Set Up Your AI Like an Employee — The Realtor's Step-by-Step

So just about every Realtor I talk to nowadays is using AI. Type a question, get a paragraph, close the tab. Still living in 2010, just with a faster answer.But doing that is a little like buying a 2026 truck and connecting your iPhone with a USB cable. Bluetooth, anyone? So today's episode's going to be just a little different.We still got rates, we've still got the housing numbers, we still got Mike's mind and all the tips. But through this whole episode, there is a thread.Every segment I'm going to point at something that AI is great at or something it will absolutely lie to your face about. And. And then at the end, I'm going to tell you how to exactly set up your chat, GPT or Claude the right way.No tricks or big promises, just set up an infrastructure. The boring but incredibly important stuff that nobody does, or at least that very few people do. Right?You will be absolutely amazed at what this tool can do for you with just a few little tweaks. So let's get into it.This is the Texas Real Estate Finance podcast where we break down the housing market, the economy's mood swings, and whatever financial curve balls that get launched at us each week. It's part market update, part strategy session, and occasionally a reminder that none of this is as simple as it should be.Built for Texas Realtors who want to actually understand the market that they're working in and not just react to the headlines.I'm your host, Mike Mills, a North Texas mortgage banker with over 17 years in the business, host of this show and an AI obsessed nerd teaching realtors how to actually put this stuff to work. So here's what's on deck for today's episode. Well, rates actually eased this week after a cooling inflation report.I'll break down what happened and why the Fed hawks are suddenly running out of excuses. On the housing side, DFW's gone flat and sellers are quietly giving back real money. At the closing table, I'm going to show you how much I've got.A buyer tip that kills the credit pull fear once and for all. A seller move almost nobody in your market is talking about. That beats a bridge loan every single time.And a tip for agents that takes repetitive tasks and puts them on autopilot. And Mike's mind is a loaded one this week. Home builders acting like banks, the job numbers that nobody's checking.And yes, we crashed a rocket into the moon. Why, you ask? I'm going to tell you. And then, of course, the main event.I'M going to tell you, step by step, feature by feature, how to actually set up your AI so it works like a real employee instead of a search box. It's pretty easy and it'll take you just a couple of minutes, but will ultimately save you hours each week.So stick around to the end for the real payoff of this episode.Now, real quick, before we dig in, if this show helps you sound smarter in front of your clients, do me a favor, hit subscribe, leave a review, and send it to one agent in your office that needs it. That's how this thing grows, and it costs you nothing but a click. And two quick things about my day job.One the Mortgage side this podcast is my fun side gig, but I pay the bills helping your clients get into the home of their dreams simply and easily.So if you've got a client that needs a straight answer on financing, a second opinion on a pre approval, or a lender who actually picks up the phone, that's me. Send them my way. And second, the AI side, which is where this episode lives. I teach agents and brokerages how to actually put this stuff to work.The setups, the tools, the workflows. If your office would like that as a class or a consult, then reach out.Everything's@mike millstx.com or just email mike mike millstx.com all right, commercial over. Let's get into it. All right, let's start where we always start.Because no matter what's going on in the world, the question every realtor and client is asking every week is the same. Hey Mike, what are the rates?So according to the Mortgage News Daily index, as of August 12, 2026, the 30 year fixed conventional is about 6.74%, the 15 year fixed conventional is about 6.27%, the 30 year FHA is about 6.29%, the 30 year VA is about 6.31% and the 30 year jumbo is about 6.85%. Now these are market averages provided by Mortgage News Daily. Not a quote.Your actual rate depends on credit, loan type, down payment, and a handful of other factors. So talk to a licensed mortgage professional like me to get your actual rate based on your actual situation. There we go. Compliance nerds satisfied?All right, here's the Good news. The 30 year number actually came down a touch this week.We've been sitting near 2026 highs and existing home sales actually dipped about 1 1/2% in July because of it. So we needed some good news and this week we got a Little. So what changed? Well, one word. Inflation.The big inflation report, the CPI came out on Wednesday morning and it came in just a little bit cool. Right in line with what everyone else was hoping for.Headline Inflation ticked down year over year, and the core number, the one that the Fed actually watches, dropped to its lowest level since early 2021. Now, when inflation cools like that, the bond market relaxes a little bit. And when bonds relax, mortgage rates ease. Which is exactly what happened.Rates dropped down to their lowest point in about three weeks. And here's the part that actually matters going forward.The Fed had some members pushing for a rate hike at the last meeting, but after the weak jobs numbers and now this cool inflation print, the odds of a rate hike in September just got cut nearly in half overnight. The smart money is actually leaning towards floating right now rather than locking betting rates hold here or improve.But fair warning, that can flip on the next report. And there's another inflation number tomorrow.So if you've got a buyer on the fence, the honest answer this week is rates got a little better, the trend's finally pointing in the right direction, and the Fed hawks are running out of excuses. And that is about as much good news as we've had in a while.But to all you folks using AI to check rates, if you asked Chat GPT this morning what rates are, it told you something