Welcome to the 8020 real estate show with your hosts Carlos Zamora and Dan Schwartz. We help real estate entrepreneurs systemize their business for freedom and profit, and your next my friend. So enjoy this episode and get to work.
Today we are talking some artificial intelligence conversations from a man named John, how's it going?
Good. Thanks for having me on Carlos. Looking forward to it.
My pleasure, man. Yeah, this is a small percentage of my interviews that someone comes across my desk from like a booking agent. And I was like, Man, this is cool stuff to talk about. And also pick your brain kind of on the trendsetting edge of tech and software and give some folks an idea of what's to come and what they can utilize. Now I mentioned that we had my buddy will brown and investor fuse user on the show that's in a similar space, as far as conversational, artificial intelligence that can help you guys qualify leads. And then also do some reach out and correspondence to some of the leads that might be like in your investor fuse account, that are cold and old that you haven't heard back from him, like six months, 12 months. So we're gonna chat all about that. But Nate is the co founder of a company called structurally, he's been there for a good bit, a good bit of time now. But would love to hear from you, Nate, kind of what structurally is how you got into real estate, how you got into tech will take the candidate from there be fun.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So kind of started back in college structurally, is actually my first and only job out of school, really, actually wanted to be like a real estate investor back in back in school, me and my co founder, Andrew, but what we found was you have to have a little bit of money to do that. And we had done being broke college kids. So we kind of ended up spending a lot of our time talking with investors, agents, lenders, kind of the full suite of property property folks, I guess, and decided that maybe there was an opportunity in tech, after talking to hundreds of them. What we kept hearing was I really hate following up with leads really hate qualifying leads. I'm really great in the field, face to face, person to person, that closing deals. I love building that relationship, but the mundane tasks of following up. Qualifying texting, emailing, getting told no a million times, is tiring. But it's super important. So we actually set out to solve that with technology rather than a human kind of call center. Our thought was call centers have been around for 2530 however, long, long time, and tech was at a point where we thought we could solve it with conversational AI. We found some PhDs in math and stats from some schools, really smart folks set out to build the first version of our product. And now we're really focused on you know, the property tech space mortgage leasing, real estate, investing kind of anything in between is where we have a pretty strong foothold right now.
Awesome. And I know you're focused primarily on residential retail stuff and work with some CRMs currently the direct integrations with on the retail side for someone that's like realtor or retail focus where I was telling before we got started more and more so off market investors doing direct to seller marketing, how different it all is that do you think the conversational artificial intelligence between like a distressed homeowner might be going through going towards like our clients or our members listening this or who you're you're currently working with? And maybe even a breakdown on what exactly is conversational? Artificial Intelligence?
Yeah, yeah, the conversations between like, those different use cases I'll call them are definitely are definitely different. There's no way around it. You know, when we're reaching out to leads on behalf of a majority of our customers, now, it's kind of after they filled out a form, or after they've been living in your CRM or database for six months to a year or more kind of gotten cold. We're reaching out to those leads over text and email, and saying things like, hey, you know, you've been on on our website a while back, checking out 123 Main Street wanted to see if you're still looking to move. So like, you can probably see how that's not too dissimilar to a message that you might send to a distressed property owner, but slight nuances in what you might say to tweak the conversation there. I you know, I'm no expert in scripting in this in your world. But I would imagine our product is in extremely customizable, straight through the app itself. So if you wanted to say certain things like hey, you know, it's been about six months since we heard from you wanted to see if you're still in need to kind of offload Your property, something like that, again, no scripting expert here in your space. But you can write essentially whatever you want. There are product and it interprets all of the questions and answers and responses can be customized back, all through the product. So the way that I boil down conversationally is pretty much exactly that. Its responsibility is to interpret and extract kind of all the information that someone might be saying through a message or written word, basically. And then kind of categorizing it for the next step. What do I need to say next, based on all the information I already know about this leap. And that's essentially what our products doing. It's almost like a little switchboard. As you're having a conversation. I know this bit of information, I'm gonna say this. Now I know this bit of information, I'm gonna say this. And at the end of it, ideally, you basically have a qualified or disqualified lead.
