Revolutionizing Real Estate with AI

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Casey Cease: Hey, thanks so much for coming back to another episode of the Casey Cease show. Show. I’m here today with my good friend, Zach Hammer. Zach is involved in the real estate industry and has been breaking through new ways to help realtors and their teams engage with AI. And so Zach, why don’t you take a minute and introduce yourself to our listeners or viewers, if they’re watching on our YouTube channel.

And yeah, tell us a bit about yourself.

Zach Hammer: Yeah. So, you know, I mean, I like long Watts on the beach and that, no in terms of a bit of the short rundown of my story I got started in the business world actually [00:01:00] as a indirect result of originally I was studying to be a preacher. I had actually founded, and planted some churches in the areas where I was studying.

And I sort of knew with the path that I was going down that I would be, what they call a tent maker preacher. I would be bivocational, which I know you’re familiar with too. And so, I, started learning about business, started implementing business stuff and then over time, I actually, I felt more called toward what I was doing with business and marketing and felt like that’s where I needed to be what I was excited about and over a series of changes and implementations.

I ended up as a marketing director for a real estate team in Las Vegas. At that point, it already had a bit of a local marketing business, but I didn’t know anything about real estate specifically but I got that job. And while I was there I five bucks, their lead flow kept their cost per lead and a half.

We doubled in business every year that I was there, but I learned I’m a horrible employee and an entrepreneur at heart. And so I set out on my own doing a lot of the same things that I did with that real estate [00:02:00] team, but with agents all across the country, all across the world at this point and it’s shifted and changed over the years, that’s where my company, real estate growth hackers came from.

and yeah, I started just by saying yes to everyone, learning where I could help, where I could serve and that sort of idea, and then I did a bit of an agency for awhile, I’ve done courses and trainings. And then now these days I’m still doing a little bit of a mix of all of that mostly on the training and teaching side.

But I keep a handful of clients where we dive into some of those principles, implementing cutting edge marketing tactics and technology like AI into the real estate world. And I work with real estate teams and high level real estate agents. And actually I do a little bit of work as well with SaaS companies that are in the real estate space as well, who are looking to reach the same people that I do.

But yeah, that’s a little bit of my story. Yeah any other questions on that?

Casey Cease: No, I think that wraps up our episode today. No. I mean, I love the story of going in and realizing, man, I’m [00:03:00] not a great employee, and I know people, they’re great employees. They want to be told what to do, where to be, when to be there, how to do it, how am I doing?

And then there’s a wild bunch of us that are, You know, and I always tell people when I go into coach or consult, I’m like, now look, I’m going to be like the new puppy you find on the street that you’re like, Oh mama, can we keep them? One, because it’s less expensive if you put me on a long tail salary than to invest for a short sprint, I say, but like, I am a dog that turns into a St. Bernard.

That is a cute little puppy, but I’m difficult to have around the house and I require way too much food. So, the entrepreneurial journey of discovering your strengths and what you’re able to do, but then taking that and finding like Dan Sullivan in strategic coach says your unique ability and leaning more into that.

The companies I’ve worked with as a coach that are really the expression of the owner’s unique ability is something that they’re able to [00:04:00] make it through the fact that I’m not a great employee, but I’m good at what I do. So let me go help more people do what I do and then get out of the way.

When it’s something I’m not great at doing. And I’ve been really impressed. You and I are in a mastermind together and I’ve watched you navigate the growth of your business. But I think an interesting fact of what you’re doing right now, in addition to engaging with real estate is you’re looking for ways to integrate the use of AI into real estate.

So why don’t you share a little bit about one, how you got into that and then how you started adapting that. And what is the receptivity been like for people that, are still using business cards and open houses and all those different things. So, walk me through, walk us, the listeners and me through how you landed on that kind of pivot and what have you been seeing and noticing along the way?

Zach Hammer: Yeah. So like, honestly, when I talk about AI in real estate, one of the things that I tell people is I’ve been playing with AI in everything that I do about as long [00:05:00] as I’ve been doing marketing easily over 10 years. Now, what we have today in terms of what’s become in the zeitgeist is these large language models.

Obviously those didn’t become popular and, really publicly known by most people until ChatGPT came on the scene. But by the time ChatGPT came on the scene, I was already using other AI models. I was using Jasper, which was named all sorts of different things before it became Jasper.

And then even before that, in my history of all, I’ve always been striving to leverage technology to make the work of marketing and business easier. And so I’ve used article spinners and AI analyzers for articles for like SEO and stuff like that. So it’s always been in my mix.

