How AI Is Transforming Commercial Real Estate Deal Flow | Ira Zlotowitz on Avery GPT & G-Parency

Ira Zlotowitz (00:00)

So, you everyone has this fear in general of AI, like, it gonna replace me? Is it gonna replace you? It’s not gonna replace you, and it’s not gonna replace me. What I believe, and I coined this, you know, I made sure to like to put onto X, onto LinkedIn right away, the line that AI is not gonna replace you, those using AI replace those that are not. So, the best example I give, I tell people, ask yourself two questions. If you hired this summer the two brightest college kids at a Harvard as interns.

Kristen Knapp (01:58)

Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Kristen and I’m here with Ira Zlotowitz. He is the owner of G-Parency and also the owner of Avery GPT. We’re going to talk a lot about AI automation and how it’s changing the commercial real estate industry. So thanks for being here, Ira. So give us a little bit about your background. Obviously, we’re going to be talking a lot about AI and kind of how it helps the industry. What is your place in the industry?

Ira Zlotowitz (02:12)

Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

So, just to give a little recap, I started my career, I started doing mortgage financing, brokerage, my whole career. And I started a company about 25 years ago called Eastern Union. We always were ahead of the curve in technology. It way before AI, way before things were hosted on websites before, you and…

over the years, came about 5, 7, 10 years ago, I realized that the market is clearly going to change. Tech is starting to take over, social media is changing. Look, the fact we’re sitting here doing a podcast and we’re doing it from remote locations, that wasn’t unthinkable years ago. And I saw it was coming in that direction and I was always prepping for where that future was going to be. About 4 years ago, we merited to build the company to the 10th in the country, 5 billion dollars a year, number 3 in transactions. And about 4 years ago,

almost to the day now, we got a venture capital offer to build a Netflix of the finance industry. And I said, listen, I never want to be Netflixed out of my own business. I didn’t like this blockbuster story line. So we took the venture, and I told my clients about it. They wanted to match the offer. So about 250 clients came and we got together, and they decided to fund it the largest seed round in total, two all the rounds combined.

And we opened up G-Parency. G-Parency was the beginning, a little ahead of the time, four years ago. It was technology and human mixed together. we were, it was a long battle. Had a brand, but when we landed on, which worked out, thank God, perfectly today, is that G-Parency is mortgage assurance. For $4,500, we shop a deal, guarantee the best financing, and then you close direct with your broker. So we don’t compete with anybody. The 80 % of people who go direct, they know they’re leaving money on the table. ⁓

$400 will shop the market. For the 20 % of the user broker, they like their broker, they love their broker, they’re great broker, but they want to keep their broker in check. Maybe there’s something else out there. About $4,500, so mortgage assurance. And last about 90 days ago, we spun off all of our tech, all of our AI, all of our data, banking data, into a new company called Avery GPT, which used to be the future, now we’re looking at it the present. So it’s the AI hub for commercial real estate. That’s the vision.

Kristen Knapp (04:27)

Right?

I mean, it’s so exciting and I know a lot of people have a lot of, you know, maybe trepidation around AI and how it affects the real estate industry. You talk about how you’re using it to actually supplement and help it.

Ira Zlotowitz (05:29)

So, you everyone has this fear in general of AI, like, it gonna replace me? Is it gonna replace you? It’s not gonna replace you, and it’s not gonna replace me. What I believe, and I coined this, you know, I made sure to like to put onto X, onto LinkedIn right away, the line that AI is not gonna replace you, those using AI replace those that are not. So, the best example I give, I tell people, ask yourself two questions. If you hired this summer the two brightest college kids at a Harvard as interns.

What work that you do every day would you give them? Think about Christening yourself. What would you give them? There’s things you’d give them. Number one. Number two. What have you been procrastinating that you know you should do, but you don’t do? If they were here, you’d give it to them. Now think about how much time would that save you? And what would you do at that time? That’s what Avery GPT is. Avery’s going to be vet.