Yep, it always ends like that. And then it kind of goes back into the top of funnel, whatever you do, once you have a qualified or disqualified lead, whatever your SOP around, that looks like, super interesting stuff, man. And we're huge on that. As far as following up. And we were one of the first company we were the first company to build a Podio based solution, if you're familiar with them, which is like turnkey for investors doing direct seller marketing, one of the biggest features has always been the automated drip campaigns. Because we understand the importance of follow up like most of the deals that our investors are getting are after months of follow up and probably close to double digit touches for the most part, aside from from lower hanging fruit or people that are really ready to sell. But the sequences are huge, because you can make a drip campaign, that's a year, two years, however long you want, have texts, ringless voicemails and emails that go out to the seller automatically. But those are even though super efficient. And we have functionality as far as like when they respond. The artificial intelligence kind of takes it to a new level. And some of the stuff even like, like wills, and I'm sure structurally is looking at this as well, where it can kind of learn more, as you give it more information or give it some of your preferences in the wording and stuff like that.
Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, everything in our product is completely customizable in terms of the conversations, but we do have kind of pre built templates, like 1000s of them that you can pick from that we're constantly tweaking based on what we look at. I mean, we've handled north of 1020 30 million messages today over 5 million conversations. So we kind of know how people talk. And one of the things that's really important in a product like ours is, you know, real estate's a tough industry to get conversational, right, or conversational AI, right. Because it's so emotional. You know, there's the the three deaths of or the three Ds of real estate, death, disease, and divorce. Those are pretty emotional things. Not to mention the other things of why people typically move, new new job, new child, all very emotional, and our product has empathy in it. So when someone says going through divorce, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry to hear that. Things like that, that go a long way in these conversations that we do kind of handle for you, based on what we're seeing across those millions of conversations that we're having.
Yeah, and the, the rate or the percentage of, I guess this would be people that are consuming the messages or receiving the messages, 99.9% of them believe it to be actually humans, which is incredible.
Yeah, that's a that's, again, one of the benefits of AI is, you know, kind of before all of those messages, think about all the messages that you might have in your database, talking to leads, that's kind of a black box, like you couldn't, you couldn't go through and say, show me all the leads that I've talked to who mentioned they're going through divorce, or are not approved for a loan, or are moving out of state or something like that. Those are all things that we can actually extract at scale between millions of our conversations on a very granular level to say, show me of the 5 million conversations, we have all the people who said they were a veteran, who are not approved for a loan and not working with an agent. Pretty much anything that you could think of, we can kind of query for. And that's how we actually got to the 99.9% believe they're talking to human, we actually just did the inverse and said point 1% of our conversations indicated someone saying something like, Are you a human? Are you a bot? Are you a real person? So that's how we actually got to a pretty accurate number on figuring that out.
Super interesting. And you're a great guy to talk to just about, like a State of the Union of where tech and software is right now and kind of where it's going to be in the real estate space moving forward in the years to come. But it's interesting even seeing restaurants or small businesses add in like something as simple as texting. So a couple that come to mind are for me this cup like restaurant franchise called and pizza, like the symbol and and then pizza, it's almost like a Chipotle for getting pizza, we can go and get orders. But they're texting reengagement game. And that's like how we are like people like real estate investors or you know people in our industry, they're always looking at people's like marketing message and follow up and stuff at least I'm but the and pizza texting the last year is insane with a personal message. They'll put like a yo with like 10 O's on it, your first name that we miss you, we haven't seen you in a while. Here's how you can get a $3 pizza, you know, on us. And I know it's an automated message. But that stands out over the 2030 plus different restaurants that I've ordered delivery from since I've been, you know, in this area. And then similarly, with any type of you, you guys will notice like boutique, boutique places like grocery stores or barber shops, for example, like my barber got installed for set up with a texting software for reminders and everything I know that's huge in industry now, but it's interesting to see, kind of I don't know the way to describe it, but kind of places like that, like smaller businesses and franchise restaurants and even small businesses implement texting and engagement campaigns, yoga studios, gyms, whatever it may be. So I'm curious to hear with the conversational artificial intelligence coming out for being out for real estate, and then kind of just like text, email campaigns getting more and more sophisticated for businesses in general. I'm curious to hear where you think real estate tech, and AI stuff is going?
