This week on RealTrending, Tracey Velt chats with Tamir Poleg, CEO of The Real Brokerage, about how AI is rapidly changing the real estate game — if you don't build it, then someone else will.
Tamir shares how Real is using AI to streamline operations, from an assistant answering thousands of questions per day to developing automatic broker reviews. He also discusses scaling without compromising culture, the evolving agent-client dynamic, and why brokerages must refocus on consumers.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Real is both a technology and a real estate company.AI enhances operational efficiency and client service.A strong company culture attracts like-minded agents.Leadership will always involve taking responsibility for failures.Automation can replace many tasks traditionally done by agents.AI will play a significant role in decision-making for real estate transactions.
Related to this episode:
The Real Brokerage
https://onereal.com/
Tamir Poleg - The Real Brokerage Inc | LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamir-poleg-1b303429
Real Brokerage leverages agent count growth for soaring revenue |
https://www.housingwire.com/articles/real-brokerage-q4-2024-earnings-call/
Best Real Estate Brokerages in United States | RealTrends Verified
https://www.realtrends.com/ranking/best-real-estate-agents-united-states/brokerages-by-volume/?__hstc=44321979.3ad0991f82af19ed035ab5958380bad3.1737576277468.1746135106667.1746138550650.193&__hssc=44321979.5.1746138550650&__hsfp=3347877758
Enjoy the episode!
The RealTrending podcast features conversations with the brightest minds in real estate. Every Monday, brokerage leaders, top agents, team leaders, and industry experts join us to share their secrets to success, trends, and the lessons they’ve learned. Hosted by Tracey Velt and produced by the HousingWire Content Studio.
Tamir shares how Real is using AI to streamline operations, from an assistant answering thousands of questions per day to developing automatic broker reviews. He also discusses scaling without compromising culture, the evolving agent-client dynamic, and why brokerages must refocus on consumers.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
Real is both a technology and a real estate company.AI enhances operational efficiency and client service.A strong company culture attracts like-minded agents.Leadership will always involve taking responsibility for failures.Automation can replace many tasks traditionally done by agents.AI will play a significant role in decision-making for real estate transactions.
Related to this episode:
The Real Brokerage
https://onereal.com/
Tamir Poleg - The Real Brokerage Inc | LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamir-poleg-1b303429
Real Brokerage leverages agent count growth for soaring revenue |
https://www.housingwire.com/articles/real-brokerage-q4-2024-earnings-call/
Best Real Estate Brokerages in United States | RealTrends Verified
https://www.realtrends.com/ranking/best-real-estate-agents-united-states/brokerages-by-volume/?__hstc=44321979.3ad0991f82af19ed035ab5958380bad3.1737576277468.1746135106667.1746138550650.193&__hssc=44321979.5.1746138550650&__hsfp=3347877758
Enjoy the episode!
The RealTrending podcast features conversations with the brightest minds in real estate. Every Monday, brokerage leaders, top agents, team leaders, and industry experts join us to share their secrets to success, trends, and the lessons they’ve learned. Hosted by Tracey Velt and produced by the HousingWire Content Studio.
Category
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NewsTranscript
00:00If you don't build it, then someone else will.
00:04And that's the lesson we learned, especially about technology and AI-based products and
00:09services for real estate from Tamir Pollack.
00:13He is the CEO of The Real Brokerage.
00:15And we had a deep, deep dive into AI and the transformation that is possible in the real
00:22estate industry because of it.
00:24Some of it is scary.
00:25Some of it is really great.
00:27Efficiency is a big positive.
00:30And you'll really enjoy this conversation.
00:32So thanks for joining.
00:34Tamir, welcome to The Real Trending Podcast.
00:37Thanks, Tracy.
00:38Excited to be here.
00:39Congratulations on your Real Trends verified brokerage ranking of number five by volume
00:46and number six by transaction sides.
00:49Congratulations.
00:50So we've talked more in the last couple of weeks than I think in two years.
00:55So I'm really excited to talk to you again.
00:57And I wanted to dig in a little bit about some of the topics that we talked about for the
01:05interview that I published on HousingWire.
01:08So you had said that Real is really focused on tech innovation.
01:13And I wanted to get into that.
01:14You know, what is that?
01:18And how do you define success with that?
01:24I think that it goes back to why and how we founded the company.
01:29We started the company back in 2014.
01:31And I think that throughout the years, we always asked ourselves, are we a technology company
01:36or are we a real estate brokerage?
01:38And every time we would say, OK, we're a real estate company, but we're also a technology
01:42company or we're a technology company that operates a real estate brokerage.
01:46But I think that technology plays a role in different aspects.