and it said it with a straight face and was probably wrong. Remember, mortgage rates are based off your client's specific situation. Their credit, their down payment, their loan type.All things that AI has no idea about unless you know or tell it. But it will still give you a very confident answer.But that answer will not only be not specific to you or your client, but also based on old information. Rates move every single day. But unless you tell AI where to check, it will give you data that at best is an average over the last month or so.Or at worst, just flat out wrong. My best buddy Claude is good at a lot of things. Quoting rates is not one of them.So if you or your client want to know where rates really are for them, then ask the professional like me. Next up, do you have a buyer who's scared to even talk to a lender?Well, this week's buyer tip of the week is about knocking out that fear that stops buyers cold, plus a warning about where I will actually steer them wrong. So here's the fear. Buyers are terrified about getting their credit pull.They think that every time a lender checks their credit, their score takes a beating. So they either avoid talking to a lender at all. Or they freeze up the second anybody mentions pulling credit.And that fear costs them because they put off getting properly pre approved. So here's what you tell them, and it's just true. Getting your credit pulled for a mortgage is not as big of a deal as you think it is these days.A lot of lenders can do a soft pull to get you started, which does absolutely nothing to the score. And even if they do a hard pull, it's going to barely move the needle. We're talking a few points, if any at all.In fact, the credit system specifically protects mortgage checks. You could have your credit pulled by five different lenders in the same week and it still counts as one event on on your score.The system is built to let this happen. Getting pre approved will not wreck your credit. But if Your client asks ChatGPT, what rate can I get or can I get pre approved?Well, here's the thing. AI is great a lot, but this isn't one of those things.Even if your client knows their own credit score and hands it over, a real rate isn't built on that one number. It's their income, their debt, their down payment, the property, the loan type, a dozen moving pieces that AI just can't see.So it gives them a confident answer that feels real. And it's almost always wrong. And a wrong number that they fall in love with becomes your problem when the real rate comes in higher. So the tip?Simple. Tell your buyers to quit being scared of that pre approval. It barely touches their credit and it's the only way to get the real number.And that real number comes from a human who looks at their whole file, not a chatbot that's never seen it. That's how a buyer goes from I think I can afford this house to I know I can afford this house.So if you have that conversation early, you're going to be the calmest and smartest voice in the deal. Which, let's be honest, you are. Now to the market that those buyers are shopping in in the.Here's the thing about AI and these numbers, it can get them. It just has to be plugged into something that actually has the right numbers. That's a connector and we'll get there.So let's talk about the housing data. I'm going to keep this one really quick, just the hits, because the real meat today is in the AI segment at the end. Here's where DFW sits.And all these are straight off of Netris RMLs. Locally, these are July numbers. The median sale price across the Metroplex is right around $420,000.It's basically flat because we're kind of just moving sideways, not crashing, not climbing. Homes are taking about 50 days to sell right now, which is slower than the frenzy years. And buyers have a lot more room to think again.And for your sellers, the typical home is closing at about 95% of its original list price. So the average seller in this market is knocking almost 5% off of it before it sells.And on a $400,000 house, that's 20 grand, they give back because they priced on yesterday's market instead of today's. So the one line story, sideways prices, more inventory buyers with leverage. Sellers who have to price right or situation boring. Boring is just fine.Now, here's the tie in. I actually ran into this exact thing when I was prepping for today's episode.When I went to pull these numbers, I got five different DFW median prices from five different sources. One said flat, one set up 10%. One said down. All true, but all measuring different things.City versus metro, average versus median one month versus three. So if you just grab that first number you see, you can walk into a listing appointment with a stat that's flat wrong for your neighborhood.And this is where I actually earns its keep for you. And notice it's not, hey, AI, what's the DFW median home price? Because we already know it'll be a guess and it'll be confident and wrong.It's the opposite.You go pull the real report, and for us in North Texas, that means Netris, through your metro text data, backed up by the Texas A and M Real Estate Research Center. And that is the gold standard. That's the actual source.Then you hand that to your AI and say, read this report and tell me what's happening in Mansfield under 400 grand. Or compare this month to last month and tell me what changed. For my sellers, you bring the real data. It does the sifting.It reads 40 pages of tables in 10 seconds and hands you the three things that matters for your client. That's the move. Don't ask AI for the data. Feed it the right data and let it do the reading. Garbage in, garbage out. But the good Netris report in.And that's the smartest analysis that your team has to offer. All right, so now we know the actual numbers.But if you've got a seller staring at those numbers, wondering how they'll use their equity without having to sell their house first in this changing Market, Then the next seller tip is for you.So how do we best help a home seller that's also going to be a home buyer with all that equity in their current home that they can't use until they sell their house?Your seller wants to move up, but all their equity is locked in the house