EP 126: How Agents Use AI as a Business Operating System

and start using it as a true business operating system. I'm joined by Felix Brau, Managing Director of International Expansion at EXP Realty, who shares how he uses AI to scale communication, automate decision making, and build custom tools Without a tech background, we discuss everything from creating a digital version of yourself and building AI-powered personal assistance to developing custom applications that solve real business problems and create a competitive advantage.

If you've been using AI primarily for writing content or answering questions, this conversation will challenge you to think bigger about what's possible and how AI can help you scale your business without scaling complexity. Let's dig in. Welcome to episode 126. Can't believe it. We're already in the early June when you hear air this episode. Obviously, we're recording it a few weeks before. But today's guest.

comes to us from EXP International. He's the managing director of EXP International, Felix Bravo. He's also a real estate agent. So I love the perspective that he's gonna have where he's Practicing as an agent, but also teaching agents how to become more efficient and the topic of AI. So, Felix, welcome to the podcast.

Um and um I got wind of that when, you know, Next Home and EXP came together and or acquisition uh and I heard Leo on the podcast of uh Dwigan. So Um so if you're watching us on YouTube you can see the hat. Anyway. So Felix

Real estate career when I was quite young. I was probably seven or eight years old. And I always joke that I was the youngest realtor in in all of Florida because at the time you couldn't take the the state exam in in Spanish. You can now, but at that time you couldn't. And my mom's English wasn't great. But I picked up English quite early since I was young. And so one summer she sat me down after failing the test, I think two or three times.

I will buy you whatever video game, whatever toy you want, if you could just help me um get through this test. And so for a whole summer I helped her study and and helped her practice and kind of Um and so I I got into the industry quite young. Um, you know, I was helping her. My first real job was just being a her assistant and whether that was open houses, scheduling things, scheduling showings.

Um a lot of property management stuff. And then in my teenage years, I started working for a um a gentleman based out of here in South Florida who who was quite the the local legend in the new development space. And so that's where I started my career. And by the time I was 22 years old, I was a sales director for my first project.

presenting projects. And so I got a feel and understanding for what international real estate was like. Um and you know, started my own brand, uh was was partnered with a couple of other big virtual brokerages here in the United States. Uh I got to be a part of a couple of brands that were startups and helped them grow and scale and that was my first sort of take somewhat of this like hybrid corporate role. Um at the

And then I was coming over to EXP just as an agent to to build my team. And I met uh Glenn and Leo, uh our CEO, who's also based out of here in Miami, and and they loved working with them and they thought I'd I'd be good at at at what we're currently doing and so I I gave it a go and uh

Even though I'm still a licensed agent, I'm not I haven't been active for for three or three something odd years now. Um and I've been fully just focused on on running our international expansion, running our international division and um yeah, it's been a it's been a journey.

Um, and then I think the first light bulb moment I had was there used to be this thing on ChatGBT that they killed a long time ago. I think it was called widgets or something like that, where you could it was the first time that they added any sort of uh connectors and you could connect it to Canva.

And then uh on Canva it just took a bunch of images and basically created Faceless YouTube video that was five minutes long talking about the story of Starbucks. And all I did was just prompt it. I didn't think, I didn't do much. Uh, and then it spit it out and I put it up on YouTube. And I remember going, Oh my god. I mean, mind you, the video is pretty bad. I'm not gonna lie, the video is

You know, I've started outside of even outside of real estate, I started another company called the Ground Up, um, which was a it it is a portal um for all of the new development homes between West Palm Beach and South Florida. And we did a a partnership with the Miami U. plus agents. And at the time I was really thinking about how to market and advertise more for some of these projects. Thousands of videos.

Every single pocket and neighborhood of South Florida and and generate a ton of leads from that. So my mind started churning and now As I started growing within um, you know, uh in my leadership positions at EXP, and now I I have over 200 staff. seven different countries, all time zones from Australia to to here to the United States. That's when I started using AI as an operator. And I had a couple more just sort of the light bulb moments I feel like happen every quarter.

uh or a business operating system, depending on how you look at it. Move away from tool to teammate uh and have things taken off of your plate so you can actually focus on what's meaningful, which is your client relations. Right? Truly do do more of that. So um and and and it's interesting when um when we got connected, I was uh really excited to talk to you because you have a an agent perspective. Majority of our listeners are agents.

And then you're obviously in a leadership role now where you're actually scaling growth for company, big company, uh and their agents sort of listening to your voice and actually you're kind of em embarking systems on them that would help them grow their business.

