AI Could Take Your Job, But It Can’t Take Your Real Estate

Dave:
As many as 30% of all jobs in the US could be affected by AI within the next five years. Are you confident your career path will last until retirement age? And what are you doing to protect yourself from the unknowns of this rapidly advancing new technology? Today, we’re giving you an investing solution to safeguard your financial future. AI might take your job or all of our jobs, but it can never take your real estate. Hey everyone. I’m Dave Meyer. I’m a rental property investor and the head of real estate investing here at BiggerPockets. And with me today on the podcast is my friend Henry Washington. Henry, how’s it going?

Henry:
What’s going on buddy? How are you?

Dave:
I’m

Henry:
Good,

Dave:
But I got to admit my AI anxiety is pretty high. How high would you It should be. Okay. I’m glad we’re on the same page about this because I just want to be vulnerable with you, man. For the

Henry:
Record, you should be for your day job. Your investments are probably okay, but you should totally be worried

Dave:
Being a data analyst.

Henry:
Yeah, 100%

Dave:
Or podcasters or both.

Henry:
Yeah, all of the above.

Dave:
Both, yes. So I think this is a good topic for us all to talk about because I don’t know anyone who’s just like, yeah, this is going to be fine. There’s going to be no disruptions. Even if you believe in the technology, which I do, I think long-term it’s probably going to be beneficial, but I think there’s a lot of uncertainty what happens as we transition to a AI supported economy in the next couple of years. So I wanted to talk about that on this podcast and how it relates to real estate. So today we’re going to talk about the best way to take control of your finance and how to get started right now. So Henry, you’re obviously roasting me. I do think data analyst is like number one job for a job that’s going to get replaced.

Henry:
It’s like the first job that’s going to go away,

Dave:
Which just sucks, man, because in 2014 or something, I saw all these reports like data scientist, data analyst, number one job for the future, and I went back to school and got a master’s degree in this. I’m like job security forever. 10 years later, it’s the worst job to have. I just totally got punked on this. But I mean your job before you went into real estate full-time was similar, right?

Henry:
It was almost the exact same thing. Yes.

Dave:
So you would also be screwed if you were in a full-time real estate investor

Henry:
Right now. 100%, yes.

Dave:
So I mean, I know you’re not an expert in this. I’m not an expert in ai. I’ve done some research before this show, but data analyst is definitely up there, but I have a hard time imagining who’s not going to be impacted by AI in the next couple of years. I think you look at a lot of businesses, a lot of white collar businesses. I’ve worked in tech my whole career and this whole industry is really getting shaken up, whether it’s product managers or software engineers. Another job that has been a really highly sought after highly paid skill over the last couple of years are coming for lawyers, paramedics. It’s really going to impact the whole economy. It’s just a matter of when even the jobs that we are now saying are somewhat safe from ai, they’re still going to be impacted by AI in some way sooner or later, right?

Henry:
100%. There’s not a way around it.

Dave:
So listen, I don’t want to be totally alarmist. I don’t think the sky is falling just yet, but I think there are already signs that AI is impacting the labor market, and I do think that is only going to continue as the technology gets better and better. And so I guess my question to you is from a financial perspective, how do you even think about that?

Henry:
I mean, I think it went out the window when pensions went out the window, right? Because the last time I could remember somebody saying they retired comfortably was because they had some sort of pension or some career where they have some sort of pension like retirement, like firefighters have great retirements, military have great retirement, where you get tenured, those kinds of things. Those people say they have comfortable retirements, but when’s the last time you personally ever heard somebody who had a 401k who was retired say, I have a comfortable retirement.

Dave:
I don’t really know, to be honest. I mean, I think every person who’s retired I know has some level of economic or financial anxiety and uncertainty.

Henry:
So I think that vision that you painted that we talked about has been gone for a while and AI’s just going to make it worse for people who don’t have a plan who are solely relying on that 401k income.

Dave:
The way I keep thinking about this, and I know I’m biased because I am a real estate investor, I’m thinking about all the things that I could do to try and quell my own fear about this and make sure that I have income. And I’m like the one thing AI really can’t do right now or probably for the foreseeable future is own assets. And to me, that just has sort of reinforced my belief and prioritization of real estate investing because even though we’re in a very uncertain economy, it does make me feel like real estate is going to provide a really strong backbone. For me. That has always been true, but especially in this new environment.