that they're living in and they don't want to sell first and go couch surfing on the in laws for two months or miss out on that move up home that they really love because they have to write a contingency offer. Well, most agents I know always reach for the same tool, a bridge loan or a heloc. Borrow against the old house to get the new down payment.And here's why. That's actually usually the wrong move. A bridge doesn't get around the debt to income math. You still have to qualify carrying that payment.So all you've done is add a second loan and a second set of closing costs on top of the exact problem that you were trying to solve. The better play that almost nobody tells sellers about is called a recast.Your buyer puts down less money upfront on the new house and a bigger payment for a few months. But a payment that's usually a little more workable.The old house sells, they drop that equity straight into the new loan's principal and ask the lender to do a recast. And then the lender re amortizes with the same rate, the same payoff date, but the balance is way lower.So the payment falls to right where they wanted it. No refinance, no appraisal, no underwriting. The equity just does its work a few months later instead of right up front.Now, two quick caveats on this recast are for conventional loans only. FHA, VA and USDA do not recast. And it's only worth doing on real money. Recasting 50 grand barely moves the payment.Six figures of equity, however, from that house that they just sold moves it a lot. So the next time a client says, I want to buy my next house, but my cash is stuck in this one, don't send them straight to a bridge loan.Send them to a lender who will walk them through a recast. It's cleaner, it's cheaper, and almost nobody in your market is telling them it exists. But you will be.All right, now it's time to dive into what my mind has been fiddling on all week. So this is the part of the show where I just empty out my brain. All the stuff that I bookmarked this week that's been rattling around in there.Some of it connects, some of it doesn't. All. All of it is just a little peek into what's rolling around inside that old brain of mine. So buckle up. Let's start where it actually touches you.So, Dr. Horton, the biggest home builder in the country, is now financing a huge chunk of its own sales through its in house mortgage arm. And they're sitting right now on something like 568,000 lots. Now, on the surface, the builder helps you get a loan.Sounds convenient and usually is the case. But here's what it actually tells me. When the biggest builder in America has to become its own bank to keep sales moving, that is not a strength.That is them quietly telling your buyers that they can't qualify the normal way anymore. And it's usually not because of them, but because of the home. So here's the part I really want you to understand.To move these houses, builders are throwing everything at the deal rate. Buy downs, closing costs, upgrades, all for the purpose of keeping that sticker price up so your buyer feels like they're getting a screaming deal.But that inflated price, well, it's baked right into their loan.And if they have to sell in a year or two or three, job moves, life just generally happening, well, all of those free incentives evaporate, and now they're underwater by exactly that much. You see, the incentive isn't necessarily a gift. It's kind of a trap with a bow on it. So you got to know that going in.And while we're doing reality checks, the true cost of owning also keeps climbing. Back in 2019, the average homeowner spent about nine grand a year on maintenance, improvements and surprise stuff. That's up to around 12,500.Now, the mortgage was never the whole payment. It's just the part that we show you.All right, let's shift gears to the economy and whether that the numbers that they hand us are actually even real. So get this. The monthly jobs report has been revised down 21 out of the last 30 months.21 Out of 30, averaging something like 35,000 fewer jobs than they told us the first time. See, that's not a rounding error. That is what we call a pattern. Give everybody a rosy headline number, then quickly walk it back a month later.While nobody's paying attention, this happened in the same week. Just another example of this. 720,000Americans left the workforce in a single month. Because they left, they don't count in the unemployment number.That's how you keep your unemployment looking pretty While people are quietly giving up. And then the one that really got me was Nvidia. So the most valuable company on the planet, the AI golden goose, is now tapping private equity.Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman, KKR reportedly put together a $500 billion financing deal for them. That's half a trillion dollars. So if the healthiest company in the hottest sector in the world is.Needs to go borrow half a trillion dollars, ask yourself how healthy the whole thing really is under the hood. That's a red flag the size of a billboard. Next. The rules of this economic game are certainly changing, by the way. I'm just going to lay these out.I'm not saying it's good, I'm not saying it's bad. I'm just saying it's a little different.So, number one, the US Government now holds equity stakes, which is ownership, in around 30 private companies. A year ago, that number was zero. And in some cases right now, the government is the single largest shareholder.Now, whatever you think about that, that is a genuine shift on how this country does business because now the free market's looking a little less free. Number two, this one's pretty wild.There is a story going around that the U. S. Treasury essentially stepped in and took the wheel of the bank of Japan's policy operations. So we're running another country's central bank from Washington in order to keep another financial catastrophe from blowing up in our face.Now, I do want to be careful here. This is a big claim and I can't fully verify all of it. So take it as a.This is what's circulating and not necessarily gospel, but if even half of it's true, that's the kind of thing that used to start wars and it barely made the news. Which brings me to my favorite theme of the