AI for Real Estate Agents | Seth Siegler - CIO of eXp Realty

Right on. Yeah. The theme of today is adaptability. Yes, it is. Today's broadcast is brought to you. All right. So, yeah. So, I am Seth Siegler. I'm the chief innovation officer here at eXp Realty. I've been with the company for like six years now. But before this, my whole history is proptech startups. I did a bunch of them. I built a lot of stuff for other startups and other bigger companies. And I was actually a real estate agent too a long time ago, right after college. That's when I learned the business and fell in love with it. And then I sort of pivoted to my more natural tech side of things where I was much better at it.

I can.

I can.

You good? Is it messing up, man?

Yep. Great question. My role is to look forward in a nutshell. What we did was we used to have a chief information officer that was in charge of all technology and product here at eXp. They'd be in charge of everything from eXp Enterprise and my eXp and all that kind of stuff, Skyslope integrations, the nitty-gritty. And I was reporting to that person in my old role of being in charge of innovation. So we split that role up into a chief technology officer, which is Sumant, who does an awesome job overseeing the core tech, and then my role, which is forward-looking. That's trying to figure out and be on top of what's next, investigating all different types of emerging technologies. These days, the only one to concern ourselves with is AI, obviously. So experimenting with all the new different tools that come out, building prototypes, evangelizing and empowering the staff and agents to make sure they understand what's possible, helping people learn, establishing relationships, and getting some of the industry giants to leverage their expertise for us. I'm talking about OpenAI, Google, Amazon Web Services, Palantir, companies like that. Because of our size, we get that benefit where those companies actually want to see their technology work on our scale. So stuff like that in a nutshell. Just making sure we're ahead of the curve and not in a reactive state, given how important and inflection point-y it is right now with the state of technology and AI especially. We really want to empower agents and staff and operations here at eXp as much as possible before we're in a reactive state or falling behind. eXp's always been innovative. Glenn's vision and business model and execution was wildly innovative and still is, and we want to continue that trajectory into the future. It's a huge opportunity right now given what's happening every single day. The new things that are coming out and happening. It's a monstrous opportunity that hasn't really sunk in yet in our space here in real estate land. We want to make sure we make the right moves to ensure eXp agents have the unfair advantage.

Yeah, all kinds of stuff. The opportunities are everywhere. It's important to spread it around. There are opportunities to make eXp run much more efficiently and better, to more instantaneously get you as agents exactly what you need, exactly when you need it. Give you less steps, less systems to go into, less buttons to click, less menus to dig through. Make that stuff more anticipatory of what you need. There are opportunities with what they call agentic AI, which is more autonomous AI that can act on its own, anticipate your needs, communicate with you, collect information, or get you information. There's also the ability to build software much more quickly because of AI-enabled coding. What used to take months or a year plus to build, or we'd have to go to a very expensive vendor partner, we're able to build much more quickly now. That's an initiative we have internally. Even non-technical staff, people in the trenches doing the work every day processing transactions or onboarding agents, they're able to create little pieces of software now without coding to better operate eXp and better serve all the agents. That can also be done by agents now too. With tools like Lovable.dev, which is a vibe coding tool, vibe coding means being able to create software and write code just by communicating like this. If you can describe what you want a piece of software to do, you can actually build it. Nobody is better to build the most ideal piece of software for what you do than you. Only you know what you do. Only you know the secret sauce that makes your team run the best. So you can build the most ideal hyper-specific piece of software without coding using a tool like Lovable. That's something we encourage and actively evangelize to the staff. When I go and talk at the top producer masterminds or wherever else in front of agents, I'm talking about tools like Lovable because it's a huge opportunity. Imagine being able to quickly create a single property website for a listing presentation you're going on. You can walk in with an entire website dedicated to the listing you're hoping to get. It looks like so much work went into it and you've already invested so much, but it may take you five minutes to make it and it looks incredible. You can even mock up drone photography using the image generation tool on ChatGPT. All these little hacks you can put together where you can absolutely blow somebody away. That's just one little idea. You could also build real software to help your team run. The opportunities are great across the board. There are a lot of turnkey tools that make your life easier all the way to the other extreme of AI infused into the tools you're already using to make them work better and more anticipatory. Very long answer, sorry Ruben, but there's a lot cooking.

