Ashley:
Every day it seems like there are new things and many changes coming out with AI. And as a real estate investor, I want to stay on top of it. I want to know what’s the best use of AI for me. So today I’m talking to our resident AI expert, Tony J. Robinson. Welcome to the Real Estate Rookie Podcast. I’m Ashley Kehr.

Tony:
And I’m Tony J. Robinson. And today, as Ash said, we’re going to be talking about AI and the ways that we can use it in life and in business and really just as people. And I think between the two of us, I probably spent maybe a little bit more time just going into the depths of Claude and ChatGPT and the different ways that it can be leveraged. So I’m going to kind of sit in the interviewee seat and Ash is going to be the interviewer and we’ll do our best to give you guys some value today.

Ashley:
So AI has helped me as an investor, but a lot of times behind the scenes when we are recording podcasts, I am picking Tony’s brain or he is just telling me about this new thing that he stayed up until 1:00 AM and figuring out how to set up an AI. So Tony, let’s start with what AI software or programs are out there that you think are maybe the top three that us as entrepreneurs, real estate investors listening to this podcast should be looking into first to use? What platforms?

Tony:
Yeah. I mean, there’s so many different models out there, so many different providers, but the big ones are probably Google, which their models Gemini, you have Anthropic, their model is Claude, and you have OpenAI, their model’s ChatGPT. And then you also have Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, but those are probably the four big players. Oh, Meta also has one like Facebook and Instagram. So point proven, there’s so many different models, but those are probably the big players right now.

Ashley:
One that I’m actually using that you didn’t mention was Stanley AI, and it’s built for social media to help you. And it’s kind of like a chat and actually it’s integrated now to text. You just text it and it analyzes your Instagram and then it helps you build carousel posts and reels and gives you ideas and analyzes similar posts and things like that too for social media.

Tony:
So that’s a slightly different example because Stanley’s probably a company that’s leveraging some version of these other… They call them frontier

Ashley:
Models. They’re already being educated on

Tony:
AI. Most of these companies like that are leveraging the models from Anthropic or Gemini or to build these kind of wrappers. And it’s interesting because I’ve built out my own version of that tool using Claude. So you can do it either way. You can go to the service providers or you can build it yourself.

Ashley:
So let’s talk about what you are doing right now. Let’s start with real estate, your real estate business. How are some of the ways that you have implemented AI outside of we both use Hospitable and they have AI integrated with the AI chat, which is amazing, but what are some of the things you have done yourself?

Tony:
There’s a handful. Let me first just say that I think when ChatGPT first had its moment, it was cool because you could ask things in a reply.That was version one of what a lot of us know as AI, but it has evolved so much in the last several years where now AI is really about doing work on your behalf. So if you are listening to this podcast and you’re still only using AI as a-

Ashley:
A

Tony:
Search really. A search engine, then you’re very much underplaying what its true value is. And today, the people that are really getting the most value are the people who have turned it into a tool or even into a quasi employee. So just laying the foundation, that’s a big difference from what we saw a few years ago. But things that we’ve done in our business, I’ll give you a real life example. We needed a new direct booking website for our Airbnbs. We had initially built ours through Hospitable. Hospitable is a great way, just out of the box, it works well, but it lacks some of the customization and just control over design that we’re looking for. And before you would’ve had to go pay some agency to build out a website for you, and it’s a four or five figure check maybe to have them build that out.
And then you also have to pay them to maintain it for you once it’s up and once it’s running. So we’re like, “Hey, I’m pretty good with Claude and ChatGPT. I can probably build this myself.” So that’s exactly what I did. And over the course of a few late nights and me in between other sessions, I was able to build out this beautiful direct booking website that is integrated with Hospitable to still manage. So any booking that comes through our new direct booking website automatically flows into hospital. I can still manage all my guests the same way, but it’s this really unique kind of custom digital experience that I would’ve had to pay a lot more for

Ashley:
Before. Okay. So how do we do that? Those are the things that I want to know. I hear all these ideas of things people are doing, but how do you actually do it? So what are some of the first steps? Are you using MCP? What is MCP? How is that a connector? How does that work? Educate me.