01:50And I'll try to describe a few of them.
01:52So it's no secret that this is a low margin industry and the margins are shrinking for
01:58brokerages, which means that you have to become more and more efficient in your operations.
02:03You need to automate as much as possible.
02:06You need to be able to scale without adding more operating expenses.
02:09You need to leverage the existing human capital, but also the software that you're able to build
02:15in order to automate processes that will eliminate the need for human in the back office.
02:20So I think that from the very beginning, we were trying to focus on, instead of, for
02:26example, marketing, agent marketing, property marketing, we were trying to focus on efficiency,
02:32operating efficiencies.
02:34So we're trying to understand what are those tasks that are being handled by humans in the
02:38back office of a brokerage and how can we replace those humans with software?
02:43So I'll give you just a couple of examples.
02:44A year and a half ago, we launched Leo, which is our AI assistant for agents.
02:51Leo currently answers 2,000 agent questions a day.
02:54So think about how many humans we would need in order to answer 2,000 agent questions.
02:58So that's number one.
03:00And this makes us extremely efficient.
03:02And we measure efficiency by the number of employees to or full-time employees to agents.
03:08And that ratio is the best in the industry.
03:11And that is due to the fact that we are able to automate through software.
03:15So that's number one.
03:16Number two, another thing that we just recently launched is automated broker view.
03:21So as you know, that brokers have to review every file that agents sign with their clients.
03:26And in order to approve a file for payment, we need to verify that we have all of the documents
03:31in place.
03:32Everything is signed.
03:33All of the paragraphs are filled in.
03:34All of the boxes are checked.
03:36And typically, humans are doing it.
03:38And now we created an AI tool that knows how to look and read documents and immediately
03:43provide feedback to the agents saying, hey, you're missing a signature on page 8, and you're
03:48missing the late paint disclosure.
03:50So instead of a human reading through hundreds or thousands of documents every month, we now
03:57have AI doing that.
03:58So what I'm trying to say is that AI is instrumental in our ability to continue and grow profitably
04:05and scale without adding operating expenses.
04:09At the same time, just 10 minutes ago, our tech team gave me a demo of what our AI is doing
04:18for clients.
04:18And this is a project that we've been working on.
04:21They stitched my voice.
04:22So they trained AI on my voice.
04:25And they recorded a conversation between a client that's looking for a two-bedroom home.
04:32And that client was talking to me.
04:35It was my AI.
04:36But it sounded like me.
04:38It had the same accent, the same way that I'm speaking.
04:41And it actually had a conversation with the client.
04:43So what we will be rolling out in a couple of months is an AI tool for agents that will
04:48enable them to switch it on and have conversations with their clients, trying to understand or
04:53better understand what they're looking for, what kind of homes they're interested in, what
04:57is important to them, what their financial situation is, collect all of the information
05:01that is required in order to jumpstart that process of finding homes.
05:06And then later on, also be there 24-7 in order to provide updates and just improve the
05:13level of service that our agents are able to provide to their clients.
05:16And again, it will feel and sound as if it's the actual agent that is speaking to them.
05:22Obviously, there will be a disclaimer.
05:23And we will tell them that this is not the agent.
05:25This is the agent's AI.
05:26But we want to get to a point in which within a couple of quarters, our agents can have voice
05:35conversations and also video conversations speaking to their clients without them actually
05:40needing to allocate the time to do so.
05:43So there will be detractors to that because real estate is a relationship business.
05:50So what do you have to say to people who are probably competitors?
05:56Who say, well, this is a relationship business.
05:59We don't want AI talking to our clients.
06:02Oh, 100%.
06:03This is a relationship business.
06:05But at the same time, we have to understand that AI is probably bigger than all of us anticipate.
06:12And AI will change industries and AI will eliminate a lot of jobs.
06:17So it's not about whether Rio will be using or not using AI.
06:23I think that AI is a bigger threat to our industry.
06:27And unless we, as the brokerage industry, and I urge all of my peers and the CEOs in the space
06:32to double down on AI, unless we invest in AI in order to provide the tools for our agents
06:38to provide a better service to their clients, somebody else from the outside will be leveraging
06:43AI and will end up probably eliminating all of us.
06:46So I think that it's not about, you know, this is a personal business and based on relationships,
06:54it will continue to be so.
06:57But at the same time, you also have to try and break down what are those tasks that agents perform
07:03for their clients.
07:04And we came up with a list of 200 or 250 tasks that agents perform for buyers, for example.
07:10And we realized that about 90% of them can be automated or replaced by or enhanced by AI.
07:17So it's not about real or not real.