Yeah, good question. We got to go visit OpenAI and Google's cloud and AI headquarters recently, Glenn and I. We're an OpenAI Enterprise customer and also a pretty big Google customer. They've made a lot of strides in AI this year. Both of them talked almost exclusively about this idea of agentic AI and being able to easily build AI agents. That has nothing to do with real estate agents, by the way, it's just the same word. Agentic AI means AI that most of us think about when we say that is ChatGPT or Grok or whatever your flavor is. That's just a chatbot, a super smart chatbot that can do a bunch of stuff. But that's just the first implementation of the tech. The next phase is agentic AI, which we don't see. It's in the background doing work for us. It's hard to explain or comprehend how big that is. All the things you or someone on your team has to do during the day, the agentic AI will be able to help with, especially the most tedious parts. When I was an agent, I used to do a lot of FSBO prospecting. There was so much legwork to get ready for that task that I didn't really want to do anyway, let alone doing all the legwork before to get all the numbers and prospects together. That's something you can have an AI agent running in the background doing. It's not the easiest thing to do today, Wednesday, July 16th, but by Friday it may be. Things are moving so fast. It is possible to set that stuff up with tools like N8N and Zapier. There are tools you can use to set those things up and then you've got an agentic workflow in your real estate business. That's a monstrous opportunity. It's getting easier and easier every day as new tools come out. You're going to be able to handle 10 times or 100 times more business with the same size team. You'll have tools helping you prospect, transact, and manage your customers and team.

Yeah, that's going to happen. We'll have stuff running on the eXp side that helps run the business better and can get you what you need when you need it, before you need it even in some cases. And I 100% no doubt that all of you in the business will be using AI agents as well. Not AI real estate agents, that has nothing to do with that. I'm talking about you as the irreplaceable human real estate agent will be using AI agentic workflows in your business to help you run. There are a lot of new companies outside of real estate, like Cursor AI. It's a SaaS company that makes a tool for software engineers. It's a 12-person company doing $300 million or $500 million a year in annual recurring revenue. That's the new breed of company: small, efficient, leveraging AI agents to do the stuff that's time-consuming. That frees them up to think of features, and it'll free you up to be in person, which will be the super value in an increasingly non-authentic world. Your face-to-face interaction becomes the value. If you've got AI agents doing the stuff that's not that in the background, you're free to have more human interaction, showing value, alleviating people's fears, shepherding them through this stressful experience. That's where you win.

Definitely. Yeah, for sure. The AI is very good at taking on your tone and your type of decision-making if you work it properly. As these things get better, especially the OpenAI and Google agentic AI platforms we saw, they give you a way to go back and reflect on the answers it gave. If that particular agent has chat, you can go back and look at the responses and be like bad, good, great, and it'll learn from there. But it doesn't even have to interact with anybody. It could be compliance stuff going into Skyslope and doing some work for you, or going through your CRM and updating it after a call automatically, or preparing your listing presentation.

Totally. I think that's one of the beauties of eXp. There's a real spirit of helping each other here. I've been in real estate for my whole career, longer than I like to admit, but none of the places I've been at really have that spirit like eXp has. People are so forthcoming. We just did a panel at eXpcon Barcelona with Jennifer Jones, Leo Roblace, and Carrie Sove. They were talking over each other trying to tell everybody how they do what they do and the results they're seeing. There are tons of those stories. A lot of agents are finding success, and you just got to ask them or listen. They'll be more than happy to help. The other thing I always love to remember is if you go to ChatGPT and use the deep research feature, it's a button called deep research in ChatGPT if you have any paid account. The $20 a month one is fine. You turn that on and ask it to research what agents who are finding the most success are doing. You can ask, 'What are some things that real estate agents are doing in the last two weeks in the United States leveraging AI to find the most success?' It will go to town, take 15-20 minutes to run sometimes, and provide you with a research paper of tips from other real estate agents. That's a great example of using AI to learn how to use AI. All you got to do is ask ChatGPT, and deep research is the way for that type of thing.

