10 Days That Changed The World

The Real Estate Espresso Podcast

10 Days That Changed The World

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10 Days That Changed The World

Ten days can change the world! Now, that sounds like some historic platitude. What I’m referring to is a new software application that was introduced only a few days ago. That software application runs on a Mac, not on Windows yet, and it was developed from concept to release in the wild in just ten days.

Now let that sink in for a moment. Inside most companies you would have trouble getting the marketing focus group to convene a meeting to discuss the future content for the release of a software application for maybe sometime next year. You wouldn’t get that meeting in ten days.

In this case, the application I’m talking about is called Claude CoWorkz from Anthropic. Yes, it’s an AI application and it was developed and released in ten days.

Now this is a real estate podcast, so stay with me. I’m not here to talk about AI; I’m here to talk about the impact of this software application on your real estate investing business. This shift is happening inside real estate investing offices. Not on the job site, not in zoning hearings, but behind the scenes where the work actually gets done.

Specifically, I want to talk about the application of Claude CoWorkz agents to the automation of various workflows in the real estate investment business.

So let me start with a simple observation. Most real estate offices, even sophisticated ones, are still organized around human memory, around manual handoffs. A deal analyst remembers where the underwriting files will get filed. An asset manager remembers which investors asked which question. Someone manually updates the capital stack model, then emails a PDF to the lender, and so on. It’s an intensely manual process.

But all of that work is not strategic. It’s a cognitive task.

Claude CoWorkz represents a different operating model. Instead of using AI as a prompt-based tool just to answer questions, you’re using it as a digital employee. It understands context, it understands your documents, your history, and your intent across the entire workflow of your computer.

Think of it less like ChatGPT answering a question, and it’s more like a junior partner who never forgets, who never gets tired, and is always working inside the rules that you define.

Let me give you a concrete example. As you know, I’ve been training our own language model for some time now. It’s based on the 3,000 episodes of the Real Estate Espresso Podcast and we affectionately call this Victor AI. But Victor AI is passive; it provides information. The technology behind Victor AI will give you information, but it won’t actually do work for you.

With Claude CoWorkz, the AI is trained on your actual documents, not generic internet data. Just like Victor AI, it understands your specific structure, your mechanics, your risk disclosures, it understands your workflows.

It’s worth understanding, in fact, how CoWorkz came to exist within Anthropic. The employees within the company were using Claude Code. This is an application within Anthropic that is used for writing software. You tell Claude Code what function you want to create and then it writes the software.

But then, instead of using it to write software, these same employees were using it to handle scans of receipts and using the AI tool to generate the expense report so that they could get reimbursed on their travel expenses. That was the use case that showed that the underlying technology could be used for so much more than just writing software.

Now in fact, there are numerous use cases today that are being solved by intensely manual work. In the case of an expense report, the output is an Excel spreadsheet. And yes, CoWorkz can manipulate Excel. In fact, I’ve already installed the Excel connection on my CoWorkz installation on my computer.

You see, humans decide, machines prepare. The companies that operate with clarity, repeatability, and alignment, they’re the ones that are going to scale faster.

Now that brings me to a fairly contentious point. I do see some jobs being threatened by this kind of capability. But that was only a matter of time. We could easily foresee the day when low-level clerical tasks could be truly automated. It’s just happening a little faster than I expected. Not much faster, but a little faster.

Claude CoWorkz is not just about speed for the sake of speed, it’s about removing noise so that judgment has room to breathe.

You see, you can provide CoWorkz with a bunch of raw images and a storyline, and it’ll create a PowerPoint presentation for you. Will it be perfect? Probably not on the first go. But you’re lowering your cognitive load.

My very first test case involved simply finding duplicates in my Downloads folder. That was a simple use case, and guess what? I have over 3,000 files in my Downloads folder. Claude CoWorkz can clean up that directory structure. It can organize those files according to a set of rules that I give it. It can help restore a sense of calm and order in areas that you might not have been paying attention.

Another common use case is looking at your credit card statement for recurring subscriptions, as well as giving the instructions for how to cancel those subscriptions if you’re no longer using them. And if you go tell it to cancel a particular subscription, it will go do it for you.

Real estate is still a human business. It requires a lot of intuition, political awareness, relationship capital. AI doesn’t replace those things, but what it does replace is the excuse that you were too busy to be thoughtful and provide a document.

In your own work, whether you’re using AI to chase more deals or not is kind of irrelevant. Whether you’re using it to ask better questions on fewer deals, that’s where it’s going to make a difference.

So if you’re running a real estate investment office today, the question is not whether you should be using AI. The question is which of your workflows are worthy of automation. If you’re disciplined, you’re documented, and you’re aligned, AI’s going to make you stronger. If not, well, AI might just multiply the chaos.

As you think about that, have an awesome rest of your day. Go make some great things happen. We’ll talk to you again tomorrow.

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