Whatever, if you think in those terms, yeah, a lot of little tasks. This won’t save you two minutes, eight minutes. You’ll have to review it just like you review the college kit, but you’ll train it get better. So the beauty of commercial real estate is everyone does the same thing. Everyone listening to this podcast, if you’re in real estate, you do the exact same thing as your competitor. The difference is how you underwrite, where you buy, the size of the building, where you get your capital from, but the steps are the same. So the idea of ABGBT is build that AI agent, that Avery that’s gonna go and the parts you want from the time you get a deal in your email inbox.

scrapes it, put it onto a pipeline tracker, run the back end of the numbers for you, make the offer, nurture if the price is not right. Imagine you had a whole team that could nurture every day they looked at. 18 months later the price changes, you’re there to make the offer. And then do basic due diligence. Call up your title company for you, get a quote from the insurance, get the banking quote, and then when you want to do a mortgage,

the banking data. So the way we built AVGPT is it’s a membership based product and then somebody gets five things for that membership. One is just we always need, no matter where it goes, training, consulting, there’s new things always come out, get an hour of training consulting one-on-one, another hour company-wide. Second thing it does is that all those things we’re building might be one builds one AI agent or one big pipeline tracker, but break it down, an OM reader, and envelope underwriter, all the little tools one at a time.

toolkit to access to it and then give you to the full enchilada. You need a pipeline tracker, which I find amazing. Commercial real estate 2025, no buyer of real estate has a good pipeline tracker that they use. None. There’s no good system really for that. And we’re building that in here. And the last two items is the lender match. You have it take it down to market. You want to just see what banks the right banks for you with AI, with the profile and the contact information. And the cool thing is we have the ability to get you on the

So when a seller, a banker, investors looking for information about you, you should be able to show up and rank at that point. So the goal is like Netflix. You have something people pay money for, we can build it. Let’s build it and throw it into the membership and keep building it out from there.

Kristen Knapp (08:11)

Absolutely, that’s so interesting and how long has it taken you to kind of build this AI and all the intelligence behind it?

Ira Zlotowitz (08:18)

So it’s going be a lifetime of building, going to keep building. But we basically took the tech that was sitting in G-Parency, and it’s all map-based and the whole bit, and we just finished migrating it over. And that was just overlaying the AI and more AI pieces on top of it as we go.

So it’s gonna be constant iteration. But as you know, AI gets cheaper to build things everyday, easier to build things everyday. You know, you have a 12 year old kid today is the one that’s gonna be building your stuff here. You know what mean? Like, ⁓ it’s a new world. So for me, people ask me, where’s the future, the present? I don’t know.

But I wanted to make sure that if someone wants to do, if AEI is taking over and doing deals A to Z or assisting, AVGPT was going to be that for there. Someone wants that human to help them guarantee shop at Genova level of personal relationships, that’s G-Parenting. And from their previous company, I want old school. I want a mortgage broker to the closing, pay the full fee. Let me bring you to Eastern Union. So the connective tissue is there. And this was always like, you know, this way I have a sports stance. God will decide where it plays out. And hopefully, you know, one of the three is going to be the benefactor of

⁓ of the next opportunity.

Kristen Knapp (09:21)

I mean, I think it’s a really smart strategy and even as technology progresses, there’s always going to be people who like that personal touch with G-Parency. So I think it’s a good way to kind of spread out.

With G-Parency, obviously, your tech was fueling your company. How did you have to adjust it to be consumer-facing and to kind of be friendly for anybody to use it?

Ira Zlotowitz (10:15)

So it was built in G-Parency for client facing a lot of it. The difference was we had internal and external. Now we just, because we’re focusing on like from the acquisition steps. So we took the foundation that we have and said, okay, we have, you know, dozens of beta users that are telling us what fields they use when they see a new deal, you know, so that those things we added. But the real key thing is we connected Avery, the LLM.

Kristen Knapp (10:21)

Okay.

Ira Zlotowitz (10:43)

to the pipeline tracker. for example, someone doesn’t want anyone to encroach in their emails, they’ll be able to email the pipeline tracker, it’ll update the deal for them. They’ll read it and update it. They’ll be able to tell it. Now think about, I tell someone, people pay this, you know, these big data providers like CoStar, a fortune of money for, then, you know, people can argue that the data is great, it’s not great, there’s competition to them, but you know how much data you have yourself? If you’re buying real estate, or investing in real estate, you could be seeing 10, 15, 20 deals a day.

That’s up to 400 deals a month. That’s 5,000 a year.

Can you imagine if you tracked every one of those deals and you to ask questions on it? You have much data you have, people don’t realize. What are the rents in this area? Let it open up every file in that area and see the last two better apartments that rent it. And you see what the rents are. And then you can send out an agent to go on see what apartments.com or something like that is showing for rents. And you can reconcile it. There’s so many things you have yourself. think once someone comes up with this idea that I’m telling you, why should you spend five grand building that agent? In effect, every time I get another 20, 30, 40,

Kristen Knapp (11:31)

All right.

