The AI advantage - the free tool that's outperforming most strategies

0:02Hey everyone, Rob B here with Rob D and you are listening to the Property Podcast. I'm going to say something that is a big claim, but I feel very confident that we will deliver on this. By the end of this episode today, if you listen to what we talk about and follow along, you will feel that this is the most valuable podcast that you've listened to from us this year and maybe any podcast you've listened to this year. it's a big claim but we have got so much value to deliver to you this week i can't wait for you to listen and be inspired

0:41welcome to the property podcast in case you don't know we run a business that arranges more than 100 million pounds worth of property deals for our clients every year you can find out about that at propertyhub.net slash invest and within our business as well as personally we're going big on AI. Why? Because it's crazy not to. If you can get things done faster to a better quality and have valuable insights coming out of your ears, why would you not do that? And in this episode, we're not just going to inspire you by sharing all the things that you can do to make your property life better and easier, but we're going to give you the step-by-step instructions for how to do it as well.

1:12So what's probably going to be the biggest news story of the week is the resignation of Keir Starmer as leader of the Labour Party, which means we're going to have another Prime Prime Minister and another leadership contest. So at the time we're recording this, this has just happened. So we're going to save the analysis for next week. What does a new Prime Minister mean for property investors? What can we expect to happen? What are some of the suggestions on the table? We'll get into all of that in next week's episode. But first, Rob, there was something else that caught our eye in the news this week.

1:39This week's news story comes from Savills. And you may have heard of the Bank of Mum and Dad. Well, they've extended it out further. It's the bank of granddad and grandma because Savills are reporting that half of first-time buyers receive direct financial support from family members to help them get on the property ladder which I suppose isn't shocking Rob because people know that this happens but as much as half that's quite a staggering number and it shows that while property is affordable it is compared to where it has been for a long, long time. Making that first step to get on the property ladder, to become an owner of a property, is still really, really hard work.

2:26Yeah, it's the scale of it that shocked me. Obviously, there's lots of family support going on, but more than half, 53%, I wouldn't have put it that high. And apparently last year, the total amount,£11 billion. But that's not to say that people are just coasting by on their parents' money. The data also says that the average first-time buyer uses more than£24 ,000 of their own savings as well as contributions from family and saving up that amount is no joke which I think supports your point Rob like even if the payments are affordable once you're in because we haven't had a nominal price crash for getting on for 18 years and wage growth hasn't been strong and things are just tough it is really hard to become a first-time buyer and if you've got family support available of course you're going to take it but it is I suppose a broader social issue that your own chances of becoming a homeowner are depending on whether your parents have been in a position to build up home equity at a certain time in the past.

3:15Yes, it very much seems that way, Rob. And of course, regionally it varies as well. You can in the northwest, northeast, some other areas pick up first-time starter homes for what would be seen as reasonable value. But if you're a first-time buyer or an aspiring first-time buyer in the southeast or in particular London, that is a huge huge challenge and you can see why particularly in those regions the bank from her dad or granddad or grandma are so important so rob surprise surprise we're going to talk about ai for a bit and we probably were going to do this anyway and so at least we can have the microphones on and get a podcast out of it but i think some of what we can share in this episode is going to be ultra valuable because there's so much that property investors can do with ai right and there are levels to this stuff you can go ultra geeky we're not going to get there in this episode but i think most people are probably at level one just like typing something into chat gpt and seeing what comes back but if you just push a bit beyond that and get to level two then a whole world of opportunities opens up oh it's massive and i know i said at the top of the show that this is possibly the most valuable episode we will do this year but it really is because we're going to give you the tools the process so you can go and do these things even if you're at a basic level with AI now, I promise you, we'll get you there.

4:32It's so much easier than you think. It'll be a game changer for property. But once you've done it with property, you'll be able to then quickly go, where else can I do this? So it's the inspiration not just to suddenly become an AI expert within the property industry, the property sector, but then take it to elsewhere in your life. And Rob, I think we need to make it super, super clear. I've just touched on it, but super clear that this is within complete reach of everybody listening today. You don't need to be a coder. You don't need to be an IT whiz. You don't need to have been on computers since you were two years old.

