Ai for Multifamily Success and Navigating Beyond the Hype

Welcome back to the Multifamily AI podcast. This is your go-to resource for navigating the exciting world of artificial intelligence in multifamily investing All right. So if you haven't already subscribed to the show, I would love for you to do that. We're going to bring you amazing things over our time together. We also have a website that will host all the resources that we're going to have, including shows and show notes, things like that. That's at multifamilyaipodcastcom. Listen, I am so thrilled to be on this journey with you. We're going to explore all the possibilities that AI will bring to not only you, your career, your individual financial success, but the multifamily business and then, of course, the industry.

Now, what I want you to do right now this episode is truly about really navigating this hype. Okay, and I'm going to give some reasons to what you may be feeling with everything that's coming at you, and so what I want you to do now if you're in a car and you're driving or you're doing something that requires your attention, don't close your eyes or do anything like that, but I want you to imagine a seesaw on a playground. Now, you've seen one of these things before, right, like you know what a seesaw is, right? It's longboard, right. It's sort of that balancing pivot point. On one end, you know, if you're like me, I was trying to gain weight in school, be strong, gain weight, all that right, and so on this thing, I mean I could go flying, okay. And so on one end, you have, you know, some weighted measure, some activity could be a person in a seesaw metaphor. And it's this balancing act that we face in life, right, like where are we? You know, what is up, what is down, all that stuff, and sometimes when one side falls, the other one flies off, her crashes, or whatever that may be. But if you don't have the balance there, there can be tension, right. And so if you have paper in front of you, anything to write with, just on a clean sheet of paper, you know, just imagine that seesaw up on one end and down on the other, like someone's sitting on a plane sitting on a plane, sitting on a plane sitting on the ground and the other person's at the height, so the one in the air could be opportunities. So we're balancing these two different things capabilities and opportunities, and these two things are on this seesaw, so with the capabilities on the floor, meaning we don't have all of them, maybe ourself or our company to tackle this AI stuff. So it could feel like our capabilities are on the ground and up in the air is opportunities right, they're flying high, right, like it's exciting and it's things are going fast, fast, fast. And whenever you have that where something's on the ground and something's high in the air, something's weighing the strength of the other right, so it's unbalanced. This is not about life balance and all of that stuff. What I'm talking about here is whenever you have your capabilities are low and your opportunities are high, there's tension, there's overwhelm.

Or think about this. Let's say, I don't know. Let's say you're a singer or songwriter and you happen to be in the right building and somebody says, hey, by the way, then your dream is to be a singer, songwriter, right. And someone says, by the way, I'm gonna give you the stage Today. You're gonna take the stage and there's 40,000 people in the stands. Come on up here and sing that song you like. If you don't feel like you've done the voice training, you understand the words, you know the lyrics, the opportunity is high, it's amazing. You're gonna be put into the dream situation. This is why the minor leagues exist in baseball. They need your capabilities high because the opportunities are gonna be great. You're gonna be in front of a lot of people, you're gonna be on the world stage.

So in this case, the opportunity is like what you dream for it's high. But if the capabilities are low, it's tension, it's panic, there's stress in the voice. You know it's not enjoyable experience. On the flip side of that, if you're the best singer, songwriter in the world, your capabilities are really really high and your opportunities are on the ground and nobody knows you. You're not getting the opportunities. You have no social media following. People aren't hearing your songs. You could have built a great product. Nobody knows about it. Right. High on capabilities, low on opportunities. Tension, not enough sales, not enough growth, not enough whatever. You could build great apartments if nobody knows about them. Capabilities are high, opportunities are low. If it's in a bad area. Nobody knows about it and that type of stuff, right?

So this idea of there's hype in AI is not really a thing. What is really happening is it's exciting and the opportunities are amazing and everybody has access to a company in their pocket, access to knowledge, information, resources that they've never had before. The game is changing. The opportunities are really high. So if you're sitting there with you feel like you don't have the capabilities, you will feel it will think you will think it's hype, you will think it's. But if you get the capabilities up now, you're matching the opportunity. That's where the real growth and transformation happens. So on this podcast, my goal and through the Multifamily Innovation Council, is to increase the capabilities for you, your organization, your teams around AI, and I have software developers on payroll right, building things. We are building AI products. We have a platform AI technologies that can make the business better. So it's interesting.

When you're spending your own money, you learn. It's like doing development. You just have to go through a new development and lease up to really understand. In my studio, it's like a museum. I have these white walls that I can see and it's perfect, smooth, like a museum, right, and not a lot of real estate. I mean real estate developers come in. How'd you get this smooth and it's beautiful like a museum. But to me, I can see through the drywall. I know the electrical that's there, I know the plumbing, I know what's behind the drywall and the reason why is I have the capabilities because I've built apartments right. I'm done framing walks. I know what it's like when one little decision isn't made and it messes up every other decision down the road. I understand city infrastructure and I understand how things come together and how things get integrated in development. Right, there's domain expertise in real estate construction. Multi-family owners and operators are. They are developers.

