Vanessa Alfaro, a real estate investor with $50 million assets under management and founder of Venus Capital Partners, shares her profound insights on leveraging AI in real estate. This episode, recorded at the onset of 2024, delves into the transformative impact of AI on property management, acquisitions, and investor relations within commercial real estate and how teams can integrate it to maximize returns.
Key Takeaways:
Listen to Vanessa’s previous episode: 3261 - Disrupting the Real Estate Game with AI
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Transcript
Ash Patel (00:01.45)
Hello, best ever listeners. Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I'm Ash Patel and I'm with today's guest, Vanessa Alfaro Alfaro. Vanessa Alfaro is joining us from Houston, Texas. She and I had a conversation not too long ago. So if you Google Joe Fairless and Vanessa Alfaro Alfaro, their interview will pop up. And it was an amazing conversation about AI and a lot of things going on in real estate. Vanessa Alfaro is the founder of Venus Capital Partners, co-founder of Luna X AI, as well as an entrepreneur, a real estate investor with $50 million of assets under management. And if you're on social media, if you're at all connected to the real estate world, you will know Vanessa Alfaro. She is on a lot of the top stages. She's very well connected and I'm excited to have this conversation with her today. So best ever listeners, thank you again for joining us, Vanessa Alfaro. If you would please give the best ever listeners a little bit more about your background and what you're focused on now.
Vanessa Alfaro (01:00.453)
Thank you so much. I'm excited to talk to you again this year, especially at the beginning of 2024, because many exciting things are happening in real estate and in AI as well. So my name is Vanessa Alfaro Alfaro. I am the founder of Venus Capital Partners, which is a multifamily private equity firm focused on technology and innovation to provide investors with the best opportunities that we can find. We have been doing multifamily, but actually we're open to do more things this year, like office spaces and commercial, which is your field. And plus that I'm also the founder of Luna X AI and some other companies, a production company, I'm also writing a book and I have few things I managed for 15 years. I had two marketing companies, large marketing companies in Latin America, a trade show company, and that's it for now.
Ash Patel (01:56.714)
Vanessa Alfaro, amazing. You know, there's so much to dive into, but one of the things that you are an expert on is real estate and AI. Now there's a sea of AI experts. If you look at Instagram, everybody's an AI expert, right? But you are practically using AI for not only acquisitions, but property management and essentially running your business. So, and again, best ever listeners, you're doing yourself a disservice. If you don't listen to that first interview.
Vanessa Alfaro gave us so many nuggets of advice and practical tips on how to use AI for real estate. But Vanessa Alfaro, 2024, have we peaked out with AI usage? What's going to happen with real estate and AI?
Vanessa Alfaro (02:40.229)
We are still at the, crashing the surface with AI. And 2024 is gonna be a very important year for the implementation of AI in corporations. Last year, I focused when, even when I was talking to you, last year, I was like very basic talking about AI. The basis of what we can do. And I was actually trying to open the eyes to people in business of why it is important to pay attention to this. But now if you allow me, I'm gonna go a little bit deeper. So you're right.
So for people that hasn't watched that episode, please go back and check that out as well. Because these technology, these AI technologies that we're seeing right now, it has never been a technology that has been adapted so fast as this technology. Now, the pace of these technologies is still slow compared to the pace of the technology is advancing. Let me rephrase that. These technologies are advancing really fast. People are adapting these technologies really fast as well, even faster than any other technology, but we can still cash up with the technology because this is advancing so fast.
So in 2023, we saw a lot of things happening, and people has been a little bit overwhelmed. But in 2024, what I believe that we're gonna see is people trying to implement these technologies. Now, if you don't do it in the right way, you're gonna spend so much time and energy, and you're not gonna have a competitive edge.
This is what I think is 2024 is going to focus because on real estate, if we go to real estate, a lot of things are happening. We're still in the middle of a storm. We're still with interest rates. We're still occupancy is going down. Vacancies are going high. So we're going to see a big difference in 2024 in good operators to not so good operators. Cash calls everywhere like I mean, it has been a very hard 2023. People stopped distributions. But in 2024, we're going to see also a difference in between good operators, okay, that are using technology and artificial intelligence and good operators that are not. Because all these technologies are going to be able to help us. Okay. And augment everything that we're doing in our business in a way that other companies are now using it.