5:08You actually could have picked up a computer for the first time last year and still be able to do what we're about to talk about. Oh yeah, for sure. There are people in our business who would not describe themselves as techie at all, who are building tools for themselves because they spotted something they want to do. And oftentimes they've just gone in and they've asked, how do I do this? And then they've followed the steps that come back. And this is where it comes back to levels again. Like you can go ultra geeky and be typing things into your terminal and all kinds of mad stuff, but you don't need to.

5:35The main tools that you'll have heard of, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, the friendly looking versions of those, the ones with a user interface that will be very familiar, that you'll know your way around intuitively. They're just getting more and more powerful all the time to the point where you don't really need any of the super techie stuff anymore. No, you don't. Let's start with tools that exist today, because there's two ways to approach AI. There's lots of people building stuff out there that you can use and the AI platforms themselves that you can use. And we'll briefly talk about that. But then we'll get on to what I think is the most exciting stuff and the stuff that you should not be intimidated by, which is the stuff that you can build.

6:15And like I feel I've pretty heavily emphasized you do not need to be a tech wizard to do that but let's start rob let's start with like the absolute basics so if someone's not logged into ai before they've heard everyone talking about it and they want to start using it for property let's introduce them to claude and chat gbt and gemini and there's others but the main ones yeah everyone will have used at least one of these tools at some point but most people we see using them at the most basic level a glorified search engine you put a prompt in you get a response out sometimes that response is useful sometimes it isn't and if you get a response that's not very helpful just mediocre then you think oh this isn't very good and you move on but the tool isn't the problem the tools are amazing the problem and the opportunity is in what you put in in the first place if you ask it a vague question that's very general it doesn't have much to go on you will get a vague answer if you ask a specific question or at best give it some context about you then you'll get a far more helpful one so the key word for me rob is context because these days the tools can hold a huge amount of context in memory without losing track of anything so you can give it all of that context once have it, save it, and then it knows it every time.

7:37So it saves you a whole load of work putting in the same basic information again and again. And there are different ways of doing this depending on the tool. If you don't know where to start, the easiest way in your tool of choice, just say, I'm a property investor. I want you to start helping me with the property side of my life. Interview me and ask me what you need in order to help. It'll then ask you questions. You can answer them you can use voice mode to get it done more quickly and then the whole lot gets saved to context and then that will transform the answer that you get to an ordinary question so let's say that you ask is liverpool a good place to invest now normally you'd ask that and you'd get a very generic answer but with your context loaded it can say well for you the strength is rental yield because that's what you told me if you focus on and the average yield here is x but you've also said that one of your specific worries is overbuilding and that's something that you see in this part of town that's just one example but immediately you can see that's far better information yeah don't sleep on that point around the interview if you're picking up these tools for the first time or you've only used it in a light way it's a great way for building that context now if for some reason you don't want to listen to that very good piece of advice from rob you can give it the context when you're asking the question so instead of saying i want to invest in Liverpool you could say tell me why Liverpool is a good place to invest you could say I'm considering investing in Liverpool here is information about me I'm this investor here are my goals here's my budget here's the type of strategy I'm trying to deploy give me a list of all the positives or the negatives and things that other people miss or risks that I should be aware of the more you give your question the more you'll get out context interviews great another one I like to ask on nearly every question is before you start, do you have any questions?

9:33Or what else can you ask me to give me a better answer? Sometimes it will ask you by default, but often it won't because it just wants to rush to please you. So force that extra step. Again, we're talking about property, but this is a great AI tip for whatever you do. Force that extra step at the end of the prompt. Make it ask you questions because the more it understands about what you're trying to achieve, the better answer you will get. And it's like different worlds, Rob, from going to, is Liverpool a good place to invest, to what we just talked about there. If you just do that alone, you've immediately leveled up with AI.

10:07For sure. The same goes for digital analysis. So the advantage that AI has over you and me is that it can process a vast amount of information very quickly, but it needs to know what to do with that information. So you can feed it contracts, legal packs, online listings, anything you can think of, and it'll go through it all in a flash. It'll note every single thing that's in there. And some of the conclusion it draws can be really powerful. But there are two things you need to be aware of. First is that, like we said, it needs to know about you. So it can have all the detail on the deal. But if it doesn't know who you are and what you're trying to get out of it, then the answer won't be a lot of help.