07:19It's about what consumers expect.
07:22And consumers expect you to be 24-7 on.
07:25They want immediate answers.
07:27They want very knowledgeable answers.
07:29They want a lot of information.
07:31And sometimes an individual cannot get to that level of service.
07:37Or I'll put it differently, an individual can be enhanced using AI in a way that is not
07:45scalable just based on the human component.
07:47So if anyone is kind of second-guessing what we're trying to do, we'll probably let the future
07:53decide.
07:55Yeah, absolutely.
07:56I mean, I think there's a lot of confusion around AI in the brokerage industry.
08:01And with agents, they don't understand the true capabilities of it.
08:06And they're using it maybe to write a listing description.
08:11Or what are they missing?
08:16I think that what's encouraging is that more and more agents are using AI.
08:20And yes, it starts with very basic tasks.
08:23Like, please help me prepare a listing presentation.
08:27Or please help me draft an email response to that client.
08:30But those are just the first steps to maybe more widespread use of AI.
08:37I think that we cannot expect agents to build the AI technology that they need.
08:44This is on the brokerages.
08:45We have the resources or we need to be the ones that provide them with those tools.
08:49Because sometimes they don't have the resources or they don't really know what they're missing
08:54or what they need to build.
08:56So, you know, as a company that allocates tens of millions of dollars a year into R&D,
09:01and a lot of that is into AI research, I think that it's our job to equip our agents with
09:08that competitive advantage that is AI-based.
09:12But I was on a panel over the weekend in a conference, and agents asked me,
09:20what are we supposed to do now with AI?
09:23And I told that agent that as a first step, you have to train AI on who you are.
09:30So get your AI to know you.
09:34It doesn't matter which kind of AI tool you're using.
09:37Let's say you're using ChatGPT.
09:39Just start conversations with ChatGPT.
09:43It will help ChatGPT understand who you are, what you're doing, where you're coming from,
09:51what you're interested in.
09:53I have a friend who recently started dating a new girlfriend.
09:58And every time they had an argument or a misunderstanding or something was going wrong,
10:04he would go to ChatGPT and he would actually tell ChatGPT what was going on.
10:10And within a couple of weeks, ChatGPT was becoming so knowledgeable about their relationships and why is she reacting in a certain way and why did he tell her what he told her.
10:20And ChatGPT was actually able to analyze their relationship much better than each of them was able to.
10:26So right now, most of his responses to his girlfriend are coming from ChatGPT.
10:31What I'm trying to say is that there could be a point in time in the future where AI will actually be making the decisions for buyers and sellers on what to buy or how to sell or for how much to sell.
10:43And it could very well be that the buyer's AI will be making decisions with the seller's AI and the human component will be just there to create trust and make sure that the transaction moves along.
10:58But I think that it's not far-fetched to think that within 10 years, my AI will be talking to your AI.
11:05Or I'll put it differently, in a year from now, I bet you that this conversation can be done without me being physically present here.
11:15It will be my AI talking to you.
11:16You wouldn't feel a difference.
11:18It will provide the same answers.
11:19It will look like me.
11:20It will talk like me with the hands and all of that.
11:23So it's not 10 or 20 years out.
11:26We're talking about quarters.
11:28That's how rapid this thing is moving.
11:30Am I talking to your AI right now?
11:32No, no, now it's me, but you can never know.
11:37So how do you think your tech stack is future-proofing your brokerage for maybe the next generation of homebuyers and agents?
11:50Again, I think that if we don't create a competitive advantage for agents, somebody else will be coming from outside of the industry.
11:58And we've seen some examples of that happening in the past of companies that came from the outside and thought that with technology they can eliminate the agents.
12:07Luckily, most of them failed.
12:10Some of them are still alive, but they're not really meaningful.
12:12I think that there is a chance that in the future something like this will happen.
12:16So first of all, this is kind of a defensive move, making sure that we have what it takes in order to fight with any external force that will be coming in and trying to take away our agents' businesses and our business.
12:29Second, I think that when we're talking about our agents and when I'm thinking about my kids and the point in time in which they will be coming into the industry wishing to buy their first home,
12:40they will probably be expecting a different kind of service and a different kind of experience than what the industry is providing them at the moment.
12:46And we want to be that company that really changed the way people buy and sell homes using technology and primarily using AI in order for my kids to have the kind of experience that they will be expecting in 5, 10, 20 years from now.
13:01So, again, it's a competitive advantage and at the same time ensuring the longevity of our agents' businesses and our business as a brokerage.
13:08Yeah, I think it's a huge strategic move, honestly.
