“You’re all Tony Stark,” Audie Chamberlain tells real estate agents nervous about AI taking their jobs. “It’s just with artificial intelligence, you’re Iron Man.”
Chamberlain, vice president of strategic growth and communications at Rechat, has spent the past few years watching AI compress weeks of marketing work into minutes. He has built his own “chief of staff” on Claude to manage the rest.
Ahead of a talk on that exact topic at Inman Connect San Diego, Chamberlain spoke with Inman about how real estate marketing has changed over the years, the thin line between AI-driven productivity and just doing more work, and how Rechat differentiates itself in an industry where every platform calls itself a super app.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Inman: You’ve been in real estate marketing for a while now. What’s the biggest shift you’ve seen in the space over the past five to 10 years? What’s changed the most?
Audie Chamberlain: A few things have changed, and are still changing rapidly.
The first — less obvious — is the rise of personal brand. Way back, social media was almost a strange concept for real estate. I remember people saying, “Why would I share a house I’m interested in on social media if that means someone else could see it and make an offer?” There was a real sense of scarcity, almost a walled-garden mentality. Who would be crazy enough to do that?
It took a lot of convincing to get people to open up to it. Early in my career at Realtor.com, I convinced the company that making every listing easily shareable was a net positive. It drove hundreds of thousands of unique users and added to the excitement around a listing.
Social media gave everyone a platform. You see people like Ryan Serhant and Mauricio Umansky building brands around their lifestyle, which attracts high-ticket clients and high-ticket agents. There are jokes about how you now have to be on TikTok or Instagram, making Reels as part of the job, but there’s something true to that.
Communicating what you’re doing, letting the world know your business: That’s been a huge shift from the old model, where you were a nameless, faceless agent under a big brokerage brand. It turns out people connect more with individuals, and clients will follow that agent wherever they go.
The other major shift has been AI. Things that used to take my colleagues and me weeks or months now take minutes or hours. We talked about this earlier in the year. Reports that took weeks, I can now do in 20 minutes. Building a luxury website for a top-producing agent used to take weeks or months. With AI, at Rechat, we can build one in 40 seconds.
For example, I used to run marketing at a brokerage in Beverly Hills that was later acquired by Compass. We had dozens of marketers supporting hundreds of agents. They were hand-creating flyers and ads in Illustrator, days and weeks of manpower. With AI, that’s condensed into minutes. When we demo this live to a room full of agents, you hear the “oohs and aahs,” because everyone’s been through how hard this process used to be.
Now, once a listing hits the MLS and the data connects, all the marketing you could dream of gets created automatically. You get a notification that your marketing is ready, created by the AI working alongside the creative directors and designers. That’s a massive, fast-moving change.
I don’t think we’ve fully seen the impact of AI in the real estate industry yet, since it’s still ongoing. What do you think the implications are as everyone gets access to these tools?
At this scale — going back to scarcity versus abundance, and I’m an abundance guy — I believe that if you’re freed from things like listing maintenance, you get back 40 percent to 50 percent of your day. That creates opportunity: time to think about in-person events, open-house strategy, personal brand, social media or other parts of the business that weren’t getting attention.
Just because a 10-hour process becomes a two-minute process doesn’t mean you stop working. It means you now have 10 hours to spend on other growth areas.
I always use the Iron Man analogy. When people in a room get skittish about AI taking jobs, I say, “You’re all Tony Stark. AI is your Iron Man suit. It lets you do a 10-hour task in two minutes. You can fly.” That’s the mindset, not fear.
You see this playing out in the media, too. A company like IBM will announce it’s letting go of HR staff for AI, and six to 12 months later, they’re hiring people back for other roles, because it turns out AI didn’t do quite what they expected, or it ended up costing more than the humans it replaced. I think it’s all working itself out.
At Rechat, we take an Apple-esque approach: The best technology should just work, quietly, in the background. I think the future is multi-sensory: AI with vision that can look at what you’re cooking or help you troubleshoot a printer, functioning more like an actual team member.
Back in January, when we talked about Claude, ChatGPT and agent user behavior, we predicted — accurately, it turned out, based on what we said at Inman Connect [New York] in February — that things would shift quickly from generative to agentic. Instead of asking a chatbot to write your listing description, it starts creating content and asks you to approve it.
That’s already happened. If you get a showing request, our AI checks your calendar, tells you if you’re available, drafts a response, and says, “Hit send.”
Where I see it going next: keyboards and typing fading out. I’ve never met an agent who said they love data entry or filling out CRM forms. We rolled out AI Memo, our AI note-taker, a couple of months ago. That’s the direction.
You can’t talk to Claude or ChatGPT out loud in a crowded room, and that’s not changing in the next three to six months. But note-taking itself is disappearing. Fathom captures our expressions, Granola generates takeaways in the background, and AI Memo takes notes. On video calls now, there are often more note-takers than people.