I started like talking about it more publicly when it became more publicly known that, we’re calling this stuff AI people are more familiar with it. It’s a little bit more well known that it’s possible. And by having the experience that I’ve had of really one of the things [00:06:00] that people have always been attracted to what I do, in that vein of a unique ability is how I deploy technology to solve real problems in your business, right?

How we leverage technology to make marketing easier, more efficient, more effective, how we leverage it to make your business systems more scalable and efficient, that sort of idea. I seem to have a little bit of a unique touch on how I do that and how I think about that.

And so AI is just such a natural place to deploy that. And yet I’ve been able to keep a solid balance because I actually try it. I actually build things with it. I actually put it into practice. I’m not just using it as a buzzword. I actually leverage it day to day on behalf of clients and in my own business as well, seeing, where can I take things that are easy for me to show up and then leverage AI to make it easy to scale, easy to iterate, easy to take it through those other steps.

And really being able to sort through what is on the horizon in the [00:07:00] future. That’s really cool. And going to be coming down. The pipeline, but maybe isn’t actually here yet. What are the things that people think when they think AI in your business versus what’s the reality of it?

And being able to give people clarity around that so that they could actually say, Hey, what’s the power now? Where can I actually save time now? Where can I actually get better results now? Versus what are just the pipe dreams that people are selling on, but aren’t actually viable yet.

And helping people to implement that. So, Really. You know, You asked when did I make the pivot? Like, I started talking about it more and leaning into it more when it became more in the zeitgeist, but in terms of my experience, in different ways, forms and fashions, all the different things that have been called AI over time, it’s somewhat always been a part of how I approach business and the large language model and a generative AI world that we’re in now is more the obvious next step for lot of the crux of what I’ve been doing anyway.

Does that make sense?

Casey Cease: No, it absolutely does. And you’re constantly processing through, okay, how can we [00:08:00] automate that? How can we leverage AI and what have been some of the biggest ahas that you found for the clients you serve, the realtors that you serve through your real estate growth hackers.

Zach Hammer: Yeah. I mean, Especially when it comes to AI, I think the biggest takeaway, and this is regardless of the industry, right? So let me give a quick side note on that. So I do, I specialize in real estate. I specialize in helping the real estate industry, but really the reality of that is mostly that’s where I’ve got a proven track record.

That’s where I’ve got the receipts to say, Hey, I speak your language. I speak your jargon. I know what you’re going through. I’ve been on the other side of the table when people are selling into it and you’re trying to figure out what actually works and what doesn’t.

So I know what the goals are, know what the motivations are, and I can, approach from a real place of empathy, whereas I don’t have that as much in other industries. But what I have learned is that, business is business. And a lot of these truths are true regardless of the industry.

And that’s especially true with AI. In this AI [00:09:00] stuff one of the biggest impacts that I’ve seen that when people understand it starts to make a massive difference is that people are thinking of AI as this thing is going to do the work for me. And they try and put too much on the shoulders of these large language models and thus get either uninspiring results because, what it produces when you expect it to be the expert is hot garbage, you know, it, sort of loses something in the process.

It doesn’t give you exactly what you’re looking for. And so what I’ve learned is that when you come armed With your expertise, with your spark of humanity, with your point of view, that AI is able to leverage that into different forms and structures and formats that would typically take a lot of time to adapt to a lot of effort to create, that’s really the power.

It’s showing up with your context and your humanity, and then being able to get drastically further results out of that and really the simple idea is, AI is making it easy to show up as you [00:10:00] are and get results from other specialties and other skillsets that you may not have, right? So for me, I show up, I record video.

So I get video and audio, and then I’m able to leverage that into a massive suite of written assets and clips and audio assets and, and stuff that is adapted to different social platforms, emails, blog posts, all of that. But it still feels like me. It’s still the points that I’m making and unique to me, even though AI is really helping do a lot of the legwork of crafting it because it’s starting with my unique point of view.

And that difference of understanding where does it fit? Where doesn’t it fit? I think is making a massive difference. When applied, whether it’s to marketing, like I just gave as an example, or even things like building out SOPs and building your backend processes you still want to have a point of view and have an idea of what you want to achieve in order to get the best results.

Does that make sense?

Casey Cease: A lot of sense. So I’m curious, what kind of pushback have you really [00:11:00] received from some of the potential clients you’ve interacted with? Because it’s interesting for me, some of the people I know do not think highly of AI now, mind you, I’m in Texas, right? And so we are the land where conspiracy theories abound.

And the response in my life, in my neck of the woods is well, it’s not a conspiracy if it’s true. Has it been widely accepted? Has there been any resistance? What’s it been like approaching realtors and people that you work with this concept of being more public about leveraging AI.

