“You’re all Tony Stark,” Audie Chamberlain tells a real estate agent worried about losing his job to AI. “Just with artificial intelligence, you’re Iron Man.”
Over the past few years, Chamberlain, vice president of strategic growth and communications at Rechat, has watched AI compress weeks of marketing work into minutes. He built his own “chief of staff” in Claude to manage the rest.
Ahead of his talk on that very topic at Inman Connect San Diego, Chamberlain spoke with Inman about how real estate marketing has changed over the years, the fine line between AI-driven productivity and simply getting more work done, and how Rechat differentiates itself in an industry where every platform calls itself a super app.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: You’ve been in real estate marketing for a while. What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in this field over the past 5-10 years? What’s changed the most?
Audie Chamberlain: Some things have changed and are still changing rapidly.
The first, though less obvious, is the rise of personal brands. Back in the day, social media was almost a strange concept for real estate. I remember people saying, “Why would I share a house I’m interested in on social media if other people can see it and make an offer?” There was a real sense of scarcity, a walled garden mentality. Who would be crazy enough to do that?
It took a lot of persuasion to get people to open up. Early in my career at Realtor.com, I convinced the company that making all listings easily shareable would ultimately be a plus. This attracted hundreds of thousands of unique users and added to the excitement of the listing.
Social media has provided a platform for everyone. We see guys like Ryan Serhant and Mauricio Umansky building brands around their lifestyle and attracting high-paying clients and high-paying agents. There’s a joke about having to be on TikTok or Instagram with Reels as part of your job, but there’s some truth to this.
Communicate what you do and let the world know about your business: This is a big change from the old model of being a nameless, faceless agent under the brand of a major brokerage firm. We find that people connect more with individuals and clients follow their agents wherever they go.
Another big change is AI. What used to take my colleagues and me weeks or months now takes minutes to hours. We talked about this earlier this year. Reports that used to take weeks now take 20 minutes. It used to take weeks or months for top production companies to build a high-end website. With AI, Rechat lets you build one in 40 seconds.
For example, I worked in marketing for a brokerage firm in Beverly Hills that was later acquired by Compass. We had dozens of marketers supporting hundreds of agents. They spent days and weeks manually creating flyers and advertisements in Illustrator. With AI, that’s condensed into minutes. If you demo this live in a room full of agents, you’ll hear the “ahhs” and “ahhs”. Because everyone has experienced how difficult this process was.
Once your listing hits the MLS and your data is connected, all the marketing you dream about is automatically created. Receive marketing-ready notifications created by AI in collaboration with creative directors and designers. It’s a massive and fast-moving change.
The impact of AI in the real estate industry is still a work in progress, so I don’t think we’ve seen it fully yet. What do you think will be the impact of everyone having access to these tools?
On this scale, going back to scarcity and abundance, I am a rich person. I believe that 40% to 50% of your day will come back to you if you free yourself from managing lists and such. It creates opportunities. That means you have time to think about your in-person events, open house strategy, personal brand, social media, or other parts of your business that haven’t gotten the attention.
Just because a 10 hour process becomes a 2 minute process doesn’t mean you stop working. This means you can spend 10 hours on other areas of growth.
I always use the Iron Man analogy. When people in the room complain about AI taking their jobs, I say, “You’re all Tony Stark. AI is your Iron Man suit. With AI, you can do a 10-hour job in two minutes. You can fly.” It’s a mindset, not a fear.
I see this played out in the media as well. Companies like IBM will announce that they will lay off their AI human resources managers, and then rehire people for other roles six to 12 months later. This is because the AI either didn’t work as expected or turned out to be more costly than the humans it replaced. I think everything is going well.
Rechat takes an Apple-like approach. In other words, the best technology should work silently in the background. I think the future is multi-sensory. Equipped with vision, AI acts like a real team member by observing what you’re cooking and helping you troubleshoot printers.
Back in January, when we talked about Claude, ChatGPT, and agent user behavior, we made predictions based on what we said on Inman Connect – and that’s exactly what it turned out to be [New York] In February, things will quickly shift from being generative to being operative. Rather than asking a chatbot to write a listing description, start writing the content and ask it to approve it.
It’s already happening. When you receive a showing request, the AI checks your calendar, tells you if you’re available, drafts a response, and says, “Press send.”
Next up is the keyboard and typing fade out. I’ve never met an agent who loves data entry and filling out CRM forms. A few months ago, we released AI Memo, an AI notepad. That’s the direction.
You can’t talk to Claude or ChatGPT out loud in a crowded room, and that won’t change over the next 3-6 months. But note-taking itself is disappearing. Fathom captures our facial expressions, Granola generates key points in the background, and AI Memo takes notes. In today’s video calls, there are often more people taking notes than there are people.