Tony:
First, I’ll answer the MCP and API thing here in a second, but first thing I want to say is how do you do it? That’s the beauty ash of the time that we’re in right now is that you don’t even have to know how to do it. You just have to know the end result that you want. I never built a website through ChatGPT or Codex or Cloud before, and I just went to it and said, “I want to build a website. Help me figure this whole thing out.” And Claud’s like, “Okay, hey, here’s what we need to do. And we need this, we need this, we need this, we need this. Hey, can you get me this? Okay, cool. Here’s this connector.” So truly anything that you want to do, you can just state the end result that you’re looking for and say, “Walk me through the steps we need to take to actually make this happen and it’ll do it that way.” Now the 30,000 foot view is that I started off just by working on the designs.
And again, you can use whatever model you want for the designs, CloudCode, Codex. Those are probably the two ones that are really good at design. And I just had to mock up and I gave it some inspiration for some other websites, both in travel and just non-travel websites that I liked. I said, “Here’s the general vibe that I’m going for, here’s the functionality that I want.” And then it just gave me all the mock-ups for the different pages. So there were some rounds of just getting the design and the UI and the UX dialed in. Once I approved that, then I said, “Okay, can you build this?” And don’t ask me how I built it because I’m not a developer. I don’t have a technical background. But the

Ashley:
Point of this is that

Tony:
You don’t need to be. You don’t need to be. So it built it all out and then I connected it to Hospitable. And you used the word MCP earlier and MCP is basically, it stands for model context protocol. And before all these AI models became super popular, most programs communicated with each other using API. And API is basically just like, it’s a way for programs to talk to each other, but MCP is, think of it like a wrapper around an API that is specifically built for these AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, to be able to get information more efficiently. So 30,000 foot view, that’s difference. But yeah, there is an API connection between my direct booking website and this Claude website that I built out in Hospitable to allow them to communicate with one another.

Ashley:
How long did you say this took you? Probably less than a week?

Tony:
It was a week of… Yeah, not even me. It wasn’t me sitting down eight hours a day It’s like, “Hey, I’m working this other thing and oh hey, I forgot. Let me go respond to this one.” So off and on, but total time, if I just would’ve sat down and only did this four to six hours maybe of actual working time and we got this beautiful well working website.

Ashley:
Now what about the maintenance on this? Are you having to do anything to… Are you paying anything for a subscription to host this website? Do you have to go in and make sure there’s no errors or it doesn’t crash? Tell us about that.

Tony:
Yeah. I mean, I had already owned the domain. I bought the domain, but I’d already owned it because we had our hospitable direct picking website pointing to it. And yeah, I want to say I’m paying for some sort of hosting for the actual website itself. I don’t know. It’s not super expensive, like 10 bucks, 15 bucks a month, something like

Ashley:
That. On something like Squarespace

Tony:
Or – No. Again, I ask Spot, it’s like, “Hey, where can we host this?” And it was like, “Hey, here are some options that work really well based on what I just built.” I was like, “Cool, set it up.” So my answer to any question that I get stuck on is I just ask like, “Hey, tell me what’s the best solution here?” So I can’t even remember what service we’re using for the website, but once it’s up and running, there’s no real maintenance that’s needed. Now, if I want to change something, then I just open up a new cloud session and say, “Hey, fix this thing, change this thing, do this thing.” It’ll make those changes for me. But the ongoing existence is there. Once the foundation is laid, it just runs.

Ashley:
Now this isn’t really AI related, but with this new website, you say it’s beautiful, it’s great. Have you noticed an increase in bookings because of the website?