Yeah. The short answer is that everything has AI. Anything new that's software or technology at least has some AI in it. We rolled out Canva to all the agents at eXp. Hopefully everybody's using that. It has AI in it. It's an unbelievable tool, a pro Canva account including the new Google video generation AI where you can tell it what you want the video to be of and it'll create a video of you walking into a house and saying something. It's amazing, and everybody has that now. We rolled out Slack. Most people like Slack, so that's a nice new thing. The CRM of choice is exciting. You're not stuck with KV Core anymore if you don't like it. You can choose Lofty, Bolt Trail which is the new KV Core, or Close. There's also something we're calling the agent platform. One of the nice things about eXp is we build some software, like my eXp, and we partner with best-in-class for a lot of other stuff like the CRM and Skyslope. I don't think too many people love Skyslope, but it works. It's the best in class for transaction management. The beauty is you run whatever you want because it's your business. The downside is it creates a lot of places to go to do stuff, and that's something we hear sometimes. A big project the main engineering org is working on is what they call the agent platform. It'll have a more clever name at some point, but it's a layer on top of a lot of the tools you use day-to-day at eXp. It allows you to just chat your questions or queries or something you want it to do. This is coming soon, it's in beta now, and it unifies the more common tools you'd have to use day-to-day at eXp. That's something still in the garage, but very much coming soon, plus a few other goodies.

Yeah, we look at the NPS reports that agents fill out for all different interactions with eXp. That's support requests, your onboarding experience, everything. There are all these different NPS surveys that go out. We look at that stuff at just below a psychotic level. We are looking at every single comment that comes in because at the end of the day, another beauty of eXp is that our only customer is you folks, the real estate agent. We don't have franchises to answer to. We don't even look at consumers. That's not our customer. Buyers and sellers are your customer. You're our customer. We're singularly focused on bringing value and making sure we're properly serving the real estate agent customer. So we look at that NPS data like crazy. We use AI to digest that and find themes and understand where we need to focus efforts where there's a sudden spike in something that needs to be focused on. We really look at that manically.

It's everything under the sun to be honest. It's easier for us to only have one customer, that makes it better. We can focus on that. The flip side is that eXp is a platform, an infrastructure platform to run your business, and it's for every type of real estate agent business. It's for the brand new solo agent all the way through teams, mega teams, independent brokerages rolling in under eXp that are selling hundreds of houses a year, developers. It's for everybody. Leo says it allows you to build whatever size dream you want. We have to cater to and have something for every type of real estate agent in every geography around the world, not just the US. That takes real work. We're not a bunch of market centers like our competitors. We're centralized operations as efficient as we can be. There's plenty of revenue to put into the revenue share. The more we are, the better it all works. That's the challenge, trying to keep everybody happy. Sometimes you hear a little bit more from one group and we have to innovate there to address whatever rising concern is. It's been amazing having Leo and Wendy and the new group of leaders come in for this eXp 2.0. There's nothing wrong with eXp, it's been great, but having fresh eyes and fresh energy, they should be innovating like we were in the early days. We've received a lot of positive feedback on that. You see it when the Spring Banks come to eXp and folks like that. Every week we have another major team or brokerage coming to eXp.

I was going to say the co-sponsorship was a great example of that. Glenn invented revenue share, real estate brokerage revenue share. That was his invention. Of course, we pick up copycats like anything. Sometimes you see a new little feature on one of them and we're like, 'That's cool, let's make an eXp version where we leverage our scale.' The one thing that cannot be copied is scale. You can copy the features, but you can't copy the scale. Another beauty of being at eXp is what's known as a network effect. You have that by being part of a bigger network, by being able to attract agents in 27 different countries, by being able to co-sponsor with anybody in any country. That's an example of turning that on and it's the eXp flavor. It's instantly a hundred times more powerful because of the size of the network. Anything that leverages the size of our network cannot be copied. That's one of the most exciting things about eXp.

