Episode 45: Interview with Nick Van Valkenberg

Scott Williams: Sweet home, Santa Barbara, where the skies are so blue. Sweet home Santa Barbara, what’s worked for me can work for you.

Jonathan Robinson: Well, welcome back, Sweet Home Santa Barbarians to Sweet Home Santa Barbara. I’m your co-host, Jonathan Robinson. I’m with my friend, real estate broker, and co-host, Scott Williams.

I’m particularly interested in this episode, Scott. We have Nick Van Valkenberg. Hopefully, I said that right, Nick.

Nick Van Valkenberg: Got it.

Jonathan: Just a little bit about Nick, who’s a specialist in AI. Nick’s the father of a spirited 2-year-old and a seasoned prop tech expert with over a decade of experience in the real estate industry. Nick’s focus is on artificial intelligence, specifically in real estate. He aims to revolutionize the industry by empowering professionals and clients alike. We welcome you, Nick, to Sweet Home Santa Barbara.

Nick: Hey, gentlemen, thanks for having me on the show. Yes, I do hope to revolutionize the experience. We’ll see how that goes.

Jonathan: Yes. Well, how long have you been into AI and real estate? Because for most of us, AI was kind of a snuck up on us about a year ago, but how long have you been into this field?

Nick: I’m not shy of two years in the AI space, and then well over a decade in just the property technology space.

Jonathan: Mm-hmm.

Nick: I don’t know if it was dumb luck. I kind of snuck in here in the AI space about eight months or so before ChatGPT came out, when all of a sudden AI became the forefront. You can’t be in a conversation or a podcast and not hear about AI, right?

I’ve been learning heaps about it. I’ve been using a lot of it. I’ve gone on, I wouldn’t say I’ve gone on tour. I’ve been to a few places and presented to real estate brokers and agents. Everybody’s super curious. There’s so much information out there. AI, we’re like in this hockey stick. It’s just taking off. If you’re not paying attention, it’s hard to keep caught up. Folks like myself in the industry are just trying to help, I don’t know, separate the noise from opportunity, if you will.

Jonathan: Yes. I’m not even sure where to begin. There’s so much to talk about. For people who don’t know about how AI is going to affect real estate, what would you use? What would be your two-minute speech to them? They probably need to be woken up.

Nick: Yes. AI is already affecting real estate, and it’s affecting every industry. It has been for a long time. As ChatGPT came along, everybody got really hypersensitive about it and paying attention.

If you back up a little bit, think about Netflix, for example. Netflix came on the scene. They obviously stole all, if not most, of the business from Blockbuster by just putting things digital. The digital wasn’t that great because, as I was looking for shows to watch, by the time I found something I wanted to see, either my food was cold or it was time to go to bed. It took hours to do that.

They started implementing some AI, and they started profiling us, which sounds a little strange. They’re profiling us in a way that they see what we’re clicking on, what we’re watching, how we’re rating, and what’s happening. Inside that profile, they start giving us kind of the answers to what we want to watch.

Amazon’s done this for years as well, if, whether you’re paying attention or not, those you should also buy this, or the emails that you get about things you should buy or not just based off of what everybody else is doing. It’s based off of what you’re doing, what you’re looking at, or what you’re clicking on.

Fast forward now to real estate. This is what’s happening as you’re searching for homes. If you think about the home search experience, it’s pretty archaic, really. I would go to most brokerage websites. I would put in my neighborhood. I would put in maybe some beds, some baths, and some minor filters to get that map and that tile view of the homes for the area I’m interested in, which isn’t a bad experience. The problem is I come back and I need to recreate that experience. I come back to recreate that experience all before I’m working with or being represented by an agent.

What ends up happening is that I just got this weird archaic movement of, “Okay. What area was I looking at? What were my filters last time?” I’m looking for this one particular home. What AI can actually do is similar to Amazon: create that profile for you. Now, when you come back, AI’s going to help you find the homes that you’re looking for based off of your preferences and what you’ve been doing. So really just helping you in that search for my home so then I can get ready for representation.

Jonathan: Mm-hmm. Scott?

Scott: Well, that sounds like moving us out of twenty years ago and up to today. You’re personalizing. I think that this is a way to describe this search experience. You’re personalizing it. I can see where that’s going to become immediately desirable to people. Is AI intruding or bringing personalization to other parts of the business?

