Explore the future of real estate marketing with Brian Hanson, the co-founder and CEO of Real Agency. Jason Lavender talks with Brian about how AI can transform your marketing strategies and lead generation. Learn practical tips and tools to boost your real estate business and stay ahead of the competition. Whether you’re new to real estate or a seasoned pro, this episode is packed with valuable insights you won’t want to miss.

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AI Strategies For Real Estate Success: Insights From Brian Hanson

In this episode, we’re going to talk with Brian Hanson. Brian is a master marketer, AI integrator, all things business and AI integration. We talked about it. It’s amazing. He lays it all out, very simply put, and gives us some amazing tools, some websites and resources that you can begin using. Honestly, this conversation is literally scratching the surface, but hold on to your seats. It’s going to be a good ride. We are going to talk all things AI next in 3, 2, 1. 

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Overview Of Real Advisors And Interview Style

This is going to be pretty badass. Honestly, I’m super excited about this. We are talking to Brian Hanson with Real Advisors. Brian is no stranger to real estate, no stranger to AI, automation marketing and everything in between. We’re in for a treat. Let’s get started. Tell us a little bit about yourself, about what you’re doing now, how you jumped into real estate and how it led you down the path to what you’re doing now in your entrepreneurial journey. 

 

Passion For Marketing And AI Integration

Thanks for having me on. I’m honored to be here. I’m originally from Iowa. I came down to Florida in 2000. How I got linked up into the real estate side is I met a gentleman down in Jacksonville, Florida named Ron LeGrande. We ended up doing some things together, started a funding company and helped out with lead gen, sales and all kinds of different things. While I was there, I took an interest in how the heck are all these guys buying houses without using their money and credit. That interests me. I started getting into the real estate side back then, and I did a handful of deals. I didn’t do anything crazy. What I learned quickly is I had a massive passion for marketing. 

At that time, I started looking at, “Who’s the guys that this guy’s trying to study from?” It put me on a path of learning from guys like Dan Kennedy, Gary Halbert and a lot of the direct response marketers. Once I went down that path, my whole life literally changed forever because I realized I had the ability to go into any niche or market regardless of what it is and be able to make money. Personally, he made me the laziest marketer. I can’t ake that crown anymore because I haven’t been lazy lately, but I gravitated into the affiliate marketing side, promoting other people’s offers because I was good at marketing. I didn’t have to do any setup or anything. People already had offers ready. 

I would market those things and I made a lot of money doing that. In fact, my first big business that turned into a multimillion-dollar company was in auto parts. I have zero clue how to fix cars. I don’t even know how to change my own oil. I get the concept of it and probably could figure it out, unscrewing the cap on the bottom, all that good stuff. I became one of the biggest engine and transmission resellers in the United States, not knowing anything about it, by understanding marketing concepts. If I had to put my finger on what I do best, it’s finding loopholes to make lead gen and sales conversions easier, which leads me to where you’ve been seeing me lately into the AI side and why I loved it much is because that’s exactly what it does. It cuts to the chase and makes all the stuff that you did before way easier, way cheaper, and a lot of times lightning speed fast compared to what we were able to do before. 

AI cuts to the chase and makes all the stuff that you did before way easier, way cheaper, and a lot of times just lightning speed fast. Share on X

That’s Brian in a very small nutshell. I’m a marketing guy and that’s what I live, breathe, and eat. I’ve become very obsessed and passionate about the AI stuff. What I find when something like this comes along is I know you’ve probably felt it. Other people listening have felt it, but once you get onto something that lights your fire, you feel it inside. I was getting stagnant for a while. Things were boring. It was repetitive and all this AI stuff made me come alive.

It is been fun showing people how to use AI because most people think it’s this cool tool that you can maybe make a blog post or an email, which it can do very well, but it goes much deeper than that. The things that it can do Absolutely blow my mind. Even on the medical side, being able to heal people and make people who couldn’t move start to literally control their computers with their brains. We have taxis now that are coming in, picking people up with no person driving, or even helicopters with no pilot and dropping them off. We’re in The Jetsons. 

