AI Will Save Real Estate from Outdated Permits and Broken Processes with Ari Rastegar

Speaker A: I think of AI right now in real estate as a really good assistant. Not giving the assistant the keys to the castle and having to make executive decisions without oversight, but first being an enhancement to me, it's not meant to replace all this stuff yet, but it is a damn good advisor.

Speaker B: Today's guest is Ari Rastigar, founder and CEO of Rastigar Capital. He shares how AI and innovation are, are transforming real estate development and creating smarter investment opportunities nationwide.

Speaker A: I deal with a lot of people, a lot of consultants, a lot of lawyers, a lot of everybody, just bringing the awareness into the firm of use one of the bots, use one of these AI agents, ask it a question, and get people comfortable having their own basic personal assistant. That alone has created so much, so much productivity by itself, which is exciting. And that's just not even the tip of the iceberg.

Speaker B: We've been in the technology industry for 30 plus years, but the legal field and the real estate field seem like they're still stuck in the 70s. Why do you think they are so resistant to AI from our business standpoint? Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the AI for Business Owners podcast sponsored by Singin AI Uh, I am your host, Jeff Torello, and my guest today is Ari. I'm going to have Ari introduce himself in a minute. Just a quick reminder, Stingen is an interesting consulting company. We're really trying to find ways to help companies figure out the right uses of AI and where they should not use AI I'm a firm believer that AI does not solve every problem. And so I'm not a, uh, consultant that pushes the AI can do everything for you. But I do think that I can help in a lot of ways. And so if you're interested or curious, please get in touch and we'd be happy to talk about it. All right, Ari, Happy Saturday. Uh, introduce yourself and, uh, let's have a good conversation.

Speaker A: Hey, thanks for having me. My name is Ari Rastigar. I'm an attorney by trade. I started my own real estate investment company about 11 years ago. Um, we manage money for public pension plans, insurance companies, hundreds of, um, accredited investors. Um, we've invested in 38 cities, 13 states, 7 different asset classes from single, um, family home, build for rent, large master plan communities, industrial facilities. We're working on two massive sites to build some data centers in Texas. And yeah, and so it's very interesting time. Real estate is a very antiquated business by nature. Certainly at the institutional level, there hasn't been much, you know, innovation, how we build a single family Home and you know, maybe 40 years. And so I'm very, very, you, uh, know, very excited about how some of these tools can be used to enhance the process, move us through, just move us along in a way where we can shorten build time or we're doing Some stuff with 3D printing and robotics and just the enhancement of the entire experience. And I agree with Jeff, you know, I don't think um, AI is going to, should even if it could yet do everything, but certainly be an enhancement mechanism to streamline processes, to take us out of some of the menial tasks, um, speed up certain processes. And we're certainly experimenting with it as individuals within the firm and as a firm, um, as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot of pieces in there that I think are kind of neat. I'll probably want to comment on. Um, two thoughts. You jogged a memory that I haven't thought about in quite a long time. But I worked for intel for quite a While and in 2003 we did a program where we went and did some small business makeovers to try and show how if you improved some technology in your business, you know, you could gain some productivity. And of course intel wanted to sell the processors, whatever. One of the folks that I worked with happened to be a um, independent Realtor in Portland, Oregon says 2003 time frame. So to put that in perspective for everybody, Wi Fi was just getting started in 2003. Most everything was wired and the Internet was sort of nascent and not on everybody's phone. That's the, that's the error we're talking about. And I looked at what this gentleman was doing and it's, you know, it's typical realty real uh, estate agent sort of approach, right. He would drive folks around, look at four or five houses on a Saturday or Sunday. They'd hopefully find one they like. They'd make an offer at that normal model. Right. He wanted to try and improve things a little bit so he challenged me to come up with some stuff. So one of the things that I offered him was a uh, tablet with a cellular connection as cellular Internet and the ability to have his realtor agreements like right to represent and other things electronically signed on his tablet so that when he met folks they didn't have to go back to the office and flip through a book or. Right.

Speaker A: That's big.

