Why Most Real Estate Teams Waste Money on Big Mailing Lists with Dan Gandee

Q: How is Dan’s team using AI differently from everyone else?

A: Dan’s background is IDX websites, marketing agencies, and luxury construction, and his team at the Operative Group in Oregon — 174 closings and counting this year — treats AI as an operating system, not a pile of task-based tricks. While most people are piecing together single-use agentic tools, Dan and his business partner Ed build at the system level: operational consistency, better auditing, and replacing entire software categories. His argument is that anybody running a real estate team today has to use AI to be efficient.

Q: What did Dan build for direct mail, and is it making money?

A: Yes — the process went live six to nine months ago, and a property closed the day of the interview for a $15,000 commission on maybe $1,000 to $2,000 of mailers. The system circle-prospects the same asset class they sell: they pull owners around their last five to seven duplex sales from the title company, then run the list through an AI scrub — remove active listings, trusts, and municipal entities, DNC the whole list so they can call behind the mail, scrub against the litigator list, de-dupe, and separate site from mailing addresses. The offer is a free portfolio audit plus introductions to their five key referral partners, and when an investor texts the word audit from the QR code, Dan runs their numbers through AI and mails back a physical audit. What used to be a four-to-five-hour project now takes about 45 minutes.

Q: Why does Dan insist on niching the mail list down?

A: Because hyper-targeted beats big. His rule is to understand your ideal client and niche the list down further and further — you can send to batches of 50 to 100 addresses and still crush, versus circle prospecting an entire neighborhood of 3,000. The follow-up call is easy when the list is that tight: did you get our letter, are you open to an audit, when’s the last time a property manager audited your portfolio — do you even have one? They also track every campaign by dropping the mailer invoice back into the AI project, which builds a spreadsheet of pieces sent, cost per piece, and ROI on any callback.

Q: Has the system produced deals for Dan’s own portfolio?

A: It has — 44 units locally, including two mobile home parks, though they’re picky about the buy box. Rather than wholesaling, Dan passes the deal to a value-add buyer: the off-market seller pays Dan 1 or 2% instead of the 4 or 5% a traditional flip-style buyer would need, the buyer doesn’t come out of pocket, and then resells in one to two years for 4 or 5% — which in their market is actually more than the property’s yield. He hasn’t heard of anyone else running that niche.

Q: What is Ed’s 8 AM CRM audit bot?

A: John Cheplak’s advice is to audit your CRM for an hour every day, and Ed turned that into an agentic agent. Every morning at 8 AM, by lead source, it posts to Slack — transparently, where everyone sees it — each agent’s name, the people they need to talk to, any lead still sitting in lead status, anyone without a task set, and anyone without a call or text logged. What used to be a manual weekly audit before one-on-ones is now daily and automatic.

Q: What’s Dan’s team doing with AI phone calls?

A: They just started testing AI calling this week on a reactivated Twilio account. The call opens by identifying itself as an AI agent for Dan’s office, confirms the connection, and asks how serious the person is about buying or selling — screening hand-raisers before a warm handoff to a real agent. The point is precision, not volume: blasting an entire list burns it, annoys people, and gets expensive. Suneet’s parallel play is an email agent he calls The Mailman that tags the right leads daily, sends the right emails, then finds non-openers, rewrites the subject and copy, and resends.

Q: What is Reoperative AI, and why did they build it?

A: It’s their custom AI agentic operating system, and Dan says they honestly don’t care if they ever sell it — they built it to solve three problems: growth, coordinating a bunch of VAs, and getting the listing manager and transaction coordinator to work together without a generic project management tool. It blueprints the entire listing process from intake through SkySlope, comps, and photography, then handles contract-to-close with contract parsing and automatic Google Calendar deadlines — things Real Broker’s native tools didn’t do. They eventually canceled Asana and Monday entirely, and the platform now serves the listing manager, TC, and marketing manager seats with a team-leader dashboard on top.

Q: Why did they stop selling it to agents?

A: Because agents wouldn’t adopt it. So they reverse-engineered the product: now only the team leader, operations manager, transaction coordinator, and listing manager log in — three or four seats instead of an entire agent roster — which lets them raise the price and stop worrying about seat count. They’re also building custom versions for a roofing company and a commodities brand to learn what works across industries, and their headcount tells the story: they went from 10 to 14 VAs down to three people — an ISA, a listing manager VA, and one operations hire — because everything else can be built agentically.

Q: What’s the HomeLight example of a problem worth automating?

A: When a HomeLight lead hits Follow Up Boss, it can’t be assigned directly, so an agent posts “Mark B” in the Slack channel, and Dan has to hunt through FUB for Mark B — who might be Mark Buffington, or just “Mark” — grab the email, paste it in, and assign the lead. It happens three or four times a day, which sounds like nothing until you realize it’s 30 minutes a week. Dan’s point: bring problems like that to an AI builder, and a bot can log into HomeLight, find the lead, and assign it to the agent named in Slack automatically.

Q: Where should a team leader start with AI?

