You're the CEO: James Harris on Building a Real Estate Pipeline That Lasts

You're absolutely right.

And there's two pieces to that.

The first piece is our consumers today are a lot smarter than they've ever been because they are going on ChatGPT and Claude and Perplexity.

And I guarantee you any agent that you ask, they've received a call from a client that's testing them.

They've asked the LLM a question and now they're calling you as the agent to make sure you know what you're talking about, right? And so we need to be experts at what we do.

We need to become masters of our craft.

We need to think about why should a consumer work with this agent or that agent? There's 1.6 million of us across America.

What's your differentiator? It's the information that you have at your fingertips.

And I talked earlier about door knocking and development opportunities.

If I had underbuilt, In my hands, when I was door-knocking development opportunities where I could create the story for the consumer or the developer, my God, my business would have flown 50x back then.

Because now I can identify a lot.

I can find out how underbuilt it is.

I can show it to the client.

I can look into the comps of what it's worth once it's developed.

Now I'm underwriting the deal for that client.

And that brings tremendous value to the table.

Well, you're useful from day one.

I

feel like really turning that corner of this real estate agent is being extremely useful for me as their client.

That's where I feel like you unlock trust, you unlock that credibility, and you're providing that utility, that usefulness right into

people's hands.

but if you're not useful at this point of the AI world, what are you, right? And everyone's asking, is AI going to replace agents? It won't replace agents if you're good at what you do, if you are useful.

And I think that's what it comes down to, right? And I think as agents, we are pretty sick and tired of hearing about AI this and AI that, and we're being sold this product and that product.

It's overwhelming to hear about all of this AI madness, but at the core of who we are, is we're advisors, we're experts, we're more than agents.

I don't look at myself as an agent.