Speaker B: And it was ah, again it was 2003. And I bring it up only to tell you this. The thing that was the most impactful for him had nothing to do with what intel was doing is when he purchased a Lexus hybrid because he was in Portland, Oregon. And what he was finding is people wouldn't go out looking at houses with him unless he had a car that burned less gas because, uh, that's the area that he lived in. I don't think that would have been the same thing in Manhattan in 2003, but it definitely was in Portland. And what I find interesting is the technology part was nifty and, you know, like he thought that was great and people were fine with it and they were like, oh, yeah, less paperwork, cool. But they cared more about something else. And I look at AI the same way. Like there's a, uh, technology here and it's innovative and there's things you can take advantage of, but if you're not actually solving a problem that needs to be solved, it doesn't really matter. And I know that's a bit of a stretch analogy wise, but you said real estate and I was like, oh, shoot, I remember this craziness in the past there. Okay, we can move on from that foolishness. Sorry, I just wanted to tell you a little story. A lot of things that you said. There's wide gamut of stuff. But what I'm curious about is where you think at the moment AI would help you with those things, where you think it wouldn't benefit. And the thing I'm more interested in actually is this idea of like construction or like, I'm very curious if there's. Right. And this is what I want to talk about.

Speaker A: Like where is happening?

Speaker B: That's happening, right? Yeah.

Speaker A: You know, there's an incredible 3D printed housing community here in Austin, Texas. Um, where I.

Speaker B: One of the companies is from there, isn't it?

Speaker A: Yeah, one of the companies here. Icon is from here.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: We've, we've spent a lot of time talking to those folks. Some of it is a little bit cost prohibitive still, but that's ending, you know, like meaning we are getting to a place where not only is it not cost prohibitive, but what it can do. Now that's very interesting. And again, this happens in iterations, right? Like you see what robots are doing now, it might seem rudimentary, but with information, technology grows exponentially and accelerates exponentially, as we know. So one thing that's very interesting, because we have a housing crisis across the United States, no question, we're 5 million houses short, um, of what we actually need in new single family homes. Uh, we're 500,000 houses short in Texas alone, which is an Astronomical number. And, and one of the big innovations, you know, that seems kind of nonsensical, but it's real, is it takes longer to get a permit to build a house than it does to actually build the house. And so when you look at just dealing with different counties and permitting and uh, if you're demolishing something, if you're all of the things, the paperwork that goes in, because the cities and the counties, municipalities are in the dark ages of how they deal with paper processing. I mean quite literally there's things that aren't even electronic still. I mean in major metropolitan cities I'd like to believe. You know, in the grand scheme of things, Austin is relatively tech forward. You know, some have called it, uh, Silicon Hills. You know, Tesla's global headquarters is here, you know, so you would think that, but it's just really not there yet. So finding any way to shorten those timelines, whether it's the building itself or some of the 3D printed single family homes, what would normally take, you know, seven or eight months is being done in six weeks. So when you take the financing costs and the construction loans and how interest compounds during that time, that shortening the time frame like that is a profound savings that can then be passed along to the end user consumer that can start to deal with some of the pricing issues, same thing with material costing. But also if we can shorten by using, you know, some of the AI, some of the technology, maybe diving AI, maybe just like DocuSign, you know, in some, in some instances and shorten the permit processing and then you can shorten the building time. You're talking about a fricking revolution in the savings and the cost prohibited nature of what some houses have started to become. Where a lot of it has to do with the financial engineering or the structures and the mechanics of how they're done, the timelines it takes to do it, the amount of labor cost that goes into building a house. So we're right on this precipice where with the 3D printing there is robotics that's going into some of the building, there is some AI that's being worked into how it's printed, processed. But we're right at this tipping point where we now have software that we use that scours land sites for potential development. It's an AI software that does it. Still rudimentary, but very effective. I think of AI right now in real estate, in our private equity real estate world as a really good assistant, really good assistant, you know, not giving the assistant the keys to the castle and having to make executive decisions without oversight. But first being an enhancement to me, like you're, uh, just using CHAT GPT alone. The amount that I put through chatgpt in terms of now contracts to look at. Again, not the end all be all, but I have it redline agreements. I ask it questions about much more complicated things, asking much more, uh, comprehensive prompts. Again, as an advisor, same thing where the AI AI is now scouring land sites. It's not making the final decision, but it is giving us more options. Now you can go take using, uh, different softwares to do renderings, blueprint renderings or architectural renderings based upon existing zoning of what that could kind of look like. And then you have the 3D printing component in the robotics. And when you start to bring in the robotics becoming much more refined in their skill sets. If it can build some of these other things, it can do some of the more, you know, safety hazard, um, own parts, a building, all of that together. Although as I said, not there yet. Close. Like very, very close, which would spur such a massive productivity boom. Again, for a business that is so wildly analog, because the people, well, a lot of reasons are the people that run the real estate business and the wealthiest people in the world that run the real estate business are in their 70s and 80s and I don't think our, you know, this is how it's been done. So I was going to do it. This new generation coming in that's running billions of dollars of stuff too, is, you know, grew up at least hybrid in the digital and analog age. Like I'm, you know, a millennial or I think they changed it to the lennial or something where I'm right in the middle of. I had full analog life and I was lived in the digital, you know, in the digital age as well. And so it's exciting and it's cool. And like I said, it's not for everything. As you said, you know, astutely, it's not meant to replace all this stuff yet, but it is a damn good advisor and a damn good assistant. And just like any advisor, you don't listen to everything they say. Some things they say you like, you know, just like a mentor. Some things you ignore and you know, and you need human intelligence to know the discernment of what to, you know, listen to and what not to.