So let's kind of take, you know, three to four things that you feel like agents listening. Um, start wherever you want to start. Um, how do you feel like don't do these one off things? Maybe if people are listening to us, that's where they are. That's fine. But the sooner you can scale and systems scale businesses, not one off tools, don't scale it. So talk through that journey for you and the people you're teaching.

business and those are fantastic and honestly they're a really good like entry level sort of stepping stone into getting into AI. And then I think second uh route two is Excuse me, using it as an operator and helping it actually scale your business and and leveraging AI that scales with you, which is really fancy for just you have a system that Um and I think that's where a lot of people Like I I would argue that probably ninety still only uses AI as a Google search.

And that's a really good um first start, but then you have to start thinking about how you can use AI to do things. Right.

I did it, I did it on Chat GPT, and uh it was when custom you can start making custom GPTs at the time kind of first started. And so what my digital me is is basically a

an AI version of myself as an operator and if you're listening and you have a team or assistants, et cetera, there's a lot of times where they need you and you're just not available. And so I spent probably about a week Downloading every piece of information, every SOP, every document, and also just word vomiting into um a custom chat GPT, just telling it everything about how.

I built out a full back end blueprint of how I want to solution problems. What are the biggest problems and most common um challenges that we face in our business? Answering not necessarily what the answer to the problem is, but how I want my my people. challenges and then I created this custom chat GPT called just Felix Bot that you could talk to at any time. And um at first it was kind of gimmicky and funny. And then what ended up happening is I realized that like a lot of my team members

Talking to me, and they were just talking to my Chat GPT. And then they would come to me and be like, Hey, um, you know, I had this question and or I had this idea, and then I ran it through your your And here's my now. And so when we were entering into a conversation, I was already we were already three or four conversations ahead. So it saved us quite a lot of time.

Sometimes I'm on a plane. Sometimes I'm just I'm a human. I need to sleep. Um, and that was a really big aha moment for me on okay, I'm I'm now having a They're not always going to be perfect. They're not as as good as just speaking to me. Yes. But I didn't try to replace myself. I tried to replace like. Five questions.

Yeah. Uh to your point. I mean same thing with Chat GPT. I mean, people haven't discovered Cordex. If you're paying for Chat GPT, you owe it to yourself to go see what Cortex can do. Um whether it's Claude or Cortex, depending on your loyalty, that's not the purpose of the show. Um but there's individual tools. Um and that flips week to week too, you know, in so many ways. Right. So individual tools. Yeah, exactly. So individual tools to me

still add a lot of value. Like I use WhisperFlow for dictation. Like awesome. Uh I use granola for meeting notes that don't have bots have don't join and it it does the best transcription I find Those are still valuable, but they're not systems for you yet, right? I think your point. And what Felix you did was you sort of cloned yourself in many ways for the first five, six questions.

Um and it scales you. I mean it personalizes it, it scales you. And custom GPTs were their early for A. And if you're if you're listening to this show, if you're if you've been listening to the show, we've I've done a few custom GPTs on Specific things real estate agents need to do for winning an AI search, biooptimization. Just look it up with my name and you'll find all of them. Uh and there are many show notes that we've added. But um, so find a problem.

in your business and find the right solution. And that's when you're starting to think more system thinking, more than individual tool thinking. Um so I think that's a great takeaway. So you've cloned yourself in many ways. Um and

So that's custom GPT. So that's a good takeaway. Um, what else are you doing that helps your agents and people you manage?

Because they all want to go into cowork and they all want they all hear agentic AI and all these fancy terms and and they think that's so it sounds so scary. It's like how how do I get into it? All agentic means is you have Chat GBT or any AI doing things for you while you're not And so if you go into the and I did a video on this on Instagram But all you have to do is go into

Go into Claude, go into your settings, click connectors, connect your Google Calendar and your Gmail. And if you use Slack or anything else like that to talk to your team, connect that in there. And you could even throw in all of your meeting notes into it as well. And then prompt in projects, start a new project. All you have to do is write a prompt.

Every single morning at nine AM or at eight A. M. or five AM whenever you And every single evening at six or seven PM I want you to go through my Google Calendar, my Gmail. my every single meeting note I had, my transcripts, and I want you to break down a list of priorities, what emails did I miss, what didn't I? I want you to start drafting responses for me as well so that I can get ahead of things. And that's your first step into a

Now, every single morning when you when you wake up, the first thing you should do is instead of opening up your email, instead of opening up your calendar, you have a very condensed version where Claude has gone and skimmed through all your emails and said, Hey Felix, you you messed up. You haven't responded to Rajiv in three days. Or hey, um your two PM showing actually emailed you asking if they could move.