Henry:
And I think the value with real estate in terms of AI is it’s just way too people facing. We’re providing housing to people, whether you’re fixing and flipping, whether you’re short-term renting, long-term renting, the housing is built for people to live in, the population is still growing. Those people need to live somewhere. My concern from a real estate perspective with AI is if AI does have such a negative impact on the economy, those people still need to live somewhere. And is that going to drive housing prices down because people aren’t making enough money to pay for more housing to pay higher rents because there’s less jobs? How does that financial negative impact hurt or help real estate?

Dave:
We do have to take a quick break, but Henry and I will be back right after this. This week’s bigger news is brought to you by the Fundrise flagship fund, invest in private market real estate with the Fundrise flagship fund. Check out fundrise.com/pockets to learn more. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m here with Henry Washington talking about how AI is disrupting our entire industry. Let’s jump back in. Okay. We’ve mused enough about AI and shared our thoughts about it, but maybe tell me what you think the benefits of real estate investing are in this kind of environment. Is it just the same as they’ve always been or is there anything different to you?

Henry:
The benefits of real estate and then the benefits of trade work?

Dave:
Yep. A hundred percent.

Henry:
Trade work got really uncool as technology started to advance. And so people were like, why would I go learn how to be a plumber and get my hands dirty when I can go and get this super cool technology job? And now technology has advanced so much that it’s like people are like, why would I go get that technology job that could go away in a week when I can go learn how to be a plumber and make 150 to $200,000 a year starting out? And so I think that owning the real estate, yes, you get the tax benefits, you get the cashflow, you get the appreciation, but the safety from an AI perspective is that it is people focused and AI

Speaker 4:
Will

Henry:
Help us operate our businesses better through helping us do things that typically took a lot more time to do, which can technically help you grow and scale your real estate business faster now by leveraging some of the AI tools. But you can’t take the people out of real estate. It’s not a thing for

Dave:
Sure. Yeah. I want to get back to how AI benefit real estate in just a minute and the trades, I want to talk to those. But yeah, I want to just hit on why real estate? Because you could say the same thing like, oh, AI is coming for your job. You should invest in Bitcoin or you should invest in the stock market. And to me, I think that the real lesson or the thing that I’m taking away from this is ownership. You need to be an entrepreneur and own your own business so that you have control over the way AI is being adopted around you. Because if you work for another corporation, someone else is going to make a decision about where they can cut people and where a machine can do that job. Now, as Henry said, AI is going to impact real estate in some way, and I think it just really is in these kinds of scenarios, you get to decide what you spend your time on and what AI is used for. That’s going to be like a defining differentiator for how people fare over the next few years. And I’m not saying that’s right, I just think that’s the way it is and that’s all the more reason for people to pursue entrepreneurship, whether it’s real estate investing or something else, to just have that say and have some control over your income and your future.

Henry:
Yeah, I mean that’s what I like about real estate is the amount of control that I have a yes, control over the income that I make control over where to implement technologies or not implement technologies, but also just control over my finances and being able to make money the way I want to make money. And when I choose to make money, which it was more of a luxury 10 years ago and even more of a luxury 20 years ago because that path of go to school, get a degree, get a job, work the corporate ladder and retire was easier to do. It was more achievable. But as technology has grown and the ease of that has dwindled away, becoming an owner of something has become more important. I hear and I see a lot, especially on social media where people say, stop telling people everybody needs to be a business owner or an entrepreneur. There’s always that crowd that’s like, this isn’t something you have to do, you can just go be an employee and you can,

Speaker 4:
Yeah, it can,

Henry:
But that path isn’t as guaranteed as it used to be in terms of being able to do that and then retire comfortably. And it comes with sacrifices. Both of these paths come with sacrifices because the sacrifice of the nine to five is less control. Somebody can take your job from you and then you have to go find another one. And for some that’ll be easy and for some that’ll be more challenging. But the sacrifice for entrepreneurs is you got to go get it. I saw a TikTok where a guy said, entrepreneurship broke is worse than nine to five broke.

Dave:
Yes.

