same opportunity everyone else already got, and watch what they do with it.
The full conversation with Brandon and Bill goes deeper on all of this. Watch it here.
*Judd Hoffman is CEO and Co-Founder of Ethica AI, building AI-powered tools for real estate transaction workflows.*