To recap, jumped in and met Ron LeGrande. For those who don’t know Ron LeGrande, he is an amazing guy. Many people have launched real estate careers by following Ron LeGrande. You found your niche in marketing, Dan Kennedy. Fast forward AI, here we are. Is that pretty accurate?

That wraps it up.

That’s sometimes funny to sit there and think about your career, your entrepreneurial journey and your business. Sometimes it does feel like that quick, but it’s sometimes how it is. I love what you said that you feel business and innovation in your belly. I feel the same thing about AI. I know you have like, take that and absolutely run with it and what you’re doing and some of your partners. We’re going toland the plane there if you don’t mind. First, you talked about marketing.

We have a real estate audience and you’re no stranger to real estate. I know you have a lot of real estate clients. Before we go off into AI, some of the sales psychology and marketing, what are some of the things that you see studying marketing that a real estate investor needs to know about and needs to understand whether that’s Psychology of Sales, understanding motivation, what are you seeing from a marketing perspective you could help maybe a new investor that’s reading or somebody that’s been in the game for a while as far as sales? 

On an easy level and because I’ve seen this many times, I think people get caught up feeling like they have to be this massive expert in real estate investing in order to be taken seriously or talk to sellers and be able to score a deal. It’s literally the furthest thing from the truth. In fact, the more polished you are, the more intimidating you become. The investors that have been doing this for a while almost have to dumb down their knowledge because a home seller, the biggest thing they’re going to be afraid of with an investor is, “This guy’s going to try to take me and they’re not going to give me what I deserve for the property.” That scares them.

When people are new, you got to get out there. For instance, I have done a few deals with this stuff and the biggest hurdle was getting out in there and making the damn offers. I was in my head that because I started in my early twenties, I’m too young. I don’t know enough. These guys don’t know anything, literally zero. If you’ve ever read a book far or listened to some of your stuff that you’re miles ahead of them and all they’re looking for is a solution, 1) Get out there and do it and second of all, listen. The thing is you’re a problem solver. There’s more than one way to do a deal. Sometimes it’s not a cash offer. You have to learn another way to do it. 

Maybe you can buy closer to the market value on terms and different ways to buy the property, but spend a lot of time listening because they’ll tell you how to approach them, get the deal done and less time talking. The big thing for me, like with the new crowd, you’re going to get a deal. If you get out there and make the offers. It’s going to happen. Get out of your head. It’s not your training, courses or anything that’s holding you back. The thing that’s holding you back is right between your ears. It’s your brain. That’s the secret to this stuff. If you want to get it at a core level. It’s not the marketing, the sales calls and everything. It’s literally making offers you’re going to learn way more from doing that than you will on almost anything else. 

 

Importance Of Authenticity And Listening In Sales

That is killer. That’s good. Problem solve. Be authentic. I appreciate you saying that. There are a lot of ways that you could answer certain sales tactics and high pressure. The truth is what we found in our business and the people that I know, being authentic, being relatable and trying to help problem-solve wins the day almost every time. You don’t have to become this killer sales instinct, alpha male, go go. It does turn people off especially as it pertains to real estate where people are oftentimes vulnerable. I appreciate that and that is true.

It is a numbers game. Just make the offers. Anybody reading that’s looking for their first deal or looking for their next deal, it’s all about making the offer, having the conversations, tracking your KPIs, and you’re going to find out how many phones calls it takes to make an appointment, how many appointments it takes to make a deal, how many of those close and then reverse engineer it. That’s killer. I appreciate it. That’s good to know, man. There’s not some secret sauce that we’re all sleeping on or something. 