Speaker B: I do think that there is, uh, a good amount of productivity value. An individual using any of the chatbots doesn't really matter.

Speaker A: ChatGPT, whatever, dude, it is apps just that alone and bringing the. As a founder and a CEO, you know, I started this business with a 3, 500 loan. As I mentioned, we've invested in 38 cities, 13 states. You know, we have billions of dollars in our development pipeline at this moment. So I deal with a lot of people, a lot of consultants, a lot of lawyers, a lot of staff, a lot of everybody just bringing the awareness into the firm of use one of the bots, use one of these AI agents, ask it a question, and get people comfortable having their own basic personal assistant in their smartphone or on their, you know, on their computer. That alone has created so much productivity by itself, which is exciting. And that's just not even the tip of the iceberg.

Speaker B: Right? Yeah. I think one of the things we talked about before the podcast previously was that there's a lot of material and content out there focusing on, hey, you personally can get a productivity benefit just by using this as an assistant. And I think that, honestly, moving forward, there will be a point in time where if you're not using AI to do your job in some way, then you're competing with people who are.

Speaker A: I think it's already now, I think we're already the process.

Speaker B: I think it is in some cases. But, like, there's places where it's still currently frowned upon. Like, if you get into the medical field, they'll all hate if someone's talking to an AI. Now, here's the fun part. They are, but they're doing what they're delegated. Uh, like, you know, if a doctor's struggling with. What do I think are the possibles here asking ChatGPT for an opinion of, you know, validates for the doctor? Oh, uh, yeah, I was thinking about those three. I don't think the fourth one's relevant. Good. At least I'm on the right path. And then they go do the research they need to do, or they talk to a colleague, whatever. But some folks would frown upon that. Some folks would look at it, go, wait, you asked the AI, but aren't you, uh, can't you not trust them?

Speaker A: And aren't they bad at what's the point? What's the harm in asking? It's your own discernment of whether or not to listen to the damn thing. Like, I think that's like banning books. It's like the book didn't do anything. Like, what does that have to do with anything?

Speaker B: But it does seem like people do think they should ban books occasionally. So, not that you're saying something wrong,

Speaker A: some people, some People also think they should be dictators and destroy people's human liberty. There's m. Some people think everything. Yeah. You know, like, so that the realm of human stupidity never surprises me. Yeah.

Speaker B: I think there's a lot of things that people do that are not always in their best interests. Um, or at least not in the best interest of others. One of the things that I find interesting about the framing, you know, there's a lot of hype about AI being amazing and perfect and good, and that's probably where I tend to want to round that edge off. Right. I don't agree that it's perfect. What I try to tell people and get them to comprehend is underneath the hood. If you take away the word artificial intelligence, we're all just dealing with software. And what drives the artificial intelligence boom at the moment is the probability engine. And it's just a real quick, like, every answer an AI comes up with exists between 0 and 1. And that sounds weird, and it should sound weird because it's weird. However, there's a lot to this that makes sense if you break it down a little bit. As an example, if you've been in a field and you've done a job for a decent amount of time, it doesn't matter what the job is. You have seen trends, you've seen. This is the way this is going to go. This is how this is going to turn out.

Speaker A: You see or see a pattern.

