Most “AI tools” are just expensive wrappers that limit your capability. We explore why the future of real estate ops lies in “vibe coding” your own internal tools rather than paying for bloated SaaS subscriptions.
Key Takeaways:
- Reskilling Mandate: You must free up 20% of your workforce’s time specifically for AI experimentation and reskilling.
- Transformative vs. Incremental: Stop settling for faster emails (incremental); aim for transformative workflows like auto-underwriting 24/7.
- Build vs. Buy: With coding costs dropping to near zero, building custom internal software is now cheaper and more effective than buying enterprise SaaS.
Check out the full episode to see why you shouldn’t be a “quarterly CEO” when building AI infrastructure.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious. Today I wanted to dive into a follow-up on that Section AI article about the three AI strategy investments leaders should make in 2026. I’d already talked a bit about this in last week’s episode, more about how to answer those two questions about how to even think about AI investments, meaning how does your company actually create value? And we talked about.
the land business, how all the value is created on the acquisition side, and then what are you not going to invest in anymore so you can fund the future? Where do you have to make cuts? Difficult question to answer, painful to answer when you’ve built up so much potential inertia or status quo, this is just the way we do things. But in order to get to the next level, especially implementing AI to its
greatest capacity is where you have to make cuts and understand that the way you’ve been doing things is not going to get you to the next level here. So I wrote about kind of this full article or at least touched on a lot of pieces of it within this week’s serious news. So if you want to see this in written format.
you can go ahead and check it out. I’m going to go in a little bit more depth on the podcast side of it. So just FYI from that perspective, again, I think section just does the best job out of any AI specific blogs, especially related to companies that I’ve read here. So highly encourage you to utilize it. So the next section of this article was just going over the three, well, the actual strategy investments to make. So once you’ve answered,
those questions of how are you creating value and rather what are you not going to invest into anymore, then you can start actually creating your AI strategy investments. So you need to reallocate time from your leadership and your employees and potentially your strategic focus overall.
so it’s not just a money investment, like a huge part of it’s just a time and longer term potential for your, your company, to account for. again, the name of the game is subtracting, not, not adding, like a lot of the times you have to just rip, rip down, you know, existing infrastructure down to the studs and then just start rebuilding from scratch with an understanding of what AI can actually add into your business.
instead of just trying to band-aid solutions by throwing AI on top of it. So key thing to keep in mind here. so within this longer-term context is that you actually need to build an AI strategy for the next five years. So a lot for just a game-changing technology like this. Think about the potential of the internet when it came out in the early…
to mid 90s, how long it took for the true potential of that technology to reach its highest levels. And you know, there were some fits and starts, right? I mean, there was the dot com bubble that happened that, you know, took a whole bunch of entrants into the internet space, like completely destroyed them. And then you got just the rise of
You know, the Amazons and the various social media companies. I mean, honestly, today it led into the AI companies that we’re seeing now. So there’s just multiple iterations across the technology that can take potentially years to decades to fully realize. And so this stuff is just not going to happen overnight. I’m continually reminded of that as an entrepreneur is like to get really good at something. I mean, to even start to understand.
the full implications of the business or venture that you’re working on, like it probably takes about a half decade. That’s I really realized that. And a lot of the higher level entrepreneurs like Hermos, you’ll mention that as well too. It’s just harder to get up to speed when you need to build up so much underlying wisdom, even if you have great mentors and so forth. think about the long-term here. And there’s different levels of
what could be your AI strategy over those coming five years? How is it affecting your personal productivity? The output quality of anything that you are doing on a day-to-day basis? How do you get your team comfortable? Or how do you get team leaders if you’re working in a business with multiple departments?
so like you have to start at that personal piece, like things you’re touching with every day that that’s probably the easiest way to throw in AI. There’s a whole bunch of great templates out there. You Kalan’s uncommon course like helps get people started and to a much more advanced level as well too. so that that’s your lowest hanging fruit. Then you can look at the level two, the workflow automations.
what are key AI features that, you know, can start taking over manual work? and. know, again, like, like we mentioned here, you have to rip some workflows down to their studs, like which workflows can be fully redesigned versus just partially automated. That’s a much tougher question to answer. And then perhaps even tougher is, you know, which.
which of those workflows are even worth investing into? Do you have the underlying data on, which particular workflows are driving more revenue and profit and into the business? do you know the answers to that? if not, how do you determine the answers to that? and which processes are you doing that aren’t having any impact on?
your revenue or profit or maybe they’re too far out to say whether they’re helping or not, do you have, like even if you’re betting on a longer term potential play here and honestly like content creation is one that’s can be related to that. But do you have, even if you’re making a longer term bet and you’re telling your team, yeah, it’s gonna take a while for this to pay off.