A: Dan’s starting move is a single Google Doc with two lists: every manual task and piece of busy work you do, and every strategic milestone you want to hit this quarter — your EOS rocks. Load the whole thing into Claude, ChatGPT, or Perplexity as your first assignment: here’s who I am, here are the tasks I want to automate, here’s my quarterly plan and my problems — give me a step-by-step protocol to remove them, systematize, and build scalability. Where people go wrong, he says, is going task by task instead of handing over the entire outline of how to become more efficient.

Dan: [00:00:00] that whole process, which we implemented about six to nine months ago, I have a property closing today.

Dan: It’s a $15,000 commission check. I’ve probably invested a total of maybe one to two grand in mailers 

Suneet: All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Reside Platform Podcast. I am your host today, Suneet Agarwal, and this one is gonna be fun. So I’m glad that everybody’s here. I’m glad that people are listening, and I’m glad that you’re here, Dan, ’cause I think we’ve been trying to schedule this for how fucking long, dude?

Dan: This is my second appearance on… w- w- we were on, like- 

Suneet: Yes, it is your second appearance. 

Dan: Yeah. For sure. 

Suneet: But I think we’ve been trying to schedule this for three months because you and I had, rapped a little bit about some of the stuff that you’re doing with AI [00:01:00] on your real estate team. So why don’t you just drop the one-minute bio just so people have context?

Dan: Yeah. So we’re up here in Oregon. We own the Operative Group. my name’s Dan Gandy, principal broker with Real. we run a top 10 real estate team. We’re at 174 transactions closed this year, as of today. On the road to 200. and so… Thank you. Thank you. I remember when we first talked, we were at, like, 80, so we’re, we’re well over doubled it.

Dan: So, but quick Cliff Note version, background in IDX websites and marketing agencies for real estate agents, I did that for seven years. Before that, design build construction in the luxury sector in the Silicon Valley. before that, a few years working in real estate operations for Brett Jennings.

Dan: Shout out 

Suneet: to Brett. Yeah. I 

Dan: haven’t talked 

Suneet: to him in a minute. Shout out 

Dan: to Brett. It’s been a while for me. He was actually on one of my podcasts, like, two or three years ago, [00:02:00] but I need to reach out to him. yeah. but it really back, my, I have a bachelor’s degree in marketing and advertising, and I’ve been just kinda on the…

Dan: Me and Suneet and my business partner, Ed, are just really n- we’re just nerd out on the tech stuff all the time. How can we be in, yeah, efficient, have op- operational, consistency, au- better auditing. And so we’re just doing a lot of fun things with AI, but we’ve been doing it at a, at a, from an operating system level.

Dan: and I think a lot of people are piecing together a lot of good task-based AI agentic things. So we’ll run into what we’re doing. And, anybody out there that just wants to run a real estate team and be more efficient, you have to use AI these days. So that’s why we’re here. 

Suneet: I mean, yeah, like, so wha- I think what had happened is of all the people that we coach and I talk to every day, and I [00:03:00] counted, it’s a lot, dude.

Suneet: I’m, I’m doing, like, 40, 50 calls a week, dude. Okay. Anyways, It’s a lot. is you guys were some of the first to show me something that I was all, “Oh, this is worth talking about.” ‘Cause back then, it wasn’t even that long ago, is everybody’s vibe coding. And I’m all, “Bro, get out of here with your, with your little app that you made.”

Suneet: right? So even when I got a message from you guys, I was all, “Look,” I was all, “I totally love you guys and I wanna help you out. So let me… So if you vibe coded some app, like maybe we should talk, but you didn’t.” good. I can’t wait to get, to get into that. But before that, let’s talk a little bit about AI and marketing.

Suneet: because we were talking offline and decided to record. So I wanna share what I did with you, okay? And with everybody listening, is, a lot of my opportunity and everything [00:04:00] I have came from organic social media. I’ve been hammering away at it since my second day as a realtor, right? Even prior, like when I, when I had the, when I had the clubs, we were always posting on the boards.

Suneet: Even MySpace, I was posting about real estate on MySpace. So I learned that mostly ’cause it was free. Was I good? I don’t know. Am I good? I don’t know. and What I noticed is across all my main platforms is I was growing… Like, my Facebook grows awesome, but everything else, TikTok’s going pretty awesome too.

Suneet: Instagram’s kind of flat, but I still wanna grow more, and I wanna grow more than what those, than what those things are doing. So I went in and I made, I think, five new social media brands. Suneet.founder, Suneet.value, Suneet.pod, Suneet.thecut, Suneet I don’t know. I don’t even [00:05:00] know the names, right? Claude wrote the names, right?

Suneet: And then we went in and opened up all these accounts, wrote all new bios, and every one of those brands got a Facebook page, an Instagram page, a TikTok page, and a YouTube page. Now I’ve been saving… I probably have thousands of posts and videos that we’ve put out over the last, since before COVID. I have all these videos saved.

Suneet: I’ve been making that, long form, short form content for that long. So I have them all inside of Monday. So I hooked up Grok Bot to it. I have my Hermes agents. They’re working awesome. I love the Hermes agents, but I set up Grok Bot when I was laying on the couch watching Bluey with my kids, right?