Yeah, yeah, a lot to unpack there for sure. But it's all super relevant and interesting, I think, at the highest level, just at the surface of like, why are we here? It's, I believe this like completely and fully that messaging is eating the world. Like, there's there's no other channel that has grown so much as messaging, text, email, Facebook, messenger, Instagram messaging, wherever Snapchat, the inverse of that is dials are kind of dying. I won't say they're dead, because people do answer the phone. Still, it's just people don't answer, as much of The Cold phone calls, the numbers they don't know, are getting ignored. There's a lot more spam, automated spam filtering, in our in our carriers these days. And that's just driving call, you know, answer rates way down. What's working is kind of, you know, pre selling that call, getting a text or message out there saying, you know, here's who I am. Let's talk a little bit. And let's schedule a phone call. So you know who the number is that you're going to be answering you, the lead has opted in, and you're ready to take that call kind of flips the tables. But I think that's kind of like why we got here. What that means is people are expecting immediate responses 24/7 365 That makes you run your business all the time. It's, it's tricky, because with phone calls, you could just say, you know, you can call us between eight and 5pm. And that's it. Otherwise, you know, see you later, we'll talk on Monday. So I think that's kind of like why we got here big picture. And that's kind of like why conversational AI has entered the fold. Because we have to have a solution to solve for all that new messaging now. But I think you're exactly right to kind of there's a lot of powers at play here. But what you what you said there's really relevant about standing out, because because of all this new messaging, a lot of it is just junk, a lot of live we we are now starting to just tune out. So you have to stand out so much more like the yo with Tenos. Like, that's a super clever way of just feeling authentic, like a real person is behind the business. Even though you know it's automated, a lot of people probably aren't that sophisticated to know what's actually automated. When it feels that human. One of the things that's worked really well with our product is again, we put a lot of effort into making it feel super human like and one of the things that we do is put purposeful typos in our mouth in about 5% of our messages, so misspell the word the th and then send a asterik th G just a second after that actually has increased our response rates because people like oh, you know, my bad, I do that too. I you know, make typos too. And you know, the other things that we do are put emojis in our texts and one of our best little tricks in terms of like a drip or sequence follow up. Text is in the after we send our first message out, you know, hey, wanted to see if we can help you buy a home or whatever sell your home. 12 minutes later, we send a message that just says let me know if I can help just we call A nudge message. And that is are by far our highest response message. Because so many people respond to that saying, Oh, I'm sorry, I thought that first message was an automated responder. This is clearly a human. So here's my life story. And it's still a robot. It's still a computer on the other hand, so but just like those little things go so far and making different things stand out. And you know, I have other thoughts on where I think AI is going. But I wanted to see if, if that answered some of your questions
around and I'm 100%, politely stealing that for our members when they're making sequences, because on the new version, you can send it, you can choose the exact minute the message is sent. So I'm 100%, recommending a text at 10am. And then another one at 1012. Saying, Oh, just making sure that you got this or let me know if I can help. That's amazing.
Yeah, absolutely go for it. It's been kind of life changing for us. So happy to share that one. Quick,
quick bookmark question. Is there any chance of voicemails in there? Or is that too hard to automate and or transcribe or figure out who's on the voice because that's like with us, we only do email and text templates in the default ones, the default templates that we put into like an investor fuse company space, just because I don't know if anybody wants to have my voice on sequences, you have to say, a phone number that's plugged into the right phone system, everything like that. I'm curious from a company that specializes in that.