Do you still have a route forward to understand if and when this particular strategy and tactic will ever have enough signal that you could actually pick up to see if it’s working or not, or if it’s like purely just a crap shoot and you don’t even know what you’re tracking. Like sometimes I do wonder that with that for content creation. Not all of it, but sometimes and some different versions of content and.
you know, how to adjust from there. I still believe, yeah, it’s a longer term and, you know, the necessity of a personal brand in any type of business nowadays, especially as when you get larger and need a higher, much more qualified talent. Like I think it’s just absolutely critical. So, but again, like that, that can take potentially years to…
to potentially pay off at the highest level there. But you need to have some type of a hypothesis at least on where you can start measuring the data. And then the level three is just core process automation. So like that’s just building full custom software to automate a process with a ton of leverage within your business. That piece is what we are attempting to do with LandPrice here. It’s like, yeah, can we actually just
throw in target properties and see, you know, can we automate the comp selection and the pricing calculation and so forth here? Really, really difficult to do, right? But we know that that is directly tied to revenue, right? Like the ability to price properties, especially at volume, that if we could automate that, it would be transformational. But again, much more time and resources involved in order to pull that off.
But that’s the five year plan here. Can you actually write that out? The next piece here, something I think we’re doing a lot better as our company too, but again, like larger the company, probably the more difficult is you gotta power up your workforce from an AI perspective here. And like you either need to reskill your workforce or replace your folks who can’t get on the bandwagon.
you know, the amount of folks who like just won’t have a capability within, you know, utilizing AI, like it’s hard to kind of imagine because, you know, it’s just getting, I think, easier to build up confidence every day. But if like somebody just can’t grasp it, like they just can’t work in, you know, at least the types of industries that were in that, you know, just absolutely require or going to require AI.
competence. So the baseline section was mentioning is like you should expect, you know, to free up, you know, 20 % ish of your people’s time to, you know, let them experiment and apply AI to their real work and build solutions. Like you got to give time for folks to get the reps in. But if they’re already at capacity, like they’re just never going to get better here. So, you know, if you’re just
working with half measures or you’re like you’re kind of one foot in one foot out with AI it’s like yeah your folks will notice that as well too and will become like just knowledgeable enough to you know be
what’s always my phrasing and this was from a section here of to be a AI driver, a passenger. So again, if you like just get your folks knowledgeable enough where like they can start making some progress with AI, but like more than likely they’re just going to.
utilize it as a crutch and potentially take your business down even worse directions. So you’ve got to teach them how to be AI drivers, which is a difficult skill to, like, it requires constant discipline. Like everybody, myself, I need to remind myself to be an AI driver all the time because AI can just make us all lazy. see that in the data. And so if your folks have less bandwidth while they’re being re-skilled,
you’re probably going to lose a little bit of, of, your output. Your revenue, your profit might take a hit, but, you know, even if you have like flat growth or even just like break even a year to like really, really invest in AI, like that’s going to pay off to go, you know, rocket ship mode, or at least stay steady in the growth directory as your competitors likely get better in, in this direction. or potentially like nascent industries who can start,
you know, competing for your business in ways you can’t even perceive yet, just through clever use of AI. Like you have to be aware of that. And then the last kind of key strategy here is like you have to start rethinking of, your, um, your, tools and your systems of record here. Uh, so, you know, and this is something I wrote about as well too, and how I’ve had to consider like any of our overhead, or even as we were building land price or, so forth, like SAS tools.
in and of themselves are going to be feeling the pain more and more and more over these coming weeks and months and years as the out of the box LLMs continue to get so good and the vibe coding capabilities can provide companies with truly custom apps at such a low fraction of both the monetary as well as the skill cost in order to develop them. And so
when you can create a truly customized solution with AIL on backend that can really solve any or kind of orient around any type of question you might ask it, that just gives you so much more capability as a team compared to if you are limited by whatever handful of…
know, capabilities that a SaaS product might be able to do here. So like that’s again, another tough question to answer and what all these SaaS companies are going to have to answer. Like, are these, you know, the AI systems of the future or are they dying beasts you’re hitching your wagons to because, you know, they’re suiting your current process here. Like you can ask that about almost every SaaS tool at the moment right now. And, you know,
Same thing like the section article points out to is like, yeah, SaaS products that are labeled AI, it doesn’t actually mean anything because when you look under the hood for some of these products, and we were guilty of this with our first versions of Lamprise, we were labeled as AI, but there’s like almost no AI actually on the backend for the MVP. Now it’s like very, very AI with like
heavy utilization of the LLMs in order to just remove the user from comp selection and image analysis and so forth. But yeah, a lot of these AI powered SaaS products, they don’t actually have true AI powered features. They’re just limiting you to only target a few possible problems that they can solve solutions for.