10:51And second, I think this is so important. For me, it's the most important thing about working with AI. It's not a replacement for critical thinking. So you might say, look at this deal and tell me all the positives and all of the risk factors. If it comes back with seven risk factors, that doesn't mean, oh no, there are seven things wrong. I need to walk away. It doesn't know how to weight things correctly. it can't get a sense of the overall strength of a deal and sometimes it will just completely get the wrong end of the stick and go off on one about something so what i find most valuable about ai is not necessarily its conclusions but what it surfaces and then it's up to my judgment to know what to throw away and what to drill deeper on so that's level one but let's move up a level and it's not a level in technical know-how, I promise you.

11:41What it is, is a level of use, like how you approach AI and thinking about using it a bit differently. So everything we talked about, I think anybody can kind of get and go with straight away. But what I think is fascinating, and it's only been really recently this, is that you can now build your own AI tools, apps websites wherever you want without hiring a developer so stuff that would have cost you thousands of pounds multiple weeks in time lots of specification back and forth big time money investment and not knowing with the end product is actually going to be worth it or not it's just in a lot of cases not needed anymore and you can do it now we're going to give you exactly what you need to do every single step and you by the end of this episode will be able to go and build your own tool you might be skeptical but by the end of the episode you'll be there so let's do it rob let's talk about the platforms that people should be using and the good news is it's the ones we've already mentioned it's claude co-work or chat gbt or gemini all the stuff that we're talk about today can be done the prompts work in every single one of them but before we go and build with code which again probably sounds scary let's do maybe a warm-up act a way of taking ai to a level beyond what we've done so far but not quite building apps yet we're about to do that but i think that actually there's a few really good uses that people can use yeah so what we're about to talk about is another big step up and it's really not scary at all.

13:28So the absolute basic is prompt and answer. The next level we've described is prompt plus context plus a bit of guidance, which gives you a better answer. But a huge leap after that is giving it access to tools and having it do things for you. Now you can do this in all the big AI platforms, but as of today, I think the most user-friendly one for general knowledge work is Claude. so they've got something called co-work which is not intimidating at all it lets you give access to folders so it can see what you're working on and make changes to those files and it uses what they call connectors which you can use to give access to things like your email and your calendar or if you're using google drive you can give access to that as well don't worry you set the permissions so it can't just go off and like write a load of emails for you and fire them off without permission.

14:18But connecting these things up is a whole new level because it just makes it so ultra powerful. So for example, let's say that your starting point is everything to do with your portfolio and your research is a complete mess. You've just got one folder, all the file names are random, it makes no sense. So what you can do is point Claude Cowork at it and just tell it to sort it out and it'll read every document, file it, rename everything so it's logical and easier to find next time, sort it by a property and maybe split out a folder for what you own versus a folder on what you're researching. It can give you a whole folder structure and immediately chaos has been turned into order.

14:59But then more powerfully, it can watch that folder and maintain it for you. So every time there's a new document, you drag it in or there's a letter, you scan it in, drop it in the folder, it can pick it up, read it and put it where it needs to go. It can even extract information and act on it. So from all of your documents, it can find end dates for tenancies or renewal dates for gas safety certificates, and it can put them in your calendar as reminders. How cool is that? And if you connect your email, then it just gets even more powerful because suddenly you can ask it questions about your business and your history, not just general knowledge and research.

15:38So I've done this before. You can say things like, I'm sure we replaced the washing machine in this flat at some point, but it's just broken again. when did we last replace it and it can go through your emails and go oh yeah um it was last replaced in 2023 here's who did it here's how much it cost and that is so powerful so it saves you so much time and remember we haven't done anything even remotely technical yet it is super cool but let's keep going okay let's keep giving you value you're going to be drowning in value by the end of this episode how about get it to bring stuff to you an example how about a property news and market intelligence tracker.