Yeah, we haven't thought much about it. Yeah, voicemails or anything yet, you know, I think that there's going to be a point where even like, I don't know what to call them, robot robotic voices, kind of voice over IP type. voices that are typically very robotic sounding, there's been a lot of research lately in the AI space about making those voices sound like extremely human like, there was even you know, a big, I forget what it was called. But there was a big Google product launched like two years ago, where they built a product that actually goes and calls like salons and stuff and like schedules appointments for you. And it sounded like insanely human. And it just made everyone freak out. And there's been a lot of research there. It's still not there yet. But that's something I'm keeping an eye on of like, is there an opportunity to use these futuristic human like, voice over IP voices to automate little parts of either calls? Or, like you said, like voicemails, but it's all pretty early and speculative right now? I'd say.
Yeah. What do you see in the near the more near future? Yeah, just tech software, anything that you have your, your, your eyes on.
I think one of my favorite things that we're watching really closely, is what I'll just call like generative AI. So in structurally, all of our responses. So like the things that our AI says back are, what we are structured in a way, that's that is what gives you the ability to customize those responses. There's a whole different field of study in conversational AI, where you actually let the AI generate its own response based on other training data, so you have no idea what it might say. And that has gone historically, really bad. In the past, like, Twitter put out a bot called Tay that became a horrible, horrible person, robot thing, and was racist and terrible. And that's because people were saying racist, terrible things to it. So I learned that instead of back, so there's a lot of problems with that type of research, which is why we steered well clear of it. But it's kind of come around again, in a way better way through kind of this big push called GPT. Three, if you've heard of that. It's from a company called Open AI, which is actually a former Elon Musk company. And it's an open source language model that basically is trained on the internet. All of the internet's words are most of the internet's words. It's the world's largest model trained on billions of pieces of text from Wikipedia, from the internet from anywhere, and it's basically been trained to you. It's been fed all of the words in all of our languages, and its goal is to predict the next word. So it you you say here's some words, it has to predict the next word. And what it's learned from that is basically how languages work. Because it has to try and predict the next word. And what people are now like fine tuning it to do is to write things for them. They're training it to write blogs. Have them to write emails for them to write texts for them to write legal contracts for them, because it knows in those certain contexts, what the likely next word is. And I think that that is a, an area where we're so interested and excited to learn from because think about how much time we spend writing emails, writing texts, writing responses, just writing. So much time that sales and marketers spend is just literally writing copy. And I think that there's a huge opportunity to automate a lot of that with this whole generative AI approach.
For sure, within the last six months or so, in our mastermind, we were presented a resource that can write emails, I think it was even advertised that it could write a whole ebook for you. Yeah, really quick, if you did enough stuff, which was like looking through that was like mind blowing, I even thought it was pretty interesting. I'm sure. You know, like, if you're writing out of like an email at Gmail, a lot of the times when you're writing it just within a millisecond tries to predict the rest of the sentence. It's kind of like that on steroids. So to say, but yeah, the publishing your own book, all through artificial intelligence that we saw roughly, or that I saw roughly, within the last six months is a pretty mind blowing stuff. And it's just crazy. What will be out in 10 years from now, five years from now?
Yeah, yeah, the the GPT lifestyle came from one, two, and now it's on three. So it'll only get bigger and better. And so that's why like, I think it's at a point where there's, there's already a ton you can do with it, there's audio rd a lot of your life that you can probably automate, like writing a book, The next models are going to be even crazier, we're looking at it in terms of, can we let it write scripts for you, because that's a that's a big challenge. You know, think about how long it might take you and your customers to write their sequences or their drips too big daunting task to look at a, an empty sequence of having to write you know, 20 messages over a year, you can do that with a click of a button with with a I like that.