Tony:
Yeah. Actually, no, I guess I should go back and check that. But the biggest reason that I wanted to make the change was less so about conversion on the website itself. But yeah, we wanted a better design. I just aesthetically wanted something different. But the bigger piece was that we wanted to start running ads. We haven’t turned the ads on yet, but we couldn’t get the tracking that we wanted from our ads like, “Hey, which ad led to this specific reservation?” So that was a big motivating factor for us to make this change. So maybe ask me in a couple months once the ads are actually up and running and driving traffic if we’ve seen that. But that was a big motivating factor for us to want to make that change.

Ashley:
Now, how are you using AI for your ads?

Tony:
Yeah. Aside from the real estate business, we also have our education company. So I run a company called Alpha Host Academy. We teach people how to buy and start short-term rental businesses, and we run a lot of ads for that business. I’ll give you a real life example. A few years ago, I was paying an agency, I want to say four or five grand a month to run our ads. We’re still spending money on the ads themselves.

Ashley:
Are these just social media ads?

Tony:
Just social media

Ashley:
Ads. Okay. No matter what business or what you’re doing, if you have to do any kind of marketing, what Tony’s going to talk about is relatable for any kind of ad.

Tony:
Any kind of ad, right? We had to actually pay Meta, Instagram and Facebook to run the ads, but then we separately had a four figure bill for this agency to run our ads for us. I went through a bunch of different agencies because I wasn’t happy with any of them and then they just weren’t doing a great job. Now I literally have this, they’re called skills. Skills are, think about them as almost like mini employees inside of your AI ecosystem and have this skill called media buyer, and that’s what you call them the media buyers, people who run the ads for you. And every morning it’s connected to my Instagram, it’s connected to my Meta ads account. And every morning it gives me this report to say, “Hey, here are all the ads that are running for your business. Here are the ones that are converting really well.
Here are the ones that we’re seeing performance degrade that I think maybe we should reduce budget for. Here’s some really bad performance we just need to turn off. Here are your stars that are doing really well that we should increase budget for. And hey, here are some new ad concepts I think you should consider based on what we’ve seen work well. What do you want to do? Okay, cool. Cut that one, bump the budget here. Cool. Give me the new ad concepts.” And if it’s a video that I need to record, it’ll give me the scrip say, “Hey, here’s a script.” I’ll give some feedback, then I’ll go record it. It’ll edit it for me. If it’s an image, it’ll literally create the image itself and it’ll say, “Hey, here are some proofs of what the imag will look like.” And I just say approve and it’ll go and do that.
So because I had built that out for our education company first, once I figured that out, I was like, “Well, man, we can do this for the real estate business as well.” So that’s what I’m working on recreating now, but for driving our own direct bookings to our real estate portfolio. So I’m excited to take that next step.

Ashley:
So when you say working on it, this skill, you’re having to train it in a sense. Give us an example of what you have to do to train it.

Tony:
So when I first built the skill, and when I say skill guys, it’s literally just a file on your computer with a set of instructions and references.That’s all the skill is. Rules, references, it’s just a set of instructions of how this AI model should operate. So the first thing I did is like, “Hey, I want you to help me run my ads. Go do as much research as you can about what it means to be a really, really good media buyer for my specific type of business.” And I ran out on it and did a bunch of research. And actually had a few different models do the research. So I think I had Gemini do it. I had ChatGPT do it. I had Claude do it. And then I had them argue with each other basically to say, “Okay, how do we get to a really good finalized version?” Then I reviewed it.
I gave my feedback just based on what I knew about my business and, “Hey, here’s the things that typically work. Here are my targets, here are my KPIs.” So yeah, it’s laying the foundational knowledge, but then also giving it the guardrails of what’s important for you and for your own business.

Ashley:
Okay. So now you talked about doing the website and now the ads. What else have you implemented with AI?