16:15Sounds fancy, right? But all you need to do is go into your platform of choice. So it could be Gemini, Claw, ChatGPT. They'll all be able to do this and just say to it, I want you to bring me the rental regulation news, the planning news, the infrastructure announcements for this area, employment news once a week. Send it to me on a Friday morning at 7am and it will do it. That's it. Honestly, it will do it. It's as simple as that. You just need to ask it go into the platform and tell it to do that and in return it will deliver it for you and guess what every week it will be there now something you want to do is go do a test run now so you get that first result and you can tweak it you can go oh i really like that you've done this but can you give me a top five news stories of the week you've given me a lot here but i just want the big five for example you might want everything but that's the point you can just keep editing and changing with it.

17:13So you don't have to accept the first hit. You get what it puts together for you and then you go, change that. You can even go design it in this way, create it. So it's a website that updates for me every week. You are just limited by what you think to tell it, but you can have that. You can have your own personal property news and market intelligence report delivered to you every week. You can do that. You can then start to think about what else do I want weekly reports for or daily reports for. For our business, I get a mix of daily and weekly reports and multiple daily and multiple weekly reports.

17:50And they are incredibly useful, incredibly useful. And you could do that as well right now. But Rob, we can keep going. We can keep levelling up. Let's do that. So let's say you want to build a tool that estimates rental demand and rent levels for a type of property in a given postcode. Now you can do this with a prompt. You can even get AI to write the prompt for you so it's a really good prompt and you can store it and you can paste it in each time with the postcode you're interested in. That works but wouldn't it be better to design it once and then just have it set up. So it can be a page that you go to, you type in a postcode and out comes a lovely dashboard or a pdf even that you can share with other people.

18:31So if this is something that you're potentially going to use again and again rather than just like as a one-off bit of curiosity then i wouldn't just give it the prompt to start with i would take it through like a really basic software design process so i would say i want to build a tool that estimates rental demand and average rents help me work through the decisions we need for how to build that and actually chat with it get its ideas on what you need to be thinking about what you need to look at where it can get the data from and really understand the limitations of that data because it should be able to do a web search filter down to a postcode and go and pull live data from somewhere like right move or zoopla but go through that process and check that it can because if it turns out that it's just pulling stale data from somewhere or guessing even worse then that's not very helpful if you're going to be using it again and again then it's worth going through this process and making sure that you're confident in the quality of what you're getting out.

19:31Then you can have it work through the output with you. So do you want it hosted on a website where you just go and use it there? Do you want it as a tool that you use inside Claude? What do you want the output to be a PDF? Do you want that to have a certain design? Figure it all out once and then you can use it as many times as you like. And I'm using the word software here Rob which I I know it can sound intimidating, but if you think about it, a good prompt is already a tiny piece of software. So all you're doing is pushing this on a little bit further and just going through a logical process of specifying how it's going to work.

20:04Then you've got something solid that you have been through a process, you understand it, you believe in the output, and then you can just use it again and again in your business. The great news is we can give you a prompt you can start with for this. So if you go to the show notes, there'll be a link there. And we're going to batch up these tools, these prompts, all in one place. Everything else that we mentioned as well is going to be in this one location. So check out the show notes for the prompt. And here's something for those people who are still doubting that you can do this. Once you start and you put the prompt in, if you're AI of choice, we recommend Claude probably for this, but you can use others.

20:41If you get stuck, just ask it, how do we fix this? what do we need to do to move forward just ask those questions so for some reason if it doesn't work on your first attempt then just ask it how do we solve this it's so good at problem solving and it will give you the steps i've built stuff before where their first solution hasn't worked and i've gone that didn't work what else can we try and lo and behold i found a solution with ai it's always approaching getting and not making the assumption that it's limited always just keep questioning like it has the answers it has the solutions and most of the time it does i think a lot is made of hallucinations in ai of course you get them and of course it lies sometimes but i think it's a lot worse than the reality particularly when you're building things when you're asking for information that's where it can go wrong but when you're building stuff that's where it's very very good so that's one example that you can have stored within your own ai platform and it'd be there as a reference for you to go back to over and over again or if you're just going to use it a lot for yourself build the app anyway why not do it well this is all great but can it help us with the single most annoying part of property conveyancing actually getting transactions through or getting a remortgage agreed surely ai is not powerful enough to conquer this giant annoyance Well, it can't remove it, but it can definitely help.