Suneet: And I said, “Hey, here’s all this content, years of content. Here’s all these pages.” I hooked them all through Metricool, which is a social media scheduler. However, GoHighLevel could do it fine. Hooked them up through [00:06:00] Metricool, maxed out my Metricool account and said, “Change all the content a little bit.

Suneet: Change the copy w- with the post, by 20, 30%, and let’s schedule them out on something that makes sense.” Dude, so I started it on the 1st, and I’ve got, like, 50,000, 60,000 views. With old ass content

And the deviation is what is allowing that engagement to happen because it’s not the same thing getting posted on

Suneet: And it’s been a while. and I haven’t logged into the accounts once. I’m not even following the damn accounts 

Dan: Sounds dangerous.

Suneet: Yeah, so right? Like, h- you know how that took me two hours, and that’s a way, for marketing. What is something cool… I have something else I wanna share with you, but I wanna hear something cool that you’ve done with marketing with AI. Out- o- ’cause I know you’re in ops, but I wanna hear on the marketing side.

Dan: Yeah. On [00:07:00] the marketing side, so direct mail, how can we make a direct… ‘Cause direct mail is so ingrained into- 

Suneet: Dude, this is what I wanted to hear about. Yes, good. O- okay. 

Dan: Yeah, so what we’re doing for direct mail is basically I mapped out, all right, what are the four type of campaigns that we could do, not for our agents.

Dan: Our agents can do it and have access to it, but what could we do to streamline this? So first thing I did is, like, how do I circle prospect the same type of asset class that we’re selling? So we sell a lot of investment properties, so what did I do, is I just looked at all the last five, six, seven duplexes that we sold in different areas.

Dan: And we basically, there was one manual thing we needed to do, is we’d reach out to our title company, ’cause we can pull that data from different sources, but our title company seems to have the best data. So- 

Suneet: For 

Dan: sure … I just send out a mass email- Far the best 

Suneet: cost, right? 

Dan: It’s free. Free 99. Yeah, exactly. 

Suneet: So- Exactly.

Dan: So what we did is we pulled all these lists, and then I was like, “Okay, now we need [00:08:00] to do the de- the de-scrubbing process.” And I, what’s interesting about this is flashback when I used to work for Brett, I used to have to send this stuff out to a guy in Oregon, before I even lived in Oregon, and he would do the scrubbing, and it would take him, like, two weeks to get stuff back to us.

Dan: So now I throw it into our, into our AI. you can do it in ChatGPT, OpenAI, whatever. First thing I wanna do is I- 

Suneet: The tool is irrelevant, yeah. 

Dan: Tool is irrelevant. I wanna scrub this list, and I wanna remove any active listings. That’s the first thing. 

Suneet: That’s a easy filter. They can look on Zillow.

Suneet: Sure. 

Dan: Yep. Second filter, remove all trusts, any, and a- and any, municipal entities, because they’re never going to sell their property. I- if so, they’re gonna have the agent that’s connected to them. So basically, that’s the first thing we do, is scrub and clean the list, phase one. Phase two, drop it into DNC Project, and DNC the entire list, because we want to [00:09:00] call behind it once we send the direct mail.

Dan: Then third thing we wanted to do is, scrub it against the litigator list. Fourth thing we wanna do is- 

Suneet: Dude, good one. That’s a good one, dude. 

Dan: Fourth thing we wanna do is look for… We wanna de-dupe. 

Suneet: Yes. 

Dan: So any, any duplicate owners. Then I wanna remove, I wanna remove site address and move it to a different tab.

Dan: So essentially I’ve cleaned up this now, first name, last name, phone number and email address. So we’ve really- appended the entire list 

Suneet: Address. Address 

Dan: Address. Right. Yeah. Site address versus, site address versus mailing address. And then from there, we can drop that into an AI automation for direct mail letters, direct mail postcards.

Dan: So we’re doing circle prospecting around our investment properties that we sell to only non-owner occupied absentee owners. And then I took it, two steps [00:10:00] forward. It’s like, okay, well then how can … once these lists go out, I wanna know. So what we can do is we can drop the invoice from the direct mail company back into the same project on AI, and essentially track, create a spreadsheet on how many mailers were sent, and then provide a return on investment if we do get a call back and this appointment set appointment.

Dan: So what we’re trying to do is track every campaign based upon how many, how many price per piece has been sent and what our RI- ROI is. That is just one example of what we’re doing. But- The complexity to it in all of this is then we’re dropping that list into a 

Suneet: dialer. 

Dan: And then essentially cold calling those lists, not with AI yet.

Dan: We’re actually using humans, people that actually can talk. And what we’re doing is we’re offering them a [00:11:00] portfolio audit. Mm. We’re offering them a list to our five y- 

Suneet: Smart. Portfolio audit, bro. Smart. Listen to that. Fuck, I like that too. 

Dan: And then a list to our five k- five key referral partners, which is gonna be our financial advisor that can do 1031 and reversed exchanges into REITs or, 721s.

Dan: we’re, are… Also, I’m the president of the Rental Owners Association, so we’re like, “Hey, if you need forms or you want subscription to forms, like, reach out. This is this company.” And so what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to hit them with, can we give them an audit, but also can we give them all this value in the people that we use in our ecosystem?