Again, hyper-personalization is gonna be the name of the game here. Like that’s just a requirement for any software type system that you’re utilizing or working within your team. like, you you have to reconsider some of these are like super expensive licenses on a monthly or yearly basis, you know, cutting deep into your overhead and potential profits here. So really, really look keenly on what could be on its way out the door. So the final takeaways here.
Um, and again, I had mentioned some of these within the, uh, newsletter here, um, is, know, the top advice to win and 2026, um, you know, you have to ask yourself like, what can you do now with AI that you couldn’t do before? And so like there’s two categories of AI opportunity, one that like pretty much everybody is at least trying to do is just incremental, like making existing workflows faster and cheaper. Um,
You know, one that we’re doing right now that like helps us is just creating podcast headlines. We can take the transcript of something that I’m saying right now. We have a whole Claude project built. well like a prompt for headlines built within our brand guardian, which is a marketing Claude project that, know, Callan’s team oriented us around. that makes, creating consistent copy and, know, podcasts, headlines and descriptions and Instagram, real copy.
all far easier compared to just running it from scratch. That makes us faster, it’s cheaper. But it’s incremental, right? It’s not gonna radically transform the business. So that next category is just the transformative workflows. What can AI enable that you literally could not do before? Way, way harder to think about that. And an example I mentioned within Serious News is,
Can you imagine having triggers for every single possible subdivide project that comes onto the market in the US on any given day? And as soon as it hits, you have automatic underwriting that happens through a tool like Land Pricer or something that would probably be eventually where we want to head in the direction for. So you could determine the subdivide potential.
out of any of these on market listings hitting the market. And then after your pricing is calculated, you are automatically sending out offers to whoever the agent is for that particular property. Like that is not something you could do prior to AI. Like no matter what type of team you had to the highs.
guess you could have had a team of like 100 plus analysts. It’s ridiculous to kind of consider because it would just not be cost effective to do that. You’d have so much slack in the system. And I haven’t heard of anybody doing that. Even the biggest companies out there, and honestly, even then, your analysts are, still gonna have to sleep. can’t, mean, to have them available 24 seven.
to, to work on something like that, it was just like unrealistic. Like that was just not something that would be possible to do and have them all as accurate, consistently accurate across their underwriting processes. to where there’s really no mistake between analysts to analysts, like a human team just could not do that. So like, those are the types of opportunities you have to think about that could be truly transformative for your business. very ambitious to do, but this is the new.
marketplace that we are heading into. And that’s just, you know, one example I could think of a number of them within the Landers real estate space writ large that could become possible here. So again, what outcome do you want as a business? Again, how do you create value as a company on the acquisition side? And what process would you design if we just started from scratch? So like go back, rip
rip things down to the studs and figure out what you need to do to design the workflows of the future. That’s what we’re going to be working on really as a top priority over this coming year here. Again, it might keep growth lower than it was before, but I know it’s going to set us up for years and decades to come. And that’s the message I’ve been repeating internally here and externally. Last couple of things here. I know we’re running a little bit long.
Don’t be a quarterly CEO. This goes along with, you got to have a five year plan. You got to convince your team or whoever, your partners, et cetera. Like, yeah, we might be taking a hit this year. Growth might flatten out and we’re going to do it anyway. because this is, the only route forward. if you need a bet to pay it, like if you need your quarterly growth to be, you know, just
you know, solid each and every quarter, but like that, that’s the only thing you’re focused on. Like it’s harder to be, you know, building transformative infrastructure at the same time. So you got to be that, five year CEO, founder, whatever in your company, to bet on the long game. last point too, again, just think hard about building versus buying. Like I mentioned, you know, these vibe coding opportunities, even if you have to hire out for that, it’s going to be far cheaper.
to do that, like building custom software, custom internal tools and so forth always tended to be far more expensive or like only larger enterprises could do that versus just like buying a license for a particular SaaS tool. Now that is just starting to shift to where all of a sudden building something that could be far more capable than any SaaS product on the market could actually be cheaper and easier to implement than
buying a software that might inherently limit you with the actual capabilities that you need for your specific business. you know, think about all those licenses you’re paying for, you know, the cost of customization consultants for various SaaS products out there, very complicated products. And again, the trade-offs of inefficient workflows.
and operational workarounds like where, you know, if these SaaS products don’t fit your workflows precisely, and then you’re just building in more inefficiencies or your team has to jump between tool to tool versus something that fits more particularly just for your core business. So then you have to like look at the math between that effectiveness gap versus the tool cost and make that long-term play. So really, really interesting stuff. Hope you guys take a lot out of this. I know.
This is our number one focus that, that we’re betting our future on. So, you know, we’ll see if we can pull it off. Serious land.capital, for any of your land funding needs and, subscribe and share everybody. I hope you enjoy the holidays. you’re listening around then Merry Christmas and subscribe and share, take care now. Bye.