Okay. Do you want to respond to them? If so, I'll go ahead and You have this personal assistant and if you want to get really fancy with it, um if you use dispatch one PM Hey I need to move my two PM.

a tool, as an employee, as an AI agent, whatever, whatever fancy word they heard on a podcast or or something like that, and they come to me with is okay, all you have to do 20 bucks a month, go into co-work, connect it into the tools you're already using. It's so simple. You just click a couple buttons and you have this Um I did a video on it that gives you the exact prompt you need to use, it's step-by-step guide.

Go ahead and make it if you want. But I I would say that that was the first one that I started seeing agents from any level of technol technological. whatever tech level they were at. I'm a big believer in something. I don't know if it's been coined or not, but I've always said it. I I believe in lazy technology. I think tech should be as lazy as possible. I should be able to go in and and it shouldn't challenge me. I should be able to just very intuitively walk through it.

And I think that's what this does, and it accomplishes it accomplishes that. And what I've seen is the people who use this and start building their first personal assistance. Immediately they go to their wife or husband or kids and they're like, I I need you to go on Claude right now. I need you to set up your own personal assistant and then they start coming up with all these other ideas. So it's a great stepping stone into into how you can

But now with AI, what I did, I did very similar. I connected all the stuff. I had I used Gromlove for meeting notes, so I had the MCP, all the connectors in clock. And I it basically sends me my review. Here are the high priority five things you should follow up on. So it it cut down again, look at shaving time off to become more efficient and kind of having my review preview assist.

I call it and it just sends it to me on Friday and you it can be any time with a day to your point, it could be morning, evening. That's just you know, you're just uh and and that's the beauty of it. And I think the most powerful language

There's two things I tell people, look, you just have to be curious. Insanely curious. Um and when I watch videos, I don't know about I don't know if this is you, I I follow a few people on YouTube. When they put a video, I bookmark it for the topic of interest, I watch it and I say, no, that's interesting. Let me go try it.

So if you just have a curiosity mindset and go shave off things in your business that have been like problem sucks, time sucks, I think you'll be much further along than just using it as a simple tool.

I'm like, uh, I kinda just wanna prompt this really easily and I want it to save me time and I don't wanna have to think And that's the the fun part.

Which kind of probably brings me to to step three of a couple other tools that I'd like to share with with if you're an agent listening to this. There is a phenomenon happening. that you may or may not have experienced already, which is when you're walking in And this happens even with your buyers. How are you gonna use it? The truth is, ninety nine percent of the consumers asking this question have no idea

They're just kind of asking it because they keep hearing about AI. They hear about someone sold their house only using AI and they they don't really know. And I think it's almost like a It's just a test to see if you even have an answer half the time. Um, and also it's an opportunity for you to showcase.

Right, and this is this isn't new to real estate. You walk into a listing appointment, you want to make sure that what you say, what you offer, your specific value proposition is something different from everyone else going in and going. photographer.

portals, it's gonna go on the MLS and I'm gonna host some open houses and maybe maybe because I'm I'm So that's like what everyone says and your goal should always be to to leave that seller or You leave that conversation for them to go, you know what? A couple other things I haven't heard anyone say. And so um I built a couple really specific tools that I think are really strong for this use case. The first one is called drone. Anyone can use it, anyone can jump into it.

I was making, you know, I I started in in new development and I broke into high-end really quickly. But my um when I started selling general real estate, my budget for So we all have this challenge when you jump in, you want to jump into luxury. Okay, well, you got to be prepared to how to handle a luxury listing and market it. And if you look on any single MLS or any portal, what you'll find is almost every single house under like six.

There's no drone videos, there's no videography'cause it's expensive. And so mostly those houses is just And so I I built this tool called drone this house.com. And what it does is it takes the still images of any house. And it turns it into drone clips and it takes it and it turns into full-blown drone footage. Um, and the idea was why pay a couple thousand or a thousand dollars for. when I can just get really simple quick clips from my social media.