There are some secrets too. To tie a little bow in that thing, people don’t want to be sold and closed. They want to feel like they’re doing that. When you’re like new and you even admit that to them, like, “I wanted a new property and this is my first time. That gives them the belief that they can get one over on you,” which is what they want. Don’t be worried about your level of expertise. That lends an advantage to you. You don’t even realize it because you’re in your head with that stuff, but people want to feel like they’re the ones in charge of things and the less they do, the more intimidated they get. 

I appreciate that. Let’s shift gears a little bit. I know one of your passions is AI. AI integration, AI in into marketing and everyday life. I mean, you’ve mentioned, you know, medical and self-driving cars and helicopters is a new one on me, but pretty soon we’re going to be, we’re already seeing drones flying and stuff like that. Let’s park the bus on AI. What is the average entrepreneur, business owner, real estate, and professional investor, what do we need to keep in mind as far as any AI integration?

There are a lot of buzzwords you hear a lot, “If you’re sleeping on this, you’re going to get left behind.” I think one of the phrases I’ve heard you say is, “You may not lose your job to AI, but you’re going to lose your job to somebody who’s using AI.” In general, what do business owners need to be keeping in mind right now as this wave, this flood AI integration and opportunity is hitting us? It’s not around the corner, it’s here right now. 

There are a couple of 0things to keep in mind. First of all, if you’re not following AI, it’s growing at such a rapid rate. There’s a lot of belief even from people like Elon Musk, that we’re going to be entering an AGI level within 2025. What that means for you is that right now AI can do very specific tasks well. Some of it can’t do well. People who are getting on expecting it to pop out a perfect sales letter, they can struggle with things like that because it knows what copy is. It doesn’t know the difference between bad and good. There are certain things it can’t do. When it gets to the AGI level, it’s going to think as smarter, greater than a human. We’re in about a year’s time probably from that happening where this is going to literally take over the world. 

AI is not just a toy anymore. It's growing rapidly and soon will be smarter than humans at many tasks. Share on X

It’s not some little toy anymore. Even as is, ChatGPT for example, a lot of people don’t understand its capabilities. They’ll use it for creating emails, blog posts and things like that again, it can do that, but it can do a whole slew of different things for you. It can help you get your keywords for your pay-per-click campaigns. If you have boots on the ground looking at properties, you can upload pictures of the properties and get an idea of what repairs it need because it can look and identify stuff in pictures. It can create apps. If you have a tedious task that you’re continuing to do, like listening to sales calls or something and seeing how you could increase conversions, you can create a GPT to do that. 

You can take MLS data, like a ton of data in the area and it’ll tell you the exact neighborhood to buy in and do direct mail to based on the size of the home, the bathrooms, the bedrooms, and how long the days on market, which always changes. For all that data that a lot of investors are looking at, ChatGPT can give you the answer and seconds instead of taking days and weeks and months to have data analysts go through all that stuff. ChatGPT is a data analyst and in seconds you can have that stuff. A big mistake people make with GPT, and this is the core tool, is they’ll ask a very basic question and settle for the answer. If you want good answers, you ask good questions theory. That’s the same with GPT. 

 If you said like, “How do I get leads for motivated sellers?” It’s probably going to say Facebook, radio, different ideas. You can say, “Great radio sounds amazing. What specifically in Jacksonville, Florida, which radio stations can I advertise on that allow advertising?” It’ll tell you the stations and why you should use them. Most people don’t go past just the first answer. If you dig into it, it’ll tell you Instagram pages to advertise on. It’ll tell you radio stations to buy from. It’ll give you the keywords for your campaigns. It’ll give you the negative keywords for Google ads. It can do so much stuff.

 

Practical Uses Of AI In Real Estate

The other thing is even building the apps for your processes, you can build a ChatGPT app probably about five minutes. Everybody thinks they hear the word app and it sounds intimidating. Literally, the way you build a chat GPT app is you tell it what you want, you write a sentence and it’s going to ask you about five questions and you answer them and then you hit create and it’s done. 