day. The haves and the have nots.Or as I like to call it, there is no red team, there is no blue team, there's just the green team because they're all playing for money. Exhibit A. Trump Media launched something called Truth API.So for 60 to 100 grand a month, Wall street firms, mostly high frequency traders, can get the president's market moving. Post piped to them several minutes before you or I see them. And more than 10 customers have already signed up. So think about what's being sold here.Not information time. A head start on the one account on earth that can actually move markets with a sentence operating right out of the Oval Office.And the president owns 40% of the company that's selling it. Now, former SEC folks are saying this looks an awful like the exact insider trading setup the law was written to stop.Now, to be fair, Pelosi stock trades caught the same heat for years and are still going on. So this isn't a one party sport again, it's a green team sport. But the question does stand.Is a sitting president allowed to profit off his own information while he's in office? Because right now the answer appears to be for 100 grand a month. Sure.And if you don't have that 100 grand, well then you'll be trading in the dark behind the ones that do. And real quick, two more for the green team file. Chevron's profit nearly quadrupled while you're paying four bucks a gallon at the pump.And right here in Texas, Greg Abbott waived all sales tax for data centers, reportedly one of the largest taxpayer giveaways in the country. So somebody's always getting the carve out. It's just usually not you or me.And speaking of Texas one, that's actually close to my heart if you've got kids. There's a new statewide heat safety law for UIL sports this fall. Football, soccer, even the band.Schools now have to monitor something called wet bulb globe temperature.Not just the heat index, but humidity, sun and wind together figure out how dangerous it really is out there with mandatory water breaks and cooling equipment on hand. Brian and College Station have been doing it for a couple years already.And now it's everybody good rule if you ask me, because Texas heat is no joke, as many of you are very well aware. And then finally, because we've got to end on something fun, the moon. So you might have seen that we crashed a rocket into the moon this month.So on August 5, a stray SpaceX Falcon 9 plowed right into the lunar surface. South Korea's satellite got the before and after crater shots. Whole thing was treated like a quirky little space junk story.Meanwhile, and this is public, verifiable and on NASA's own website, we are actively planning to build a permanent nuclear powered base up there on the moon's south pole, supposedly breaking ground on in the next few years.And also in the same news cycle, there is a physicist going around claiming that NASA's been editing aliens out of the Apollo moonshots for 60 years, pointing at two versions of the same shot. One with the black sky and one with the mysterious blue orbital.Now, Buzz Aldrin is on record saying that it's not an alien, but he's also on the record saying a lot of other Crazy things that would imply something weird happened up there. So who knows? You tell me. But apparently we are trying to move in up there.We just chucked a rocket at it and there's a guy saying that they've been scrubbing photos the whole time. I'm not saying it's connected, but I'm not saying it isn't. Just saying the timing's a little funny.And that is what has been rattling around in my head this week. Next, for my agent tip of the week. Set it up once. Quit fiddling. Housing numbers on the board. Now here's what to do with them on Monday morning.So your agent tip of the week. And this one costs you nothing but a little self awareness. And it pairs with the big AI segment coming up at the end. Here's the tip this week.Pick one thing that you do over and over. Your buyer consult, your listing prep, your Monday follow up routine, whatever.And the next time you do it, narrate it or type it out loud to your AI model. Talk through every step as you go and have your AI model capture it. So here's what I mean. You sit down to prep a listing presentation.So instead of just doing it in your head like you've always done, you open a chat and you talk it out. Okay, first thing I do is pull the last six months of comps in the subdivision.Then I check the days on market so I know how aggressive to price the home. Then I look at what's pending so I know what's actually moving. Then I build the pricing story that I'm going to tell the seller.And on and on, every line, every step in your own words. Now here's why that is worth doing. Because right now, all of your breast processes live exactly in one place. Your head.You've done your listing prep so many times that you don't even think about it anymore. Which sounds great until you realize you can't hand it to anybody. You can't systemize it. And on a busy week, you cut corners without even noticing.You see, the stuff that you're the best at is the stuff that you've never written down before. So narrate it once. And now it exists outside of your brain. And here's the magic of it. You didn't have to stop working to do it.You did your actual listing prep the thing that you had to do anyway and you walked away with a written playbook as a byproduct. Do your job, get the SOP for free. And once you've got that, you've got the raw materials for everything.You can hand it back to your AI and say, run this for my next listing. You can turn it into a checklist. You can hand it to an assistant, but it has to start with one simple move.Next time you do the thing, say it out loud and let AI write it down. And if you're sitting there thinking, narrate my work into a chat bot. That sounds insane.Well, hang on, because that's exactly what I'm about to show you how to do. And it's the whole reason it works. The that's what's coming up in this week's AI segment.All right, so half of you just heard narrate your listing prep into a chatbot and thought that it sounded insane. Well, it's not. It's about four minutes, and I'm going to show you exactly how.So if you're a realtor and you're using AI right now, I