Episode 177

Why Most Real Estate Teams Waste Money on Big Mailing Lists with Dan Gandee

· 42:34 · Host: Suneet/Nick/Mie

Suneet sits down with Dan Gandee, principal broker of The Operative Group in Oregon, for a conversation that is less about AI hype and more about what actually pays. Dan is on pace for 200 closings this year and he walks through the exact direction his team took the technology: a scrubbed and…

Play this episode

Chapters

  1. 00:00:00 — The $15,000 check that started with two grand in mailers
  2. 00:01:12 — Dan Gandee on 174 closings, IDX roots and why tech obsession pays
  3. 00:04:22 — Five new social brands running years of archived content
  4. 00:07:05 — Building the investor direct mail machine, list scrub to send
  5. 00:11:20 — The portfolio audit offer and five referral partners that open doors
  6. 00:16:10 — Letting the SEO vendor go and handing the website to an agent
  7. 00:20:05 — Daily CRM audits posted in Slack where every agent sees them
  8. 00:23:15 — AI calling, retargeting and screening the hand raisers
  9. 00:28:10 — Why they canceled Monday and Asana and built their own system
  10. 00:33:20 — Coaching reports, 45 day onboarding and where to start today

Read the full transcript ↓

Show notes

Suneet sits down with Dan Gandee, principal broker of The Operative Group in Oregon, for a conversation that is less about AI hype and more about what actually pays. Dan is on pace for 200 closings this year and he walks through the exact direction his team took the technology: a scrubbed and appended investor mailing list that turned roughly two grand in postage into a $15,000 commission check, a portfolio audit offer that gets absentee owners to raise their hands, daily CRM audits that land in Slack at 8:00 AM so nothing sits in lead status, and an agentic operating system his team built after canceling their project management tools because none of them spoke real estate. Suneet shares his own side of the ledger, including five new social brands running years of archived content on autopilot, an autonomous agent handling SEO and website pages after he let his vendor and staff writer go, and a daily email agent that rewrites subject lines for non openers. Both of them keep landing on the same point: the win is not asking a chatbot to write a listing description, it is handing the machine your whole operation, your recurring busy work and your quarterly goals, then letting it tell you what to systematize first. Dan closes with the simplest starting move any team leader or solo agent can make this week, plus how he squeezed a six month onboarding process down to about 45 days and where automated coaching reports fit into agent productivity.

Chapters:

  • (00:00:00) The $15,000 check that started with two grand in mailers
  •  (00:01:12) Dan Gandee on 174 closings, IDX roots and why tech obsession pays
  •  (00:04:22) Five new social brands running years of archived content
  •  (00:07:05) Building the investor direct mail machine, list scrub to send
  •  (00:11:20) The portfolio audit offer and five referral partners that open doors
  •  (00:16:10) Letting the SEO vendor go and handing the website to an agent
  •  (00:20:05) Daily CRM audits posted in Slack where every agent sees them
  •  (00:23:15) AI calling, retargeting and screening the hand raisers
  •  (00:28:10) Why they canceled Monday and Asana and built their own system
  •  (00:33:20) Coaching reports, 45 day onboarding and where to start today

Links and Resources:

Thanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to the Reside Platform Podcast? Have some feedback you’d like to share? Connect with us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube to leave us a review!

The Reside Platform Podcast is produced by Amplafy Media. Podcast production services · Client results

Full transcript

The complete conversation, in order. 7,357 words.

Dan [00:00:00] that whole process, which we implemented about six to nine months ago, I have a property closing today.

Dan It's a $15,000 commission check. I've probably invested a total of maybe one to two grand in mailers

Suneet All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Reside Platform Podcast. I am your host today, Suneet Agarwal, and this one is gonna be fun. So I'm glad that everybody's here. I'm glad that people are listening, and I'm glad that you're here, Dan, 'cause I think we've been trying to schedule this for how fucking long, dude?

Dan This is my second appearance on... w- w- we were on, like-

Suneet Yes, it is your second appearance.

Dan Yeah. For sure.

Suneet But I think we've been trying to schedule this for three months because you and I had, rapped a little bit about some of the stuff that you're doing with AI [00:01:00] on your real estate team. So why don't you just drop the one minute bio just so people have context?

Dan Yeah. So we're up here in Oregon. We own the Operative Group. my name's Dan Gandy, principal broker with Real. we run a top 10 real estate team. We're at 174 transactions closed this year, as of today. On the road to 200. and so... Thank you. Thank you. I remember when we first talked, we were at, like, 80, so we're, we're well over doubled it.

Dan So, but quick Cliff Note version, background in IDX websites and marketing agencies for real estate agents, I did that for seven years. Before that, design build construction in the luxury sector in the Silicon Valley. before that, a few years working in real estate operations for Brett Jennings.