Nick: It is. A lot of companies are just starting to dip their toes into AI. As they’re starting to dip their toes, ChatGPT is kind of the overlay that a lot of folks are doing.

In real estate in general, I think on the technology side, also on the brokerage side, we’ve been looking for this interconnectedness. How do I make all of my products and everything that I’m using work synonymously so I don’t have to log in here and do this here? Like, how can I go to one spot? AI’s creating that in other industries.

I did a presentation for California Properties, and I showed Copilot at Microsoft, which is an overlay on all of the Microsoft tools which pulls them all together. I think, in the near future, we’re going to have something like that here in real estate. Not only the agents and the brokers but also the consumers and the visitors that are looking for homes. Like, how do I have this one communication line across the whole buying or selling idea?

We’ve always been trying to simplify it. A lot of companies have spent tremendous amount of dollars to make this easier. I mean, moving to DocuSign and e-signatures was a very powerful move, and it really took a pandemic for that to really take over. The way that AI is coming, it’s going to revolutionize it the same way. The hope is it just makes it an easier experience.

Now the thing that a lot of folks are getting nervous about is, well, is that going to take my job? That’s kind of what everybody’s thinking about AI. Is AI going to take my job? My full belief in the real estate industry is it’s still an extremely emotional and personal experience to purchase a home.

Amazon uses AI to profile me. If I want to buy a new chord for my iPhone or a new mouse, it’s not a very emotional experience, right? I just can go purchase it. It comes, shows up in my house. It’s not a problem at all.

Yes, sure. It’s taken maybe some of the small and medium businesses. Moved them away from a brick-and-mortar to more of an e-commerce feel. I see real estate still doing the same thing. The AI is really just helping and helping the agent kind of stay top of mind, helping the consumer find what they’re looking for easier, or kind of go through that process that they’re going through.

Jonathan: I hear you say that it’s going to make it easier and a little bit more efficient. Is there anything that AI can do in the coming three, five years that you go, “Oh, that’s going to be a really big shift in how people buy and sell real estate? ”

Nick: Well, so there’s a few companies that are launching like virtual reality headsets. I don’t know if you’ve seen that. Meta has One. Apple’s launching theirs. I was thinking about this. As I was preparing for this podcast, I was like, “Well, is that something I think is going to be in the future?” I think it will be something you could use. Will it be revolutionary?

A product like a Matterport or a virtual tour was revolutionary in its time, but you still want to go see that home, right? I don’t know that sitting in my living room, looking through houses in my virtual binoculars, are going to be any better than I want to go and actually fill the home. I want to walk through the living room. I want to smell the air in the backyard, if you will, or see how the sun hits at a certain time of the day or what the traffic’s like, things like that.

Jonathan: Mm-Hmm.

Nick: Those are the feelings that you want when you purchase, right?

Jonathan: Yes, yes.

Scott: Yes. If you can filter out the lawnmower that’s going on in your backyard, you can also filter out the freeway that goes right past this house [laugh]. You have to show up.

Nick: Might be able to filter out the vacuum that’s going on in the background while you’re doing a podcast. [laugh]

Scott: Yes. Sunlight makes a room alive, vital, and a place where you want to hang out. You have to sort of show up to see the sunlight.

Nick: Yes.

Jonathan: Mm-Hmm.

Nick: It’s an interesting relationship, AI and real estate. As I think about it, as a realtor, as an agent, as a broker, you’re kind of choosing to use the products that provide that AI that is going to give you that additional layer that that assistant, if you will.

On the consumer side, you’re not really choosing. It’s just kind of part of the experience, right? I don’t know that consumers are going to be opting in and opting out. I’d rather not have my profile of the homes that I’m interested in. Unless you click the full opt-out and now you get nothing. It’ll be an interesting experience as things start to, I wouldn’t say gradual, but probably spike pretty hard here in the next couple years. Being that we are right here in that hockey stick curve with AI, I saw a graph the other day. There’s some of twenty-five hundred AI companies came out this year. It might even be a bigger number than that. It’s pretty incredible.

Jonathan: Mm-Hmm. Yes. Do you see any particular potential challenges or ethical concerns that show up as AI enters the real estate field?

Nick: Absolutely. A lot of us are paying attention to fair housing, the way that properties are being represented or recommended. There’s certain laws out there for privacy. A lot of the tech companies that have good foundations of kind of followed along and are taking ethical practices in this.

