How we built an AI employee for real estate — and exactly how you could build one too. This page is the whole talk: every step, every tool, every claim.
Scanned the QR code at the live talk? Welcome — this is the deck, yours to keep. No notes required.
Part one — A brief history of harnesses
About six thousand years ago, somewhere on the Eurasian steppe, somebody looked at a wild horse — a thousand pounds of muscle that could kill them — and had an idea that changed the trajectory of our species: what if I could point all of that power at my problems?
The horse never got smarter. The human just built a harness.
Guns, Germs, and Steel asks why some civilizations raced ahead of others. One answer is almost embarrassing: geography dealt some continents horses. Africa got the zebra — and zebras duck, bite, and could not care less about your goals. People have tried for centuries.
Entire civilizations diverged not on intelligence, and not on effort — but on whether the raw power lying around them could be harnessed.
We use the word two ways: a harness is an implement that controls something powerful — and “harnessing the power of” something means putting it to work. Both meanings apply today.
The model — ChatGPT, Claude — is the horse: genuinely miraculous, and useless standing in the field on its own. For most realtors right now, AI is a very expensive zebra: fun to look at, pulls absolutely nothing.
What follows is the full recipe for our harness — Homies — with nothing held back. At the end, we’ll tell you why most agents shouldn’t build it themselves.
Part two — Who’s talking
Canada’s #1 real estate podcast
Host, with a weekly audience of agents and investors across the country.
Built the Habistat
A data platform used by thousands of REALTORS® every day — acquired by the Toronto board.
Co-owner of Valery
A working brokerage, not a software lab.
Sells real estate, just like you
Showings, listing appointments, offers at 11 p.m.
At Valery we built AI tools for our own agents. Then agents from other brokerages kept calling with the same question — they wanted the tools, not a new brokerage.
When enough people ask you the same question, that’s not a conversation anymore. That’s a product. We packaged the whole system into software and called it Homies.
Part three — The two mistakes
Neither camp wins. There’s a third option — but first you have to understand one thing.
Camp one ignores AI
And hopes it’s a fad. It is not a fad.
Camp two DIYs everything
Hundreds of hours becoming an amateur software developer, six tutorial tabs deep at midnight.
Everything that makes a model useful — the connections, the data, the skills, the checks — is the harness.
The model is not the product. The harness is the product.
Part four — The build. Five steps.
Download the Claude or ChatGPT desktop app onto your actual computer. Not a browser tab — the app, so it can see your files and use tools.
Congratulations. This was the easy part. You now own a horse.
Connect your email, calendar, contacts, CRM, and files. Inside your CRM’s settings you’ll find something called an API key — the keycard your AI badge-swipes to get into your other tools. Every tool you pay for has one hiding in the settings page.
Now your AI knows who your clients are, what you’ve said to them, and what’s on your calendar.
If “API key” is a new term: write it down. It’s about to become the most-googled phrase of your year.
In Canada: Repliers takes the IDX data feed from your real estate board and turns it into an MCP — the universal plug that lets your AI query live listing data directly.
In the US: this September we’re announcing a partnership with AgentFire to do the same with IDX feeds.
Now your AI knows your clients and your inventory.
5%of the way to a working harness
You now have an AI that knows your contacts and can search the MLS. Everything that makes it an employee — rather than a very informed chatbot — is still ahead of you.
Self-employed people own knowledge. Business owners own systems. The self-employed agent has fifteen years of expertise, all of it living in their head, traded for money one hour at a time. The business owner has the same expertise written down — as systems another person, or an AI, can run.
AI can only scale systems. It cannot scale the chaos in your head.
The Loom habit
Don’t write dummy SOPs — record real work. Next time you write an actual offer, hit record and narrate it. Five minutes. The AI turns the recording into an SOP.
A month later
Do that for every task and you have something most agents never build: a business operating system. Valuable whether or not you ever touch AI again.
Start delegating: follow-ups, CMA drafts, booking showings. Your job changes — you’re not the admin anymore, you’re quality assurance. Review, correct, repeat. You’ve become the manager of one very fast, slightly overconfident employee.
And unlike any assistant you’ve ever hired: every correction is permanent. It doesn’t forget. It doesn’t quit and take the training with it. Every correction makes tomorrow better.
That’s the whole recipe. Five steps. The steps aren’t hard — the fill-in work is enormous.
At the live talk we tell the room: if you’re at either “I want off this ride” or “shut up and take my money” — scan the QR code. You already did. This page is the ride, at your own speed.