Dan Shout out

Suneet to Brett. Yeah. I

Dan haven't talked

Suneet to him in a minute. Shout out

Dan to Brett. It's been a while for me. He was actually on one of my podcasts, like, two or three years ago, [00:02:00] but I need to reach out to him. yeah. but it really back, my, I have a bachelor's degree in marketing and advertising, and I've been just kinda on the...

Dan Me and Suneet and my business partner, Ed, are just really n- we're just nerd out on the tech stuff all the time. How can we be in, yeah, efficient, have op- operational, consistency, au- better auditing. And so we're just doing a lot of fun things with AI, but we've been doing it at a, at a, from an operating system level.

Dan and I think a lot of people are piecing together a lot of good task-based AI agentic things. So we'll run into what we're doing. And, anybody out there that just wants to run a real estate team and be more efficient, you have to use AI these days. So that's why we're here.

Suneet I mean, yeah, like, so wha- I think what had happened is of all the people that we coach and I talk to every day, and I [00:03:00] counted, it's a lot, dude.

Suneet I'm, I'm doing, like, 40, 50 calls a week, dude. Okay. Anyways, It's a lot. is you guys were some of the first to show me something that I was all, "Oh, this is worth talking about." 'Cause back then, it wasn't even that long ago, is everybody's vibe coding. And I'm all, "Bro, get out of here with your, with your little app that you made."

Suneet right? So even when I got a message from you guys, I was all, "Look," I was all, "I totally love you guys and I wanna help you out. So let me... So if you vibe coded some app, like maybe we should talk, but you didn't." good. I can't wait to get, to get into that. But before that, let's talk a little bit about AI and marketing.

Suneet because we were talking offline and decided to record. So I wanna share what I did with you, okay? And with everybody listening, is, a lot of my opportunity and everything [00:04:00] I have came from organic social media. I've been hammering away at it since my second day as a realtor, right? Even prior, like when I, when I had the, when I had the clubs, we were always posting on the boards.

Suneet Even MySpace, I was posting about real estate on MySpace. So I learned that mostly 'cause it was free. Was I good? I don't know. Am I good? I don't know. and What I noticed is across all my main platforms is I was growing... Like, my Facebook grows awesome, but everything else, TikTok's going pretty awesome too.

Suneet Instagram's kind of flat, but I still wanna grow more, and I wanna grow more than what those, than what those things are doing. So I went in and I made, I think, five new social media brands. Suneet.founder, Suneet.value, Suneet.pod, Suneet.thecut, Suneet I don't know. I don't even [00:05:00] know the names, right? Claude wrote the names, right?

Suneet And then we went in and opened up all these accounts, wrote all new bios, and every one of those brands got a Facebook page, an Instagram page, a TikTok page, and a YouTube page. Now I've been saving... I probably have thousands of posts and videos that we've put out over the last, since before COVID. I have all these videos saved.

Suneet I've been making that, long form, short form content for that long. So I have them all inside of Monday. So I hooked up Grok Bot to it. I have my Hermes agents. They're working awesome. I love the Hermes agents, but I set up Grok Bot when I was laying on the couch watching Bluey with my kids, right?

Suneet And I said, "Hey, here's all this content, years of content. Here's all these pages." I hooked them all through Metricool, which is a social media scheduler. However, GoHighLevel could do it fine. Hooked them up through

[00:06:00] Metricool, maxed out my Metricool account and said, "Change all the content a little bit.

Suneet Change the copy w- with the post, by 20, 30%, and let's schedule them out on something that makes sense." Dude, so I started it on the 1st, and I've got, like, 50,000, 60,000 views. With old ass content And the deviation is what is allowing that engagement to happen because it's not the same thing getting posted on

Suneet And it's been a while. and I haven't logged into the accounts once. I'm not even following the damn accounts

Dan Sounds dangerous.

Suneet Yeah, so right? Like, h- you know how that took me two hours, and that's a way, for marketing. What is something cool... I have something else I wanna share with you, but I wanna hear something cool that you've done with marketing with AI. Out- o- 'cause I know you're in ops, but I wanna hear on the marketing side.

Dan Yeah. On [00:07:00] the marketing side, so direct mail, how can we make a direct... 'Cause direct mail is so ingrained into-

Suneet Dude, this is what I wanted to hear about. Yes, good. O- okay.

Dan Yeah, so what we're doing for direct mail is basically I mapped out, all right, what are the four type of campaigns that we could do, not for our agents.

Dan Our agents can do it and have access to it, but what could we do to streamline this? So first thing I did is, like, how do I circle prospect the same type of asset class that we're selling? So we sell a lot of investment properties, so what did I do, is I just looked at all the last five, six, seven duplexes that we sold in different areas.