Zach Hammer: Yeah. Definitely. So I do a lot of promotion. I put a lot of content out there and yeah, I very consistently see that there’s a strong contingent of people that feel strongly that they never want to touch AI, that they hate what AI does. All of that.

What I’ve found is that again, my angle has always been like helping people integrate technology in order to make their lives and businesses easier. So I attract the kind of person that’s like, you mean to tell me that we could do all this work with drastically less costs and less effort?

Uh, Yes, [00:12:00] please. Where do I sign up? How do I do this? Really for me, the biggest struggle that I’ve had is, learning how to convey the way that I think about AI in a simple enough way to make it easy for other people to implement. So that’s been my biggest thing is I tend to, for my own business, do fairly complex flows and structures and prompts and giving real estate teams, the tools that they could quickly rest, grapple with And get put into production in order to see those results quickly.

That’s been more of my challenge, right? Like they’re bought in, they’re interested in getting those results. But making that simple has been the harder part. But luckily honestly, I’ll mention this. So one of the tools that I’m starting to put into place is Magai, which I know you’re, familiar with and I think you’re an investor in, right? So, uh, and

Casey Cease: Dustin was, my first guest on the podcast. So yeah the, the founder, yeah.

Zach Hammer: Yeah. So part of what I’m liking about Magai is I am very used to like I’ll mess with the APIs. I’ll play with the backend of the tools. I’m not a developer, but I [00:13:00] like I’d like developer light, if that makes sense.

Casey Cease: Developer – ish? maybe.

Zach Hammer: yeah, yeah, exactly.

exactly. And so I’ll play with some of those things and build workflows for myself around basic usage of maybe more advanced stuff. But obviously most people don’t do that. And so what I really like about Magai and where it’s starting to, where I could clearly see where it’s going to start fitting in my business is how it’s making access to multiple models, easy for teams, for businesses to be able to say here’s the reality.

We’re in the wild west right now of AI and GPT- 4 from Open AI was the best but we’re starting to see, like Anthropic just came out with cloud three and cloud three in my experience right now is dominating against open AI on the kinds of stuff that I want to do. like,

Casey Cease: And it’s 3X’d the price right now. So when you pull on it on the API, and that’s, the thing of the piece where you’re finding application, it’s one thing to, like, oh, I’m going to go use AI, but watching you work, like you’ve shown me some of the ways you [00:14:00] develop prompts, like you’re a different level, man.

It’s kind of like when people look at my Zapier account and I’ve been using automations for a while, and I’m sure look at yours, It’s going to be night and day and for you, it comes easily. And so as you’re adapting these things, why don’t you share with us a little bit about what have been some of the top entry level applications that you’ve helped realtors do with AI?

I want to get some very practical applications so that people, when they, if they like, I want to know more about that, they can reach out to you, but what’s some entry level gateway AI that a realtor could utilize to begin without just the simple like, please write a response email, but like, what are some entry level AI stuff that you could share with us without giving away the whole thing.

Cause I know you’re worth your weight in gold when it comes to your value, but, just give us a taster of some ways that I have friends that are realtors that they can leverage AI for real estate.

Zach Hammer: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I’ll share a few things. If it’s okay with you, I actually have something [00:15:00] that I call the vault that’s completely free for people to access that includes a number of these prompts. The website for that is RealEstateGrowthHackers.com/the vault.

And people can go and get access to some of these prompts and frameworks that I’m about to talk through. And again it’s, completely free. So it,

Casey Cease: And that should be in the description. And whether you’re listening to this, or you can go to the CaseyCeaseShow.com and look for this episode with Zach Hammer and find that link there. But yeah, Zach, go ahead and tell us about some of those prompts. Yeah.

Zach Hammer: Perfect. One of the concepts that I have, that I’ve built is called thousand leads from every listing. And essentially it’s a framework of playbooks to say, first off, whether or not you have a listing, I have frameworks for how you can reach out to get a listing that you could promote, even if you don’t have your own.

If you have a listing, it’s even better. But you leverage a listing. And then I’ve got a prompt that is designed to craft an excellent listing description. Designed to really promote a property effectively. And the whole idea is that you can [00:16:00] brain dump all the basic details. Literally, like one of the pro tips for me most of us speak drastically quicker than we could type.

And so if you leverage voice dictation on your computer on max, it’s built in or you can use an AI app and they like ChatGPT, for instance, has that built in where you could turn it on and just talk to it. So just literally doing a brain dump of saying, here’s the property information.