Henry:
Because nine to five broke when your next paycheck is coming. If I can make it a couple more weeks, I got a little bit more money coming in. But entrepreneurship broke. You don’t know when that next paycheck is coming in. You got to go make the money. And so that’s the sacrifice you make with ownership is you got to go make the money and you may make it every couple of weeks. You may make it every couple of months. You may make it once a year, right. It depends on the industry that you’re in and how you set up your business. And so you’ve got to choose your heart for sure. I just think that the nine to five path isn’t as secure as it used to be, and you should be thinking about how to protect yourself and just here to tell you and talk to you about how to do that in a safe way, safer way with real estate. That’s the whole point of us being here.

Dave:
So my question though to you though is like let’s presume everyone agrees with this, that real estate is a good way to sort of hedge against the uncertainty that AI is bringing. Do you think you would change your advice to the average investor who’s not a full-time professional investor, how they would go about it in this era or would you keep giving the same advice you have been?

Henry:
No, it’s the same advice. That’s the coolest part about real estate. To me. How you do it essentially has remained unchanged over the course of its lifespan.

Henry:
The whole point of making money in real estate is finding something that has an opportunity for you to add value to it, buying that thing, adding the value, and then monetizing it at its new higher value, whether that’s renting it out, whether that’s selling it, whether that’s midterm renting the exit strategy isn’t important. The goal still is, has always been and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, is to find something that has opportunity for you to make it more valuable and then you make it more valuable and you monetize the higher value. Now as time has moved on and technology has advanced over the course of real estate being owned by the common person, there have been tools that have allowed you to do that more conveniently. It was a whole lot harder for someone to drive for dollars before apps like deal machine existed. And it was a whole lot harder for someone to identify distressed properties before the internet existed and you had to go down to the courthouse and look up all these properties that you drove by and saw and then manually look them up to build a list to reach out to those sellers,

Henry:
Like the people who were doing those tactics prior to the internet, had to spend a whole lot more time to get the result that you and I can get at the click of a button on our phone now. But how has always been the same. They were trying to identify properties that had opportunity to add value, and so all AI is going to do for us is help us get that more conveniently. But how hasn’t changed? And I don’t think it is changing.

Dave:
We got more about AI and how you can actually use AI for a positive benefit in your real estate investing business right after this quick break. Stay with us. Welcome back. I’m here with Henry Washington talking about how AI can help you in your business already and where we think the industry is heading as we adopt ai. We talk about on the show a lot, trying to figure out what you’re good at. So much to do in real estate investing. You can’t be good at all that you can’t do all of it. And for me, for 15 years that I’ve been doing it, I felt like I was good at market analysis and deal analysis and that doesn’t even matter anymore. I am just wondering if that is even a skill.

Henry:
It’s not a skill anymore, it’s a button on a piece of software.

Dave:
Exactly. And so I need to evolve I think as an investor and I’ve done value add stuff in probably not the most efficient way. I’m a long-term investor, so I’ll buy stuff. I’ll probably take longer to do value add than you do. Probably pay a little bit more than you do out of convenience. And I’ve thought hard about that. I’ve told you this, but I think I mentioned on the show that I’m flipping my first house actively not I necessarily want to flip houses, but I want to get better at construction. I want to learn the business a lot better because that’s a skill that you can read about, but you can’t really get good at it unless you’re on a job site learning about it. And so I’m just trying to learn new things, even 50, I told you before, I can’t learn new things here. I’m saying that I’m trying to learn new things, but I am just trying to think about what my advantage is going to be as an investor and it’s really, really changed for me over the last couple of years.

Henry:
Yeah, that’s a phenomenal point and very true because you’re right, those are skills that a real estate investor did need to know. And I’d argue that any real estate investor that’s going to grow a substantial portfolio, in other words, you’re going to own more than just a couple of houses, you should still probably understand those skills.

Dave:
Oh, for sure. It’s amazing to me how many people cite metrics to me like they’ve chatt it and they have no idea what the metric means. They’re using it in the complete wrong way or they look at, you can pull a list of top markets to invest, but that ability to connect why that market is good to your own personal strategy and your personal circumstances, absolutely you’re still going to need that, but that can probably be the first year of your investing learning how to do that. It’s not something that’s going to be a enduring benefit and skill that you’re going to outcompete other investors on.