Dan And we basically, there was one manual thing we needed to do, is we'd reach out to our title company, 'cause we can pull that data from different sources, but our title company seems to have the best data. So-

Suneet For

Dan sure ... I just send out a mass email- Far the best

Suneet cost, right?

Dan It's free. Free 99. Yeah, exactly.

Suneet So- Exactly.

Dan So what we did is we pulled all these lists, and then I was like, "Okay, now we need [00:08:00] to do the de- the de-scrubbing process." And I, what's interesting about this is flashback when I used to work for Brett, I used to have to send this stuff out to a guy in Oregon, before I even lived in Oregon, and he would do the scrubbing, and it would take him, like, two weeks to get stuff back to us.

Dan So now I throw it into our, into our AI. you can do it in ChatGPT, OpenAI, whatever. First thing I wanna do is I-

Suneet The tool is irrelevant, yeah.

Dan Tool is irrelevant. I wanna scrub this list, and I wanna remove any active listings. That's the first thing.

Suneet That's a easy filter. They can look on Zillow.

Suneet Sure.

Dan Yep. Second filter, remove all trusts, any, and a- and any, municipal entities, because they're never going to sell their property. I- if so, they're gonna have the agent that's connected to them. So basically, that's the first thing we do, is scrub and clean the list, phase one. Phase two, drop it into DNC Project, and DNC the entire list, because we want to [00:09:00] call behind it once we send the direct mail.

Dan Then third thing we wanted to do is, scrub it against the litigator list. Fourth thing we wanna do is-

Suneet Dude, good one. That's a good one, dude.

Dan Fourth thing we wanna do is look for... We wanna de-dupe.

Suneet Yes.

Dan So any, any duplicate owners. Then I wanna remove, I wanna remove site address and move it to a different tab.

Dan So essentially I've cleaned up this now, first name, last name, phone number and email address. So we've really- appended the entire list

Suneet Address. Address

Dan Address. Right. Yeah. Site address versus, site address versus mailing address. And then from there, we can drop that into an AI automation for direct mail letters, direct mail postcards.

Dan So we're doing circle prospecting around our investment properties that we sell to only non-owner occupied absentee owners. And then I took it, two steps [00:10:00] forward. It's like, okay, well then how can ... once these lists go out, I wanna know. So what we can do is we can drop the invoice from the direct mail company back into the same project on AI, and essentially track, create a spreadsheet on how many mailers were sent, and then provide a return on investment if we do get a call back and this appointment set appointment.

Dan So what we're trying to do is track every campaign based upon how many, how many price per piece has been sent and what our RI- ROI is. That is just one example of what we're doing. But- The complexity to it in all of this is then we're dropping that list into a

Suneet dialer.

Dan And then essentially cold calling those lists, not with AI yet.

Dan We're actually using humans, people that actually can talk. And what we're doing is we're offering them a [00:11:00] portfolio audit. Mm. We're offering them a list to our five y-

Suneet Smart. Portfolio audit, bro. Smart. Listen to that. Fuck, I like that too.

Dan And then a list to our five k- five key referral partners, which is gonna be our financial advisor that can do 1031 and reversed exchanges into REITs or, 721s.

Dan we're, are... Also, I'm the president of the Rental Owners Association, so we're like, "Hey, if you need forms or you want subscription to forms, like, reach out. This is this company." And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to hit them with, can we give them an audit, but also can we give them all this value in the people that we use in our ecosystem?

Dan 'Cause I think that's the, the most important thing that an investor's looking for. and then when they raise their hand, one just came in. They, the QR code came... I get a text that says, "Audit." What do I do? I start texting with the lead, "Hey, give me your address. What are the rents? What are the utilities that you pay?"

Dan I throw it back into chat and [00:12:00] basically do a portfolio audit, and then we snail mail that portfolio audit back out to the investor in a, in a manila v- So there is some manual heavy lifting, but the warmer leads, they've got something and they've received something. So essentially, what we're trying to do is automate this process as much as possible.

Dan Every investment property that's sold, whether it's

Suneet Airbnb, short-term, long-term rental,

Dan development, looking for land. But we do it on the reverse side. I won't go through the whole entire process, but if I get an investor that calls me and says, "Hey, I wanna buy a house w- or buy a lot with this," what I do, I just start the entire process over and do a, I have a buyer letter in the exact same process using AI to basically speed up the process 100%.

Suneet Dude, so good So good.

Dan it's taking like a four to five hour thing and turning it into like 45 minutes.

Suneet Yeah.

Dan Writing the letter should be the l- And I, we use AI to write the letter or assist with [00:13:00] the letter, but as long as you have the good call to, menu of call to actions and you have what you're gonna give, the high value content, then writing the letter should be the longest portion of that entire exercise.