want you to be honest with yourself about how you open it. You type a question, you read the answer, you close it. Maybe you copy something into an email. That's the whole thing, right?Well, here's the part that you're missing. That is about 10% of what this thing actually does. You bought a new truck, and you're using it to charge your phone, and that's it.So I'm going to spend the next 15 to 20 minutes showing you how to exactly set this up so it knows who you are, it knows how you talk, and it knows your business and stops making you re explain yourself every single time you open it. This isn't tips and tricks. This is the setup that very few people do.And it's the difference between a party trick and something that actually saves you hours a day. So settle in. Mark this down for later, because this one's worth it. All right, first Things first. Your AI has a settings area.ChatGPT calls it custom instructions, Claude calls it your profile, whatever. Almost nobody fills it out. And it's the single most important thing that you need to do, and here's why.Right now, every time you open that thing, it's meeting you for the very first time. It doesn't know you sell real estate. It doesn't know that you live in North Texas.It doesn't know that you talk like a human being instead of a corporate brochure. So it gives you a generic answer built for nobody, and then you spend four messages dragging it toward what you actually need.The fix takes five minutes. One time, you tell it three things. Who you are? I'm a real estate agent. The DFW market and I mostly work with buyers.Then you tell it what you do, the actual day to day. The clients and the problems that you solve, and then how you talk. And this is the one that people miss.If you don't want it writing like a press release, tell it. Talk to me. Plain, short sentences. No corporate speak. If something's a bad idea, tell me it's a bad idea.Because AI is your biggest fan, unless you tell it not to be. Now tell it who you are and how you talk.Sounds easy until you're staring at an empty cursor box blinking at you, and suddenly you can't describe your own job. Everybody freezes up here. So instead you can flip it, make AI do the work for you. Open up a chat and type this. And I mean type it exactly.I want to fill out my custom instructions so you understand my business and how I work. Interview me. Ask me one question at a time. Wait for my answer, and once you've got enough, write my profile for me. That's it.Now it's asking you the questions. What do you sell? Who's your client? What's your market? How do you like things written?And all you're doing is answering one at a time, like a normal human conversation. When it's done, it hands you a finished profile that you copy and paste into the settings and you're done. One question at a time.Write that phrase on your hand. It's the single most useful trick in this entire episode. And it works for everything, not just this.Anytime you want to get the good stuff out of your head, make the AI pull it out one question at a time, instead of trying to dump it in all at once. And here's how I want you to think about it. That thing isn't a search engine. It is your staff.It's your consultant when you're thinking through a deal, your copywriter when you're stuck on a listing description, and your IT guy when something breaks. But staff that's never met you and doesn't know you is relatively useless. So this is you actually onboarding a new hire.That's the difference between a brand new employee on day one and one who's been with you for two years now. Everything that I just walked you through there, the interview, the one question at a time, teaching at your voice.I actually have already built the done for you version. It's called my brand Builder. It's a project that you drop into Claude or chat GPT and it interviews you 30 questions.30, 30 Minutes, one at a time, and hand you back a finished profile that you can paste into any AI tool forever. And it does the one thing that separates a profile that sounds like you from one that sounds like every other agent online.It makes you prep real voice samples first. Your actual posts, your actual emails, phone call transcripts and conversations with clients.So if you want that brand builder, the link is in the show notes, it's free. I just want your email so I can send it. That's the whole thing.All right, so now that it knows who you are, the next question everybody asks is when do I just open a chat and when do I make a project? Well, the simple version is a chat is a question, a project is a job. So if you need a quick answer, reword this. What's a good subject line?Open a chat, ask, done.It's kind of like the drive thru window, but the second that you're doing something that you'll come back to something with moving parts that needs to remember the details from last time. Well, that is a project. And here's why. A project beats a pile of random chats. You see, in a random chat, you close the tab and it's gone.Next time you're re explaining everything all over again. It's an employee with amnesia every morning. Here's who we are, here's the client, here's what we're doing. It's exhausting.A project, however, is like a room. You walk in and everything is set up on the table. The files, the background, the last four conversations, all there.You can pick up where you left off. Now here's the part that makes the project actually work. And it's the part that people skip. It's the stuff that you put in the room that matters.Context, docs and instruction. This is the difference between a project that's just a folder and one that actually knows its job.So let me tell you about a real one, because I built one of those as well for you. It's called the Buyer Assistant project. What do I have inside it?Basically 10 documents, a Texas Realtor reference guide, a transaction timeline that knows every deadline from contract to close, a plain English contract guide, email templates in your voice, and one master instruction doc that ties it all together. It tells the AI start every buyer by collecting these details. Use this timeline to calculate dates and match the voice in the profile doc.So that instruction doc is your