Speaker B: Right. Because we're all human. And in some cases, the math just works out. And what happens Here is the AI's engine is able to recognize those patterns in a lot of cases better than humans can, because we can. But also, the last piece of this that I think clicks for everybody, if you just sit back for a minute and think about how many words do you use every week? I would wager that it's not more than about 5,000 total.

Speaker A: That's a big number.

Speaker B: I know. I'm trying to give everybody the benefit of doubt. Right. 5,000 words is not a lot of words in the world of language, especially

Speaker A: to say that you're fluent.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, completely. Right. But what we're getting to is if you were to analyze our conversation here, we would probably be pretty repetitious in the things we say. From one podcast to another, from one conversation to another, from one deal to another, There's a lot of repetition in there. And so if I now bring you back to AI as a probability engine, and I ask you to think about the probability that you've said those words before or that you've seen that pattern before. The AI can recognize that, and so it's able to do word things that look amazing to you, but what it's really doing is living in the world of the repetition and probability of how we all interact.

Speaker A: Okay, that's a great way to explain it. That makes perfect sense.

Speaker B: And I don't mean that as a negative. I mean that as a. Here's a little peek under the hood. Right?

Speaker A: Explanatory. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah.

Speaker B: So now when you look at it and say, okay, I want to ask this thing to help me propose an answer or review a proposal or whatever, why is it pretty good at that? Well, because the proposals are pretty similar to other proposals that have existed, and your response is pretty similar, and on and on and on. And so the way I tend to teach people when I'm doing consulting or whatever is a think about the AI as an 80% accurate guesser. All right?

Speaker A: Based upon patterns, based upon history, based upon repetition, based upon, you know exactly.

Speaker B: And where that comes out when you. If you want to test it is like, okay, let's say you have an AI that you have provided access to your email. So to help you to simplify, to automate all those things, one of the first things that you want to do is have the AI look at your existing sent items. How do you typically respond to stuff?

Speaker A: Right?

Speaker B: What's your style? What's your tone? How do you talk to business people versus friends or family? Or maybe your business partner? Maybe you and your business partner swear at each other all the time, but when you're talking to one of your attorney buddies, maybe you don't. Okay, fine. Or maybe it's the opposite. It m. Doesn't matter. But the AI can easily see that pattern and replicate it. And that looks like magic to anyone who doesn't understand the math. And I don't need people to understand the math. But what I want you to get to is, okay, so if you're resistant in thinking, I don't want this AI to help me, why it's good at a lot of things. Better than some ways than you are not replacing you, but augmenting you and removing some of the BS Repetition that you probably go through every day, that it could do easily. Let me, uh, give you a simple example. How many times have you. You personally, Ari, or anybody listening had to spend more than 10 seconds negotiating a rescheduled calendar item? Okay? Like, just especially the bigger that meeting is, the more schedules in the mix. That's a geometric progression of silliness, right? Why does any human ever need to do that task? If someone says, I can't make this meeting, why can't my AI bottom find the next thing that makes sense with all these calendars? And I don't even never need to see that. Just do it and move the meeting. And everybody goes, oh, the meeting moved to Tuesday and we're done. And I've never even been bought. But right now, how many people. And if you're lucky enough to have an assistant, good for you. How many folks are spending human hours on a task that is not adding value? Right? I'm just picking one silly example. I know you could probably think of 10 more, all of you. But this is where I think AI has independent productivity value. But then there's another component to this, and this one's a little more complicated, but I think is worthy of thinking through. If all the employees in your business are using AI in some way as an assistant to gain productivity advantage, that's great. They spend less time on bullshit tasks, they spend more time on value.

Speaker A: Cool.