Suneet Totally. Yeah, dude. That's a good example of something sick. And is that making you money?

Dan Oh, yeah. I, I clo- today-

Suneet Listen to that. For everyone who was only listening and didn't see, right now Dan is, big old smile on his face. So yes, go ahead.

Dan Th- that whole process, which we implemented about six to nine months ago, I have a property closing today.

Dan It's a $15,000 commission check. I've probably invested a total of maybe one to two grand in mailers

Suneet The super targeted lists Super.

Dan Yep. And don't... There, don't... The main thing I try to tell everybody when we're ta- when we're nerding out on marketing copy, 'cause you can use AI to assist with, "Hey, s- [00:14:00] give me a letter that has Alex Harmozi type offer."

Dan But what I was gonna say in all of this is the most important thing to re- remember is that understanding your ideal client and niching down that list even further and further, you can send it to little batches of 50 to 100 addresses and still crush, versus circle prospecting an entire neighborhood of 3,000 addresses.

Dan So that's, that's really what we're trying to focus on is... 'Cause if you wanna call back through that list, "Hey, did you get our letter? We just wanted to be able to see if you were open to an audit. When's the last time a property manager's done an audit? Do you even have a property manager?" So we try to really-

Suneet So good, dude.

Suneet You're dropping bombs right now. So good. have you stumbled across any deals for yourself?

Dan We have. We have. w- we have a cl- we have, like, f- 44 [00:15:00] units here locally, two mobile home parks. we're pretty particular on what we want in the buy box. But,

Suneet You could wholesale it or whatever, right,

Dan so. We could whole- we could wholesale it, but really what I try to do is just slang it over to anybody who's gonna do value add and then turn around and sell it, and we make more off the f-

Dan I'll cut the s- off-market seller, pay me 1 or 2%, my buyer doesn't have to come out of pocket. You would've been going, taking it for four or five. And then turn around and resell it in one to two years, you make 4 or 5%. It's actually more than the yield on the property in most case.

Suneet Dude, totally.

Suneet That's awesome, dude.

Dan Maybe not in your area, but in our area it is.

Suneet Well, what a good niche, right? Who else is doing that?

Dan There's no one we've heard.

Suneet Yeah, me neither. I mean something... Yeah, I love that. For me, again, like something that we've, that I've been doing which is a win, [00:16:00] instant win, using AI in marketing, is, I had an SEO vendor for four years.

Suneet I had another person who worked for me who did SEO on different properties, different sites. I was doing three newsletters a week, to the consumer database, and I, I had a great, writer on staff. and I let the SEO writer go, and I let the staff writer go, and I automated all of it Right? hooked up my Sierra website to, GA4 and, Search Console and all this.

Suneet So for everyone listening, I have a Claude autonomous agent working on my Sierra site and is optimizing it, getting traffic, [00:17:00] right? building pages. I have a Claude autonomous agent, working on the newsletter, sending it out, optimizing it. I have another a- I have another agent working on my other websites because sure, there's a bunch of slop out there, but there's also, that's such a floor.

Suneet put out more content.

Dan Yeah, and I think with websites, with websites too, if you're like a, if you're an agent at just a surface level and you're like, "Hey, how do I start this?" Look, we took our eugenerealestate.com website that was, was at Sierra. We like Sierra. There's nothing bad to say about Sierra.

Dan You actually build really great websites and great SEO. But, we moved it over to YLOPO just 'cause of where we were with the domain and the property alerts, and we just plugged in Sora. I think that's who we're using now. So like, Sora. And that's an AI-powered tool that writes articles for you. It's doing exactly what you're doing, but it's just indexing and it show- the coolest thing about that dashboard is, like, [00:18:00] we're in week eight and we're starting to rank.

Dan We get a, we get our first lead yesterday. It's like, "Where did you find us?" "Search, Google search." Nine weeks later, which remember how long that would take you in the past with hire-

Suneet Oh, dude. Dude, years One year at least, right? That's the thing. So that's interesting that you're dropping content on a YLOPO site, 'cause I also have a YLOPO site.

Dan Yeah. We create a... they have their SEO ta- or they have their blog ta- the blog that they are doing, and then I just emailed them. I was like, "Hey, can you add a page called Insights?" And then I just plugged in the Soro code into that Insights tab, and it's dro- it's just dropping an article every other day.

Suneet Is it open source?

Dan It's open source.

Suneet Soro. [00:19:00] Okay, how do you spell it?

Dan Soro. S-O-R-O.

Suneet All right. Everyone listening, I am taking a note right now, because I just built it, but if it's open source, then who cares?