control panel and without it you've just got a pile of files and a confused robot. And with it, you've got a true system. So that's the lesson there. A project without context docs is just an empty room.The docs are the here's how we do it here manual that you would hand a new hire. That's what makes it yours, instead of just something generic.Now, I want to address the agent question, and not realtor, but AI agent question, because everybody wants to talk about AI agents. And here's what I actually think about it. And it's a little different than probably what you're hearing online right now.A project is actually the first step toward a an AI agent. You don't start with an agent. You start with a project that you run yourself.You use it, you refine it, you figure out exactly how you like the job done. Then once it's dialed in, an agent is just the thing that executes those tasks for you without you having to click every button. Think about it.Kind of like running a company. If you start a business, you need to know how everything works. You need to be able to do every job yourself first, if you're doing it right.Because when you go to hire someone, you can only hand off a job that you already fully understand. If you hire a social media person who has no idea how you want it done, it's a complete disaster.But if you hire one after you've been doing it yourself for a while, you can say, here's exactly how I want to do it now. They're an asset. Well, an AI agent is the same. It's an employee that execute tasks inside projects that you already built and refined.Social posting, blog drafts and email monitor, whatever it is that you're trying to do. But you build the project first, run it, and know how it works.Because skipping straight to the agent is hiring a stranger to run a system that's never been built. Get me wrong, agents are cool and they are all the rage, but they are just employees executing the work that you've already figured out.So the latter is set your context, build a project, run it yourself, refine it, and only when that thing's humming at a hundred percent do you hand it over to an agent because you don't want to buy the robot before you did the job yourself. All right, let's make this real with a vacation project. Because once you hear what goes into one, you'll never kind of look at AI the same way again.And I'm using a trip on purpose because nobody's stressed out about going on vacation. Wrong. So it's the Easiest place to learn what the moves look like. So picture the project. Two kinds of stuff go into it.And knowing the difference is the key to understanding all of this. So the first kind, the stuff that's true no matter where you go. This is your context.The permanent files in the room, who's in your family, names, age, the youngest melts down without a pool. Your oldest teenager won't go on a hike that's more than a mile without a bribe. What do you like? You like a good steak? Your wife wants mountains.Nobody wants a six hour drive in the car with these damn kids. Then you have your travel guard rails. You fly southwest because you've got a companion pass, like to go to Marriott because you're stacking points.And you got really hard budget ceiling. Heck, maybe you even drop a doc with your rewards numbers, your TSA pre check, the kids, birth dates, all this stuff for booking tickets.Because that stuff never changes trip to trip. It lives in a project permanently. That's your context. It's the here's who we are and here's how we travel file.Now the second kind, that stuff specific to one particular trip, that's the per chat part. So Colorado, first week of August, four grand budget. We want mountains in a pool this time.So you're going to start a new chat inside the project for each vacation. The summer Colorado trip is one chat. The Christmas trip to see grandmother is another one.And both of them already know your family, your budget, style and your rewards. All of it because it lives in the room. You only type the new stuff. Now how would you actually talk to it?Well, this is the part you tattooed on your arm. Remember? One question at a time. You don't say plan my whole trip. You say based on what you know about us.Give me three Colorado towns that fit, one reason for each, then stop. And it does. And then you react. I love the second one. Tell me more. Drop the third one because it's too far. You see, you're steering.It's back and forth, not a vending machine. And every answer gets sharper because you're correcting as you go instead of untangling one giant wall of text.And you can pile the tools in there too. Pointed at travel sites, have it build a full day by day itinerary. Tell it to keep up a running packing list. Have it watch prices on flights.But none of that works until the room knows who you are. So. So that's the vacation project. It's permanent context. Your family, your taste, your travel style.It's per trip chats, the specific vacation, one question at a time to steer it. And here is where it gets really cool.Because once you've planned a few trips this way and you've gone back and added the stuff that you forgot to mention the first time around, that's when you can hire a travel AI agent to run the whole thing on autopilot. But that is another topic for another day. We're taking baby steps here. You eat the whale one bite at a time.And oh, by the way, the reason I walked you through the trip at all is because those same exact pieces are what you're about to build for your business. Same room, same contact stocks, just a different job.So you're going to take everything that we just did with that vacation and point it at your actual job. It's the same two buckets. Your permanent context, who you are, your market, your voice, your process. That's the business version of the family file.Then a per chat thing that you're working on. This listing, that buyer, this week's content. Oh, by the way, here's the one that I'd bill first. And it ties back to the agent tip from earlier.Make a listing project. Then the next time you prep for a listing presentation, don't do it silently. Narrate it to the chat while you work.Okay, first I pull the comps, then I check days on market, and then I build the