Tony:
Yeah. One of the coolest things that I did recently is that I built out almost like a mothership type dashboard for all of my businesses because in our short-term rental portfolio and our Airbnb portfolio, we have data from different sources. I have data coming from my bank feed, transactions happening, money coming in, money coming out. I have additional financial information coming from QuickBooks and categorized transactions and things like that. I have data coming from my pricing tool. We use price labs. I have data coming from hospitable on, hey, what’s my calendar look like and what’s my occupancy and what are my upcoming reservations and my upcoming payouts? And historically, those data sources never spoke to each other. And I couldn’t go to one place and see a full scope of the performance of my portfolio. I had to go to all these different disparate locations.
Now I have this, it’s just called my dashboard or my real estate dashboard, and I can log in there and I can see, “Hey, for this specific property, here’s how much money’s in the bank right now. Here are all of your upcoming reservations over the next 30 days. Here’s your review score for this property. Here’s your projected income based on the reservations that are on the calendar. And here’s how much money we’ll think will be left in the bank account after you pay your mortgage to make sure that you have enough for your operating expenses.” So I literally have one place that I can go now to see all this information. I don’t have to go to all these different locations anymore.

Ashley:
And what is that place? You said you log into it every day.

Tony:
Yeah. It literally made me a website. Yeah. It’s a website and right now it only lives locally on my computer, so no one else can access it because I haven’t published it. But yeah, it’s just like I opened up a website personally on my own computer and all the information that I need is just there.

Ashley:
That’s awesome. That’s something I need to do for the liquor store. Even right now I log into the… There’s a dashboard for the cash register basically, but there’s so many other things that I need to pull from to look

Tony:
At. Yeah, we got to have a working session, Ash. It’s 2026. Okay, we’re

Ashley:
Ending the podcast now. Get out your computer.

Tony:
I’ll give you another example too. We use credit cards a lot for our business to try and get points and I always just have to go back and pay it off. But the way that I set up my bank accounts, we’ve actually interviewed Mike McCallis in the podcast a few times, but I use profit first as my banking system for my business. So I have one bank account for operating expenses. I have one for paying my team. I have one for ads. I have one for this, one for that. And when I swipe my credit cards, typically just all my different transactions go on there. So even though my bank accounts are separated, I only have one credit card that I use to get all my points. So I would have to go in every couple of days and say, okay, here’s how many transactions came out of this operating expense account.
Here’s how many came from this thing. Here’s how many came from that thing. And now, again, I have a dashboard for my credit cards just like, “Hey, here’s all the payments or all the transactions that are posted against this credit card. Here’s how much you need to pay from every single bank account to offset those transactions that have come on.” Where before, that was a manual thing I had to do and reconcile. Now I just open it up. Okay, cool. Pay this much, pay this, pay this, pay this, and now I’m done. So anything that I do in my business that requires me manually parsing through data, I’ve done my best to try and remove those steps from my workflow. And now there’s just a view that I can go look at to give me that information.

Ashley:
I feel like we had this conversation four years ago, but instead of AI, it was VAs as to you had a list on your phone of things that you did not want to do, and these were things that you wanted to train a VA to do essentially for you. And now I feel like it’s switched to AI.

Tony:
1000%. Now we still have our VA team, right? And there are certain elements that they’re very important for. And will there come a day where maybe they move on to something else because AI’s gotten so good potentially? But yeah, right now it’s like, “Hey, what are the things that either I’m not suited to do? I don’t think my VA is necessarily worth their time either because a lot of these things are just reporting and data extraction and things like that. And it’s like, I’d rather them go focus on the bigger things like,” Hey, how can we give this guest a really good experience? “So I’m even reducing workload for them. Another great example, we do reporting every month because we have partners on our short-term rentals, so we do reporting every single month. Here’s what’s happening, here’s how it looks, here’s what’s happening. And historically my VAs have always done that themselves.
I’m in the process right now of, again, we have all the data source. I’ve already built this dashboard for myself. It’s all the information that our partners need. Well, okay, cool. Can we just turn that into a report that gets sent out monthly?

Ashley:
And you can just probably have it automatically sent out

Tony:
To you. Automatically sent out to them, right? So we don’t have to do anything anymore. So I’m always thinking of ways that we can get more efficient with our time.