And so all you have to do is take a picture of the front of the house. This works on your phone. Go on your phone, take a picture of the front of the house. Type in the address of the house into the tool, it pulls from Google Maps API, pulls satellite imaging, so that it doesn't hallucinate that there's like a wall. Um

and you can generate that picture straight up into a into a drone footage. And so I I had this vision in my head of like imagine me walking into a listing appointment. And right before I go in, I just take a picture of the house. I turn it into drone footage. And then when the seller asks me, like, hey, how are you gonna market my house differently? How are you gonna use AI? I go, But look at this. And I just turn my phone and there's this drone footage.

And they're gonna go, what how when did you do that? How'd you do that? What did you have time to do this? Um now, is that drone footage gonna be the specific reason that house gets sold? Probably not, right? But is it gonna help you? Is are you gonna walk away from that listing with the seller going, Oh my god, that was really cool. Like that's something different that no one else sees.

pennies compared to to what it is to actually spend on a videographer. And that's when you get into these like more now I built that myself on Claude Code. Um that's like you're kind of getting into step three, which is you're not just Step one is leveraging one off tools for Step two is starting to build and operate. Yeah.

Step three is creating custom tools that are specific to your use case. Yeah. Um and that's where it gets now the idea that anybody I have no technical background, I don't know how to code, if you ask me a single The idea that I could create a very custom tool software to my specific use case in the matter of like, and by the way, this tool I built it in two or three hours, I don't do that to brag. I say it because anyone.

When you can start building your own custom software for everything. Like don't ever go into an app store again. Don't ever go pay for something. You can sit down and have it yourself pretty quickly, specifically to Um check out dronethishouse.com.

And we'll put a link to that in the show notes and all the things that Felix is talking about. And and and Felix, I I know I ask all my guests, anything else you want to add as a final takeaway, like an advice, piece of advice you'd give agents? Um before we get to my final question.

And goes through that moment. And that's where you have to be curious because otherwise you're never gonna break through that wall and just start asking questions like, well, what else can I do? And and the truth is You don't have to go find an AI guru. You don't have to pay The best AI guru that exists. If you're stuck for any reason, the the number one thing I I tell people I do this all the time and it helps is I go to

Chat or Claude or whoever, and whatever I'm stuck on, I say, please walk me through this step by step and explain it to me like I'm a five year old. No fancy words.

But I said, you know what? This is not rocket science. Oil change for a regular car is not rocket science. So I picked up the Gemini mobile app. It it it today it does the best on video walking you through it versus sharing screenshots. So I did the Gemini app, I flipped the phone around, and I said walk me through and look at

And it first said, Okay, what kind of model it is and told me what oil to go get. I went and got that. All that I was I prepped all that. And I actually did the oil change in like five minutes. I would have never embarked on that at all had it not been for my AI assistant that I started to trust a little bit. Now, I would not recommend doing high risk tasks. Okay, it comes with a standard disclaimer. I don't want you to burn your house down because you heard Rajiv on a podcast.

But the point is, if you're curious and you want to kind of learn new things, to your point, Felix, asking AI is the best way you can learn anything. So this has been that's great advice. Let me get to another question I ask all my guests. Are you a book or a podcast person?

Some pretty hard challenges, um both on a personal level and For a period there almost took me out of the real estate space. especially for me that I'm I'm a little bit unique sometimes in in the real estate and Usually real estate can be like a second I didn't really have anything to fall in on, fall back on. Um and I was during that period careers and uh I went through what every single realtor is gonna go through at some point in their life.

Through, you go through a hard time, things happen. And uh I read this book at the time, it was recommended to me by a mentor of mine. Um, and that idea and that concept If I want something this bad. Maybe I can go work. Maybe I can get a part time job. And that book stopped me from from doing all those things and instead sitting in that really uncomfortable period.

I don't have any boats to go back to. I've burned them, so I'm going all and um you know I think for for realtors, the truth is you're not just real estate agents, you're all CEOs of your regardless of what brand you're with. Like your destiny is in your own hands. And if you give yourself out Your brain wants safety more than anything, it will put you in position.

Yeah. I recommend it to anybody who is sort of struggling with the AI, whether that's on building a personal brand or social media, which can be scary to get on camera Reading that book will really change. And and have you questioning like even if you think you're all in on what you're doing, reading that book will make you question like, oh, and and be honest with yourself. Like there are some things that I'm I'm probably not doing out of

I I can't wait to add that to my book reading list. But um Felix, this has been fun. I appreciate we got connected. Uh I think there's a lot of value you added to our listening audience. And I hope uh I know in your international travels, hopefully I'll meet you in the stateside sometime real soon.