pricing story one question at a time. It captures every single step. And when you're done, you didn't just finish a listing prep.You've got a written playbook that you can hand it every single time. After that, you got the work and the system in the same 40 minutes, because that is the move.And you already know how to do it because we just did it for Colorado. All right, next part here I want to talk about what makes this stuff go from a smart intern to an actual employee with access to your stuff.So the first one is something that we call connectors. A connector is just a live wire between your AI and an app that you already use, like Gmail, Google Drive, your Google Calendar, or even your CRM.So instead of you having to copy and paste stuff into the chat or take screenshots, it actually reaches into the app itself. And here's kind of where the whole rates warning from earlier kind of pays off a little bit.Remember I told you that if you ask AI what rates are today, it's going to lie to you with a straight face. But if you hook it to a live source and it stops guessing and actually starts reading.That's the difference between, I think rates are around 6% and pulling the actual number off the actual page. But you see, the real unlock isn't just looking things up. It's actually telling it to do something.And this is where the AI stops being a search engine for you and becomes your actual assistant. Because you can connect your calendar and you don't have to ask what's on Thursday.You say, block me two hours Thursday morning for listing prep, and move my 2 o' clock to Friday. And it just does it for you like that.You can connect your Gmail and say, reply to that client, tell them that we're still waiting on an appraisal, and then keep it in a warm tone and you're done. And I want you to think about why that matters.Imagine that you're walking out of a listing appointment or you're driving to your next showing while it's still fresh in your head. You just tell it, say, add a task to follow up with the Hendersons on Monday and email their comps tonight.You instruct, it executes while you still got your hands on the wheel. That's an assistant. That's the whole point. All right.The second one is kind of a close cousin, is connecting your drive or wherever you keep your files. So here's the problem that it solves. Most people, when they want AI to work with a document, they.They copy the text and paste it into the chat or back into a document, and they hope that it grabbed the whole thing. So just connect your drive instead, and it will read the file directly. All of it. No copy and paste. No question to myself, if I got everything.Now, where this saves you real time as a realtor is you've got a folder of comps, signed contracts, inspection reports, an HOA doc. But you can just say, read the inspection report and give me three things I need to flag for my buyer. It reads the actual PDF and pulls it in.Or you could say, here's the seller's disclosure, Turn it into a plain English summary. Then I can text to them. So you're not retyping or copying and pasting anything.The file's already sitting in your drive, and you're just pointing it to the drive. And this stacks up with what we've already built. Because remember that listing project? Well, it's context docs live in your drive.So the project and the files are the same system. It always has your real stuff to work from. And it's not just guessing. And here's a little pro tip.Get yourself a zapier account and connect it, because once you do, your AI can read, write, and delete right inside your drive straight from the chat window. All you gotta say is update that doc or create a new one or delete the old version and it does it. Boom.So your context docs never go stale, because keeping them current is now just a sentence that you have to say out loud. And that is how you go from AI that reads to AI that actually does the filing for you. All right, the third one is something we call artifacts.So this is the one that most people have never heard the word for before, but you've probably seen it.You see, an artifact is when the AI doesn't just answer you in the chat, it actually builds you an actual thing off to the side that you can keep, edit, and use for later. It could be a document, a spreadsheet, a little calculator, a checklist, whatever.It lives in its own window instead of getting buried into the conversation. Now, why does that matter for you? Well, because the chat is just a conversation, but an artifact is an actual deliverable.So instead of, you know, here's some text, go paste it somewhere and format it yourself. You can say, build me a one page listing flyer for this property, and it hands you the actual flyer. Heck, you may not even need canva anymore.You can say, make me a buyer's net sheet calculator, and you get a working calculator that you can reuse on your next deal. Turn my last three market updates into a one page handout, and it's done, formatted, and ready to hand to the client.So it's not giving you raw parts to build the thing, it's giving you the finished thing. You just tweak it and go, all right, this is the last one, and I promise.And I saved it for last on purpose because I think it's the most underused and most powerful thing in here, especially for a job like yours. It's called skills. So here's what a skill is. It is a repeatable task that you've taught your AI to do the same way, the right way every single time.You build it once. After that, you just call it and it runs. So think about what makes real estate real estate.You do the same handful of things over and over for every new client. New buyer, buyer presentation, new listing, listing, presentation, and net sheet every deal. Read the inspection, figure out what actually matters.So you're not inventing new work each time you're running the Same plays with new names and new addresses. And here's the problem that you have without a skill. Every time you ask the AI to do one of those, it's starting from scratch.It's rebuilding your net sheet from zero. It's re guessing what your listing presentation should look like. It's redesigning how to read an inspection.It's working overtime to reinvent something that you've