Dan Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's open source, 'cause I, when the settings, there was, I'm gonna have to look here, but, You, it does a lot.

Dan You, I mean, you can But,

Suneet I mean, that's the thing is like... Go ahead.

Dan Oh, I was just gonna say, you probably could just give your AI agent the login to the website Oh,

Suneet 100%.

Dan And let it, let it do its op-

Suneet Yes, totally. Grok Bot for logging into stuff. Sure, you could do like a headless like Claude or Hermes agent, but Gro- dude, I set up Grok Bot laying on the couch on my cellphone watching Bluey, bro.

Suneet Do you have it? Have you played with it yet?

Dan Ed, my business partner who's on the operations side, he's... Yeah,

[00:20:00] he's... In Follow Up Boss, one of our biggest blind spots is, well, we could all, well, John always says, "Hey, go into your CRM every day and audit for an hour." And that is by far one of the best advice you could ever give any team owner, operator, or even a broker owner that's giving out leads.

Dan But-

Suneet Anybody giving out leads ...

Dan anybody giving out leads. But the biggest thing that Ed has created is using those agentic agents to essentially, by lead source, they literally in our Slack sends out a message every morning to the agents that's literal- and it, the cool thing about this is, transparent accountability where everybody sees it.

Dan It will literally say agent's name, this is the person that you have to talk to, here's any lead that is still in lead status, here's anybody who did not have a task set, here's anybody who doesn't have a call or text logged, and now it's becoming... That used to be like a [00:21:00] weekly or whenever we had a one on-one we'd like do a manual audit.

Dan It's every day at 8:00 AM

Dan So Grok all day long

Suneet Yes. Good one. Good one. Good one. '

Dan Cause no matter how many ponds you filter out or you create those smart lists on the left-hand side, it takes you manually to go through them and be like, "Oh, let me look in the last 24 hours."

Suneet Totally. Yeah, good one. I mean, what do you think, about some of these services that companies have been making for lead filtering and lead management now?

Dan I would never use them, a- and no, no offense. Like, w- we were at Cheplak last year, and I was thinking about signing up, and I was like... I called Ed on the way home, and I was like, "Hey, man, do you think we could just, like, create this ourselves?" And we have a agent on our team that is a, also a programmer. [00:22:00] And, he's like, "Oh, dude, just give me a couple weeks.

Dan Let the technology kinda catch up. Tell me what..." And the cool thing about Fub is, like, that API, and they're allowing people to plug their aftermarket parts into it,

Suneet Dude, I have somebody I know who downloaded 77,000 transcripts from Follow Up Boss, from calls, put them in a database, and, like, got so frigging granular with everything about missed deals, about missed follow-ups that somebody else bought somewhere else, and his coaching of his agents, number one.

Suneet I don't know how he got all those transcripts. I, I don't know what he did, right? But, now he got this deadly data. Deadly data.

Dan I was gonna say, on the lead f- the lead generation front, too, is if you have, lead sources that [00:23:00] are... every lead comes in and gets a auto property alert. It may have AI texting, AI calling going on now.

Dan That's the kinda things we're testing in different lead buckets. But-

Suneet Did you guys do your own AI calling?

Dan Yeah. We just started, we just started that this week. we're in test of what-

Suneet What kind of back end did you use on that?

Dan It is... Oh, I wish Derek was here. We, we had to get a Twilio account again. We had to reactivate it.

Dan We had to reactivate our Twilio account. And then, I'll follow up with you 'cause, he... There was several I sent to him, like screenshots. There's so many. But our- the best, this is the one thing I was re- remembering he told me yesterday that I wanted to share with you today on this call. We have, we actually are testing, like, a call that goes out that says, literally that says, "Hey, this is an AI, this is an AI agent for Dan Gandy's office at the Operative Group.

Dan We just wanted to ensure that we connected [00:24:00] with you immediately. But how serious are you looking to buy or sell?" And what it's basically doing is it's basically screening the hand-raisers and then doing a warm handoff right to the agent Yeah. so it's not just blasting everybody and then next thing like you're just getting a bunch of people that are not interested.

Dan If

Suneet you blast everybody, you're just gonna burn your list. If you unveil one of these, oh, 10,000 calls a second things, number one, that now is expensive, right? Number two is you're just gonna burn your list and piss everybody off. So it has to be... And, and that, and that's the other thing is like Using AI can create more hand-raisers, right?

Suneet for example, on my email list for Suneet Agarwal, 'cause that's me, the... just the guy, the, the coach, the writer, the [00:25:00] whatever I am these days. I email once or twice a week for sure. now I'm going to, maybe two to three times a week for sure. Now I am increasing it to, like, seven times a week.