There are some issues. Without getting into all the ChatGPT, but like those large language models, as you put data into it, it becomes part of its data set. You have to be careful what you put in there, right? If you just put all of your, I don’t know, personal information in there, it is now part of the data that it will use to generate new outputs and outcomes for other people.

Jonathan: Mm-hmm.

Nick: I would be a little leery at the moment of what I’m providing as far as information into something like a ChatGPT or a Google Bard or Microsoft Bing. There’s kind of a gray area today. When you are creating images through AI, they’re not technically copywritten. You can use that image, but, like, can somebody else use that image? There’s just a really gray area right now.

The fact that it’s spiking so much and there’s so much evolution in it on almost a weekly and monthly basis, it’s hard to keep up. I think folks in the government are trying to figure it out at the moment right now. Like, how does this all play out?

Scott: Mm-Hmm. Yes. It seems that there’s a real blurring between the facts and the augmented facts that AI can give. I’m seeing inside the industry, well, make the sky prettier, get rid of the wires and the photographs. It’s so easy to do. Just click here, and the wires disappear.

Nick: Right.

Scott: Wow. Your comment?

Nick: Yes. I mean, it can be very misleading. I mean, technically, using AI, I could have a property of a backyard, and I could ask an AI engine to put a pool in the backyard, right? That could be part of my property that I have in there, even though there is no pool.

I know that’s kind of a stretch because I don’t know that anybody would do that. You could do some small edits and changes and take the house look quite a bit different. Almost like a dating profile sometimes, right? You just want to use your best piece and beautify it.

Jonathan: Mm-hmm. As AI gets better, I’m wondering if there will be discount AI brokers where you are able to not use a human being or hardly at all.

I’m already doing that. I need to hire a lawyer for a book I have written and a class I teach. I hired a lawyer for $400 an hour, but a friend of mine said, “Well, you can ask ChatGPT what it thinks about this.” To tell you the truth, ChatGPT was much more effective than the $400-an-hour lawyer and was free. I’m wondering if you think that especially certain low-end real estate jobs can, in the foreseeable future, be taken over by AI.

Nick: Well, I won’t go the lawyer route. I mean, that large language model in general does a couple things. I mean, everybody’s talking about hallucinations. I like to call it BSing with confidence. What you do is you ask it an answer, it gives you an answer. It gives you what looks like an accurate answer, especially if you’re not super savvy on that topic. So you’re going, “Okay, well that looks good. I like that.” It’s not always correct. Not that lawyers are always correct either, right?

Jonathan: Right.

Nick: In some cases, you’re looking at the content. You’re going, “This is great. I can’t believe it came up with this in a matter of fifteen seconds.” Copy, paste, and send. And then come to find out that it made up some rules, regulations, some things aren’t in there. I mean, you can get yourself in a little bit of trouble.

In the real estate side, not as big of an issue. If I’m creating property descriptions using something like ChatGPT, it will do one of two things. It’ll kind of hold onto a very strange word sometimes. I’ve seen it use the word haven over and over again. Like a haven for your closet or for your clothes, or a haven for the outside, for parties. Just like a kind of strange word. Also, it will come up with dimensions in different parts of the property, saying it has ten-foot ceilings when it really has eight. Things like that will come about. If you don’t know the facts and you see it, you’re like, I mean, ten sounds right to me. Send it out. Now you’ve got yourself an issue because you don’t have ten-foot ceilings. That’s what somebody that’s eight foot one’s looking for.

Jonathan: Mm-Hmm.

Scott: That’s where the lawyer comes in. [laugh].

Nick: Yes.

Scott: Maybe an unpleasant experience you’re about to have.

Nick: Yes. When I talk about leveraging one of those models, you always need to overlook everything. If you don’t know everything about that topic, you can be fooled a little bit. There was, I wouldn’t call it a study, but there was an article out their kind of stating, “Is ChatGPT getting dumber as more people put more and more information out of it? ”

Jonathan: Mm-hmm.

Nick: I can’t confirm or deny. There’s a chance that people are putting unintelligent information in there that it is using to spit out for outputs. Just be cautious with it, for sure.

Jonathan: It’s kind of a consultant in this field. Who are your clients, and what are you doing for them?