already done 100 times and you get a slightly different result every time. All the while, you're burning through tokens like fresh cut grass on a fire. Save your tokens, save your time. A skill does just that. Teach it once.Here's exactly what my buyer presentation includes. Here's the order. Here's my voice, here's my net sheet math. Here's what I flag on inspection and what I ignore. Now it's locked in.So on your next new client, you just say, run my buyer presentation for the Hendersons. It produces the exact thing your way in seconds. Not a fresh guess, not a fresh play. It's run, it's clean, it's quick. Here's an example.An inspection report comes back 40 pages, half of it standard stuff that nobody really cares about. Build the skill that knows your eye. It knows that a cracked slab and a failed water heater matter and a missing outlet cover doesn't.So now every inspection, for every deal, you feed it in and it hands you the three things worth the repair request and skips all the noise and the thing that used to eat an hour of your night. Every single file now is 30 seconds. And it's consistent whether you're sharp or you're exhausted. And here's the best part.A skill is never really locked in stone. See, anytime it misses something or you just change how you do a thing, you just tell it. Update that skill from now on.Also flag foundation, drainage, or change my net sheet to include the home warranty line. It rewrites itself, so every time you use it, it gets a little sharper, a little more like you.Until it's running a task almost exactly the way that you would every single time. Because it compounds the skill you build. Today is the worst it will ever be. And here's another pro tip.When you're done doing something that you think might fit as a skill, ask your AI. Should we build a skill for this? Because it won't usually recognize it on its own, you have to ask or suggest it. So remember to ask. Very important.So that's why skills matters. Connectors, drives, artifacts. Those make it capable skill Makes it yours.Because in a business where you do the same thing a hundred times a year, the agent who taught their AI those plays is running circles around the one that's still typing it fresh every time. And finally, that brings me to the big one. The thing that the whole Internet is trying to sell you right now. Agents.Everywhere you look, it's build an AI agent. Automate your entire business. Never lift a finger again, make millions of dollars. Agents are real, and they are coming, and many are already here.But here's the part that nobody's selling you on. The dream is going to tell you you cannot build a successful agent until everything that we just talked about is dialed in.An agent is just a thing running your plays automatically. And if you haven't built the plays, haven't set the context, haven't refined the skills, all you've done is automate a complete mess.You've hired a robot to do a job that's never been defined. That's not a shortcut. That's a faster way to get it wrong. Think about the Internet. When it showed up, it was an incredible tool.It changed everything.But if you didn't learn how to actually search and how to tell a real source from a garbage source, or how to think critically about what you actually got back then, it wasn't just useless. It could actually steer you wrong. And AI is the exact same deal. It's a tool, a very, very powerful one.But it's only good as the person that learned to use it. So you gotta learn to drive it before you can put it into Turbo. And that's the whole thing. Set it up once. Teach it who you are.Build your projects, wire your files, save your skills. Do that, and it stops being a party trick that you poke at now and then and starts being the best employee that you've got.And once everything's humming along, then we can talk about agents. But not a minute before then. So how do you start? Well, not with all of it. That is a mistake.If you watch a video like this, they get fired up and try to build 10 projects and a robot army by Friday. Then they burn out, fall down some rabbit hole at midnight and quit. So don't do that. Start with one thing. The foundation. Set up who you are.Fill out those custom instructions so your AI actually knows you and your business, your market, and your voice. That's one step. And honestly, if that's all you ever do, you're already ahead of probably about 90% of the agents out there.And if you want A running start at that piece. Well, that's exactly what my brand builder does. It interviews you, hands back a finished profile that you can drop into any AI tool. It's free.The link's in the description. I just asked for your email so I can send it over. And that is your one bite for this week. The next week, build a project, the week after.Save a skill. One thing done well, then the next. That's how this actually sticks. Not in one heroic weekend, but one bite at a time.Because nobody eats the whale in one sitting. And if you do that, a month from now, you've got an AI that works like it works for me. You'll wonder how you ever ran your business without it.All right, go set up step one. I'll see you in the next one. All right, guys, that is it. Probably a bit of a long one today, but here's a quick recap of what matters.So rates actually eased this week after cool inflation report. So there's a little good news to share. But remind your buyers a real rate still comes from a real person, not a chatbot.DFW's flat and sellers are leaving money on the table by pricing on last year. So price it right or watch it sit. And if you've got a move up seller with equity stuck in their current home, remember the recast.You'll be the only one in the room who brings it up, I promise. But the big one, the thing that I really want you to walk away with is stop using your AI like a search bot.Set it up once, tell it who you are, Build one project, save one skill, and it stops being a party trick. It starts being the best employee that you ever hired. You don't have to do it all this week. Just do the first thing, one bite at a time.That's it for me, guys. As always, be good humans and just keep grinding. Because life is what you make it. So make it great. See you next week.