Most of this AI stuff is push button. There is no work involved. I told myself the last time because when the dot-com stuff boom happened, I was late in the game. I still ended up building over 300 sites and I smashed it with dot-com stuff. This time I decided, I’m not going to wait. I’m going to get involved right away. This is like nothing I’ve ever seen. If you’re kicking yourself for missing out on something before you’re still early to the game and there’s never been anything like this that I’ve seen in my entire life. This stuff is absolutely crazy. I can go into some other stuff that you can use. The bottom line is there’s a lot deeper rabbit hole than most people know about that can do a lot of things even in the real estate investing niche.

That is the biggest understatement of this whole conversation. I agree completely. AI is already changing the game and the landscape completely. I’m going to back up. AGI, is that an acronym?

It’s Artificial General Intelligence. Basically, AI starts thinking for itself. Instead of it being good at certain tasks, it can put it all together and do anything.

This is like drinking from a fire hydrant. I appreciate everything you’re saying. Most people reading, myself included, I got some steam coming off my head and I’m sure you get this all the time. I know you are advising companies, marketers and entrepreneurs all the time. Put the cookies on the bottom shelf. There is a flood of info. How do you sift through this, analyze it, but more importantly implement it? Everything you’re saying, I agree with 100%, but how’s the average person going to be able to sift through this, analyze it and implement it? It’s literally an ocean of information. That’s probably a super loaded question. What is the way to take bite-sized chunks? This may not be a fair question, but can you put the cookies on the bottom shelf for the average, let’s say entrepreneur on implementation? 

The one thing with AI is especially if you’re brand new to it, it’s overwhelming. A lot of people get involved. They’re trying to figure out what can it do and the answer is almost everything. It’s absolutely crazy. my advice to everybody reading is don’t get wrapped up in trying to figure out what AI can do. Get wrapped up in figuring out what it is that could make the biggest impact in your business right now. Find the AI to fix it, because it is exciting, don’t get me wrong, you’re going to love it, but you’re going to get sidetracked from keeping the eye on the prize, which is growing your real estate investing business because there’s so much to it. It’s not necessarily that this stuff is hard, it’s just that there’s a lot of stuff.

Ask yourself, “What is it that if I fixed this roadblock in my business, it would dramatically impact where I’m going?” That’s going to be different for everybody. If it’s lead generation, there are a lot of different ways to do that too. We had an event where we brought people in and set them up and worked with them. The strategy we used at that particular event, we were running Facebook and Messenger Ads from Facebook. Some of the people were doing custom audiences. They were picking probates or whatever they wanted. Other people were going direct, but we were doing Facebook Ads to the Facebook Messenger and our bot was talking to the sellers and asking them all the questions to hand over a hot lead. One of the things that sucks with real estate is talking to all the tire kickers. 

Sometimes you can’t figure out who they are at first. You spend a lot of time on that and hopefully, you guys have people calling for you. You don’t have to do that. Bots can take that over. I’ll be honest, on a DM side, the actual voice stuff has a little ways to go. It sounds great, but the actual messenger side, it sounds better than the humans we had doing it. I have funny stories too. We had people falling in love with our bots, trying to take them out to Red Lobster and inviting them over to their house. It got deep with some stuff I can’t even talk about on here. The bot sound is so real that they can’t tell. There’s a handover, technically speaking, a bot could close the deal and send the DocuSign and get the contract signed. 

I don’t recommend that because real estate leads are expensive. Get it teed up where you’re always talking to gold. That’s a dramatic shift in most investors’ businesses. If all they had to do was have themselves or their team talk to the golden leads all the time and they got rid of most of the waste, that’s a huge impact. Some of it is intertwining it. I find that a lot of people selling AI stuff or they’re missing the other keys. The trifecta of making this work is understanding marketing AI and sales because it doesn’t work without all three working in conjunction with each other. For instance, in that case, Facebook Ads has nothing to do with AI, but it was sending the stuff to the bot in order to qualify them. 