Dan: ‘Cause I think that’s the, the most important thing that an investor’s looking for. and then when they raise their hand, one just came in. They, the QR code came… I get a text that says, “Audit.” What do I do? I start texting with the lead, “Hey, give me your address. What are the rents? What are the utilities that you pay?”

Dan: I throw it back into chat and [00:12:00] basically do a portfolio audit, and then we snail mail that portfolio audit back out to the investor in a, in a manila v- So there is some manual heavy lifting, but the warmer leads, they’ve got something and they’ve received something. So essentially, what we’re trying to do is automate this process as much as possible.

Dan: Every investment property that’s sold, whether it’s 

Suneet: Airbnb, short-term, long-term rental, 

Dan: development, looking for land. But we do it on the reverse side. I won’t go through the whole entire process, but if I get an investor that calls me and says, “Hey, I wanna buy a house w- or buy a lot with this,” what I do, I just start the entire process over and do a, I have a buyer letter in the exact same process using AI to basically speed up the process 100%.

Suneet: Dude, so good So good. 

Dan: it’s taking like a four to five hour thing and turning it into like 45 minutes. 

Suneet: Yeah. 

Dan: Writing the letter should be the l- And I, we use AI to write the letter or assist with [00:13:00] the letter, but as long as you have the good call to, menu of call to actions and you have what you’re gonna give, the high value content, then writing the letter should be the longest portion of that entire exercise.

Suneet: Totally. Yeah, dude. That’s a good example of something sick. And is that making you money? 

Dan: Oh, yeah. I, I clo- today- 

Suneet: Listen to that. For everyone who was only listening and didn’t see, right now Dan is, big old smile on his face. So yes, go ahead. 

Dan: Th- that whole process, which we implemented about six to nine months ago, I have a property closing today.

Dan: It’s a $15,000 commission check. I’ve probably invested a total of maybe one to two grand in mailers 

Suneet: The super targeted lists Super. 

Dan: Yep. And don’t… There, don’t… The main thing I try to tell everybody when we’re ta- when we’re nerding out on marketing copy, ’cause you can use AI to assist with, “Hey, s- [00:14:00] give me a letter that has Alex Harmozi-type offer.”

Dan: But what I was gonna say in all of this is the most important thing to re- remember is that understanding your ideal client and niching down that list even further and further, you can send it to little batches of 50 to 100 addresses and still crush, versus circle prospecting an entire neighborhood of 3,000 addresses.

Dan: So that’s, that’s really what we’re trying to focus on is… ‘Cause if you wanna call back through that list, “Hey, did you get our letter? We just wanted to be able to see if you were open to an audit. When’s the last time a property manager’s done an audit? Do you even have a property manager?” So we try to really- 

Suneet: So good, dude.

Suneet: You’re dropping bombs right now. So good. have you stumbled across any deals for yourself? 

Dan: We have. We have. w- we have a cl- we have, like, f- 44 [00:15:00] units here locally, two mobile home parks. we’re pretty particular on what we want in the buy box. But, 

Suneet: You could wholesale it or whatever, right, 

Dan: so. We could whole- we could wholesale it, but really what I try to do is just slang it over to anybody who’s gonna do value add and then turn around and sell it, and we make more off the f- 

Dan: I’ll cut the s- off-market seller, pay me 1 or 2%, my buyer doesn’t have to come out of pocket. You would’ve been going, taking it for four or five. And then turn around and resell it in one to two years, you make 4 or 5%. It’s actually more than the yield on the property in most case. 

Suneet: Dude, totally.

Suneet: That’s awesome, dude. 

Dan: Maybe not in your area, but in our area it is. 

Suneet: Well, what a good niche, right? Who else is doing that? 

Dan: There’s no one we’ve heard. 

Suneet: Yeah, me neither. I mean something… Yeah, I love that. For me, again, like something that we’ve, that I’ve been doing which is a win, [00:16:00] instant win, using AI in marketing, is, I had an SEO vendor for four years.

Suneet: I had another person who worked for me who did SEO on different properties, different sites. I was doing three newsletters a week, to the consumer database, and I, I had a great, writer on staff. and I let the SEO writer go, and I let the staff writer go, and I automated all of it Right? hooked up my Sierra website to, GA4 and, Search Console and all this.

Suneet: So for everyone listening, I have a Claude autonomous agent working on my Sierra site and is optimizing it, getting traffic, [00:17:00] right? building pages. I have a Claude autonomous agent, working on the newsletter, sending it out, optimizing it. I have another a- I have another agent working on my other websites because sure, there’s a bunch of slop out there, but there’s also, that’s such a floor.

Suneet: put out more content. 

Dan: Yeah, and I think with websites, with websites too, if you’re like a, if you’re an agent at just a surface level and you’re like, “Hey, how do I start this?” Look, we took our eugenerealestate.com website that was, was at Sierra. We like Sierra. There’s nothing bad to say about Sierra.