Suneet So every day, the autonomous agent, name is The Mailman, goes through my GoHighLevel and tags the leads that should get an email, and it goes through my database of my emails, 'cause I still have, I still take ownership on that part, right? And, sends the right emails to the right people, whether it's a podcast announcement, like it'll happen with this episode, and then it'll go through, it'll see who all the non-openers were, tag them, rewrite the subject, rewrite the copy, and then send it to them.

Dan Try again. That's huge. It's like your resender strategy. that's, that's next level because what... YLOPO, when I was talking to them this [00:26:00] morning, was talking about how they send out that first two or three or four messages, and then whoever does not open, now they're gonna s- yeah, they're gonna segment them, right?

Dan So I think the retargeting, whether it's email marketing or even ads, who's receptive and who's clicking.

Suneet Dude, have you hooked up the Meta MCP to any tools to run ads, to run Facebook ads?

Dan Derek, Derek has got one or two listings testing right now with us in the back end.

Suneet Oh, where he has listing ads out that he had Meta make and see h- the, see how the buyer l- leads do?

Dan Yeah. W- we haven't had a good amount of leads come in yet, but we, the retargeting, 'cause we had, like, 35,000. We went and scrubbed our list. We had a database of 50,000. It was interesting. After we scrubbed everything for duplicates and trash, like, it went from 50 to, like, 36,000, 30... We, like, lost 14. But, what I was gonna...

Dan The [00:27:00] retargeting strategy is really what I was telling him I wanna work on in Q4, is, like, setting up not only, like, s- we have street text retargeting going on, like YLOPO retargeting going on, but what AI can we drop a different ad format, whether it's video or text retargeting, to kind of connect, connect those loops.

Suneet the retargeting, I've found, is, like- When it's off a list, I found it to be less successful than when it's off a website

Dan Activity based, yeah

Suneet pixel based versus uploaded list based. that's something that I tested I used to talk about that on stage because I thought it worked super well till I realized that really those people weren't transacting.

Suneet They were coming back, but they weren't transacting. So anyways, that's something I built all those funnels out of. I thought it was brilliant for that shit. maybe I was. what else is something? So let's, let's talk about that, that tool that [00:28:00] you guys have had, because I know people will have some questions, the tool you guys made.

Dan So we built, we built a platform, an operating, an AI agentic operating system. And what that is in layman's terms is that we build an operating system. And this, to be very honest, and I keep telling people this, like we could care less if we sell it to a single soul outside of us. We needed to build a, a software.

Dan we needed to build a platform in which we could organize three things. One, we were growing. Two, we had a bunch of VAs helping us. And then number three was how do we get our transaction coordinator and our listing manager to talk to themselves and not use monday.com? Not that we don't like monday.com or any type of project management software, but we wanted to basic- make it real estate-eccentric or -centric in terms of what that process is.

Dan So what is our listing-

Suneet Wait, so did you replace Monday?

Dan Yeah. We don't even use a project management software anymore.

Suneet Oh my God, bro, that hurts.

Dan you're so much more advanced. We were using Asana. [00:29:00] We had a Monday account. Me and Ed, we canceled both of them. So right now, when a listing, a listing comes in, comes into our listing manager, he's got a process, and that process is going to go all the way from start to finish, to SkySlope, to, paperwork, and listings, to comps, and get everything in.

Dan You get all the way to the point where it goes live, now you have photography ordered. So we try to basically blueprint out that entire process and put that into Reoperative AI in terms of that's the steps. Then once it goes into contract, how do we hand that file off? Well, Reason for Real Broker already had something similar.

Dan Put in your listing, convert to contract. But the problem is it didn't have any contract parsing. It didn't have any... It, it wasn't setting your Google Calendar events for your deadlines and timelines. And so what we were trying to do is create a listing manager, a transaction coordinator, and then a marketing manager seat so that they could all three work in, under one platform, and the team leader could log in and be like, [00:30:00] "Okay, where are all my listings?

Dan Where are my transactions? Where are all my agents in terms of their marketing plans?" And so we're trying to create a recruiting and coaching platform on top of that, but we dismantled it over the last couple weeks, and we plan to put it back together because what we're trying to do is not make it easier for the agents.

Dan The problem is we were selling it, and then they were like, "Oh, our agents won't adopt this." So we were like, "Okay, let's reverse engineer this. Let's only make it so that the team leaders or team owners or the operations manager, the transaction coordinator, and the listing manager, the only three people or four people that'll log in, not the agents anymore."

Dan Yes, we need to increase the price, but the seat count doesn't matter anymore. So what we're going with this is that Lofty, Brevity, all of these CRMs were already trying to do this, but the issue is it wasn't open source in terms of, like, how do you create an agentic operating system for each and every...