Speaker B: But at the same time, there are tasks that they do that they probably should not touch. But right now, it has been difficult to automate some things because not everybody's a programmer and not everybody wants to pay for custom software. And the bigger problem with custom software is not paying to get it written, but paying to keep it running. Because if Ari and I sat down for 20 minutes and we thought about a specific problem he wants to completely get rid of, I could design software and have it written and it would solve that problem, but it would only solve the things Ari thought to tell me in those 20 minute window and only the requirements that I gathered at the time. And there will be some technical glitch Ari didn't think of or I didn't think of that gets in our way. And so we deploy it. And Ari's like, man, this works great, except when it doesn't. And that's where the sticking point tends to be. So always building custom is not the answer all the time. Sometimes it is. But what is a, uh, cool capability and what AI is really good at is trying to stitch these individual pieces together to make an automation or to make a workflow or to make a thing where if you want, you can even have the AI pull a human into the loop and say, hey, look at what I'm doing. Does this look right? Hey, this is what I'm about to do. Do you want to change it? I'll stop preaching for a minute and let you jump in and comment. But that's interesting because what I think I would like to get us to is a point where anyone could call upon the AI or someone to help if they needed to to solve a problem they see without having to wait for Microsoft to add that feature or for Google to invent a new thing in Gmail or whatever, which could happen. But you're at the mercy of, you know, and you can always ask for it. But how many times has anybody asked for a feature that's actually been written into software they didn't own? Right? Like never. But here's an example of just a simple one. The underlying piece of this isn't necessarily simple for everybody to implement, but the idea behind it is what I want to get at. It is impossible to keep up on the changes in the AI landscape from my perspective as a consultant trying to know a lot about everything. And it's just, you know, there's, there's content flying out all day long trying to understand what is worth spending time learning and reading into. And what's not is, is an exercise. So what I did was I had one of the folks that works for me write an automation that looks at a list of keywords and that is a list that's in uh, like a Google Doc, so you can just edit that list anytime. And every morning it uses a uh, news aggregation search tool to look for articles related to those topics within the last 23 hours so it doesn't duplicate from day to day that are like really high reviewed, lots of stars getting a lot of traction. Like I want to see the top noise, right? And then it grabs articles on those topics and then it prunes to just the top two on each topic and then it takes those at like 6am and dumps them into a Slack channel so that instead of reading four newspapers in the morning like folks used to do in the robber baron days, right? Or whenever that was, I look at Slack and see headlines that are relevant to me at that moment and then I click on the ones I want to go get the full context in and I, you know, read the ones I want to read and I don't bother with the ones I don't bother. I then I modify that list of keywords as topics come in and out of my either interest level or if I'm working on a, with a client and there's a particular topic that I want to make sure I'm um, up to speed on, I add that topic for six weeks or two months or whatever and then change it up, et cetera, et cetera. That type of personalization is what I'm really focusing on.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: What if everybody could have that level of personalized content distribution? Would that help you? Would that be valuable to you? As an example, I think it would be because I used off the shelf tools and was mostly a click and drag kind of exercise to go click, click, click, bing, bang, boom. And you know, you don't have to make it be in a Slack channel. You can make it be an email, you could make it be a text. It doesn't matter. None of that's relevant. These are the types of things that I don't think people are spending too much time thinking about. But that could be value add. Um, it's not necessarily, oh, automate, uh, my email, but it's more automate my knowledge. Like, think of this way. What if you didn't even do it for work? What if you just did it for your passions? If you're a Formula one fan or if you're a hockey fan, it doesn't matter. But like, what if you curated that content rather than scrolling through Reddit or something? Could be about the Latest news in 3D printing. Right? It could be any of that.

Speaker A: Totally good.

Speaker B: Uh, these are the types of things that I think people believe are out of reach or too complicated for them to go sort of do on their own. And that's the thing I want to break, that's the perception I want to shatter, because these are relatively easy tasks to get to with AI assistance. And, you know, for example, one, uh, of the tools that I use is called N8N, just the letter N, the number 8, uh, N8N. And if you were to say to ChatGPT, Hey, I want to write an automation in N8N to do X whatever it is that you think you want, it would totally tell you exactly what to do, step by step. And you could do that in N8N while it prompted you to, that's cool,

Speaker A: I'm going to look that up.

Speaker B: You wouldn't know what you were doing from the, you know, programmer perspective. But so what you don't need to know. And I think what I've calculated is it costs me two, uh, and a half cents a day for that script to run every morning.

Speaker A: Dang, that's cool. Very, very cool.