So while Yeah, that's that's definitely a challenge for sure. For the conversational AI. What type of position is that, Phil? For real estate companies, it's kind of like a little bit of a lead manager, slash Acquisition Manager, at least partially, I don't think the human can completely go away. But that definitely leverages, you know, software technology and everything like that.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. In the kind of retail side, the typical role that this, you know, type of product is, what we like to say is augmenting the role of, it's never, it can't replace these types of roles. It can replace parts of it, like the mundane tasks that everyone really dreads. But that role is typically like an inside sales agent, I say. So, historically, that is literally then their job to sit on their computer, dive through the CRM, follow up with leads cold, call them, chase them until they get to be qualified, or you set an appointment. That is the exact role of the type of things that our product is doing. But again, it's not, it's not here to replace NSA, it's here to augment the role. In fact, a lot of our best users are actually Ishs themselves, because they can manage more leads, you can, you know, have an assistant basically, that you can send more to, and their lives are better. I, it's a pretty high turnover job, usually, because they have to spend so much time on the phones getting yelled at getting told to get lost. And that's exhausting for everyone. It's not so exhausting for AI, when it texts, 100 people and you know, 30 of them say get lost, fine, we're on to the next. And that actually allows Ishs to then focus on the high quality leads. So the leads that our product is qualified typically go and I say that I say then calls the lead. And that is much more of a deep relationship now that they can hand off to an agent to go and close the deal.
That's amazing. Yes, so true, man. And that's that's like a principle or a parallel principle that we see all the time where you're essentially just trying to get through the Monday bleeds mundane conversations and tee up the most qualified most motivated leads. In general, obviously, it's just with a couple clicks of the button pretty much having an assistant what other areas or what other facets of like a real estate investors day to day or real estate agents day to day. Do you think that automation can be most applied to most efficiently applied to?
Yeah, um, I think that there's a lot more data available in getting leads, especially in kind of these little niche spaces that has historically been pretty hard. I mean, I even think about our, our lives as a software company. You know, there's databases out there Pretty much every lead every person that works at other companies that we could sell to, that that same thing is most likely true in, you know, the investor space where you can find people who are likely distressed, likely opportunities for you to reach out to. And a lot of that is becoming more automated, I imagine. But I think it can probably even be automated a little further, with kind of these kind of, you know, cold outreach products that can sift them out and actually go one level deeper to gauge someone's interest. It's one thing for software to say, This person might have a high likelihood of being likely to sell. But then it's a whole nother thing to say, we actually reached out to him and confirmed that they're likely to sell. I think that's a big opportunity right now for automation.
Love it, man. Good stuff. Where can people follow you learn more about structurally I know that we're going to talk more in the future just about integrations with investor views and kind of more in the investment space instead of in the retail space. But what's the best place to check you out? And structurally?
Yeah, I think you can always reach me at Native structurally calm, if you want to test the product out to I always kind of like to put my money where my mouth is, and let people experience it. You can go to test your AI assistant calm and fill out a form as if you were a lead in, you know, have a have a conversation with it. Sometimes we see people that ask it ridiculous questions like, you know, when when are we going to find aliens, and it'll it'll try and find a response. But, you know, give it a little break and try and actually have a real lead, like conversation.
Awesome. And I'll make sure that my team has that in the show notes for that. So check it out. And then anything that you want to close on closing words or anything like that, I'll make sure that we have everything in the show notes, then we'll talk future integrations. But this sounds even like if someone I don't know if it's a direct integration with investor fuse. But it sounds like someone can even utilize this, like you're mentioning, even if they export their opportunities out of investor fuse and put them into structure like
Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited to work on on an integration more with you guys if we find a fit there. But by no means is it a requirement. You can always export your leads, send them in to us and lively conversations. So pretty easy to get started. Especially if that's right. You want to go? Yeah, don't looking forward to see if that that integration makes more sense and to talk about it more in the future.
Also, man, well, I appreciate you coming on and talking some some futuristic Elon Musk, Elon Musk tech stuff. We always like to stay ahead of the trend and see what's going on and what's coming in the future.
Yep, absolutely. Thanks for having me on Carlos. My pleasure, man.
And that is a wrap of this episode of the 8020 real estate show. We hope you enjoyed it. To learn more about how our software investor fuse can help you turn more of your incoming leads into contracts systematically with cool features like our automated drip sequences that basically take follow up off your plate. Then learn more at Investor fuse comm where you can sign up right away or request a demo. That's investor fuse, calm investor, F U S. e.com. Now go out, take some action, close some deals. And don't forget to focus on the essential 8020 tasks that give you the biggest leverage in your business in automate, eliminate or delegate the rest. And that is how you can start to own your business instead of working in it all the time. Learn more at Investor fuse.com See ya