 

That’s one way to start. It depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Let’s say you’re not trying to get more leads, you’re trying to create your buyer’s list. There are tools that I use. One is called HeyReach and it goes out onto LinkedIn and will prospect for any single person that I want. In your case, you would go after real estate investors and it runs on automation through multiple accounts on LinkedIn reaching out saying, “I noticed you’re an investor in Jacksonville, Florida. I’m a wholesaler here wondering if you’re in the market for more deals. If shoot me your buy box and your info and I’ll put you on my list and give you a heads-up.”

That stuff’s running while you sleep. Other people, maybe they’ve been getting courthouse stuff because that is the freshest leads and they’re pulling like Lis Pendens. You can use a tool like TaskMagic where it watches what you do on your screen and how you get the leads and it automatically creates the app to automate the process. It’s putting the stuff on the Excel sheet for you. The core question to ask yourself is like, “What do I need the most help with in my business?” Start there, then move to the next thing. If you don’t do that and you say, “I’m going to integrate AI,” you’re going to waste a ton of time. 

 

That resonates with a lot of people if you’re listening to this and AI is here, you need to adopt it in your business. If you’re treating it like you’re going to the ocean and dipping your toe in it, it can be daunting. I appreciate what you said and what you’ve outlined there. One thing I would add to those reading, a focus on revenue-generating activities. Think through the holes in your business and what you want to accomplish. The first question you need to identify is, “What do you want to accomplish?” It should be centered around revenue-generating activities. If you’re going to use the AI integration or tools and the sexy software and everything to have fun and stuff and you’re not focusing on revenue, you can get lost in a sea of all things AI without moving the needle in your business. 

Understanding and identifying those things. Like you said, marketing, AI and sales. Those are going to be the three pillars of you as a business owner and as a real estate investor. You had a conference recently that started using Reoon. Killer scraper. It’s good. Thanks for that tip, TaskMagic and HeyReach, some good stuff. I know that there was a glut of new apps and software. How much AI-infused stuff has generated every single day with new products, and new software. You can’t even honestly keep your head spinning the whole time and you’re in this all day. How do you go about identifying what’s usable, what’s it’s going to end up on the leftover pile and what’s the gold as this stuff rolls out? I don’t know the statistics but every single day, there’s like hundreds and hundreds of new businesses in software and apps. How do you find the gold through all that? 

First of all, it’s a lot of work. For one I do have a Facebook group. It’s called AI For Business. It’s free, but I put a lot of the tools I find in there. I also have a newsletter, AiForBusiness.com that is also free. I talk about the tools, but the way I find a lot of them, there are a few. Product Hunt is a great website. It’s not just AI. It’s tech in general, but it’s a daily rating of the hottest stuff that’s coming out. It’s all-new, generally, then you find the old stuff too that was hot in the past. There’s Futurepedia, which is pretty much all AI tools. There’s one that I love that I found HeyReach, the YP Scraper, all that stuff is AppSumo.It resonates with several people because it’s been around for a while.

What’s changed with AppSumo is now that AI’s come along and there’s no code, people can build apps like crazy now. There’s tons of new stuff. AppSumo needs to pay me money. I plug them a lot, but here’s why it’s cool, almost all the tools on there, 98% of them come with a 60-day money-back guarantee. if it doesn’t work for your business and help you and in some way make more money or scale or in any case, you go in and say, “I don’t want it.” They instantly refund you and you don’t have to talk to anybody or anything. The stuff either works or it doesn’t cost you anything. The other thing with AppSumo is you can upgrade tiers. I’ll get the lowest tier and if I love it, then I scale it up to the top level and spend more. 

When I first got in, I was excited I was buying all the most expensive tiers. You don’t even know if you like it yet. You can do that later. The last thing that makes it cool is most of them are going there for seed capital to grow their business. They’re giving lifetime deals. I wind up spending $100 or something on something and I can use it every month. They’re as low as $30 up to generally $500 depending upon what level you buy. I don’t ever get anything that I don’t love because I get rid of the rest.