Dan: You actually build really great websites and great SEO. But, we moved it over to YLOPO just ’cause of where we were with the domain and the property alerts, and we just plugged in Sora. I think that’s who we’re using now. So like, Sora. And that’s an AI-powered tool that writes articles for you. It’s doing exactly what you’re doing, but it’s just indexing and it show- the coolest thing about that dashboard is, like, [00:18:00] we’re in week eight and we’re starting to rank.

Dan: We get a, we get our first lead yesterday. It’s like, “Where did you find us?” “Search, Google search.” Nine weeks later, which remember how long that would take you in the past with hire- 

Suneet: Oh, dude. Dude, years One year at least, right? That’s the thing. So that’s interesting that you’re dropping content on a YLOPO site, ’cause I also have a YLOPO site.

Dan: Yeah. We create a… they have their SEO ta- or they have their blog ta- the blog that they are doing, and then I just emailed them. I was like, “Hey, can you add a page called Insights?” And then I just plugged in the Soro code into that Insights tab, and it’s dro- it’s just dropping an article every other day.

Suneet: Is it open source? 

Dan: It’s open source. 

Suneet: Soro. [00:19:00] Okay, how do you spell it? 

Dan: Soro. S-O-R-O. 

Suneet: All right. Everyone listening, I am taking a note right now, because I just built it, but if it’s open source, then who cares? 

Dan: Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s open source, ’cause I, when the settings, there was, I’m gonna have to look here, but, You, it does a lot.

Dan: You, I mean, you can But, 

Suneet: I mean, that’s the thing is like… Go ahead. 

Dan: Oh, I was just gonna say, you probably could just give your AI agent the login to the website Oh, 

Suneet: 100%. 

Dan: And let it, let it do its op- 

Suneet: Yes, totally. Grok Bot for logging into stuff. Sure, you could do like a headless like Claude or Hermes agent, but Gro- dude, I set up Grok Bot laying on the couch on my cellphone watching Bluey, bro.

Suneet: Do you have it? Have you played with it yet? 

Dan: Ed, my business partner who’s on the operations side, he’s… Yeah, [00:20:00] he’s… In Follow Up Boss, one of our biggest blind spots is, well, we could all, well, John always says, “Hey, go into your CRM every day and audit for an hour.” And that is by far one of the best advice you could ever give any team owner, operator, or even a broker owner that’s giving out leads.

Dan: But- 

Suneet: Anybody giving out leads … 

Dan: anybody giving out leads. But the biggest thing that Ed has created is using those agentic agents to essentially, by lead source, they literally in our Slack sends out a message every morning to the agents that’s literal- and it, the cool thing about this is, transparent accountability where everybody sees it.

Dan: It will literally say agent’s name, this is the person that you have to talk to, here’s any lead that is still in lead status, here’s anybody who did not have a task set, here’s anybody who doesn’t have a call or text logged, and now it’s becoming… That used to be like a [00:21:00] weekly or whenever we had a one-on-one we’d like do a manual audit.

Dan: It’s every day at 8:00 AM

Dan: So Grok all day long 

Suneet: Yes. Good one. Good one. Good one. ‘

Dan: Cause no matter how many ponds you filter out or you create those smart lists on the left-hand side, it takes you manually to go through them and be like, “Oh, let me look in the last 24 hours.” 

Suneet: Totally. Yeah, good one. I mean, what do you think, about some of these services that companies have been making for lead filtering and lead management now?

Dan: I would never use them, a- and no, no offense. Like, w- we were at Cheplak last year, and I was thinking about signing up, and I was like… I called Ed on the way home, and I was like, “Hey, man, do you think we could just, like, create this ourselves?” And we have a agent on our team that is a, also a programmer. [00:22:00] And, he’s like, “Oh, dude, just give me a couple weeks.

Dan: Let the technology kinda catch up. Tell me what…” And the cool thing about Fub is, like, that API, and they’re allowing people to plug their aftermarket parts into it, 

Suneet: Dude, I have somebody I know who downloaded 77,000 transcripts from Follow Up Boss, from calls, put them in a database, and, like, got so frigging granular with everything about missed deals, about missed follow-ups that somebody else bought somewhere else, and his coaching of his agents, number one.

Suneet: I don’t know how he got all those transcripts. I, I don’t know what he did, right? But, now he got this deadly data. Deadly data. 

Dan: I was gonna say, on the lead f- the lead generation front, too, is if you have, lead sources that [00:23:00] are… every lead comes in and gets a auto property alert. It may have AI texting, AI calling going on now.

Dan: That’s the kinda things we’re testing in different lead buckets. But- 

Suneet: Did you guys do your own AI calling? 

Dan: Yeah. We just started, we just started that this week. we’re in test of what- 

Suneet: What kind of back end did you use on that? 

Dan: It is… Oh, I wish Derek was here. We, we had to get a Twilio account again. We had to reactivate it.

Dan: We had to reactivate our Twilio account. And then, I’ll follow up with you ’cause, he… There was several I sent to him, like screenshots. There’s so many. But our- the best, this is the one thing I was re- remembering he told me yesterday that I wanted to share with you today on this call. We have, we actually are testing, like, a call that goes out that says, literally that says, “Hey, this is an AI, this is an AI agent for Dan Gandy’s office at the Operative Group.

