The builder’s AI harness

I’m Daniel Foch. I built The Habistat and host The Canadian Real Estate Investor, Canada’s number-one real estate podcast. We’ve spent five or six years building real estate technology, including AI. Today: how builders can put their existing leads to work.

Think of a powerful horse. The horsepower is already there, but it needs a harness to connect that power to useful work. The AI model is the horse. The harness gives it connections, context and direction. Your business supplies the job: follow up with a buyer, coordinate a showing or prepare a project update.

That is what we mean by a harness: the system around the AI that lets it do useful work. It brings together your project information, authorized connections, and the way your team operates. Instead of a generic email, it can prepare a relevant follow-up using the buyer’s history and your inventory. Your people stay in charge.

The original harness presentation breaks this into seven pieces. One: an app and model, the place to work and the intelligence. Two: connected accounts, like your CRM and calendar. Three: context and memory, so it knows your projects and preferences. Four: saved skills, the repeatable methods your team uses. Five: approval controls, so it knows when a person must review. Six: phone and channels, how you assign and review work. Seven: a place to run, on your computer or a supported cloud service. You are assembling a working setup. Start with one connection and one useful skill.

A plugin or connector brings a system into the assistant’s workspace. A tool is a specific action it can take there, such as looking up a contact or creating a task. A skill tells it how your team wants a job done. For example: read a buyer’s requirements, compare relevant inventory, prepare the update and route it for review. That is one workflow running on the harness. You can add another workflow without rebuilding the whole foundation.

Homies packages that working setup for real estate. We connect the tools people already use, supply the business context and save repeatable ways of doing the work. The useful part is continuity: the next interaction builds on the previous one. For a builder, project information, buyer history and the sales team’s next action can work together. That same foundation supports pre-construction and leasing.

The first use case is pre-construction. Builders spend thousands generating leads that can sit in a CRM after the campaign ends. Our follow-up process is already being used. The extension we are developing connects Red Bricks project information with the buyer profile in the CRM. Someone wants a particular product, area and budget. When there is something relevant, the assistant has a reason to follow up. It prepares a specific conversation and moves an interested buyer toward a sales-office visit. The goal is better use of demand you have already paid to create.

The biggest issue Cassandra and I discussed was what happens over time: getting someone to the sales office, then maintaining the relationship between signing and closing. The process combines early contact, a personal-call reminder, follow-up over the next week and month, and useful ongoing content. It adapts to replies, preferences and consent. Someone who says next year should not disappear. Someone who bought should leave the prospecting sequence. The harness keeps the history and next step together, so your team can answer real questions instead of trying to remember who has gone quiet.

The second use case is leasing. Working through this with Eugene, the bottleneck was coordination: collecting requirements, sharing the right unit, arranging a showing and assigning the next step. We have built and tested a pilot around that workflow. The prospect shares their requirements, sees relevant unit information and moves toward a viewing or application. The system supports showing assignment, follow-up tasks and a reviewed handoff. People still handle the showing and final decisions. Live operations and results are still being established. For builders with rental inventory, the opportunity is a consistent process across the building.

This is not limited to realtors. Builders can use the harness with their own inventory, contacts and project information. MLS is a separate connection. It requires an eligible realtor at your company who can supply the appropriate IDX licence and data permissions. Buying Homies does not automatically grant MLS access, and you do not need that connection to begin with your own leads.

Start with one project or one rental building. Connect the relevant inventory and lead source, agree on the follow-up process and assign someone to the handoffs. Then measure contact coverage, replies, appointments and where the process stalls. That gives you a concrete way to judge the system before expanding it across the portfolio. Keep your sales team; give them a more consistent operating system.

Scan the code for the slides and tell us whether you are focused on pre-construction sales or leasing. Homies is a harness you can buy and use in your own business. We can help with the connections and setup your team needs. Bring us one project, one building or the part of your CRM that needs attention. We will start there. Thank you.