I'm not gonna be able to touch it. And I'm gonna go to a specific examples because I know you like a specific examples.
Ash Patel (05:38.923)
That was my next question. Yeah, yeah. If you would give us a few specifics because you're right, it is overwhelming. And for people that haven't gotten started, where do you start?
Vanessa Alfaro (05:56.293)
Oh, well. Um, you have to start with the basic chatbots. Okay. And understand what the capabilities are. Okay. Uh, right now, what people is doing right now is using a chatbot like chatGPT or Claude or Bean or Bar and just playing around with social media. Okay. And what this has created is a lot of content. And usually bad content creation. So that's a low-hanging fruit. People are using that to create social media posts or all these things. We are way past that.
We are creating specific AIs, private versions that we can use customized. We have customized AIs that we can use for our specific unique needs. Okay.
So at this era in our company, what we have is a specific chat bot for the needs that we have. To give you an example, we have created a chat bot for financials that can analyze all the financials or the properties and can give us projections and can save a lot of time for our team to understand how we're meeting the projections or how we're going to forecast what is going with the property, what is going on in a specific area of the asset management. That's a specific chatbot that we have created with our criteria. Okay.
Another example, we have created as well an AI chatbot that is actually a clone of me, okay, that has all my information, my personality, my disc assessment, the way that I talk, it has analyzed all my podcasts and can actually reply and write social medias as I would. So at this level of personalization is that we are going towards 2024.
We have created another chatbot that is specifically for analyze on the right deals. Okay, so we can do a basic and our analysts can do basic underwriting and analysis of market research and see if that deal is actually something that fits in our criteria with this chatbot and it's that conversation back and forth. I personally use it a lot because I don't have time when I have a phone call from the broker or I have a call with my acquisition team, sometimes I don't have time to go over 10 spreadsheets. I just wanna see the bullet point. I wanna see, is this really good? It has what we need in our box or not. So I use this chatbot a lot because I can just tell three or four pieces of information and can analyze the deal, it can give me information about the market, things like that.
Ash Patel (10:47.926)
Vanessa Alfaro, how do you learn all of this about AI? Do you learn it from AI?
Vanessa Alfaro (10:56.077)
Well, you can actually learn from AI, and you can actually create a system that AI can teach you many things. But it has been into technology for a long time, and actually has been studying with the MIT for some time as well. And I've been following this trend for about five to seven years already. Now, AI has been here for a long for a long time, okay. When you use Alexa, that's AI. When you use Siri, that's AI.
But what it was interesting, what it actually got me excited is when ChatGPT came out and all of these apps, okay, that are actually sometimes based on ChatGPT OpenAI, make this technology available for everybody, okay, for small companies for small corporations. So now this is not owned by Amazon. It's not only Amazon that can have a Siri. I can have a Siri if I want to for my company because the technology is available.
The other thing that is interesting, Ash, is that this technology with the time becomes cheaper and cheaper and more accessible. Okay, so one of the things that I say to people is if you're trying a new AI technology, don't engage for a year because we're still at the beginning of this phase. So if you engage for a year, it may be you can have another one that is better in three months, okay? And cheaper than actually the one that you had for a year. So it's important to understand that this is advancing really, really fast. So for any technology, I do not suggest to engage for a long term.
Ash Patel (12:47.987)
When you say don't engage does that mean don't use it don't play with it. Don't try it?
Vanessa Alfaro (12:54.145)
No, try, of course, but don't sign a contract and don't pay for a year. Don't sign a contract for a year for $5,000. Okay. I have seen this in 2023. Okay. Many apps that are really, really good that you can use, there was $5,000 is now $500. This is how fast, because the competitions are coming. Okay. And as the time passes, they're becoming cheaper. The technology is more accessible.
Ash Patel (13:22.778)
Yeah, that's a great tip. Vanessa Alfaro, a question that's been in the back of my mind since our first interview was you've been in real estate for many years and it just seems like all of a sudden, you're everywhere, you're on some great stages, you're connected with some of the top people in real estate and you're all over social media. Where did all that come from? What changed? Was that a conscious effort to put yourself out there? Why, really, you know, a better way to ask that question?