Dan: We just wanted to ensure that we connected [00:24:00] with you immediately. But how serious are you looking to buy or sell?” And what it’s basically doing is it’s basically screening the hand-raisers and then doing a warm handoff right to the agent Yeah. so it’s not just blasting everybody and then next thing like you’re just getting a bunch of people that are not interested.

Dan: If 

Suneet: you blast everybody, you’re just gonna burn your list. If you unveil one of these, oh, 10,000 calls a second things, number one, that now is expensive, right? Number two is you’re just gonna burn your list and piss everybody off. So it has to be… And, and that, and that’s the other thing is like Using AI can create more hand-raisers, right?

Suneet: for example, on my email list for Suneet Agarwal, ’cause that’s me, the… just the guy, the, the coach, the writer, the [00:25:00] whatever I am these days. I email once or twice a week for sure. now I’m going to, maybe two to three times a week for sure. Now I am increasing it to, like, seven times a week.

Suneet: So every day, the autonomous agent, name is The Mailman, goes through my GoHighLevel and tags the leads that should get an email, and it goes through my database of my emails, ’cause I still have, I still take ownership on that part, right? And, sends the right emails to the right people, whether it’s a podcast announcement, like it’ll happen with this episode, and then it’ll go through, it’ll see who all the non-openers were, tag them, rewrite the subject, rewrite the copy, and then send it to them.

Dan: Try again. That’s huge. It’s like your resender strategy. that’s, that’s next level because what… YLOPO, when I was talking to them this [00:26:00] morning, was talking about how they send out that first two or three or four messages, and then whoever does not open, now they’re gonna s- yeah, they’re gonna segment them, right?

Dan: So I think the retargeting, whether it’s email marketing or even ads, who’s receptive and who’s clicking. 

Suneet: Dude, have you hooked up the Meta MCP to any tools to run ads, to run Facebook ads? 

Dan: Derek, Derek has got one or two listings testing right now with us in the back end. 

Suneet: Oh, where he has listing ads out that he had Meta make and see h- the, see how the buyer l- leads do?

Dan: Yeah. W- we haven’t had a good amount of leads come in yet, but we, the retargeting, ’cause we had, like, 35,000. We went and scrubbed our list. We had a database of 50,000. It was interesting. After we scrubbed everything for duplicates and trash, like, it went from 50 to, like, 36,000, 30… We, like, lost 14. But, what I was gonna…

Dan: The [00:27:00] retargeting strategy is really what I was telling him I wanna work on in Q4, is, like, setting up not only, like, s- we have street text retargeting going on, like YLOPO retargeting going on, but what AI can we drop a different ad format, whether it’s video or text retargeting, to kind of connect, connect those loops.

Suneet: the retargeting, I’ve found, is, like- When it’s off a list, I found it to be less successful than when it’s off a website 

Dan: Activity based, yeah 

Suneet: pixel based versus uploaded list based. that’s something that I tested I used to talk about that on stage because I thought it worked super well till I realized that really those people weren’t transacting.

Suneet: They were coming back, but they weren’t transacting. So anyways, that’s something I built all those funnels out of. I thought it was brilliant for that shit. maybe I was. what else is something? So let’s, let’s talk about that, that tool that [00:28:00] you guys have had, because I know people will have some questions, the tool you guys made.

Dan: So we built, we built a platform, an operating, an AI agentic operating system. And what that is in layman’s terms is that we build an operating system. And this, to be very honest, and I keep telling people this, like we could care less if we sell it to a single soul outside of us. We needed to build a, a software.

Dan: we needed to build a platform in which we could organize three things. One, we were growing. Two, we had a bunch of VAs helping us. And then number three was how do we get our transaction coordinator and our listing manager to talk to themselves and not use monday.com? Not that we don’t like monday.com or any type of project management software, but we wanted to basic- make it real estate-eccentric or -centric in terms of what that process is.

Dan: So what is our listing- 

Suneet: Wait, so did you replace Monday? 

Dan: Yeah. We don’t even use a project management software anymore. 

Suneet: Oh my God, bro, that hurts. 

Dan: you’re so much more advanced. We were using Asana. [00:29:00] We had a Monday account. Me and Ed, we canceled both of them. So right now, when a listing, a listing comes in, comes into our listing manager, he’s got a process, and that process is going to go all the way from start to finish, to SkySlope, to, paperwork, and listings, to comps, and get everything in.

Dan: You get all the way to the point where it goes live, now you have photography ordered. So we try to basically blueprint out that entire process and put that into Reoperative AI in terms of that’s the steps. Then once it goes into contract, how do we hand that file off? Well, Reason for Real Broker already had something similar.

Dan: Put in your listing, convert to contract. But the problem is it didn’t have any contract parsing. It didn’t have any… It, it wasn’t setting your Google Calendar events for your deadlines and timelines. And so what we were trying to do is create a listing manager, a transaction coordinator, and then a marketing manager seat so that they could all three work in, under one platform, and the team leader could log in and be like, [00:30:00] “Okay, where are all my listings?