Nick: I work with real estate brokerages around the country. I help them leverage AI for their website. Similar to that Netflix experience, I was talking about profiling. We do that on websites for brokerages. Basically, allowing them to connect with consumers as they come onto the site. It’s very difficult for a broker to connect with you before they know who you are or even an agent, right? We do that profiling.

We have a recommendation engine to give your ideas of homes to look at based off of what you’ve given the bot for information about the property or just how you’ve searched natively on the website. We can see where you’re clicking and go, “Oh, okay, well, you like three bedrooms and two bathrooms. You’re looking for this in this area on a beach property. Okay, here’s some other ones that fit that.”

Jonathan: Mm-Hmm,

Scott: Well, it’s pretty clear that this is going to be part of our experience, whether we opt into it or not. I don’t opt into Amazon to say, “Show me more stuff.” It just does. Or Netflix. I’m thinking that you’d said that we are going to end up with an opting in or not, or we’re just going to do this with customers. How’s that going to go?

Nick: You can opt out even in Amazon. It’s extremely buried into a bunch of settings, right? You’ve got to find the area. You’ve almost got to watch a YouTube video to find out how I can get it to not send me this email.

I don’t think in the real estate industry it’s going to be that difficult. I can talk about our situation. If you’re chatting with our AI bot and you ask it to stop or do something like that, it will. You can ask it to remove photos from the listing or something like that after you purchase. It’ll do stuff like that. It’ll help you with that. It will escalate this to somebody that actually can do the work.

I’m not going to say it does all the work for you, but there are ways to get the opt out. That’s not going to be as difficult as that Amazon experience. I don’t know if you’ve tried to reach out to Amazon’s customer support, but it’s almost impossible.

Scott: I don’t find that a pleasant experience. [laugh]

Nick: [laugh].

Jonathan: Is there anything else, Nick, that buyers or sellers should know in terms of AI in general or AI in terms of real estate that puts them on the upper edge?

Nick: Yes. I may have a bias to this. Obviously, I’m in the AI space, but I think AI’s here to help us for the most part. The folks that are working endlessly to help out the real estate industry or trying to provide some positiveness to it.

For the consumers, I just think about if I’m buying a home, I really want some help buying that home. Maybe I’m just not quite ready to talk to an agent or a broker yet.

Jonathan: Hmm.

Nick: How do I have a nice experience going through that? AI can give you that experience. If I’m an agent and there’s tools out there that will, if you’re having questions on a contractor, where something’s at, or something about an image, you can actually ask the AI. It can help find it for you.

It’s really just trying to speed up some of the things you would do. I know in my business, I’ve got a pile of things I need to accomplish, right? Some of the busier work just tends to go to the bottom of that pile. I’ve been learning over the years to start leveraging AI to do some of that.

Jonathan: Mm-hmm.

Nick: Maybe I need to summarize a document or take some notes and do something with that. I can have the AI help me. I used it the other day, ChatGPT. I don’t know if y’all use Excel or spreadsheets, but have you ever tried to create an equation on a spreadsheet? Sometimes it could take you hours to do that because you don’t know where that parentheses should go. Does it do this or that?

You can actually go on ChatGPT and you can say, “Here’s what I’ve got. Here’s an example of the line. I need an equation in this column.” It will literally write the equation for you. I used that just the other day. Something that would take me an hour and a half now takes me ten minutes.

Jonathan: Mm-Hmm.

Nick: Then, I can do the things that I find more pleasant in my day versus trying to figure out that equation in a spreadsheet.

Scott: It occurs to me that this is right in the flow of the internet. Buyers are looking for properties. A great deal of my time is spent with sellers selling a piece of property.

Nick: Yes.

Scott: How do you see the world of AI in the seller’s world? Do you pay attention to that?

Nick: Yes. There’s a lot of tools out there that are helping sellers understand the equity they have in their home or what the market’s doing to help them just kind of stay on top. Now, I know it’s the agent’s job, the broker’s job to stay in touch. I mean, we know across the nation that’s not always the case.

What we’ve got is we’ve got our largest asset here, which is generally the home that we own. There’s tools out there that are showing you. I mean, some of them are almost live. What’s going on in the market? What does your home valuation look like? What’s going on down the street? All that information, just helping us be more powerful in our decisions.