13:13I don't know that a lot of brokers are, you know, they're dabbling in AI, but I feel like you're much deeper into it than some of them.
13:24And it's interesting, yeah.
13:26A hundred percent.
13:27I think that within two weeks I'll probably be able to provide you a phone number that you can call and actually have a conversation with me and it wouldn't be me.
13:35And I think that at that point it will be much more tangible than it is at the moment.
13:39Yeah, yeah, definitely.
13:40And by the way, maybe another example.
13:45You know, as a public company, we have our earnings call every quarter.
13:49The upcoming earnings call on, I think it's May 8th, there's a scripted part before the Q&A part.
13:59And that part, my part at least, will be read by my AI.
14:04It's not going to be me who's going to read it.
14:06And I bet you that nobody is going to notice that this is actually not me.
14:09At the end, we will actually say that.
14:11That wasn't me.
14:12But, yeah, as you said, you can no longer trust whether it's a human in front of you or their AI.
14:19Yeah, I've seen that, you know, just on social media with AI, you know, selling products from well-known people that they come out and say, I did not back that product.
14:34That's totally fake.
14:35That's an AI-generated, you know, image of me.
14:38I don't back that product at all.
14:40So it's interesting how people are already using it.
14:43You know what?
14:44That's an interesting point.
14:45A couple of months ago, my brother, who is an advisor to some very large real estate companies on housing innovation, he asked me what we're doing with AI.
14:53And I described to him everything.
14:54And he said, you know, it's interesting because we might be at a situation within a couple of years where the people that are selling real estate are not the same people that are selling real estate at the moment.
15:04And I asked him what he meant.
15:06And he said, you know, let's take Gary V, for example.
15:09He's an influencer.
15:10He has massive following.
15:11People trust him.
15:12People know that he's business savvy.
15:15Imagine that Gary V had an AI tool that would enable him to service homebuyers without him actually spending time.
15:24So, you know, taking them throughout the process, he would figure out a way to actually open the doors and show the homes to them.
15:32But let's think or let's assume that Gary V had a tool that was able to cater to thousands, hundreds of thousands of homebuyers at the same time.
15:42Why wouldn't people buy homes from Gary V?
15:44And that's interesting because I think that AI truly has the potential of changing the profile of the people that are actually selling real estate at the moment.
15:56It would go from, you know, real estate professionals to maybe more of influencers.
16:03So it would be interesting to follow.
16:05Yeah, I'm all in on this.
16:08I want to see what happens.
16:09It'll be really interesting.
16:10I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your culture because you kind of cited autonomy, upside and culture as the key drivers of agent recruitment, aside from the efficiencies of technology on the brokerage side.
16:25So how do you intentionally scale a strong culture across thousands of agents and in a virtual mode?
16:33You do not compromise and you always do the right thing.
16:41This is a question that came up when we had a thousand agents and then two thousand and then five thousand and ten thousand.
16:47I think that if you build the right human foundations to any organization, that foundation will end up attracting like minded people.
16:55So I always give the example of I'm Israeli and if you stand in line in Israel, it doesn't really look like a line.
17:04It looks like a bunch of people that are trying to get ahead and get to the head of the line with no respect to everybody else.
17:12If you stand in line in the U.S., it's a clear line and everybody respects everybody's face.
17:17But if an Israeli traveled to the U.S. and they would stand in line, they would stand in line like everybody else.
17:24So what I'm trying to say is that if you create the right culture and you make people understand what's expected from them, they will probably behave and react the way you expect them to.
17:38So if you have enough people building the right foundations, even if every now and then there will be a bad apple coming in and trying to change things out, they will end up either being pushed out or just changing their way.
17:57So I think that culture is something that we focused on from the beginning.
18:02We didn't cut any corner corners. We did not jeopardize culture in order to have faster growth, even though we did have opportunities to bring in people that could bring a lot of agents with them.
18:13But we didn't think that they were the right fit.
18:16And you have to think very long term about about growth and and building your organization.
18:22And and this ends up in making the right decisions.
18:26Yeah, absolutely. So you have like an equity and rev share model.
18:31Well, so tell me, how does that how do you evolve those programs to stay competitive?
18:38Well, those programs are competitive from day one, just because of the fact that not too many other brokerages have rev share and equity offerings.
18:48It's not easy to maintain those.
18:51I can tell you that. And maybe this is the reason why not too many brokerages have them.
18:54And also, it's not that easy to give back so much to the agents.
19:01As we said, this is a low margin business.
19:03And and unless you're extremely, extremely efficient, you don't have enough to give back.
19:08So we started doing revenue share in 2020.
19:14We started our initial equity program.