You are probably a developer, maybe you have people, but if you've built a building, you know how to build technology probably better than the people building technology, and what I mean by that is, in order for that technology to stand strong or your buildings to stand strong, you respect the process. You understand that there needs to be a plan, an architectural drawing. You understand that a lot of disciplines need to come together and, by the way, you don't do it yourself. You don't go to court by yourself. You bring somebody that knows the law, the things that are going to get you the outcome you want, that are going to get you out of risk or make an opportunity. So in real estate construction and development it's really interesting because integration is Easy.

Right, you have plumbers that share the plans with the electricians. Right, electricians share the plans with the. Like, everybody's working off of one document. Right, and everybody understands that there's an order to things and we put the resources to make sure it gets done right. And that is capabilities. We have high capabilities and so you take advantage of opportunities, so it doesn't feel like hype.

Now, some people think multifamily is hype because they're chasing markets and the conditions and they're always a step behind because they don't have the capabilities. They're going off of market movements. But those that last and build throughout decades and decades of wealth know the disciplines of what the designer means to the flooring person, right, all these things talking together and there's an orchestrated team to make it happen. So those capabilities are the same for real estate, are also the same for technology, and when we move through these, when we move through this process, we understand it more. And when we understand it more, we can make better decisions, quicker decisions that ultimately serve the purpose of why you made your investment. And so I'm calling you to understand that this is something that you need to be on a journey of knowing technology more than you think you need to know technology Now. You may have a CIO or CTO, chief Technology Officer or Chief Innovation Officer. You may have somebody in IT, a systems administrator or just somebody in marketing that kind of toys with things and is really smart with this stuff, whoever that is. They need to be at the table with you when you're looking at deals, when you're looking at opportunities, when you're planning the future of your organization. Because, again, going back to this hype, it's not hype, it's exciting and it only feels hard or overwhelming is because the capabilities aren't there. We don't want to rush the process. This is going to be a journey, a journey of knowing what to look into, what to lean into, and it is our goal with this podcast that we spend more time together in your ears, allowing you to have the mindset of innovation, the mindset of opportunity, if we were.

If you know, there was a time with the hype that electricity was a hype. There was a time when you were building buildings or putting together structures where there was no electricity inside the buildings and electricity structures, places. When it came in, it was like an amenity, right, it was like we have this Now. Today, most of the places that you spend time are indoors and they have electricity. If it's batter in your car or in your building, you have electricity. When you're not selling like, hey, we have electricity because everybody's got it.

The large language models and what the general world does with AI is going to go to that, where everybody's got it and it's going to be expected. You're seeing that come into applications and so if everybody's got it, there's no real differentiation. And that's where the dual bilingual meaning you know your world, your domain, your real estate, your people better than anybody. But you also know this technology that everybody else has access to. But when you pair it to incredible efficiencies, incredible opportunities, with what is unique about your profile, your customer avatar, your business objectives, your market, your property, your thing, when that's paired, that's where the differentiation and value happens. And so this hype is not hype, it's just exciting.

And when you stretch this out 100, 200 years, what we do now in leading others through this is really an opportunity you don't want to let go by. You already let go. Let the internet pass you by. There was a time when people were selling like on websites. You need a website, right?

This is exciting and on that seesaw, if your capabilities are low and the opportunities are high, you will feel that it's hype, that's scary, that's overwhelm. We're just gonna get the capabilities higher. We're gonna put some more weight on the capabilities. Already getting like maybe it's the opposite. You understand the analogy. We're going to increase your capabilities to levels out and your capabilities are starting to match your opportunities and that's where it feels great. You don't wanna have more capabilities in your opportunities, right?

So this podcast and the things that we do at multifamilyaipodcastcom also what we do through the multifamily innovation council are going to frequently, with high frequency, move people through a very fast moving thing. So it doesn't feel like hype that you understand this. Like a CFO understands finance in a business, you as a business leader, investor, can make decisions about a business because you understand it, like you do development. You don't have to be the person framing, but you need to understand the cost of lumber and why it moves and when to place it and make sure the lender has it or it's spotted, and when do you draw on it all the things. So I'm excited for you and on this journey we're gonna cover a lot of things.

If you found this episode useful and helpful just a little insight into how to think through this Let me know, reach out to me. I'd love to know how it impacted you. Also, there's a way at multifamilyaipodcastcom to send us a message what you want to cover, what are you interested in, what are the challenges that you have around this process, your organization moving through this new revolution that we're going through? Reach out to us. I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to spend more time with you and love to match goals on what we do together. With that, it's been great. I will see you guys in the next episode.