There’s tools out there to help the brokerages with presentations and also understanding a little bit about the market. If you’re working with an out-of-town buyer to understand a different market, you could leverage AI to do that. To know what’s it like in Boston right now, to understand what it’s like moving to California if somebody’s coming across the country.

Jonathan: Mm-hm. Should be interesting how it develops when you talk about the hockey stick. For some of our listeners, they might not know that that’s connected to exponential growth.

Nick: Right.

Jonathan: Maybe you haven’t heard this, Nick, but a way to visualize exponential growth is, I say, if you were in the top play seat in a football stadium, a big football stadium, and somebody put a one drop of water on the fifty-yard line, and a minute later put two drops, a minute later four drops, and a minute later eight drops. How long would it take before the guy in the top bleacher was underwater?

Now you probably have a very good understanding of that. The average person says seventeen weeks. The actual answer is forty-four minutes. In forty-four minutes, there would be 1 million Olympic-sized swimming pools in that stadium. At thirty minutes, the person might not know that there’s any water on the field. We’re kind of in that place now where, “Oh yes, there’s AI. Maybe it’ll do something.” I don’t know. You can do a little bit of a ChatGPT. Three years from now, we might be inundated with a million Olympic-sized swimming pools of AI.

Nick: I love that analogy.

Jonathan: Yes.

Nick: That’s pretty cool. Yes. I mean, most of us are just kind of dipping our toe. We’ll use that water analogy that you have. We’re just dipping our toe into AI kind of understanding it. At one point, we’re going to need some sort of AI computer just to stay up on what’s going on with AI. Like, we’re going to compound AI. Right? I don’t know.

I mean, the world’s going to be interesting. I’m noticing myself just advertisements that I’m seeing. A lot of content creators are now just using AI images instead of actually creating images. It’s very interesting what’s happening now and what that’s going to look like this time next year even.

Jonathan: Mm-hm. Yes. Yes. Very exciting. Any last things for you to say, Nick, or, Scott, to ask?

Scott: Well, I think your an analogy of the drops the stadium. Yes. We can tell down there on the field itself, we’ve got water on up to our ankles. We can feel that. There’s a tsunami coming, I think, is what it feels like.

Nick: So the rain jacket’s not going to help, huh? [Laugh].

Scott: Better get an analogy.

Jonathan: And begin swimming.

Scott: Prepare for change. [Laugh].

Nick: I think kind of final comments for myself. Just be open to that change. I mean, there’s just a lot of change happening. I don’t think it’s all for the worst. I think there’s a lot of really positive things that you’re going to see come out of that. Just be open to it. Pay attention. Leverage folks like myself. If you’re curious of information, there’s a lot of resources out there to help kind of understand.

Maybe I can share with you guys after this. We have a newsletter that we do every Thursday. It’s four real estate agents and real estate brokers. Just what’s going on in AI, and how does that help you in real estate?

Jonathan: Mm.

Nick: I’ve learned some very interesting things, even from my CEO. I got a new Apple iPhone, and there’s like an action button on it. When I click the action button instead of Siri, well, it’s all locked. Instead of Siri, now I have ChatGPT. I hold this, and now I can communicate with ChatGPT the same way I would with Siri.

Jonathan: Wow.

Nick: Just some fun stuff that you can do. How does that even fit into real estate? I’m happy to provide that resource to you all.

Scott: You can provide it right here. It’s okay. If you want to tell us how to do that, then our listeners can know that. You can put it right here.

Nick: It’s Real Estate-Powered AI is the website.

Jonathan: Uh-huh.

Scott: Real Estate-Powered AI. Okay.

Jonathan: How might people get in touch with you, Nick?

Nick: You can reach out to me. My email is nick@roof.ai. If I can help if you have any questions.

Scott: That’s roof.ai.

Nick: Yes, sir. Yes.

Scott: All right.

Jonathan: Sounds good. The best way to get a hold of you, Scott?

Scott: I’m Scott at scottwilliams.com.

Jonathan: Well, that was very informative, Nick, and I appreciate the information and our listeners. Hopefully, you’ll join us next time at Sweet Home Santa Barbara.

Nick: Thanks for having me.

Scott: Thank you for listening. Please subscribe to our podcast on your favorite app. If you know someone preparing to sell their home, please tell them about the podcast. Visit scottwilliams.com to contact me and download the two free e-booklets. “Is my house saleable now” and “how not to buy a money pit” Thank you for listening.