Data entry into a CRM will go away entirely. Stanford research and other studies show you can dictate roughly four times faster than you can type. So for a busy agent on the go, it becomes: “Add Nick to my Nashville buyer list” — no typing, no tagging. I don’t know exactly how fast, but those changes are coming.
I’m curious where that freed-up time actually goes. You wrote a piece for Inman about the AI chief of staff you built with Claude. Can you give a personal example of how Claude has taken over work for you, and what that’s shifted internally at Rechat?
Great question. I’m actually going to give a talk at Inman Connect San Diego on this, building a “chief of staff.”
It started with a simple question after Inman Connect New York, when I saw everything happening with Claude Cowork: How do I clone myself? Now that AI can proactively work on your computer, take over your browser, and start working while you’re away, my question was: How do I become two of me? The AI’s answer was: start with a chief of staff.
The chief of staff takes control back in the morning. We get messages in Slack, iMessage, email, CRM updates, notifications from ClickUp/Asana/Monday, calendar changes, social media DMs — five to seven different sources, all updated overnight. Normally, you’re reactive, scrambling to figure out what happened where.
The chief of staff proactively goes through it all, surfaces what actually needs a response, flags your real priorities and tells you which deadlines are at risk, all while you sleep.
That freed-up time doesn’t mean people go to the beach with a tropical drink. Studies show people who become more productive with AI tend to produce more overall. It bleeds into other parts of work and life. You do have to be careful not to overwork.
Vibe coding is a good example. I built a “Brand Index” app in one weekend using Gemini’s app-building tools. You type in your name and company, it scans the internet, and scores your presence based on articles and social mentions. I’d never been able to build apps myself before. It was gatekept by developers. Now I can be a hobbyist and ship something that could go into an app store over a weekend.
So the short answer is: freeing up 10 hours a week through a chief of staff lets you build other dashboards, systems, prototypes and MVPs, bringing much more value to the organization.
You told me a while back about coining “super app” language with Rechat, and then watching others adopt it. Now everything in proptech is “AI-powered,” and every platform calls itself a super app. How do you differentiate when the language sounds so similar across the industry?
You have to be self-aware, because you’re right, “AI-powered” means almost nothing anymore. One of my mentors used to say, “What’s a platform? It’s something you drill for oil off of,” meaning a lot of terms get thrown around loosely.
The “super app” concept started in China with WeChat. Zillow talked about it at an Inman Connect as an aspirational goal. The app we built at Rechat won something like eight different best-in-class categories in a T3 Sixty/Tech200-style ranking.
So how do you describe an app that’s best in class across eight categories? It’s a super app — a WeChat for real estate agents — that does what would otherwise require a dozen different point solutions (video, listings, CRM, etc.).
I discovered Rechat at a tech contest in Miami hosted by the National Association of Realtors, and I was blown away. In all my years in real estate and proptech, I’d never seen an app agents actually loved using that covered their whole world.
For 20 years, companies have tried to build all-in-ones, but when you try to do everything, you don’t do any of it well. Adoption ends up low. A broker makes a big purchase and fewer than 20 percent of agents actually use it. That’s still happening today across some of the biggest names in the industry.
Shayan [Hamidi], our founder, felt that pain firsthand as a broker paying for software agents that weren’t being used and had the computer science background at the University of Toronto to build something different. Not a walled garden, but something that integrates with the tools agents already love, rather than trying to force them off things like SkySlope or Follow Up Boss.
The way to stay differentiated is not to chase what everyone else is doing or to slap “AI-powered” on something and expect adoption. We’ve seen real adoption numbers: an independent third-party study showed 84 percent adoption at Serhant’s brokerage and 87 percent at Mile High Modern, a small independent brokerage in Denver.
Part of what makes us different is that we built mobile-first, because that’s how agents actually work. And positioning has to keep evolving. When everyone starts using our language, we just evolve again. We recently launched an app platform and app store. We’re not an all-in-one, and we’re not a point solution. We’ve created a new category: an operating system for brokerages and teams to run their business from their phone.
Last question, on Inman Connect San Diego: You’ve been going for a while now. What still gets you excited about the conference each year?
It’s mostly about connecting with peers in person. There’s only so much you get from Zoom and phone. Spending time with the Inman community, having conversations like this one about where things are headed and the challenges we’re facing … We’ve been in one of the toughest markets in many areas for three-plus years now, still working through the hangover from 2021.
There’s real camaraderie and deep personal relationships built at Inman, plus the opportunity to learn from the best people in the industry. The programming is curated to give people the most actionable takeaways for their business.
For me, it’s spending quality time with people I really admire and learning from the best of the best. It delivers every time. I’ve seen more acquisitions, more business development, more breakouts and more careers take off at Inman than at any other event I’ve attended. It’s a special community.