Data entry into CRM is completely eliminated. According to the Stanford University study and other studies, dictation is about four times faster than typing. So for busy agents who are on the go, “Add Nick to your list of buyers in Nashville.” No input or tagging required. We don’t know exactly how fast, but those changes are definitely happening.
I’m curious as to where that free time will actually be used. You wrote an article for Inman about the AI chief of staff you built with Claude. Can you give a personal example of how Claude took over your job and what changes it brought about within Rechat?
Great question. I’m actually going to be speaking at Inman Connect San Diego about building a “Chief of Staff.”
It started with a simple question when I saw everything happening at Claude Cowork after Inman Connect New York. “How do I clone myself?” AI can now actively work on your computer, take over your browser, and get to work while you’re away. My question was, how can you be alone with me? The AI’s answer was, “Start with the Chief of Staff.”
In the morning, the chief of staff takes command. Receive messages in Slack, iMessage, email, CRM updates, ClickUp/Asana/Monday notifications, calendar changes, and social media DMs. 5-7 different sources all updated overnight. You are usually reactive and scrambling to understand what happened where.
The chief of staff actively considers everything, reveals what really needs action, flags real priorities, and tells you which deadlines are at risk, all while you sleep.
Free time doesn’t mean people go to the beach drinking tropical drinks. Research shows that people who use AI to increase their productivity tend to be more productive overall. It also affects work and other parts of life. You must be careful not to overwork.
Vibe coding is a good example. I built the “Brand Index” app in one weekend using Gemini’s app building tools. Enter your name and company name, and we’ll scan the internet and score your presence based on articles and social mentions. I had never built an app myself before. It was kept by the developer. Now, as a hobby, I can ship something to the app store in a weekend.
So the short answer is: By freeing up 10 hours per week through your Chief of Staff, you can build other dashboards, systems, prototypes, and MVPs that can bring even more value to your organization.
You talked a while back about creating a “super app” language at Rechat and watching others adopt it. Everything in proptech is now “AI-powered” and every platform is calling itself a super app. How do you differentiate when the language is so similar across industries?
You’re right, and we need to realize that “AI-powered” doesn’t mean much anymore. One of my mentors used to say, “What is a platform? It’s something that drills for oil,” which means there’s a lot of vague terminology thrown around.
The concept of a “super app” started with China’s WeChat. Zillow talked about this as an ambitious goal at Inman Connect. The apps we built with Rechat won eight different best-in-class categories in the T3 Sixty/Tech200 style rankings.
So how do you describe a best-in-class app across eight categories? It’s a super app, the WeChat for real estate agents, and it does things that would otherwise require a dozen different point solutions (video, listings, CRM, etc.).
I discovered Rechat at a Miami technology contest sponsored by the National Association of Realtors and was blown away. In all my years of working in real estate and proptech, I’ve never seen agents really love an app that covers their entire world.
For 20 years, companies have been trying to build all-in-ones, but when you try to do everything, nothing works. In the end, the adoption rate will be low. Less than 20% of agents actually use a broker when making a big purchase. It’s still happening at some of the biggest companies in the industry.
Shayan [Hamidi]our founder felt that pain firsthand as a broker paying unused software agents, and had a background in computer science at the University of Toronto to build something else. It’s not a walled garden, it’s something that integrates with tools that agents already love, rather than trying to force them out of the way, like SkySlope or Follow Up Boss.
The way to stay differentiated is not by chasing what everyone else is doing, or by slamming something “AI-powered” and hoping for adoption. We’ve looked at the actual adoption numbers. According to independent third-party research, Serhant’s brokerage has 84 percent adoption, and Mile High Modern, a small independent brokerage in Denver, has 87 percent adoption.
One of the things that makes us different is that we built mobile first. Because that’s how agents actually work. And positioning must continue to evolve. Once everyone starts using our language, we will simply evolve again. We recently launched an app platform and app store. We are not an all-in-one, nor are we a point solution. We created a new category: operating systems for brokerages and teams to run their businesses from their mobile phones.
One last question about Inman Connect San Diego: It’s been around for a while. What still excites you about the conference each year?
It’s mainly about connecting directly with your peers. There’s only so much you can get from Zoom and the phone. Spending time with the Inman community and having these conversations about where things are headed and the challenges we face…We’ve been in one of the toughest markets in many areas for over three years now, and we’re still working through the hangover from 2021.
At Inman, you’ll find true friendships and deep personal relationships, as well as opportunities to learn from some of the best in the industry. This program has been carefully selected to provide the most practical points for people’s businesses.
For me, it’s about spending quality time with people I truly respect and learning from the best. Delivered every time. At Inman, I’ve seen more acquisitions, more business development, more breakouts, and more career takeoffs than any other event I’ve ever attended. It’s a special community.
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