Dan So what we did [00:31:00] is we literally went out to a roofing company and said, "Hey, let us build this for you." N- now there's a, there's another brand,commodities brand. We're like, "Let us build this for you." So what we're trying to do is, yes, we can build it for real estate, but we wanna build it in many different industries and then look at what is effectively working in terms of ranking, building a website and ranking it with 300 pages.

Dan What type of data do they need? What type of lead gen or what's their, what's their call to action pro- process and protocol? So Reoperative AI is still our operating system on our backend, but we wanted to create it to basically de scale all of these tech stacks that we were paying for, the Slacks, the Mondays, everything that we can do as much as possible to decrease.

Dan We have less VAs.

Suneet Yeah.

Dan I only have a... I basically have a ISA. [00:32:00] I have an I- I got rid of my in- my licensed ISA, and now we just have an ISA, a listing manager VA, and then, somebody that helps us basically in operations. Three people 'Cause everything else can be agentically built.

Suneet Crazy, isn't it?

Dan Yeah.

Dan And that used to be how many VAs? That was like 10, 12, 14.

Suneet Totally. Totally. It's crazy. Dude, it's crazy. if people wanna find out more about that software, how do they reach out to you?

Dan Yeah. They can go to, well, f- they can send us an email, dan@theoperativegroup.com. But Reoperative AI is on Instagram. we have a webs- we have a website.

Dan we're doing custom builds. We're not trying to do it to scale, so we're trying to work with team owners, broker owners, small teams, large teams, to build it out custom to what they need. and that's, that's really, I think, the next level of what is gonna stay, stay sticky for a [00:33:00] long period of time, 'cause there's-

Suneet Yes, the custom SaaS solutions.

Suneet It's not building more shit. It's building the right shit for the right people, custom. That custom build is everything right now. 'Cause who has time, dude? No one has time to do it. Like, I'm very... My shit is built out, right? But I work nonstop at a gaps and I don't sleep. So there you go, right?

Dan A- and what's cool about this is, like, y- you can have multiple layered technologies, like Real Broker who has Leo 2.0 that we're in beta right now testing for the brokerage.

Dan we're also, if you're a real agent, just go to the vendor portal and then look up Reoperative AI. Like, they literally put somebody that has very similar technology in the ecosystem because they know that n- no one's gonna have a perfect system.

Suneet Totally. I mean, dude, like I said, every Reside team leader, as I had you on there as soon as I can, I was, "Oh, [00:34:00] this shit is so good and you're not gonna build it."

Suneet Maybe you are, and if you are, cool. Like, let's compare notes, right? But I think they're ne- everyone needs to have a solution. It's much more than asking ChatGPT to write your listing description now.

Dan Yeah. It's... And even if you just wanna bounce ideas, if you have a very specific problem, it's problem-based agentic solutions, which is like, look at your business and say, what...

Dan In a given week, how much time do these problems that keep reoccurring affect your daily efficiency and, and your profitability? And I think-

Suneet Oh, bro, 100%. And that's why I use m- why everything for me is used in Monday, because the AI is connected to all the Mondays, and the AI tells me.

Dan And I was gonna say, for example, HomeLight.

Dan When a HomeLight lead comes into Follow Up Boss, it cannot be

[00:35:00] assigned to an agent- So I'm literally driving down the street, like trying... So this is what happens. An agent on my team has to jump in Slack in our HomeLight channel and say, "Mark B." Then I have to go to Fub and literally find Mark B. Well, sometimes Mark B is Mark Buffington, or it says Mark with no B.

Dan then I have to say, "Hey, what's his email address?" Or, and then they have, I have to copy and paste it into Fub and then assign it to the agent. so if, to give you a prime example, that's the kinda shit that we want people to bring to us because that's the where you're gonna be like, "Okay, put a bot into place that when a lead comes in to Slack or into HomeLight, log into HomeLight, find the lead, and assign it to the agent that says this in Slack."

Suneet Yeah. Yeah. That's the perfect example. That's like a easy job that would, that people are stuck in the weeds doing all day long.

Dan Every day, three [00:36:00] times a day, four times a day, which sounds like nothing, but that's 30 minutes a week.

Suneet Oh, dude. I, yes. I'm all... Optimization is my word of 2026, because I've been optimi- as my career has changed and my opportunities have scaled, it's optimization, right?

Suneet In everything, like what I eat for, what I sleep for, 'cause I actually do sleep, how I work out, optimization, right?

Dan I was gonna say one last quick thing is coaching reports, so one-on-one coaching with your agents. I think that there's the, there's many different philosophies on how you, what did you talk about on your last call to this call?