Why didn't we know Vanessa Alfaro five years ago? Why do we know her so well now?
Vanessa Alfaro (13:58.437)
Very good question. You know why? Because I own a marketing company for 15 years. My company was actually doing PR for other companies. We did digital marketing for other people, for celebrities as well in Latin America. And I know how hard it is, and I know how demanding of time it is, and I didn't wanna put myself in that position. Number one, okay?
Number two, I honestly didn't feel Ash that I had something of value to provide to people. Okay. Everybody's talking about the same, the economy was happening in 2023, interest rate, okay, I'm not an economist. I'm an innovator. Okay. That's why I'm an entrepreneur. Okay. So when all this AI came and we decided we're going to embed the company in technology and innovation.
That's when I start talking and start saying to other people, my competitors, you guys have to use this. You are not paying attention to what really can make a huge change in your business in the next five years. Okay. And I have an abundance mindset. So for me, what's important to put this out actually last year in best ever, okay, was the, the time that my mindset decided to change and I decided to go out there and start talking about this. Because we couldn't find people in Best Ever talking about AI. Nobody was talking about this. I actually talked to the biggest syndicators and I asked them, what are you doing in AI and nobody was doing anything. They didn't even know what I was talking about in AI.
And at that point I said, this is the time that I have to be there and start talking to the biggest syndicators and to the smaller operators, because this is a huge change in the way that you do business if you are a small operator, because that is the only way, this technology is the only way that you can compete with the bigger operators right now. You don't have the people, you don't have the money. If you have this technology, and maybe you and your partner, and you know how to use it right, you have the power of 10 people in just one or two.
Regarding marketing, marketing is a very time consuming task. As you know, if you are in social media, you have to create content, you have to maintain your social media present. Okay. You have to answer comments. And AI, okay, is now giving us the opportunity to do that in a more efficient way. Okay.
So now I can do what it can actually take 45 days. We can do that in two days only, okay? Create videos, create content. I have my voice clone. I have my video clone. I have my AI clone that can help me to create content in my, the same way that I would do, okay? So it's making things easier for me to be there and be on social media. And that is the reason why you see me right now on social media, on stages, and all these things. I have a message that I want everybody to hear because I believe it's going to make a difference in your business in the next few years.
Ash Patel (17:37.366)
What are some practical pieces of software, practical advice that real estate people can use today?
Vanessa Alfaro (17:49.809)
Sure, for financials and operations, you have to start trying with Yen AI. It could be Claude, it could be ChatGPT. And with these chatbots, you can analyze data, you can analyze financial statements, you can analyze projections. You can actually understand the profile of the investors.
Okay. That can invest in that type of a deal. Um, I think that what is happening is that people know that AI exists. They don't know the capabilities of AI. So when they go in front of one of these chatbots, they don't know what to do. Okay. So they don't know the capabilities on how you can actually do things in your business with the chat.
So they just try for a few things. They think it's just a search, another search on Google and they pass, okay? But you don't know what you don't know. And that's one of the things that has been focused for the last few months with LunaX, because when you go and understand what are the capabilities is when you actually can use it. So for financials and operations, as I said, one of these chat bots is good.
For marketing as well, low-hanging fruit, I will say to create a clone of you with a chatbot that you can actually, when you're going to create content for your company or for you, you have actually original content and it doesn't sound like everybody else content that is posted on social media. Okay. You start recognizing when something is AI created. Okay. I just start seeing it everywhere.
And then for acquisitions, you can also use also a chatbot to analyze your deal. Or as we did, we created a specific chatbot for multifamily. But if you tell me what is the criteria for the commercials that you have, we can create a chatbot for analyzing a specific commercial and a specific criteria that you have. So, oh, I have a good one for you.
We have a chat bot that can actually understand and analyze investor and brokers personality. So this is interesting. And this is a game changing for investor relations and acquisition. Because one of the things that is hard for us, especially small operators that are starting in the business, that they don't have relationship with brokers is how do I create a rapport with someone? How do I connect with the broker? I have to make a hundred phone calls, right? And with investor relations, when you talk to someone, sometimes someone wants direct answers and sometimes other people just want to chat a little bit more and be more engaged with the family or something else. So how do you know how to talk to someone if you haven't met that person?