Part five — What the finished harness does
80–90%of a human admin’s work, measured on our own desks
If this list feels like too much — that’s the point. It took eight months to make it feel like nothing.
Part six — The reveal
You just read the entire recipe. Nothing was held back. Here’s why we’re comfortable publishing it:
2 months
One obsessed founder, to “pretty good.”
6+ months
A team of engineers, to client-ready.
Every day since
Still building. The harness is never finished.
Some agents should — the tinkerers who want to understand it at the stud-and-wire level will be better for it.
But for most, the highest-paid hours are listing appointments and negotiations. They are not debugging a CRM sync at midnight.
Part seven — The math
Buy Back Your Time. The E-Myth. The Millionaire Real Estate Agent. Cashflow Quadrant. Atomic Habits. One message between them: your time has a dollar value — buy back every hour that’s worth less than it.
So: stop doing $30-an-hour work. And for the love of God, stop doing ten-cent-an-hour work.
Old world — $30/hour
Delegate admin work to a human assistant. Worth every dollar.
New world — pennies
An AI does most of that same work for something like ten cents an hour.
Part eight — The universal law of compounding
Realtors already understand compounding — we sell it for a living. We just haven’t noticed that AI obeys the same law.
The gym
Workout one changes nothing. Workout one hundred changes your life — each builds on yesterday’s. Skip six months and you don’t lose six months; you lose the momentum.
Real estate
The first mortgage payment barely touches principal. Year ten is a different universe. Nobody gets rich off one payment — they get rich because they started earlier.
Data
When we built the Habistat, people asked why we obsessed over weird little data points — power-of-sale listings, assignments, price cuts. One month of that data is trivia. Ten years of it is a crystal ball.
Knowledge & relationships
Reading one book changes little; a hundred change how you read the next hundred. One coffee meeting does nothing; ten years of showing up compounds into a career.
“Data doesn’t become valuable when you collect it. It becomes valuable when you’ve collected it for long enough.”
Every prompt. Every SOP. Every correction. Every automation. Each one stacks on yesterday’s.
And unlike any employee you’ve ever trained — it never forgets, and it never quits and takes the training with it.
37.8×1.01³⁶⁵ — one percent better, compounded daily for a year
Get 1% better every day for a year and compounding doesn’t make you 3.65 times better — it makes you thirty-seven times better. Get 1% worse every day, and the same math takes you to 0.03. Basically zero.
Same effort gap. Opposite universes.
They’re not one year apart. Agent B skipped the compounding.
You think you’re waiting for AI to get better. What you’re actually doing is delaying the compounding.
Agent A starts today
One small automation a week. A year from now: fifty automations, each running every single day.
Agent B waits for AI to “settle down”
Starts next year. Day one: zero.
Part nine — Limitless
This stuff overwhelms us — and we live in it every day, shoulder to shoulder with engineers building things that change our lives monthly. If none of it overwhelmed you, we’d be a little worried about you.
The future with AI is scary, intimidating, and uncertain. It is also the closest thing to limitless this industry has ever been handed. On the other side of the fear: more time. More money. Better results. Happier clients. Less stress. More attention for the things that actually matter in your life — whatever those are for you.
It should overwhelm you. It just shouldn’t stop you. Going zero to a hundred from a dead stop is reckless. Going one percent is not.
Pick one task you hate, and delegate it to an AI this week. That’s it. One percent better today. Tomorrow, one percent on top of that.
A harness learns you. Every day you use it, you get better and it gets better, at the same time. We have never had a technology that compounds with you. Harness it.
You already know the life at the top of the staircase. You get there one step at a time, and step one is one task.
If you’d rather start on step thirty or forty — with a running head start on the next sixty or seventy, and nobody can tell you what those steps will look like yet — we already built the harness. Everything on this page is loaded into it, including our notes from the event itself. It’s ready for you today. Not tomorrow. Today.
If you’re a sucker for punishment — build it yourself. Genuinely. Just start.
And if you’d rather spend the next six months selling real estate instead of becoming a hobby software engineer: we already built it.
Go deeper
Research paper
A deep, practical guide to the operating layer that turns an AI model into a supervised real estate worker—with tools, memory, permissions, and audit trails.
31 min read
Research paper
An 84-system map of realtor CRM, MLS, IDX, email, voice, social, transaction and website integrations—with official API links and honest access status.
45 min read