Dan Did they move those rocks? where are they at transaction volume-wise? So what we're really trying to focus on right now is how do we have the most efficient one-on-one coaching call that I literally can pull the leads up, show what has not been followed up with, look at their Zillow [00:37:00] Preferred, metrics, look at their, follow-up boss points, and then try to aggregate that into a one-page report that I literally don't have to talk about any of it other than the blind spots and the problems.

Suneet Yeah. That's great. Yeah.

Dan And I think that-

Suneet All, all the notes from the previous meetings. Yeah, 100%.

Dan I think that's, if you really wanna move the needle on how to... Like with us, it wasn't agent count. It was agent productivity. How do we take our s- our agents that are floating 5 to 12 transactions and get them into 16 to 30?

Dan And that's really what I'm trying to focus on for Q4 is automated coaching, strategic AI coaching.

Suneet At the same time, you better KFR, dude. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that all sounds good, but also KFR. Let's not forget. And as a matter of fact, thinking about what you're doing for listings, what can you [00:38:00] automate for the recruiting?

Suneet Like, I had Grok Bot create a whole new campaign in GoHighLevel, which if you know me, you know I love GoHighLevel, and the private integrations, they smoke Follow Up Bosses. They're fucking 100 times better. So it's all dialed in, going out, and yeah, create hand raisers, create the opportunities, and then segment that list down to create, like, super hand raisers.

Suneet Somebody opens a email, instantly send them another email. They open that email, wait a day, send them another email, right? those little levers now, before would take some serious work at the back end of something, now it's a line of text. Maybe four.

Dan And I think that's the, that's the KFR to roadblock from o- to onboarding.

Dan Like, I took Tyler Blair's 86 day. I've, like, had all these different operational, like, work throughs and I said, "Okay, [00:39:00] if I bring a brand new agent in, how long is it gonna get through buyer certification, seller certification, marketing?" And really what we've tried to do is take a six-month onboarding process and squeeze it into 90 days.

Dan We're probably at, like, 45 days now. but a lot, yeah, the, a lot of that was how do we create a hell week that for the new agents, if we're recruiting for talent and volume, then we're not gonna bring them through hell week, we're gonna bring them through a different training path. And a lot of that was AI based, not just ChatGPT create me a training protocol, but also, like, what do we, what are we getting out of the agents that are brand new?

Dan Like, what do we need to see from them?

Suneet Totally. What has proven to be successful, right? And what has not. That's the thing is what has not Right? 'Cause usually there's a, you got a bunch of fucking fluff in there that makes you feel some kinda way. It makes you feel smarter, uploads your... not you, Dan, but [00:40:00] y- the person.

Suneet So anyways, okay. So, last question. Because number one, if you're in Oregon and you got a deal, send it to Dan. if you wanna join his real downline, give him a call. If you wanna join his team, hell yeah, call Dan. If you wanna get his software, talk to him more about that, do a custom AI build, call Dan.

Suneet But, so there's all your shout-outs 'cause, because yes, you're doing great shit a- and I wanna give you all the opportunities. but last question is if somebody, for the team leader or the agent or for the human being listening to this episode and wants to get started on their own doing some of this AI work in their business, where would you tell them to start?

Suneet Oh, that's a good,

Dan I think the most important thing from a most basic level is to write down every manual task that you do on a Google [00:41:00] Doc, every manual task that you do, your busy work, and then on that same document, every strategic milestone that you wanna achieve in that quarter, your EOS, your EOS type of, move the rock.

Dan and then literally, I don't care if it's Perplexity, Claude, Chat, whatever, load that in as your first assignment and say, "Hey, I'm a team leader," or, "I'm an independent agent. These are the tasks that I want to automate with AI. What's the best protocol to do? And here is my quarterly plan and the problems I'm dealing with.

Dan What should I do step by step in order to be able to remove these, and systematize these, and create scalability in my business so I can achieve more time freedom and, and monetary reward?" And I think that's where agents fuck up, excuse me, my language, but they essentially, they go at, they're a task-by task ask versus just give it your entire outline of how to become more efficient.

Suneet Yes. Yes. That's super good. Everyone listening, that's exactly where to start. Good. Love that. All right. Well, Dan, thanks for coming on, dude. That was fun. Always fun. We just geeked out. Hardcore. We just geeked out. I know. So, but I mean, dude, like, this is what's happening. So everyone listening, I hope you enjoyed and got something out of this episode.

Suneet Make sure to give Dan a shout if you, wanna talk to him more, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Reside Platform Podcast. Peace out.

About Reside Platform Podcast

The Reside Platform Podcast is built for real estate team leaders and broker-owners who want to scale. Hosts Suneet, Nick, and Mie share the systems, recruiting strategies, and leadership lessons that grow teams — straight talk from operators who've done it, not just coached it.

See all 179 episodes of Reside Platform Podcast →

Book a 30-minute strategy call