So we have an AI chatbot that can help us to understand the personality of the person even before we meet that person. And I run that with you Ash. You want to hear what it says about you?
Ash Patel (21:26.702)
Yeah, I'd love to. Maybe I'm a little scared, but yeah.
Vanessa Alfaro (21:41.781)
Okay, let me see if I can find it here. Yes, you're very similar to me. You're a driver, so you're a high D. And I'm also a high D, but I'm an initiator. Says that you like to be direct and creative. We are pretty similar. Let me see here. Ash personality.
Ash tends to be a quick thinker, ambitious and draw to calculated risk. Okay. Let me see what else. Huh. Your risk tolerance is very similar than me. You like to focus on answer and specific data. And see behaviors I can see some behaviors as well okay if I'm going
Ash Patel (22:42.246)
Well, let's hear the behaviors, because those are what gets me in trouble usually.
Vanessa Alfaro (22:49.722)
Okay, let me go back here. Okay, so is the best to use an, if I'm talking to you, is the best to use an energetic, assertive tone, speak with high energy and answer questions directly. Highly competitive advantage of your product, I have to focus on highly competitive advantage of my products, okay? Focus on high level summaries rather than deep diving on specific questions.
For you, don't be over friendly, be assertive and push back when you need to. Don't sugarcoat or use bad, baked overly optimistic language to describe the value of the product. Okay. Don't focus on risk or downside. Does that sounds like you?
Ash Patel (23:36.418)
That's 100% me.
Vanessa Alfaro (23:40.565)
I have more information, but I just don't want to disclose everything about you in front of a podcast.
Ash Patel (23:45.174)
No, that is amazing. How do you do that?
Vanessa Alfaro (23:52.205)
We have a technology that we connect to a LinkedIn profile. And through the LinkedIn profile, we can get a full this assessment. Okay. We can actually, and what we are working right now is creating a chatbot with potential investors can actually go to our website, okay, connect to the chatbot. And the chatbot is going to ask for the email. The email is going to research the personality of the person and they were gonna send in a specific package, okay, of the properties that we're offering, okay, in the language that he will receive better than other person. So we will customize, and the chatbot will do everything without the involvement of a human, and the chatbot will be actually my face, it will be actually my video.
Ash Patel (24:34.666)
That is amazing.
Vanessa Alfaro (24:47.125)
will actually say the name of the person. It is really impressive. And we are doing that not just because it's fancy, we're doing that because we believe that personalization is the thing that is going to make a difference in the next year or two with all this AI technology going out there because otherwise everybody is going to start creating the same thing. You're going to communicate the same way. You're going to see the same message everywhere.
Ash Patel (25:15.222)
Vanessa Alfaro, on that note, do you ever fear that you lose authenticity? And I'll give you an example. I'm curious. You mentioned earlier that you can field broker calls because we get a lot of calls from brokers and I would love to take them all because maybe one out of 50 could offer a great deal. But I don't have the time to do that, right? You mentioned that you have a chat bot that fields those calls.
Does the broker know that it's a chatbot or do they assume it's you?
Vanessa Alfaro (25:50.545)
So there's two different things. We have this chatbot that can see the personality of the broker. So if I'm gonna talk to a broker, I'm gonna go to the chatbot first to see how to communicate with him. Do I have to be clear, fast, straight to the point, or should I create a little bit more of rapport with this person? Okay, that's one chatbot.
There is another chatbot that actually can be a voice chatbot that we can have a back and forth conversation with the broker, which we already have that for the tenants in the properties. We already have that. Okay. So if you go to some of my properties, you get a chatbot answering the phone. And this chatbot is going to ask you, it's so realistic Ash that you wouldn't believe it. It's so realistic. The chatbot is gonna ask you if you wanna rent an apartment, it's gonna ask you a few questions, it's gonna send you by email, the application is going to book the appointment for you to show up. If you don't show up, it's going to follow up with you, it's gonna call you back, it's gonna text you. All that is gonna be in our CRM. So we're gonna see what's happening with that person and with that lead, okay? And even if we rent the apartments and we want to turn on the chat bot to call back these people again in two weeks because we have another printable available, we can do that.
