Ep 138: How One Agent Built AI Tools to Transform His Business

Welcome to Real Estate AI Flash, the podcast that helps you understand how AI is changing real estate and the strategies you can use to win. I'm your host, Rajiv Sajja. Most agents think AI will help them work faster. Peter McDonald discovered it could help him build entirely new tools for his business. In this episode, I sit down with Peter, a realtor with Coldwell Banker Hartside in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to discuss how curiosity and AI helped him go from software user to software builder. Without a background in software engineering, Peter shares how he creates Chrome extensions, automated MLS workflows, and began building his own AI-powered CRM to eliminate repetitive tasks and spend more time serving clients. If you ever wished there was a tool that solved a problem in your business, this conversation will show you that building it maybe more achievable than you think. Here's my conversation with Peter. Welcome to the first episode in September, episode 138 of the Real Estate AI Flash. And today I have Peter McDonald, is a realtor with Coldwell Banker Hartside in Newtown, Pennsylvania, in the Bucks County area, not too far from where I live. He's got over 10 years of real estate experience and a background in high-tech sales, marketing, and he's also... a member of the board of the Bucks County Association of Realtors. And he's doing some cool stuff with AI. And I bumped into him at the NAR legislative meetings in D.C. and recently we started talking. And I said, you know what? Peter's going to be good talking about how he's leveraging AI on the podcast. So, Peter, welcome to the podcast.

Well, thank you very much. And it's truly an honor. Thanks for inviting me. I love it. Hopefully we can make this interesting and fun for everybody.

It will be. It will be. Look, I think we're living in an age where stuff's changing rapidly, right? There's FOMO, fear of missing out with the realtors who don't apply themselves. But if you're listening to this, agent, broker, anyone, nobody's really keeping up with AI. I think the key thing you want to take away from this episode or any of our episodes is find one or two things that Peter shares that say, you know what, that would help my business. Find things, areas that AI can help you and really help you become more personable to your sphere and really invest time there. And I call it, you know, automate the ordinary so you can personalize the extraordinary. And that's where the AI role is, right? Like, so that's the goal. So it's not, the goal is not to like, I wanna do everything on every episode. Some episodes may make sense. And today we hope will make sense. So Peter, I gave you like a quick elevator pitch introduction of a career that's obviously in progress. So tell us, how'd you get into real estate and bring us to today?

Well, I was working in software sales, and I got a job in digital marketing at a marketing agency across the way. And they, they had a series of layoffs. And I had just been there, frankly, I hadn't been there that long. I was part of that was a group director and part of a large team. I was managing and like, you know, I thought things were going well, well, you know, this