It’s got this many bedrooms, this many bathrooms, here’s some of the key features, it’s got a great luxury kitchen. It’s got an awesome backyard. That’s got a pool like, where you just walk through those features and then it could take that sort of brain dump of unstructured data and turn it into a really great listing description, right?

And I won’t go through all the details of exactly how that’s structured because people can get the prompt and see all of that pretty readily. But the idea is you show up easy, brain dump, what’s easy, what comes naturally, what flows easy. And then it takes that and it turns that into a well structured listing description that’s designed to be clear and [00:17:00] compelling, yet not hypey because that’s important when you’re actually doing this and like in an MLS, for instance.

And that’s really what a lot of real estate agents already starting with. But the reason why I start with that is because from that foundation, you then take that and turn it into all the other assets that you need to do a massive marketing campaign. And so one of the things that I like to do with that is I like to take that listing and I like to generate a reverse prospecting listing outreach plan.

So reverse prospecting is you start with the property and you find the buyers in your list who already want that property, right? So your chances are, if you’re doing marketing and generating a buyer list you’re seeing, what are they searching for? What are they doing in your database?

What kinds of things are they looking for? So you look that up in your CRM or in your database and you say, all right, these are the buyers that are looking for this home that I’ve got it as a listing. Let me reach out to them directly and say, Hey, I got this home. Here’s what’s great about it.

Here’s why I think you’d like it. And you can do this via text, email, phone [00:18:00] call, gives you an excuse to reach out to the, to people potentially either make that by side commission or at least sell the listing on behalf of your client. And so that’s one of the tactics and I’ve got prompts that generate all of those outreaches to make it easy just from that listing description, right?

So you do that. That’s one of the things. One of the other things is one of my most successful ad strategies that I’ve ever run is what I call a single property promo. And there’s a very specific way that you do this on Facebook, leveraging a gallery style post. And all of this is documented in the vault.

You leverage a gallery style post, but you write your description in a very specific way. So you don’t include the price or the location in the post because when you’re advertising a listing, if you include the price in the location, what that’s going to do is people are going to look at it and they’re going to disqualify themselves.

Your goal is to generate as many inbound interested people as possible. Not necessarily to sell that specific property, but to help them in whatever ways you can with your real estate needs. Maybe they’re [00:19:00] not in the market for that area or that price point, but you could probably connect them to a different area and different price point that would still be happy to do and you want to generate the lead more than the, you. Specifically, you’re trying to sell that property. But that property is a great anchor point where people latch onto it. And they say, this one looks great. I’d like to find out more. So you write a post that doesn’t include the price doesn’t include the location, but does include some of the great things about that property.

You include it as a gallery style post, because that encourages more clicks, gets your ad out there cheaply. Structuring that ad. It’s not hard, but when you leverage AI, what would have taken you probably a good 15 to 30 minutes just to sit down and think about how do I take this listing description and rewrite it into this format?

It takes that process. It makes it, you include the listing description plus the prompt that I have, and it outputs exactly the right style post that in my experience is one of the best ways to generate leads in real estate. So that’s one aspect of the strategy so far, we’ve got reverse prospecting and we’ve got the [00:20:00] single property Promo. You

want

Casey Cease: What type of ads are you doing? Are you doing Legion ads? Are you doing it to a landing page? What kind of ad are you running on Facebook for that?

Zach Hammer: Because you want to do a gallery style post, you need to be able to put the post onto your Facebook page first as like a public post. So, typically I’m driving toward a landing page is the simplest way to do it. But you can also, depending on what, technology you’re familiar with, you could have people comment and then follow up via bots via DM, or even have somebody do that manually, that’s a great way to leverage the people asking about the property so really the simplest way is to a landing page.

That’s going to be the most hands off way comment to DM. It’s a little bit more technically involved, but works fantastic. And then, for this style, I’m not typically doing the lead style ads on Facebook, just because I haven’t seen how to do the gallery style post that way.

And you get a lot of benefit from that gallery style post from the people clicking through and engaging with it. So does that make sense?

Casey Cease: Yeah, man. [00:21:00] Why don’t you give us one more highlight or tip that you find help or it’s taking us to step three, maybe I’m, sitting on the edge of my seat. I’m writing a realtor. I mean, I’m like, this is good stuff, man. Just because, mean, I think a lot of times people procrastinate because they’re not clear on the next step or the amount of energy or effort it takes to sit down and think through the description or you pay someone to write a description and then you’re like now, I, how do I list it?

How do I share it? And either it just diminishes. You’re creating resources that is plug and play. So what would be the third one?