Dan: Where are my transactions? Where are all my agents in terms of their marketing plans?” And so we’re trying to create a recruiting and coaching platform on top of that, but we dismantled it over the last couple weeks, and we plan to put it back together because what we’re trying to do is not make it easier for the agents.

Dan: The problem is we were selling it, and then they were like, “Oh, our agents won’t adopt this.” So we were like, “Okay, let’s reverse engineer this. Let’s only make it so that the team leaders or team owners or the operations manager, the transaction coordinator, and the listing manager, the only three people or four people that’ll log in, not the agents anymore.”

Dan: Yes, we need to increase the price, but the seat count doesn’t matter anymore. So what we’re going with this is that Lofty, Brevity, all of these CRMs were already trying to do this, but the issue is it wasn’t open source in terms of, like, how do you create an agentic operating system for each and every…

Dan: So what we did [00:31:00] is we literally went out to a roofing company and said, “Hey, let us build this for you.” N- now there’s a, there’s another brand,commodities brand. We’re like, “Let us build this for you.” So what we’re trying to do is, yes, we can build it for real estate, but we wanna build it in many different industries and then look at what is effectively working in terms of ranking, building a website and ranking it with 300 pages.

Dan: What type of data do they need? What type of lead gen or what’s their, what’s their call to action pro- process and protocol? So Reoperative AI is still our operating system on our backend, but we wanted to create it to basically de-scale all of these tech stacks that we were paying for, the Slacks, the Mondays, everything that we can do as much as possible to decrease.

Dan: We have less VAs. 

Suneet: Yeah. 

Dan: I only have a… I basically have a ISA. [00:32:00] I have an I- I got rid of my in- my licensed ISA, and now we just have an ISA, a listing manager VA, and then, somebody that helps us basically in operations. Three people ‘Cause everything else can be agentically built. 

Suneet: Crazy, isn’t it? 

Dan: Yeah.

Dan: And that used to be how many VAs? That was like 10, 12, 14. 

Suneet: Totally. Totally. It’s crazy. Dude, it’s crazy. if people wanna find out more about that software, how do they reach out to you? 

Dan: Yeah. They can go to, well, f- they can send us an email, dan@theoperativegroup.com. But Reoperative AI is on Instagram. we have a webs- we have a website.

Dan: we’re doing custom builds. We’re not trying to do it to scale, so we’re trying to work with team owners, broker owners, small teams, large teams, to build it out custom to what they need. and that’s, that’s really, I think, the next level of what is gonna stay, stay sticky for a [00:33:00] long period of time, ’cause there’s- 

Suneet: Yes, the custom SaaS solutions.

Suneet: It’s not building more shit. It’s building the right shit for the right people, custom. That custom build is everything right now. ‘Cause who has time, dude? No one has time to do it. Like, I’m very… My shit is built out, right? But I work nonstop at a gaps and I don’t sleep. So there you go, right? 

Dan: A- and what’s cool about this is, like, y- you can have multiple layered technologies, like Real Broker who has Leo 2.0 that we’re in beta right now testing for the brokerage.

Dan: we’re also, if you’re a real agent, just go to the vendor portal and then look up Reoperative AI. Like, they literally put somebody that has very similar technology in the ecosystem because they know that n- no one’s gonna have a perfect system. 

Suneet: Totally. I mean, dude, like I said, every Reside team leader, as I had you on there as soon as I can, I was, “Oh, [00:34:00] this shit is so good and you’re not gonna build it.”

Suneet: Maybe you are, and if you are, cool. Like, let’s compare notes, right? But I think they’re ne- everyone needs to have a solution. It’s much more than asking ChatGPT to write your listing description now. 

Dan: Yeah. It’s… And even if you just wanna bounce ideas, if you have a very specific problem, it’s problem-based agentic solutions, which is like, look at your business and say, what…

Dan: In a given week, how much time do these problems that keep reoccurring affect your daily efficiency and, and your profitability? And I think- 

Suneet: Oh, bro, 100%. And that’s why I use m- why everything for me is used in Monday, because the AI is connected to all the Mondays, and the AI tells me. 

Dan: And I was gonna say, for example, HomeLight.

Dan: When a HomeLight lead comes into Follow Up Boss, it cannot be [00:35:00] assigned to an agent- So I’m literally driving down the street, like trying… So this is what happens. An agent on my team has to jump in Slack in our HomeLight channel and say, “Mark B.” Then I have to go to Fub and literally find Mark B. Well, sometimes Mark B is Mark Buffington, or it says Mark with no B.

Dan: then I have to say, “Hey, what’s his email address?” Or, and then they have, I have to copy and paste it into Fub and then assign it to the agent. so if, to give you a prime example, that’s the kinda shit that we want people to bring to us because that’s the where you’re gonna be like, “Okay, put a bot into place that when a lead comes in to Slack or into HomeLight, log into HomeLight, find the lead, and assign it to the agent that says this in Slack.”

Suneet: Yeah. Yeah. That’s the perfect example. That’s like a easy job that would, that people are stuck in the weeds doing all day long. 

Dan: Every day, three [00:36:00] times a day, four times a day, which sounds like nothing, but that’s 30 minutes a week. 