So now the technology went from text to text to text to voice in probably 10 months. Okay. And it's very, as I said, it's very realistic. I believe that the important thing here is to be transparent with everybody about what you're doing. I'm fully transparent.
Ash Patel (27:37.41)
Okay, so don't fake it. Don't, yeah, don't let them think they're talking to Vanessa Alfaro when it's really a chat bot.
Vanessa Alfaro (27:45.873)
Right, exactly. Don't say it's Vanessa Alfaro. Say it's AI clone of Vanessa Alfaro. Don't say it's Ashley. It's actually AI, okay, chatbot, AI Ashley. So being transparent, I think it's important because I am super transparent. Everybody knows, like my investors know that we're focused on technology, okay? And we use AI for optimizing. And at the end, this optimization is going to make and it's going to give them greater returns to their investment. That's the whole point. We're not doing this because it's fancy. We're doing this because we're optimizing operations and we can make more money for them and for us. So being transparent is the key.
Ash Patel (28:30.758)
You've done very well in multifamily and you mentioned earlier that you are looking into other assets, Office being one. I would encourage you to also add industrial and retail. What are you doing to learn those asset classes and invest in them?
Vanessa Alfaro (28:51.213)
Well, first of all, I'm going to talk to you because I have to go to the sources of those asset classes. But also my head of acquisition, he is also, he has been in this business for a long time. So he has a lot of knowledge on commercial as well. And even though we haven't been focused on that for this year, we see a very interesting opportunity.
So we're gonna go into more of different asset classes as well.
Ash Patel (29:24.546)
Good. And I would strongly encourage you to do that because all the technology that's available to and for multifamily folks, it seems like retail and office is lagging. It's also much more difficult to underwrite those assets because there's no playbook. With multifamily, it's relatively cookie cutter, and I don't mean that with any disrespect, analyzing deals.
And because of that, that's why there have been books written on it. There's boot camps, webinars, YouTube videos on how to underwrite multifamily. Right. With retail, every deal is completely unique. You can have a strip center. Matter of fact, all of our strip centers that we buy, let's say we have a dozen tenants, there can be a dozen completely different leases and what wins those deals often is creativity. You see one sentence in a 60 page lease that can really add value to the property that nobody else sees, right? So looking at it through different lenses. Now, knowing that I'm going to put you on the spot. How can someone use AI to be really creative and find things that nobody else sees?
Vanessa Alfaro (30:38.693)
Well, good question. I was actually going to that. Even in the unstructured data that you feel that there is no a pattern, I can assure you that if you give me your five years of experience, of 10 years of experience, of finding those deals, and we put all data into AI, AI will find the pattern. So, and if we find some patterns, with the help of AI, probably for us, it will take a lot of time and human power to understand those patterns.
But if we put that data on the structured data, we put it into AI and we find those patterns, and then we find, for example, those things that you say that you can find in the lists. We can easily create an AI that can analyze all those lists and we look for the patterns or for a specific things that you probably don't remember that you did nine years ago, but it can be there. At the end, the amount of data that AI can process is huge and it's way bigger than the human brain. So I believe that even with commercial, because you're not the first person that says that commercial is unique. I understand it's unique. It's not as easy as multifamily. It's just like cookie cutter.
But there must be a pattern, okay? And there must be certain things that you can find that then plot the information and the AI can help you to find those specific things. It will make things easier for you.
Ash Patel (32:17.762)
Got it. Can you give our listeners a few social media tips? And I want you to think back to when you made that mindset shift and, okay, I've got to put myself out there. I've got to show the world that I have this value to give. What are some things that our listeners can use AI for to help their social media presence?
Vanessa Alfaro (32:42.349)
Well, creating all the content, creating the automations. So if you have message and you're raising capital, definitely social media is the place to be. Like syndicators, most of the syndicators are in social media because they are raising capital. So they have to create an image. And the best networking place right now is social media. So creating good content is more important than ever, it's not only about going on a networking event in person, which you have to do that as well. But the amount of people that you can reach with social media, you can do it going every weekend to a networking event. So that's very important. And now with AI is easier than ever.