Zach Hammer: Yeah. So far we’ve covered like how to leverage the list that you already have, how to grow your list. The other one that I love is it’s actually a free method that a lot of people miss is just being able to tap into Facebook marketplace. So you could post your listing into Facebook marketplace and get a ton of inbound free leads.

So it’s similar to the gallery style posts, but it’s different because when you post it in the marketplace, you do need to include the price and you do include the location because that’s how it’s set up. So you, operate under the rules of the [00:22:00] place where you’re posting, right?

And so you include the price, the location, but adapting that description to fit for that. It’s not super hard, but again, easily takes 30, 30 minutes or so to try and do that adaptation. So the prompt takes that one thing and makes it really easy for you to do that. And I’ve got a playbook that just says, here’s what you want to do to be successful for this and what it looks like to implement it.

And in my experience comparing those different strategies on average, people are able to generate from the gallery style posts inbound leads from anywhere from five to $15 a lead on average. But often I’ve been able to do them for a buck a lead or less. so it depends on the area and the property, how impressive it is, some of those things.

And then on the Facebook marketplace it’s just your time and effort to get it in there, but I’ve seen people readily generating tens of leads a week at least, which it’s not as scalable as the ads, but It’s free, right?

Like it just takes your time and it’s another place to tap into it and get an inbound [00:23:00] flow of motivated people who are looking to buy homes. So yeah, those are some great strategies to be able to take one listing and really leverage it out as much as possible.

And the reason why people don’t typically do that is because again, every one of those steps normally takes a person sitting down and being dedicated toward creative energy to try and leverage it out further. But by leveraging AI, you can really minimize the creative energy required.

And this is the kind of task that starts being able to be done pretty effectively by a VA by somebody just, they’re spending, 30 minutes doing everything rather than, an hour and a half trying to accomplish each of these and it’s sapping their energy.

And so, that’s part of the power of that. That’s a more exciting element, but maybe less powerful than one of the other tactics that I really love to share, can I share the thing that I think, all right so, so this is completely different. This is that’s generating business.

This is all about establishing a strong [00:24:00] business. And so one of the things that people very often don’t implement effectively in their business is having good processes and procedures clearly documented so that, say your, star employee, maybe they get sick, maybe they get a better offer, maybe their life goals change and they leave your company.

And you have to quickly try and fill that gap and fill that void with somebody else to come in and replace them. And what people typically step into is they step into kind of a mishmash of maybe some of it’s documented, maybe there’s some videos maybe not, maybe there’s nothing. And so SOPs standard operating procedures are really the lifeblood of your business actually existing as its own entity.

And most people don’t typically do it because it takes a lot of time, effort, and energy to do them, to create them in the first place, to

Casey Cease: it’s different type of thinking to Zach with SOP’s I mean, we worked with the client and they paid us a large retainer over the course of a year and basically we [00:25:00] adapted what we’ve learned at my publishing company, Lucid Books for ghost writing the interview style. And because not all of their employees, they were very gifted in their skill sets, but they’re not writers.

And they’re so busy that you need to catch as much as you can in 30 minutes to an hour of interviewing and asking questions without them wanting to cause you harm for annoying them. you know, And so leveraging, like you said Talk to me a little bit. So the way we did it was we would use Rev, the app Rev app, and that’s before I got my Claude, thanks to you, but my Rev app and and we would record and then have the AI transcribe.

And then our writers would go and break it down. How have you adapted the use of AI for the development of SOPs?

Zach Hammer: Here’s the right now, the perfect mix that I found. If you can explain a process in about 15 minutes or less, that seems to be the ideal size of a task, right? So if you find that it’s taking you longer than 15 minutes to explain a process, you’re probably looking at [00:26:00] what should be two to three processes, right?

So 15 minutes or less. So that’s our benchmark there. And typically what I’m doing at this point is I’m using something like Loom. For me, I actually use Descript and do it through that in the same way that

Casey Cease: Yeah, I’ve been using Descript as well, yeah.

Zach Hammer: Yep. And so I turn on, for me, like I’ll turn on the camera or record my screen.

Sometimes if there’s not anything to show on the screen, it’ll literally just be me talking and I’ll talk through the process. And in talking through the process, I want to try and cover a couple of things. I want to cover why are we doing this process? Like where does it fit in the overall business?

A little bit of context about anytime I’m showing something I say what this is, what it means. If I’m talking about a concept that maybe people are unfamiliar with I’ll try and explain what that concept is. And the other thing that’s really important is to try and describe anything that’s required in order to run that process, right?

So you’ll need access to this password. You’ll need access to this document. you’ll need a login for this site. You’ll need this thing from a previous process. Like maybe it’s images or maybe it’s a copy or whatever, right? Whatever the process is you want to explain [00:27:00] in order to do this process, you’ll need these other things.