Ashley:
Really one of the only things real estate related I would say that I’ve really used AI successfully at is every morning having it pull a summary for me. So it’s going through my calendar, it’s going through my email, it’s giving me a summary of the day and then the week ahead. And then it’s also going in and writing responses, draft responses to all my emails for me. And then if I like it, I can go ahead and hit send or I can review it and change it or whatever. But God, my brain is already spinning of so many ideas of other things I need to do.

Tony:
One thing I will say is that if you talk about Claude, for example, now if you guys aren’t familiar with Claude, again, it’s probably the biggest competitor to ChatGPT. It’s actually two ex ChatGPT or OpenAI employees who’d start at Claude. And Claude has different versions. There’s the chat, which is what we’re most familiar with with ChatGPT. It has something called Cowork, and then it also has something called Claude Code. I build most of my tools in Claude Code specifically because that’s how I’m able to build a lot of these custom tools. And it sounds kind of intimidating to say code because I’m not a developer, but neither am I. And again, it works the same way.You’re just like, “Hey, I want to build this thing and then it’ll go out there and build it.” So if you want to build out this reporting dashboard for yourself, just go to Claude, open up Cloud Code and say, “Hey, here’s the thing I want to do.”

Ashley:
Now, what are some things that you want to do but you haven’t taken the time to implement? We just had a guest that we recorded in person with, and of course after the cameras are off, they actually tell us all of these AI things they’re doing and introduced us to Gronk. Is that what it was called? Grok. Grok. What’s Groonk from? What’s that show or that movie? So we just had our guest on who introduced us to Grok. You had heard of it, I hadn’t, but showed us a little bit about it. So what are some of the ideas that you have that you want to implement? Every day there’s new AI changes coming out.

Tony:
It’s even hard to answer that question, Ashley, because I’m not in any shortage of ideas of the things that I have. The bigger thing is I got to sleep at some point and it’s like there’s only so many hours in a day. And all these AI models, they still need some level of babysitting.You can’t necessarily just give it a task and say, “Hey, go do it.” It still needs some level of support along the way. So right now, ideas are not even –

Ashley:
Okay. What are some of them?

Tony:
Yeah. Gosh, I don’t know. I would love to get to a point where my guests, when they get there, as soon as they check in, because we can see when they unlock their door code, as soon as they check in, they get a phone call from an AI employee that says, “Hey, I’m Jarvis. I saw you just checked in. Any questions that you have, blah, blah, blah, whatever it may be.” Or if I guess I have any questions during their stay, they can just – They call the AI. They just pick up the thing and call and be like, “Hey, I’m not sure where this thing is and blah, blah, blah.” And like, “Oh, it’s actually here, here, and here’s what it is. Hey, do you want me to call the handyman and have him come over and take look at it?” I think we can get to that point.
But again, it just takes time to build those things out. But the idea for me is across all the businesses that we run, our real estate business, our content business, our education business, we flip homes. It’s like, “Can I reduce the amount of time that I spend actually managing this thing while simultaneously increasing the experience for the people on the other side?” So if I can get to a point where I truly never have to interact with my guests, but they get this absolute world-class experience, it’s a win-win for both of us because I never have to worry about someone not picking up the phone. I never have to worry about anyone missing anything and everything’s there. So yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of ideas and things that we can go down and I’ve got a backlog of things that I want. I’ll give you another example.
Inside of our education company, part of what we do is we educate people. So a lot of that is one-on-one coaching and those kind of elements. And I was like, “Man, I find myself answering a lot of the same questions over and over, and I have this tool that I built out for students. And one of the things that’s in there is there’s this Ask Alpha Host little bubble that follows them around. And so if they’re on any page inside of one of our tools, they can click that bubble and I’ve loaded up every single coaching call I’ve ever done. I’ve loaded up all of my content from our coaching program. Someone can say,” Hey, how do I build a comp for an Airbnb? “And it’ll search all the content I’ve ever created and give them an answer. So things like that where it’s like I can improve the experience for all of our customers across all of our businesses while reducing my own workload, that is the goal.