Henry:
I think there are enough tools out there that are sophisticated enough that if you don’t know how to analyze a deal or analyze a market, you could probably use some of these tools and pick a decent enough deal in a decent enough market. Now does that mean it’s the right thing to buy? No, I think you do need that second tier of skillset that you were talking about, but for those who don’t want to put in that time and effort, it’s a whole lot easier to get the dart on the dartboard than it used to be.

Dave:
Oh, for sure. There’s just amazing tools that just run an estimated cash on cash return for every property on the MLS that used to take hours. And I thought that was part of skill good at that kind of thing. And I could run deals faster than other people and I could make an offer, whatever. Now it just doesn’t even matter. I mean, I would never invest based off those numbers, but I could sort down to 10 or 15 deals that I want to hand analyze a lot faster and soak in everyone else. So I think that’s the way I’ve been thinking a lot about this is there’s always going to be an ebb and flow of interest in residential real estate. When interest rates were really low, people flooded into this market and that’s when having skills like Henry had for deal finding super beneficial or my ability to analyze new markets or find new neighborhoods, that kind of stuff is what I used as an advantage. But I really think people need to focus on things that are going to give them a competitive advantage in an AI era in eras of high demand and low demand. And to me, you’re great at deal finding. I think that’s always going to be true. That’s not where I’m choosing to build my skillset right now, but I think that and value add construction are the two things that are really going to endure in this business. And they’re things that you really need to learn.

Henry:
And I think those are things that you can identify now. And I think we kind of have to give this some time to help us identify what problems AI is going to create so that we can figure out if our skill sets

Henry:
Can create solutions to those problems. We don’t know the problems yet. Real estate is, it takes time if people are using AI tools to help them build a real estate business or portfolio now that could have problems or impacts in the future that we just don’t see yet because there aren’t enough people probably doing that or leveraging it enough and making decisions purely based on data and tools that AI are providing. But every new solution to a problem then just creates new problems that need new solutions. And it’s going to take some time for us to be able to figure out what are those problems and then what skills do we have that can help us solve some of those problems. I mean, those things are coming, but I think the way you’re thinking is the right way to think. Given what I know now and given the skills that I have now, what can I educate myself on that’s going to help keep me relevant until I can find out what these new problems are?

Dave:
That’s a good way to put it. I’m not going to regret learning more about construction. Absolutely. You’re not going to regret getting great at off market deal finding. Those are things that are going to be good. I’m going to add a third one to that. Just normal human interaction. Get good at that because I actually think that’s going to be one of the things that is rare in the future. And real estate we always say, but it’s true. It’s person to person game. You’re going to meet with contractors, you’re going to meet with tenants, you’re going to meet with property managers and people who are good at not just learning about those people and vetting those people, but getting them to work together. That is so much of a real estate investor. And I do think AI will help with that in some respects with the nuts and bolts of it.

Dave:
But the face-to-face interactions are not going to go away. And that is something I think you can learn a lot. But you made a good point that I think is important is that the other skill that’s going to emerge for sure, it’s like who uses AI the best and it’s too early to know how that’s going to play out. But that is something probably myself everyone should be thinking about and probably something we should be updating everyone on the show very frequently about is what the best AI tools are and the best implementation of those tools are. Which sort of brings me to another question is like are you using AI in your investing

Henry:
Today? Probably not as much as other investors for sure, but absolutely. Some of the places we use it are through our list building. So I was using a tool that essentially what they do is they take county data, they take data from direct mail companies, they take data from other investors, they take all this real estate data and they try to put a score on every house within a neighborhood or a zip code to say what is the likelihood percentage wise that this particular seller would sell to an investor based on all these data points.

Dave:
Oh, interesting. So it’s lead scoring.

Henry:
Exactly.

Dave:
Okay.

Henry:
And so then marketing to that list to see if that has a higher conversion rate on deals than just a traditional list.