Ira Zlotowitz (11:40)

members we hire another developer to build more tools. Someone builds the tools. like someone came to me and said I have this great idea I built out this this tool for you could extract a rent drill and put it to your setup because I charge X dollars a month for it. I think it’s a great tool doesn’t pay me to build it at that price. I’m putting that in my toolkit where someone could link there and find the person. So I want to be that first stop. When you think AI commercial real estate think Avery.

Kristen Knapp (12:02)

Yeah, absolutely. And as far as people who might be a little scared of technology or not really know much about AI, how easy would this be for them to adopt?

Ira Zlotowitz (12:12)

So it’s very, very easy. I took into account that’s in commercial real estate. That’s today. That’s not really the fear. I’ll you what the fear most people have. It’s the fear of the secrecy. You see in commercial real estate, it’s like people do a few deals a year and they make a lot of money on those deals. They don’t want to risk that you’re going to have their information. That’s the risk. So I set it up in a way.

Kristen Knapp (12:29)

Mmm.

Ira Zlotowitz (12:31)

where if you want to use my system to extract the data or use the tool without giving me anything, set up that way also. You want to put in a fake address that you have a code for yourself, one, two, three means by you something, that’s fine. So it won’t sync with the map, but that’s fine for you. So you can use the function. That’s who we’re building it in that type of way. So this way, wherever you are. But if someone’s scared of technology, I haven’t met those people in the last couple of years because AI took it to a new game. They know they have to. Because if you have a staff of five people,

you you you’re competitive as five people using AI is doing the output of 15 people or they cut their expenses in half and only kept two or three so they know they have to do it so it’s unlike when the when the last round of technology came out people resistant there’s no resistance anymore they have no choice i think it’s the opposite we’re going to come to a lot of lawsuits because people have been uploading their their om’s and things like that to chat gbt and they but they signed a non-disclosure what happened

Kristen Knapp (13:14)

Yeah, absolutely.

⁓

Ira Zlotowitz (13:25)

What happens

when you have an agent signing on disclosure for you? And you breach it, who’s responsible? These are the next level of questions that are going to dealt with. But that’s what it is. I want to be at the tool side of it, not so much the data side of it, except for the lending data, which is my proprietary information that I have from all the deals that we worked on and a ton of mortgage brokers that use the system.

Kristen Knapp (13:28)

Yeah.

Yeah, and if you, you know, it’s set up so you don’t have to disclose information you don’t want to disclose, where are you pulling, like, what kind of data are you pulling? I know you said like apartments.com and all of that.

Ira Zlotowitz (13:58)

So

I’m not pullingapartments.com. So what I’m saying is, we’re building, the data that we have is the same public data that’s, if you file a loan, you have to file data. So the same raw data that anyone can buy, public data. But what’s proprietary that we have is banking data. So we have the public records of banking data.

Kristen Knapp (14:14)

you

Ira Zlotowitz (14:16)

we have what bankers tell us they’re doing and because we’re working on hundreds and hundreds of deals a month and sending out quotes, we get the live feedback and we update the algorithm based on that type of feedback. So like one of the cool features we have with the lender match is you could type in any address in America and it will tell you within an X mile radius.

all the most active lenders and the buildings will color code with pins so you know, oh, in this area, this lender is pretty aggressive. It’s built. But I’m not taking the client’s data in. I’m not digesting the data from the client. For them, it’s tracking. Take my data and you want to track your information. And you want to use this tool without anything else, that’s fine. That’s way it’s built. the toolkit of individual tools, the pipeline trackers holistically, everything in one place for those that want to do it. it’s a matter of, you want

trust like people ask me a lot of times and I talk about this many times when it comes to business everybody has an ulterior motive.

What is my ulterior motive? What’s my goal? My goal is I want for the price point it roughly works out to it’s a month by month subscription and when it levels out the price ultimately settles that roughly working out about five thousand a year. So my goal is that you love it you use it you tell your friend.

Kristen Knapp (16:09)

Okay.