Now, I will also advise to be careful now with AI if you don't know how to use it. Because if you just go there and you open ChatGPT and you say, give me 30 social media piece of contents for Facebook, is going to give you crappy content that is probably gonna sound not like you, and it's gonna sound like everybody else, someone else is posting, okay? So you need to use certain prompts, you need to use some of your information as well so the chat will learn about you.
And the best thing that I would say is just to create your AI clone, okay? Which is not as hard to do it, but to create your AI clone with your data, which by the way, you can put your this report as well, your this assessment, and start creating content that is actually like you. And that can take you only four hours. That's what in LunaX, that's exactly the first four classes that we have is about how to create social media on video, on text, social media, how to actually easily going in front of camera, how to use the eyes correction, how to read in a script. Even you don't need to be, right now, you don't even need to be looking at the camera because you can use an AI that change, correct your eyes and makes it like you're looking at the camera. You can be reading in the script.
So all these tips, we give it to you and it's a life changing because you can do this in three hours and then what you need is 15 minutes a day, only 15 minutes a day to engage with the people that matters the most to you. And that way you can create actually a very good database of investors. And then on top of that, you use the AI that we have to understand the investor's personality. When you have a phone call with them, you will be winning the game.
Ash Patel (35:29.33)
Are you, do you have an education platform? Are you developing courses for this? Tell us more about that.
Vanessa Alfaro (35:38.773)
I saw that necessity in the market, even after we spoke in our first podcast. People don't know where to go specifically for real estate investors. So we created a program for small operators. So it's very accessible and it's very accessible for small operators that are just starting in the business. It's just one or two people or three in the business and we teach the basis of how to use AI and implement it with your CRM, with your social media, with investor's relation and with asset management as well.
Okay, so the four pillars on an operation for a real estate company. It's just a three-month basic classes that they can take and they go in-depth and they learn a lot, but they also, I think it's not about learning, it's actually learning something that you can use because you can spend hours on YouTube to learn how to create an image, a beautiful image, but you're not going to use that, that's not going to make you money in this business. So we have this platform with LunaX AI and we also have a corporation plan when we go to a corporation this bigger, 10, 15, 20, 30 employees, and we help them to create a culture of AI, which is the hardest part right now, Ash, is how to shift the mindset of people from doing things the way that they were doing before, to using AI and augmenting themselves to actually do more faster and better. So that mindset is something very important.
Ash Patel (37:32.79)
Where do our listeners find out more about that?
Vanessa Alfaro (37:37.985)
Okay, they can go to LunaX AI, lunax.ai. You can check about our three months short masterclass and that's when you are going to learn actually the basis, which is gonna be for our students, it has been like game changing in their business. And I still say this is not just anything.
You just have to start somewhere and open your eyes of what you can do. And they has been doing that for, we're gonna start a new class actually in February. So you can go to lunax.ai slash registration. If you wanna check more about Venus Capital, you can go to Venus Capital, at venuspartners.com as well. And if you are a corporation as well, you can reach out to me on lunax.ai, you can reach out to us if you want to learn more about how we can help corporations on this.
Ash Patel (38:45.846)
Vanessa Alfaro, thank you so much for your time again, a mind-blowing conversation. Uh, please come back in a few months when this whole landscape has evolved again and share with us what you're working on. So thank you again.
Vanessa Alfaro (39:02.433)
My pleasure. There is so much information that I would like to share, but I know for some people it's a lot to get in just one 30 minutes conversation. But there is so much. We are doing also webinars and we're trying to help these operators to actually win the game this 2024. I strongly believe there are going to be enough properties for everybody to buy.
Ash Patel (39:34.558)
Yeah. And best ever listeners, um, I've seen Vanessa Alfaro's webinars. She's out there. There's a ton of free content that she offers. So please follow her on all social media and just an absolute wealth of knowledge. And with that note, best ever listeners, thank you again for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five star review, share this podcast with someone you think can benefit from it. Also follow, subscribe and have a best ever day.