19:16I think it was back in 2017.
19:18We took the company public in 2020 just to make that equity publicly traded and a little bit more accessible.
19:26Every now and then we do some tweaks to our rev share model and equity program.
19:32But at the end of the day, I think that holistically or philosophically, agents come first in this company and we want as many agents as possible to be owners in this thing that we're building together.
19:48And it's only right that that we have an equity program in place.
19:51So there was never any discussion about, you know, whether this is working or not working or should we or shouldn't we do it?
19:58I would say that currently agents are the largest shareholders in the company as a whole.
20:05And I expect that to grow over time.
20:07And I'm actually happy to see that happen.
20:10That's great.
20:12So I want to talk a little bit about kind of the mind of a leader.
20:15Sure. So talk to me about maybe your greatest leadership fail that you failed forward.
20:23Oh, I fail all the time.
20:29You know, everything that happens in the company ultimately is my responsibility.
20:36So if we don't do well in a certain quarter, it's on me.
20:40If we have to end up playing off people, it's on me.
20:43In the past, we laid off almost everybody twice in 2017 and 2018.
20:50And I think that that was kind of those were two moments where I felt the failure the hardest,
20:57just because you're looking in the eyes of people who believed in you, who put their faith in you, who trusted you, who left their previous jobs,
21:04people that have families that are dependent on you for their livelihood.
21:08And you have to tell them that you failed and you don't have money to pay them and you have to terminate their employment.
21:15So those were very difficult moments for me.
21:17I think that the most difficult moments.
21:20In addition to that, at the same time, in 2018, it was we were trying to raise money.
21:28And we were very close to raising money from a very large fund that, by the way, later on, did invest in us a few years later.
21:34But I came to the final meeting with the investment committee.
21:38I had to do a decent job because everybody was sold out already.
21:41I just had to show up and not make any mistakes.
21:43And I just didn't do well at all.
21:48I blew it and they ended up not investing.
21:53And the company had suffered serious financial consequences because of that.
21:59So what I'm trying to say is that I have a lot of failure moments.
22:04But luckily, I'm also taking some right decisions every now and then.
22:07And we're doing well for the moment.
22:10Yeah.
22:11Well, that's being an entrepreneur, right?
22:13I mean, you're going to fail.
22:15It's really learning from those failures and taking them to turn them into opportunities that is what it's all about, right?
22:24Yeah, correct.
22:26Yeah.
22:26So my final question is just how we talked a little bit about how real estate companies have to be more, you know, their agent first.
22:37But there's a lot of focus on the consumer now, too, that maybe brokerages didn't focus on before.
22:46They were solely focused on agents.
22:49So talk to me a little bit about that shift and what it means for brokerage in general and how you see that, you know, trend impacting the industry.
23:00I think that brokerages have been focused on agents for the past 10 or 20 years just because of the fierce competition that exists in the industry.
23:09And we lost sight of the consumer because at the end of the day, brokerages exist because they're in place in order to serve consumers.
23:17That's the ultimate goal.
23:20So I think that the fact that there is more and more chatter about consumer and what's best for consumer is actually good long term.
23:30I think that the reasons why that discussion started is because of certain lawsuits that maybe were not beneficial for the industry.
23:39But I think that long term focus on consumer is something that we should be blessing.
23:45I also think that everyone who is speaking at the moment or most of the people that are speaking and taking a stance when it comes to consumer facing priorities are doing that out of position.
24:00And I would be happy to see brokerages focused on true consumer innovation and true consumer experience because right now we're dealing with things that are still within the realm of brokerage competition of, you know, this company is doing this and this company disagrees because it threatens them a little bit.
24:21So it's still about the brokerages, even though that the consumer is a part of the discussion, I don't see enough focus on what do consumers truly want and how can we allocate resources to provide consumers what they want.
24:36It's still very much around brokerages, unfortunately.
24:39What's next for real?
24:40What should we be looking for next?
24:42I think that we're heads down executing.
24:45We don't really care about the I mean, we do care about the market environment because our agents are affected, but we're trying to to write our own story and continue to build and attract great agents to the company.
25:00And the number one thing that we do is constantly try to build value for for agents.
25:05And we believe that if we build sufficient value, then more and more agents will be attracted to that value.
25:09So for us, it's just finding ways to deliver more and more value to agents and to their clients.
25:15And with a lot of innovation involved.
25:18Yeah, absolutely.
25:19Well, I look forward to seeing you in person at the gathering in June where we dig into some of some of this and more in our fireside chat.
25:29So thanks, Tamir, so much for joining me.
25:31Thanks, Tracy.
25:32Thanks, Tracy.