Ashley:
Well, we want to know what you guys are doing in your own investing or business journey to implement AI. So if you’re watching on YouTube, please put that into the comments or post about it in the BiggerPockets forums.

Tony:
So Ashley, I just want to know from your perspective, what are some things that you find yourself doing that are repetitive right now? Real estate content, whatever it may be. Think about the liquor store, just think about all your different businesses.

Ashley:
Okay. The liquor store, payroll. I’m doing payroll still myself right now. Ordering inventory. And then as far as real estate –

Tony:
Well, let’s even look at the liquor store, right? Because you said inventory. So what’s the process right now for doing inventory at the liquor store?

Ashley:
So the employee goes through and looks at our inventory and looks at what we’re low at, also what customers have requested, and then what she expects we’ll need. If there’s a holiday coming up, we need things like that. So a lot of that is her, and then it comes to me to actually manually put into the website we’re ordering five bottles of this, four bottles of that. And she does a lot of it sometimes, but then I approve it or whatever, and then it goes.

Tony:
So right now she’s manually going through the shelves and counting individual items?

Ashley:
No, no. We have the inventory tracker to tell her how much we have.

Tony:
Oh, cool. So it’s already systemic.

Ashley:
Yeah. So then she’s writing down what we should order on a sheet of paper, and then she texts it to me. And then I used to physically go to the store and we would sit down together and place the order, make sure it isn’t within the budget or whatever, but now she is doing it and then she will text me what the limit is. So I guess another one would actually be reducing communication back and forth between me and her because I am a bottleneck for sure. Actually, she texted me probably a couple hours ago for a login for something and I have not responded, so a bottleneck. So that’d be a second thing, communication with my employee to help her. But I would say inventory, so cut that for her. So how could I get the AI to actually go to the website to place the inventory order because she’s literally searching, okay, we need Jim Beam this size, this flavor, we need a case of those.
Then we’re going, it takes at least an hour sometimes to do.

Tony:
Okay. I think all of that can literally be solved pretty quickly because you’re saying your inventory at the liquor store is already in a system that you can go look at.

Ashley:
It’s in the POS system. Yep.

Tony:
So then AI can, I would assume, depending on what POS you’re using, it can connect API, MCP, whatever it may be, some sort of connection. So it can instantly know, okay, hey, here’s… So let’s use Patron as an example. It’s like, okay, hey, pull our Patron sales on a month by month basis for the last 36 months. And it can say, okay, here’s the kind of trend for Patron. Here’s our current inventory levels. If we get below this level, I’m just going to add this to the reorder sheet. So you literally never even have to think about it. It’s watching that for you based on your historical trends. And you can tell it, look forward on the calendar and see if there’s anything coming up that might spike sales, right? So it’s already going to kind of track inventory levels against where you need to reorder and the quantities you need to reorder.
And then once you actually get to the point of like, okay, hey, Ashley, just review this and improve it. Yep, looks good, looks good. Click a button. Again, depending on the website, maybe there’s an API connection, but man, I found out there’s even some times where the way that a website looks to us as humans is very different from how it looks from a computer’s perspective. There’s this website that I use where I need to download data and it only showed me a limited set of the data. It capped me at a certain number of exports, so I had to manually go through and export this data by myself. And I just asked Claude, I was like, “Hey, can you do this for me?” And it’s like, “Sure, give me a few minutes.” And it’s like, “Hey, actually, you can’t see this, but on the back end of their website, I see all the data in just one click.
So I’m just going to download the whole thing for you.” So I would maybe even assume that for your reordering website, there’s some way it can do that as well. So all those things are like, Ashley’s like you spend an hour inside of CloudCode just explaining what you want and it’ll set it up for you.

Ashley:
Okay rookies, you guys are my accountability buddies here that I’m going to be coming back to Tony and I’m going to be saying that I did implement this and I did take the time to build it out because that’s really the big thing is the time, taking the time to actually sit down and build something out. Well, thank you guys so much for joining us today. I’m Ashley, he’s Tony, and we’ll see you guys on the next episode.