So you explain that and then you just show the process. You explain, here’s what you do. Here’s where you click. You try and use visually descriptive language if possible. You don’t just say, click here. You say you click on this button in the top, right? Because what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to get a transcript, just like you just said. That in the words of the transcript conveys as much context as possible. And it’s not too hard to do this when you’re aware of what you’re trying to do. But you record that video, you get that transcript, and then I’ve actually developed a prompt that is designed to take all of those aspects and turn them into a well structured SOP that includes a title a purpose, an expected timeline prerequisites, the steps to complete and then what Success looks like at the end.

What is that expected outcome of a successful result of running that process? And so what it does is it takes, you upload your transcript plus the prompt [00:28:00] and what you get back is a well structured SOP that you could take and have a written version of. And here’s why that’s powerful.

Videos are really great for being easy for me to create an SOP in terms of being easy for me to get it out of my head and just think through something and they’re great for somebody to get a high level understanding of a task, but they are horrible when you actually need to run the task.

Because you have to keep going back to that part in the video where it’s like, what did they say? Oh, I missed this. I need to review this multiple times. And it makes trying to implement something take a long time. Whereas if you have a video, you can get a quick understanding with the video and you use the written to be what you actually reference.

You go and you look, oh, in this step, I’m supposed to do these things. And here’s the formula. It’s like, okay, I get that. And you could scan and see quickly. And so written plus video gives you a really good way to have processes that people can learn quickly, implement quickly, and that written aspect allows you to update it easily as well.

The hard part before was taking the [00:29:00] time to try and synthesize your video into something well structured. It takes a lot of creative energy, but AI AI is great at that at this point, right? So you need a model. Right now, what I found is GPT- 4 can do this. Claude 3 can do this as well. Other models that maybe aren’t as creative, have a hard time with it of being able to keep that context.

But those two models right now were great to do this. And literally you record your video 15 minutes or less, get that transcript, upload it plus the prompt. And you’re getting back something that’s 95 to 99 percent of the way there. It might need a couple of adjustments to. Make sure the nuance of what you’re saying is clear, but at this point, like my,

Casey Cease: do you, How do you prompt it? Is that in your vault as well, the SOP’s?

Zach Hammer: Is Absolutely.

Casey Cease: If you want more from Zach, can definitely go and grab that. And we’ll have the links in the description and everything else.

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Casey Cease: And so I wanted to ask you about one more thing that I find interesting.

And actually I have two more things I want to talk about. If you have a little bit of time you and I can have a little bit longer episode, cause I’m interested in sharing this part with our viewers and our listeners is you transitioned from an employee and you took the leap into entrepreneurship.

I want to hear about that. And I also want to hear about how you’re a van, a man in a van down by the river, or a man who sold his house [00:31:00] and lives remotely with your family. So why don’t you tell us, cause I have a lot of friends and people that listen that have this vision of going out on their own, or maybe they’re not really wanting to be a long term employee.

So chat with us a little bit about what that was like. How did you realize that maybe this isn’t the best fit and then have the courage to take that leap into entrepreneurship. Do you mind chatting a little bit about that?

Zach Hammer: Absolutely. So, Yeah, so my story it’s a little bit back and forth, right? So I had mentioned before I took the job as a marketing director, I did have a business as doing marketing for local businesses, but why I ended up taking that marketing director position my life fell apart for a while.

My dad had passed away and there was a lot of chaos around that. It wasn’t just his past thing. There was a lot of chaos in the circumstances of that. And so I ended up needing to take a job just to keep life together. And so, I did that. And that’s part of what led me to ultimately taking that marking director position.

It’s like, I knew I had a skillset. One of the things that I had seen at the time [00:32:00] though, is that at that point, I had done a lot of study. And I had a lot of ideas, but I had never had a budget to test those ideas. And I knew going into that marketing director position, that part of what I was looking to do was I was looking to get paid to learn as well, right?

To put these things into practice and see what actually worked and I did, I proved that out over time. In that position that the ideas that I had that when applied, they do work, they do results in meaningful, differences for my clients for at that point, my client was my you know, employer.

But during that time, like I didn’t necessarily know for sure if I would last long term as an employee and would be able to grow within that. The key thing that made it clear for me that it wasn’t going to work out for me to be an employee was mainly just how much resistance I had to implementing somebody else’s vision rather than getting to follow my own vision, right?