22:07And this is where having moved up a level that we've talked about already is essential. Because if every time you get an email from your solicitor, you're having to paste in that email and go and find all the previous context and bring it up to speed, it's going to take ages and it's probably going to miss something in the response. But using something like Claude and giving it access to your emails means that you don't have to do that anymore. So you can set up a project, for example, that's for a particular transaction. and you can add all the documents relating to that property such as the listing and the offer letter and information about the transaction and the parties involved then every time an email comes in from your solicitor you can just say hey what's this latest email all about and it'll be able to pull in not just that original context but also all the previous relevant conversations that have happened over email and it's a design decision you can leave it up to the ai whether it actually just wants to pull it in each time or does it want to proactively update its own information as you go along so it's got a self-maintaining record of the transaction either way it'll have all the information but it could even go further than that because what normally happens in convincing is you spend a load of time not hearing anything at all so you can do this in different tools but include they call them routines you can set up a routine where once a week or however you want it goes and scans and see has anything changed has anything happened and if not alert you when it alerts you it could even have pre-written the chaser email for you so you can send it you can even set up something that watches for new emails from your solicitor.

23:28So as soon as it comes in, it can read it, summarise it for you, and potentially even draft a response for you. And that can happen without you having to do anything. So I think, Rob, this is a really great example of that gulf between you ask it a question case by case, and you get it proactively doing things for you and truly acting like an assistant. I mean, seriously, how many hours could that save you? and then again think about what else you could do in your life by just taking that same approach to do this is either multiple hours of your time or you're hiring an assistant and this is just a monthly subscription to an AI platform of your choice 20 pounds it's absolutely crazy so I'm sure the ideas now are popping around your head you're very distracted you're ready to get going, let's give you another idea.

24:21And again, the prompt will be available for this one. How about a tenancy management assistant? Very similar process to what Rob just described, but you could have a personal assistant that knows and understands the Renters' Rights Act. They could create your tenancy terms, all in your tone, of course, draft tenant communications, rent increase notices that come across in the right way. Yeah, they can do that. Maintenance response letters. Yeah, you could get all that done. End of tenancy checklists. Sure. Deposit deduction letters. Why not? Again, the prompt will be there. You can do it. Go and build it.

24:57I'm excited for you. Go and get started. There's so much that is possible. And now, hopefully, we've got your creative juices flowing that you can go and do that. It's there for you to take advantage of. The worst thing you could do is just don't do it because this whole episode is set up to hopefully deliver an abundance of value and I hope you agree with that. By the way, if you do agree, can you leave us a review on either Spotify or iTunes and just say you've got value? We've not asked for reviews for ages so it'd be great to know that you valued this episode and this type of episode in particular.

25:31So please do go and leave a review. Now you will have the edge over other investors. You will have the edge. This will put you at an advantage. They're doing it the old way. They're doing it the slow way. There is a new way. Here's the crazy thing. Most people won't be doing this. The vast majority of people will not be doing this. Rob and I speak to business owners, property investors, businesses, day in, day out. We speak to all these parties and I promise you the level that most people are operating at is at a basic level. You may be listening to this and you are super advanced with AI and maybe you've got the odd idea but you've you've not got that much out of it fair enough but i know the vast majority of people listening today will have tools ideas opportunities that they can level up their property investment endeavors and level up their life i don't think it's a big sensational claim rob i know it sounded like at the beginning of the episode where i said we're going to deliver the most value we've ever done in an episode this year but if people go and do this we've delivered on that promise yeah i understand why it feels like a big chasm to cross if you don't think of yourself as someone who's technical but the best thing you can do is just carve out a couple of hours and get over that hurdle because when you realize just how easy it is it does change everything so to make that really easy we've bundled up all the prompts and the ideas that we've talked about today and we're making those available so you'll find a link in the show notes or you can go to propertyhub.net slash tools that'll take you to our complete toolkit loads of great stuff in there but one of the things in there is going to be all the prompts and instructions that go along with everything we've talked about in this episode.

27:09And that is us done for this week. You've got some homework to do, but it's potentially life-changing, business-changing homework. So enjoy, have fun, and we'll see you again next week. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.