Ira Zlotowitz (16:09)

I want to get

more people like Netflix. I’m not looking at a few clients pay a fortune of money. So I’m the opposite side of the equation and that’s the goal. So it’s not a data play. You think, you make a ton of data. Let me tell you something, if people love all my tools and there’s a hundred thousand people using it, that’s 500 million revenue. The numbers just become crazy and that’s the plan. So I’m not doing anything to breach the trust and the loyalty to have the data points because then it slows down from the mission of what I want to get to. I want to be the first stop. I want to replace Google Maps.

of Google Maps overlaid with public data. Everyone goes to Google Maps, start here. And as you look at the property, it’ll go right into your pipeline automatically.

Kristen Knapp (16:43)

Yeah, I mean, think the subscription model is very smart. And I think that that gives people a lot of flexibility as well. People doing a lot of deals or wanting to just pull a bunch of tools from the system. Talk about, so you guys are in a soft launch right now. When are you anticipating being live for everybody?

Ira Zlotowitz (17:01)

So it’s available to anybody that wants to join now. The problem I tell is if you want to get all these features, you have to know that some of the things are sitting on this platform, that platform, and I’m moving it over. So by December 1st, it’ll be on one platform. Then we’re going to keep enhancing to it. it’s really like at what point can someone actually see the experience fully?

you’ll able to see the experience sometime mid-December to January. The full experience. Like right now, we just have it. People are sick of going to all these websites for news. On our main hub, just logging in, we go to every website, many of the real estate websites, summarize the news for you. If I AI, so you just like to say that read as a ticker. So rates up there. We’re starting to put all the pieces into one place, and then holistically everything comes together. And we’re gonna launch what’s like the Pulse. Whenever we see something that someone’s using interesting commercial real estate, with AI, let’s…

Kristen Knapp (17:32)

Mm.

Ira Zlotowitz (17:45)

talk about it, let’s show people how they’re it. know, Geminis come out with a new version, tell people in real estate what it means to them. So someone knows, want to go AI Commercial Real Estate, go here, that’ll be your starting point. If there are masterminds that focus on that, I want to put a direct to your masterminds. I want to be the first step, and someone knows, you pay membership, you yourself covered. And the more members I have, I can reinvest in the platform.

Kristen Knapp (18:02)

it.

Absolutely, I I think it’d be great for people that are also investing out of state and maybe starting to look at new markets. I think it’s a really good way for them to cut through a lot of mistakes or a lot of work.

Ira Zlotowitz (18:16)

100 % but you know it’s funny you say the word out of state when we’re sitting here doing a podcast nationwide you know it’s every state is out of state for a different person yeah so it’s like I’m in the tri-state well where do you live because we’re a different tri-state you know

Kristen Knapp (18:30)

Yeah

amazing well I mean this is so cool I’m really excited for Avery GPT it seems like you guys are really finding a white space in the market and attacking it. Tell everybody where to find you, G-Parency and Avery GPT.

Ira Zlotowitz (18:44)

So we’ll go with the easiest one first. AveryGPT.com. Simple. Thank you, ⁓ thank you, chat GPT for making it simple. How people think, know, chat, GPT, AveryGPT. And for us, it actually works out that G Parency, the name G Parency is GP for general partner and transparency. That’s really what it comes from.

Kristen Knapp (18:48)

See, we’re done.

Yeah. ⁓

Ira Zlotowitz (19:03)

GPT happens also to stand for General Ponta Transparency. So works out very well, Avery GPT. So it works out very, well. And we thank OpenAI. And then for myself, GParency is G-Parency, G-P-A-R-E-N-C-Y dot com. And I give out my email and my cell. I have one cell number. My email address is IRAZ, I-R-A-Z, at G-Parency. So my first name and initial for my last name. And my cell number I give out is 917-597-2197.

Kristen Knapp (19:09)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ira Zlotowitz (19:31)

I prefer text or WhatsApp or email as opposed to a phone call. Today you don’t know who’s calling and it’s much easier to respond. And people reach out on LinkedIn. Under the name, not hiding anything. In business of transparency, you can’t be hiding things.

Kristen Knapp (19:38)

Sorry.

Well, that’s amazing. Thank you so much. ⁓ Yeah, this has been awesome. Thanks for being here.

Ira Zlotowitz (19:50)

Thank you so much for having me, I appreciate it. Thank you.

Kristen Knapp (19:53)

And thank you everybody for listening. Hope you learned a lot and maybe got some inspiration of how to integrate this AI into your own business. Definitely check out G-Parency and Avery GPT. Reach out to Ira Seems like there’s a lot of great information out there. So we will see you next time. Bye.