Real Estate Addicts

Marc and Dan are back for another AI episode, this time on the difference between an AI assistant and an AI bot. They compare assistants like Instinct and Muse with a roster of Grok bots that each have a job: Sue Pervision the chief of staff, Cash Flo the podcast editor, Val U. Add on social media, Duke Diligence on research and Walter Jarvis as admin. You'll hear how one bot got Best Buy's executive team to refund a TV by lunch, why 20 to 30 two-minute tasks a day add up to more than an hour back, and the real privacy trade-offs of handing an assistant your logins and cards. If you want to use AI to save time in a real estate business, not just read about it, start here.

Fresh off six days in Poland with Drutex Windows and a group of Boston developers, Marc and Dan break down what American builders can learn from how the Poles build. Marc toured townhouse communities 30 minutes outside Warsaw going up for about $100 a square foot and selling around $280,000, delivered as vanilla boxes: the missing middle the U.S. doesn't have. They get into 20-inch exterior insulation, hollow-core block for exterior and interior walls, how 800,000-plus Ukrainian workers reshaped the Polish labor market, and why their buildings are so quiet. Plus why 49% steel tariffs led American mills to raise prices 48% instead of adding capacity, blower-door results with European windows, and the food.

Steve Vettori went from 15 years of enterprise software sales to developing the 34-unit Beacon in Newton, and now he runs MassDwell, a factory that builds accessory dwelling units out of light gauge steel. He walks Marc, Ray, and Dan through why he switched framing systems, how the factory turns out about one 560-square-foot module a day, and why his crews are on a customer's lot for roughly 30 days instead of seven or eight months. They get into the $350 per square foot price, the 900-square-foot by-right ADU law, why septic is the real bottleneck, and a Sudbury town project that only worked off site. If you own land in Massachusetts and have wondered whether an ADU pencils or what it costs, start here.

Brian Vizarreta has been acquired twice in four years, from StructionSite to DroneDeploy to Procore, and he came back to explain what all that money is actually betting on. He and Marc, Ray, and Dan get into facade mapping that finally settled a four-fix water leak, why the most valuable thing to ask an AI is what isn't there rather than what is, and whether any of this makes sense for someone building six-unit multifamily instead of $300 million towers. 

Nick's first deal was a $50,000 Dorchester lot bought with no attorney, no due diligence, and a 13% hard money loan. Plus a deed restriction that took three years to kill. He walks Marc, Ray, and Dan through the code interpretation that turned $140,000 of steel into a $300,000 line item, why two "at cost" GC partnerships ended up in court, and how he found 40 to 50 percent margins hiding in site work and foundations.

Eleven weeks into a new demo and disposal company, a text from the business partner laid it out plainly: $70,700 in revenue, about $6,000 a week, against a burn rate that requires $20,000 just to hold even. In this first Real Estate Addicts Business Lab, the hot seat opens the books on Circa Demo. The transfer station lines eating billable hours, the overtime nobody planned for, and the $15 hourly margin left after payroll taxes and an $80,000 truck. Listen in as Ricky Beliveau is back as we pull back the curtain on Marc's latest venture.

When a two-and-a-half-acre Weston lot landed in Ricky's inbox at a price he could hardly believe, his first thought wasn't excitement, it was "why am I getting screwed here?" In his fourth appearance he walks through the two-week due diligence sprint that followed, from the zoning attorney and the wetland flags to the 1943 setback rules that determine whether the whole thing pencils, plus what's quietly killing Boston projects and the helical pile surprise that cut one deal's IRR from 70% to 40%.

Greater Boston's median single-family price just crossed a million dollars, and Marc, Ray, and Dan spend this episode explaining why the math no longer works for anyone hoping to build their way out of it. They dig into why a triple decker now costs seven figures to construct, why Boston's permit numbers have fallen to a fraction of what they should be, and the strange split where rents are softening while sale prices refuse to move.

The guys trade war stories from the least glamorous corner of real estate. The assessor's office. They get into a retroactive Newton tax bill that landed on unsuspecting condo buyers, a phantom drainage easement that appears on the city's GIS map but nowhere in seventy-five years of title records, and the one filing that quietly turns a six-unit building into six far more expensive condominiums. If you own property, are underwriting your next acquisition, or have never once pulled your own property card, this episode will probably pay for itself. 

A listener wrote in asking how you build a real estate empire when you're spread too thin to hire anyone — and the answer flips conventional penny-pinching on its head. The guys break down why the smartest operators gladly send a $100 Uber SUV to grab drip edge, tip drivers to wait, and befriend neighbors instead of drowning in thousand-cut tasks, all while AI quietly handles the admin. Along the way, they unpack the new realtor.com affordability report cards and why Indiana quietly took the crown, how Massachusetts and New York landed dead last, and what a negative new-construction premium really tells you about where to place your dollars.