That's a great question. A belief that I had that's changed. Every day with AI, I get three newsletters that recap all the new stuff in AI since yesterday. Every day, literally, something that I didn't think would be possible for another few years is possible today technology-wise. That's exciting. In the eXp world, I thought we were getting close to cruising altitude where we'd just slowly tick up and be steady and incrementally refine. I no longer think that. I think we're back down towards the beginning of things relatively speaking. I didn't realize until I really started digging into the international side of things how early it is in the eXp story. We're seeing so much growth now internationally. Every time we open a new country with the new way, eXp 2.0 in the US, but for international it's a whole other story. Glenn spent the last year totally revamping that. We opened up in Peru and already have 250 plus agents there. We opened up in Ecuador, same story. That's been in a couple of months. In those brand new markets, we're the number one brokerage now in the UK. It's very early in the eXp story. A lot of people in the industry started to think this is about how big you can get. People thought Glenn was nuts when he said the goal number of agents, whatever it was, 200 or 500,000. But it's very possible to see that level of growth with eXp. It's just getting started honestly, and that's something I very firmly believe now. It's exciting.

Well, we got to get through this market. That's the low-tech answer. It's tough. This is the lowest amount of volume in the last 30 years. Some agents in the industry won't get through it, and that's a big opportunity for all of you that do, just like in 2008. The other thing is that the pace of AI is moving unsurprisingly quite a bit faster than the regulatory environment for it, especially in our old stodgy industry. It's going to be a while till real estate catches up. It's never going to catch up with AI, but even get to the point. I remember I started a brokerage in 2008 that was also virtual. The state board in South Carolina was asking me where my files would be kept. I said Dropbox. They said they need to be on paper in a file cabinet in an office. It wasn't set up for a virtual brokerage even though it would be a lot safer in Dropbox. The regulatory environment hadn't caught up with cloud technology. We have the same thing for AI. The other thing is to just start trying different tools in AI. Start familiarizing yourself with AI. Even if it doesn't give you the answers you're looking for, or it was wrong once, just keep going because new models come out and make those tools a hundred times smarter. When a new frontier model comes out like GPT-5 this summer from OpenAI, the stuff that barely works today, put that in place. When the new model comes out, those things that barely worked will work really well and you'll have it implemented already. You'll be familiar with it versus everyone else scrambling. The way to start is to just fiddle and use it. Carve out a half hour a day to do some discovery. Start with ChatGPT. Ask it what you can do. Tell it the stuff that takes you a long time and ask what it can do to help. You'll end up putting stuff into place within weeks or months and be ahead of the game. A little head start can make a big difference.

Yeah, it's fun. It's very exciting. It can be intimidating or even scary for those who are overwhelmed with it. That's okay. It's even overwhelming for me sometimes trying to stay on top and try every single tool. Glenn also teams with me on that. It's not possible to try every tool, but that's okay. If a hundred tools come out and you try three, you've tried three new things. One of those might make a difference in your business. Everything in all industries is getting shuffled up by AI. That is a time of opportunity the likes of which we'll never see in our generation again. This is the greatest opportunity we'll ever see because of how much the board is being shaken up. We get to put our piece on a whole different square if we play our cards right.

I wish I was better at marketing, actually. That's something I've never been great at, marketing myself or a product. I really respect marketers.

Yeah, that whole video idea, I probably credit my wife who is a marketer.

That's a great question. The low-hanging ones, I'd love to try being a rockstar or a pro athlete. That sounds fun. But I think I know. I'm really into coffee, and I've always wanted to start a coffee shop and run a really cool coffee shop.

I don't know. You got any ideas?

That's a great question. One of the worst pieces of advice I've ever got was probably to stop thinking about AI, actually. A co-worker who no longer is a co-worker here really thought it was a fad. I knew it wasn't a fad.

I know. I think they just thought it was going to be like blockchain or crypto. Those things haven't gone away, but they weren't earth-shattering yet. AI is more of an internet moment. That person didn't agree with that. It was really bad advice, but I didn't listen to it.

It happens. Don't let it stop you. It's about resilience and adaptability in life. That's what it's all about, especially in our business.

I'm in Slack. Reach out to me absolutely anytime in there. I'll put my email address in the chat. I'll put it in the description as well.

It says it failed to post, so I'll need you to do that. But yeah, Slack me absolutely anytime. Love to help, love to geek out or hear ideas. It's what I do.

Anytime. Thanks for having me on. I love it.

Bye.