Suneet: Oh, dude. I, yes. I’m all… Optimization is my word of 2026, because I’ve been optimi- as my career has changed and my opportunities have scaled, it’s optimization, right?

Suneet: In everything, like what I eat for, what I sleep for, ’cause I actually do sleep, how I work out, optimization, right? 

Dan: I was gonna say one last quick thing is coaching reports, so one-on-one coaching with your agents. I think that there’s the, there’s many different philosophies on how you, what did you talk about on your last call to this call?

Dan: Did they move those rocks? where are they at transaction volume-wise? So what we’re really trying to focus on right now is how do we have the most efficient one-on-one coaching call that I literally can pull the leads up, show what has not been followed up with, look at their Zillow [00:37:00] Preferred, metrics, look at their, follow-up boss points, and then try to aggregate that into a one-page report that I literally don’t have to talk about any of it other than the blind spots and the problems.

Suneet: Yeah. That’s great. Yeah. 

Dan: And I think that- 

Suneet: All, all the notes from the previous meetings. Yeah, 100%. 

Dan: I think that’s, if you really wanna move the needle on how to… Like with us, it wasn’t agent count. It was agent productivity. How do we take our s- our agents that are floating 5 to 12 transactions and get them into 16 to 30?

Dan: And that’s really what I’m trying to focus on for Q4 is automated coaching, strategic AI coaching. 

Suneet: At the same time, you better KFR, dude. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that all sounds good, but also KFR. Let’s not forget. And as a matter of fact, thinking about what you’re doing for listings, what can you [00:38:00] automate for the recruiting?

Suneet: Like, I had Grok Bot create a whole new campaign in GoHighLevel, which if you know me, you know I love GoHighLevel, and the private integrations, they smoke Follow Up Bosses. They’re fucking 100 times better. So it’s all dialed in, going out, and yeah, create hand raisers, create the opportunities, and then segment that list down to create, like, super hand raisers.

Suneet: Somebody opens a email, instantly send them another email. They open that email, wait a day, send them another email, right? those little levers now, before would take some serious work at the back end of something, now it’s a line of text. Maybe four. 

Dan: And I think that’s the, that’s the KFR to roadblock from o- to onboarding.

Dan: Like, I took Tyler Blair’s 86 day. I’ve, like, had all these different operational, like, work throughs and I said, “Okay, [00:39:00] if I bring a brand new agent in, how long is it gonna get through buyer certification, seller certification, marketing?” And really what we’ve tried to do is take a six-month onboarding process and squeeze it into 90 days.

Dan: We’re probably at, like, 45 days now. but a lot, yeah, the, a lot of that was how do we create a hell week that for the new agents, if we’re recruiting for talent and volume, then we’re not gonna bring them through hell week, we’re gonna bring them through a different training path. And a lot of that was AI based, not just ChatGPT create me a training protocol, but also, like, what do we, what are we getting out of the agents that are brand new?

Dan: Like, what do we need to see from them? 

Suneet: Totally. What has proven to be successful, right? And what has not. That’s the thing is what has not Right? ‘Cause usually there’s a, you got a bunch of fucking fluff in there that makes you feel some kinda way. It makes you feel smarter, uploads your… not you, Dan, but [00:40:00] y- the person.

Suneet: So anyways, okay. So, last question. Because number one, if you’re in Oregon and you got a deal, send it to Dan. if you wanna join his real downline, give him a call. If you wanna join his team, hell yeah, call Dan. If you wanna get his software, talk to him more about that, do a custom AI build, call Dan.

Suneet: But, so there’s all your shout-outs ’cause, because yes, you’re doing great shit a- and I wanna give you all the opportunities. but last question is if somebody, for the team leader or the agent or for the human being listening to this episode and wants to get started on their own doing some of this AI work in their business, where would you tell them to start?

Suneet: Oh, that’s a good, 

Dan: I think the most important thing from a most basic level is to write down every manual task that you do on a Google [00:41:00] Doc, every manual task that you do, your busy work, and then on that same document, every strategic milestone that you wanna achieve in that quarter, your EOS, your EOS type of, move the rock.

Dan: and then literally, I don’t care if it’s Perplexity, Claude, Chat, whatever, load that in as your first assignment and say, “Hey, I’m a team leader,” or, “I’m an independent agent. These are the tasks that I want to automate with AI. What’s the best protocol to do? And here is my quarterly plan and the problems I’m dealing with.

Dan: What should I do step by step in order to be able to remove these, and systematize these, and create scalability in my business so I can achieve more time freedom and, and monetary reward?” And I think that’s where agents fuck up, excuse me, my language, but they essentially, they go at, they’re a task-by-task ask versus just give it your entire outline of how to become more efficient.[00:42:00] 

Suneet: Yes. Yes. That’s super good. Everyone listening, that’s exactly where to start. Good. Love that. All right. Well, Dan, thanks for coming on, dude. That was fun. Always fun. We just geeked out. Hardcore. We just geeked out. I know. So, but I mean, dude, like, this is what’s happening. So everyone listening, I hope you enjoyed and got something out of this episode.

Suneet: Make sure to give Dan a shout if you, wanna talk to him more, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Reside Platform Podcast. Peace out.