Getting to say for better or worse, I have beliefs and ideas about [00:33:00] how what would make sense and why and where I feel excited versus where I’m just doing what’s necessary to keep the job. And it’s not even necessarily a right or wrong, right? It wasn’t completely like, I think they’re stupid. I need to do it better. Right. It wasn’t bad. It was, I just I have things that I want to pursue and that didn’t always align with you know, with,

Casey Cease: Yeah, but there’s a lot of people that don’t align with their employers that have some ideas that don’t just go and start a company. So like, did you gradually have some side hustles or did you just make that, because I think a lot of people think that I’ve gotta quit my job and then jump right in with no Life net.

Otherwise I’m an entrepreneur. And a lot of people I meet with typically have some projects that grow or things that they test out with the safety of, I mean, I remember reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad years ago. And he talked about Hey, don’t quit your day job necessarily. And I’m a full time real estate investor.

He’s like, keep the salary, work really hard, get promoted until it makes sense financially for you [00:34:00] to go and do that.

Zach Hammer: right, and that is how it was for me. So I, at least I didn’t necessarily fully have like my complete income taken care of when I left the job, right? I didn’t have everything together, but what I did have, Multiple people that were coming to me asking for help doing some of the same things that I was doing there.

While I was employed there I partnered with somebody to sell a training on some of the marketing tactics that I was implementing there and had a successful launch of like a course about what I was doing. So I did that while I was working there. I had multiple people who were coming to me asking for help and implementing good marketing in their real estate businesses, right?

I did, like you said, like a side hustle on the side. And so at least for me, I had enough confidence that there is a demand for what I’m doing that I can make my own way, I didn’t necessarily have every dollar and cent taking care of where it’s I knew exactly how I was going to fully replace the income, but I knew that the potential was [00:35:00] there more than just the belief that there was evidence.

I was getting paid for things, right? I had income coming in from other sources. And so, yeah, there was, you mentioned it wasn’t just I was like, I’m just gonna go. It wasn’t like that, but it also wasn’t that I had everything taken care of.

It was a little bit of a blend. It was a little bit of, I

Casey Cease: Yeah, you’re never, it’s like having kids. There’s never a perfect moment to have a kid. Like you’re never going to be fully ready. And I think there comes a point where, okay, there is some minimum, there’s some interest, there’s some demand, and I have some income or opportunities for income. And, I found it helpful to like, if you’re married to talk to your spouse and let them know Hey, Here’s what I’m going to be doing.

Cause I remember, I know I have one friend who was released from his position and didn’t want to frighten his wife. And so for about a week and a half, he just started another business and started doing it. And he had enough, a little bit in savings, right? So he had a month’s worth of cash and savings, maybe.[00:36:00]

So there was some. And, three or four months later, she’s like, so whatever happened like, it’s like, what do you think happened? She’s did you get cut down in your job and hours? He’s no, I was cut completely. She’s oh, how did we make it? And the way they made it was, I’m actually going to, I think, I’m gonna try to get him on the podcast.

Let him share the story because it’s insane, you know, the way they go. And, And she was okay. Their dynamic of their marriage was okay to do that. And lastly, so you lifestyle entrepreneurship, everything else, you and our friend Richard, who I’ll have on the show in a little while. But you sold your house and so do you live in an RV also, or do you live and okay, so walk us through the life as a man in a van down by the river.

Zach Hammer: Indeed. Indeed. So, there’s a powerful principle. I think that regardless of what anybody want to do in their business what anybody want to do in their business, right? whatever their [00:37:00] goals are of building the business that creates the life that you want to have, right? Like being very conscious of that, knowing that, there’s sort of infinite opportunities for what your business could look like. You’re always going to have to serve your customer’s needs.

You’re always going to have to think through that and create real value in the market and all of that. But you do get to decide, do I want to be on call all the time? Do I want these things? What would my life ideally look like if I build my business successfully? So I’ve been doing that as a practice since I left that marketing director job, I’ve been very clearly and consciously thinking, do I take on this project?

Do I build my business in this way? Does it get me closer to my goal or farther away from my goal? And for me, regardless of living in an RV or not, having the freedom of location has been a big aspect of what’s important to me. And this it’s made a difference [00:38:00] in defining how I run my business, but also how I run my life.

We’ve homeschooled our kids well before. We actually, sold our house and moved into an RV. We were set up for success to be able to say we are fairly self self dependent on the kinds of things that would take to run our life. And so when I look at, the choices that we make for our family, when I look at the choices that I’ve made for my business all of it.

Essentially added up to the foundations that created the freedom to say, yeah, I could run my business and travel the country in an RV and do that successfully. So that does mean that I don’t offer everything that every business offers. I can, or that other businesses offer when I offer a coaching program, it’s catered around the reality of it might be hard for me to go and get a connection.