Henry:
Some other things that we’re testing is essentially there’s an AI tool that can cold call thousands of people at a time, right? Because it’s just an AI bot, it’s not a person talking. And so the sophistication level of some of these AI air quotes, people that talk have conversations with real people is getting better and better. And a lot of the times people don’t even know they’re speaking to an AI agent. And so like a use case for this is, let’s say you’ve got dead leads. Every real estate investor has dead leads, especially if you’re looking at off market deals. So say you have 5,000 to 10,000 just dead contacts, you put it in this AI calling tool, it calls them all and maybe you get one or two leads out of it. That’s why a lot of investors don’t work these dead leads further because you put in a lot of effort to get a low return on your effort, but if it doesn’t impact anybody’s time, if AI can call 10,000 people and kick you back five hot leads in a matter of minutes, that’s huge. Pretty good. That’s huge.

Henry:
You could make thousands of dollars for very minimal work. Previously you were going to spend weeks researching all these people and data to make these calls and get very limited results. And so people wouldn’t do it. And then there’s just other cool AI tools. Like I use an AI tool that it’s similar, it’s an AI calling agent, but it can just call and do a lot of the mundane task things that you need to do in your business. So we use it to call and turn on utilities. So all I need to do is say, Hey, call the city of Bella Vista and turn on electricity at 1 2, 3 Main Street and it’ll just call and have that whole conversation and then just produce the results For me. I’ve had it call and talk to this timeshare company my mom is a part of to get a bunch of information out of them so I can go and cancel the timeshare. I didn’t have to sit on a customer service call for 45 minutes to an hour.

Dave:
That’s your jam, dude. You don’t wait in line. I hate this is your digital answer. Yeah.

Henry:
So yeah, it’s perfect for you. Little stuff like that has been a tremendous times saving allows me to do more with the time that I have. I have to go sit on customer service calls. It’s pretty cool stuff. So there’s just, we’re not using it. I’m not building AI chatbots and going out there and talking. There are people that are at that level of sophistication who are developing true AI tools to custom using their business. I’m just using what’s available out there and seeing how it can help my business.

Dave:
I just think we’re in the infancy of this. In tech, there’s these adoption curves that they have where it’s like right now we’re with the enthusiasts. People who are super eager are going to go build those things and that’s great, but personally, I’m the kind of adopter who’s just going to wait to see who wins in the space and what the best tools emerge. I’m not going to go build my own. So I’m going to go wait and see, and for now I’m going to do things like what Henry’s doing. I don’t do cold calling or anything like that, but there are already tools that I’ve been using to scrape data from websites and to consolidate data that has really been a big help. I still check it all manually, but it helps aggregating data, which any data analyst will tell you is like 70% of the job. So that’s true. And then I don’t know if you’ve used this, but I love this thing. Have you heard of Cubi Casa or Cubi Casa,

Henry:
You pronounce it? Yes. KU is awesome. We use it on every

Dave:
List. It’s

Henry:
Magic. We use it. It’s for all of our properties. It’s

Dave:
Amazing. Yeah, KU Casa is awesome, and it just gives you as-builts and stuff for so easy, super easy. And you could do it the day you walk around the property and you already have as-builts. It’s amazing. So that was my little AI trick that I learned the other week. That was really cool.

Henry:
Yeah, dude, we have Ku Casas on every property, even when I’m just walking them. Having the layout and being able to walk your contractor through on just a layout that was super easy for you to make and you can move walls and things, it’s awesome. Super cool. It’s amazing.

Dave:
Well, those are the ones that I’ve learned so far. But yeah, I use chat T in my daily job all the time. I use it all the time just asking questions and that sort of thing. But I would love to know for people who are listening, real estate investors, active, aspiring, what AI tools are you using? Let us know if you’re watching this on YouTube in the comments, I would love for you to share with our community any tips that you have on using AI because we’re all learning about this at the same time together. Or if you’re listening on Spotify, you can actually leave comments now there too. Definitely let us know. It would be a huge help for us. And with that, that’s what we got for you guys today. But this is definitely going to be the first of many conversations about AI here on the BiggerPockets podcast.

Dave:
We wanted to bring you this first episode just to talk about the need for ai, the need for real estate in ai, how to use AI in real estate, and get the conversation going with our community. Because obviously Henry and I, not yet experts on ai. I don’t think anyone can really say that they’re an expert yet, and we want to invite you all in to help us learn about this together and as a community, learn how to both protect yourself against the risks of AI and embrace the good parts of AI as an investing community. So Henry, thanks for joining me for it.

Henry:
Hey, man, thank you for having me.

Dave:
Thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. We’ll see you next time.