Speaker B: Is worth my time right now. Let's turn it around. You could do the same basic thing that I'm talking about, but you could have it be whenever someone emails your inbound company, uh, address, let's say the info address. Right. Or you could make it be support. You could do whatever. You can have the AI look at that email, determine if they're asking for something common like, hey, can I see this document? Or can I see your plan? Or whatever. And the AI can immediately respond to that without a human having to see it or touch it. Or the AI could look and summarize that email and send it to someone and say, hey, the person's asking this. This is what I thought I would respond with. Do you want to change my answer? That's the human in the loop part I was talking about. Um, and again, you can go ask ChatGPT or whoever you're talking to to help you figure that out and, and play with it and tweak it. And when it doesn't work, tell ChatGPT, hey, this is what happened. And it'll say, oh, move this over there, change that, you're done, it's fixed. It's like having your own dedicated personal programmer. What I find from a consulting perspective is more that needs me more than it needs ChatGPT is the things that are a little bit harder to solve. Like, you've got pain points in your business. Everybody does. It's part of business

Speaker A: solving problems.

Speaker B: Exactly, exactly. Right. Which ones are A, super impactful that you want to get rid of or solve, and B, are good candidates for AI to solve versus bad candidates for AI to solve. Right. And when you're not just doing that personally, but you're doing that for a group or an organization or a team, it's cheaper to pay me to help you figure out those answers, to know where to go with the AI than it is to poke and prod and try five different things or five tools or on a problem that AI is not going to help you solve. Right. Uh, that's the difference. But, like, I really want to try and empower everybody independently to just go mess around, you know, don't spend it in foolish amount of money. But there's a lot of power that you can tap into. It's like having your own personal, uh, uber nerd that can just answer the questions that you have about whatever your topic is.

Speaker A: Sounds great.

Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know if, uh, if that's the things that were sitting in the middle of your head, Ari. About how to use AI, but I just wanted to put some thoughts there.

Speaker A: Definitely, definitely gave me a good lecture on all of it.

Speaker B: Sorry, I wasn't trying to lecture you. You've told folks in the business to use AI. Has anyone come to you with uh, an interesting revelation that they've done something that you didn't explicitly tell them to do or not to do. And you were like oh wow.

Speaker A: Yeah of course. M. I mean we're using all those automations, we use Slack, I have all my news curated. You know we're definitely have them in our emails. We have automated responses on all the um, info emails. Like all these very, very, very rudimentary, you know, things we've been um, you know we've been doing for, doing for quite some time and they, they just keep getting better and you know, refining funnels and I um, mean because there's so many different sides of the business. There is fundraising, there's marketing, there's legal, there's um, asset management, development, construction. You know real estate touches a lot of things. So um, I'm in general always astounded by how smart the people that, that work with us are and the innovation they come up with anything, whether technologically or you know, human innovation. So I'm always learning like I feel like I'm last to the party, you know, now and all and all this stuff.

Speaker B: You're involved in both real estate and, and the legal world both.

Speaker A: I'm an, I'm an attorney by trade but you know, I guess, I guess as a developer you're always in the legal world with lawsuits and all sorts of shit. So I guess so maybe both of

Speaker B: those industries still feel pretty antiquated. Why do you think they are so resistant to. I mean, and I don't mean just AI right. We've been in the technology industry for 30 plus years but the legal field and the real estate field seem like they're still stuck in the 70s.

Speaker A: Uh, lawyers don't want you to take their job so they're the ones that make the laws. So be sure that they're going to make laws that it can't take their job.

Speaker B: Fair enough. What about realty?

Speaker A: Real estate is also a big word. You know, you have real estate agents, you know, brokers, you know, and then you have real estate owner, operator, developers, construction, uh, it's a very loosely used word for us like as, as owner, operators, investment managers, you know the people that have run it because to, to make, you know, to be running a multi billion dollar business in real estate, you know, the people that usually run these firms by that time have, you know, even if they had family money or um, in their 70s, you know, it takes a certain amount of time, you know, historically to do that. So the people that are running the show historically maybe don't have the technological desires because it's not how they did it, you know. And that's very much changing now. So I'm very excited to see the innovation across the board and um, see how we can, you know, do this stuff faster, quicker, better, cheaper, more efficiently and most importantly pass that along, you know, to the end user so we can start to solve a lot of these problems.

Speaker B: Are you actually seeing some movement now finally in that direction?

Speaker A: Yeah, yes, huge movement, actually a huge net effective to what was there.

Speaker B: So is that starting at the grassroots level like independent builders or do you see it starting with like a. I don't know who the right answer is. Pulte homes. I don't know. I pick something, I don't know the right answer.