What, so what does that mean? What does that mean in terms of how I structure that? And so I optimize my offerings around the life that I want to live while still making sure that I’m creating a great [00:39:00] change, a great process for the clients and people that I serve.

Does that make sense?

Casey Cease: how long have you, How long have you been living in an RV?

Zach Hammer: Yeah. So we sold our house. We had a house in Las Vegas. We sold our house in, I think 2017 is when we sold the house. It was we had just had our second son and we wanted to wait until he was born until we sold the house. So he was born and then we sold the house. We had a period of time where we already had the RV, but we needed to do renovations.

So we sold the house and then stayed with my mom for awhile while we were doing renovations in the RV, finish those renovations. And yeah I forget, I think we set out maybe in February of 2018 is when we actually hit the road. So it’s been about, five years that we’ve been living in an RV.

We’ve been off and on the road in that time period for

Casey Cease: and how, how many kids do you have?

Zach Hammer: I’ve got five, I’ve got five kids at this point.

Casey Cease: So five kids, a wife

in an RV, any dogs?

Zach Hammer: And a dog and a cat. Yep.

Casey Cease: Does yours kind of expand out when you get there type of thing?

Zach Hammer: Yeah. So we actually, we have probably [00:40:00] a smaller RV than what most people would expect given the size of our family. We do have one slide in RV, but yeah, it’s not, it’s not massive. It’s not what that makes a massive difference. We’ve got a

Casey Cease: Where do all the kids sleep?

Zach Hammer: Yeah. So we’ve got a bunk house in the back.

we’ve got four bunks back there. And yeah, and we’ve got our dinette set up with with a crib and whatnot, but yeah,

Casey Cease: I’m going to start a cribs. Do you remember MTV cribs back in the day, man, I’m going to start one called the RV edition for all my buddies that are like living in tiny homes or RVs. Like I know guys that make a ton of cash and they rent, they, they’re like, ah, I don’t want to be locked down anywhere.

So

they’ll grab a loft somewhere for six months, live there, see how they like it.

Airbnb it a bit and just kind of know that around. And so, we homeschool, but my wife likes her place, you know, like we like traveling, but having that, but I think that’s awesome, man. you think you’ll ever own a house

Zach Hammer: again?

Yeah. I mean, we are, we are actually currently looking at getting a house. So, what we figured out after doing this for, for a while is, it is nice to have a place that you can come back [00:41:00] to, if only because sometimes the kind of repairs that the RV takes, are the kind of repairs that need you to not be living in it.

Right. and so having, having a place where you could, you could be living somewhere else. Uh, keeping the RV at the state that, that you need to, is useful. So, our plan is that we’re going to, we’re going to get a house, probably still something, you know, smaller or, not as big of a deal as what most people would want.

but we’ll, we’ll have a house that we could use that as a home base

It’s

bigger than an RV.

I

Yeah, exactly.

Casey Cease: Way to set expectations. Like, Hey guys, when you first get married, get an RV. Right. And, uh, and then, you know, grow from there. So, well, Zach, it’s always a joy to chat with you, man. Uh, why don’t you share one more time where everyone can find you online and connect with you, uh, whether than real estate or just wanna learn more about AI in general.

I, I think you’re a

Zach Hammer: great resource.

Yeah. Yeah. So you can check out, uh, what we’re up to at realestategrowthhackers. com, uh, and then if you want to get access to the vault specifically, uh, that’s realestategrowthhackers. com slash the vaults [00:42:00] and the vault is what has, uh, uh, pretty, pretty Robust collection of prompts and trainings and stuff.

It’s a, it’s more jam packed than probably most things are. And honestly, I might be giving away a little bit more than I even should,

but it

sounds like you

Casey Cease: are, but Hey, for the time being, you guys go sneak over there before you start selling it.

Zach Hammer: indeed, absolutely. Absolutely.

Casey Cease: Well, Hey everybody. Thanks so much for coming by and watching or listening to the KCC show.

And I’m super grateful to have you here. If you do me a favor. Like leave a review and share this with your friends. I’d be grateful until next time. We’ll talk to you soon

That wraps up this episode of the KCC Show. Make sure to visit our website, thekccshow. com, where you can subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, or via RSS, so you’ll never miss a show. While you’re at it, if you found value in this show, we’d appreciate a rating on iTunes, or if you’d simply tell a friend about the show that would help us out too.

You might [00:43:00] also want to check out our book for business consultation available at lucid books or double your sales strategy session at planify agency. Be sure to tune in next week for our next episode.