For instance, I’ll make an example like HeyReach that I talked about. I can send 10,000 messages every single month that I don’t pay for automated to people. The power of that is crazy. I don’t ever have to pay for that again in my entire life. It might’ve been like $500. Now everybody has to pay that monthly fee because once they’re off there, or even when they’re not off there, they’re charging monthly fees that are way more expensive. I got to steal on that. Now I can contact people on autopilot. It doesn’t cost me a dime. Those are a few ways to find tools. 

Truth be told, and you probably have all the statistics, but there’s so much out there and I appreciate that. AppSumo, you should have an affiliate with them, Futurepedia, some good stuff and thank you for that. As the average investor is trying to navigate this dumpster fire of AI stuff that is on the landscape, I can tell you from experience and investors I talk to, a lot of them are like, “It’s too much. I’m going to bury my head and I think it’s a fad. It might go away or else I’m going to get lost in it.” You need to adapt. Using the tools that are available, understand that you or somebody on your team needs to be diving into this. 

We’re going to get to some of the cool stuff that you’re doing and how you’re helping entrepreneurs and investors. Somebody needs to be doing this. You’ve got to be pulling this in your business. I said it before, you may not be replaced by AI, but you’re going to be replaced by somebody that’s using AI, and that’s a reality. You can stick your head in the sand like an ostrich and hope it goes away, but you’re going to put your head up and you’re going to realize it’s not. We’re heading to turn the corner. 

I appreciate your time. This has been killer. It’s a super eye-opener. An understatement is that we barely scratched the surface of what we could be talking about. I attended a conference with you and you talked about this for days on end. I think that was probably scratching the surface. That being said, what do you offer? How do you work with investors, entrepreneurs and business owners? I’d love for you to talk about Real Advisors and what you’re doing. If people are interested in having a further conversation, how can people get ahold of you and have a conversation? 

 

Brian Hanson’s Advice And Resources For AI

Find me on Facebook. Join our group. My name is Brian Hanson, and let me know. I do have a free group, but if you’re interested in getting more into this and doing hot seats where we’re digging into your business and all that stuff, we do have a Real 360 Group. I’m happy to share that with anybody. I’m here to give value. I hope I did give some value. There’s one last thing I’d probably leave you with that I think is important. Don’t feel like you have to do everything. The best part about this is it is very push button. You can go onto sites like OnlineJobs.ph for example, and easily get somebody for four or $500 a month. $100 or $125 a week for a 40-hour-a-week person to easily take over the AI stuff because you don’t need an expert. 

This is a very easy type of sentence and push-enter stuff that any VA who’s a hard worker and smart can do. At $100 a week for a 40-hour-week employee to handle it for you, why on Earth would you want to do it? It’s a different type of thing because you don’t need somebody with extraordinary expertise like a Facebook Ads media buyer or something like that. This is easy stuff. You need somebody to take it over and run with it for you. Find what you need to fix. Hire somebody for $100 a week to come on and fill all those gaps for you. 

That’s amazing yeah, that whole who-not-how concept. You don’t need to be pulling every lever in your business. Find somebody who can do it, delegate it and AI integration in your business. It can be somebody else and oftentimes is. I do appreciate it. You seem like such a humble guy. I honestly appreciate you taking the time, laying the cookies on the bottom shelf, giving us some good nuggets to chew on and providing some value. I thank you for that.

If you’re not following Brian Hansen, you definitely should. Hit him up on Facebook. He’s got Facebook groups. It’s worth to follow. What he’s doing is pretty killer stuff. Thank you for visiting with us for those reading. Don’t get left behind on AI integration into your business. This is not a fad or anything like that. You need to be adopting this now or your business honestly will suffer. I can tell you from personal experience, it’s moving at a breakneck pace and it’s crazy. That’s it for this episode, until next time.

Thanks, everybody. 

 

Important Links:

• Brian Hanson
• Brian Hanson – Facebook
• OnlineJobs.ph 
• Brian@RealAgency.com