Speaker A: I think there's definitely more. The techie startup prop tech groups that are, you know, are starting to lead the charge and have some cool new tools or gadgets or use cases, you know, the, the bigger machines, um, as I said are a little bit slower to adapt. You know, they have logistics, operations, manufacturing relationships, financing that once you start to really disrupt that, you know, you're disrupting the core of how their businesses operate and you know, people are resistant to that level of change because when the disruption happens it'll be an earth shattering disruption which I think for the better and we're going to push the envelope to lead that innovation. Quite frankly, as a 43 year old CEO, you know, this is what we're trying to do which is, you know, be able to create better returns for our investors. And the way to do that is to create more efficiency and cost savings and you know, all that kind of stuff too. So.

Speaker B: Okay, makes sense. What's something that you would love to have solved? Not necessarily like tell me about your business itself, but just in general from the high level perspective.

Speaker A: I would move from our business standpoint. I would love to see the speed at which we get through the permitting and zoning process completely revolutionized. Like it's just so, so, so, so antiquated and so just being able to see it digitized and see it automated in some regard so that instead of taking 18 months or two years or sometimes one of my projects to rezone has taken eight years in Dallas, Texas. One ah of you know, arguably one of the top cities, you know, in the United States or the world. Eight years. Mind you, it is a comprehensive rezoning. But eight years, I mean, you know I can make a case that it could have been done in eight minutes and so uh, you know I'm seriously. And so there is some delta between that of how these councils work and how the vote works and where the paperwork goes and the demolition permit and we're getting a demo permit in Austin is taking six months to tear down an old dilapidated building. And this is systemic across. You know, this is not just an Austin thing. As I said, Austin is very forward thinking compared to some other cities. So um, I'd like to see all of that change pretty dramatically so we can really get the product out that people desperately need.

Speaker B: I don't have a ton of insight into this particular aspect, so I'll ask some stupid questions and you can ignore the ones that don't are relevant. But is the problem that it's manually driven? Is the problem that of bureaucracy that there's so many jump.

Speaker A: It's both. Some of it. Some of it's not. Some of it just manual and the systems and the. And the software or lack of software that people are using. It's just in the dark ages. That's just one. Yes, the bureaucracy and stuff is a part of it and that can also be enhanced. But just the technological part of itself, just how documents are processed and when they're filed and they need to be stamped by a notary like in a. In person and you know, like this like the. You have to be there to actually sign something in per. You know, things that are so beyond absurd. Um, just enhancing those back to your 1% improvement a week. You know, I mean it's like it can go a long way but I appreciate the.

Speaker B: No, I uh. Part of why I was thinking that was trying to work out. It's just the way my brain works. I don't know that I'm solving any problems today, but what would be the incentive for the city or the town to write modernize or automate because I don't know.

Speaker A: God costs. It caught everything that you would think what's the reason anyone would do any of this for anything. You know, save money, have efficiency, serve the city better, you know, build more. You know like the answer to that question is the answer to any reason why anybody would do any of this.

Speaker B: Yeah, but don't they have to get budget approval from people who aren't going to see that there's value versus because. Because it works today.

Speaker A: Now we're talking, now we're pontificating about government in general so um, that I don't know a much smart people me than me can figure out politics and uh, the incentives and that kind of stuff. I want to build great houses, build great projects so businesses can come, can be efficient, can. So people can have homes, so they can have apartments. We got data centers to power these things. I just want to put the products in place that we can, you know, help the community, just have enhanced standard of living, enhanced, uh, work standards. So, um, you know, what do I know?

Speaker B: Yeah, I was just speculating. I didn't expect you to have an answer, and I certainly don't think I have an answer by any stretch. I'm not remotely that person.

Speaker A: I'm sure maybe someone much smarter than me listening to this can figure it out and they can let us know.

Speaker B: Yeah. It seems like the way to try and impact that is to find the right incentive to help the cities and towns go through that modernization effort.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's right. I think it'll definitely get there. But hopefully you're consulting and your insight into this will help a lot of people start to solve the problems that they can solve at their own businesses and their own lives and their own things. And, um, I think that'll be great. But I appreciate you, uh, having me today, Jeff. I appreciate the lecture. It was very helpful.

Speaker B: I appreciate you taking the time, and thanks for your input as well.

Speaker A: Thank you, buddy.

Speaker B: All righty.