Speaker 1human beings are necessary to do deals, right? We're exchanging real amounts of money when you're talking about a land deal. Six, seven, eight figures. There's like real trust involved. Sitting down at the dinner table with a farmer, they don't care what tools you used, right? Or what nerdy applications you've used to go and find that. They care about like, who's the human sitting here? And do I trust them? Hey, what's going on, everybody?
Speaker 2Welcome back to the Land Development Podcast. I am your host, Ryan Glick. Well, for those of you who tune in on a weekly basis to every episode, you're probably wondering why we have a off-cycle release here. But of course, from the title, you know this is a bonus episode. I've had a lot of you reach out asking me when we're gonna do an episode on AI related to land development. And so because of that, I reached out to Carter Molloy, who is the founder and CEO at Acres, and asked if he would have a conversation with me on AI related to the industry. And so that's exactly what you're gonna get out of this episode. It's not a software promotion episode or anything like that. We talk about AI in general for the industry, different areas that it makes sense for developers to be thinking about using AI, how AI might change over time, how we've already seen it change over time. And so this is a really good conversation and I think it's an interesting topic and there's still a lot of uncertainty related to where AI is going to be in 18 months, two years, three years, five years, and so on. It's just moving so fast. So with that said, I do have an ask for you. If you want to get into even more detail on AI, if you'd have any interest in us doing more of a webinar style episode where we actually get hands-on, with some of the AI tools and just walk through different things, if that would be of interest to you, shoot me an email at ryan.landdevpodcast.com and let me know. I wanna see what type of interest there is. And if there's enough interest, maybe we'll put one of those on and get a few of us on here and actually walk through some real world examples of how you could do some of this stuff on your own. With that said, let's go ahead and get over to my conversation with Carter Malloy. We've got a lot of things we're gonna get into today, all revolving around AI and land development. But before we get into that, I wanna get a little feel for your background and how you got into this space. I mean, obviously, you founded and continue to operate Acres. But even before that, what was your involvement and kind of your path into the land development industry?
Speaker 1Put most simply, it moved from investing in data businesses to investing in land development. To building a data business. That is the fastest way I could say that.
Speaker 2Since you did have that middle piece in there where you were investing in land and then ended up back, you know, starting a data business. On the land investment side, when you were doing that, you know, what was it about the land investing business? Or I'm sorry, yeah. What was it about investing in land that led you to say, you know what, I should get into the data side of this industry?
Speaker 1Yes, the classic, solve their own problem, right? I think that's how many better businesses out there got started is somebody had a problem and they went out and go, they were stubborn and perhaps a little or a lot stupid to go out and try to solve that themselves. And that is how we got here. So we were deploying capital across, I think it was 23 different states in the US as land investors. And we had this big problem of data reliability, of pipeline management, of, you know, just being able to find land in the first place. And then underwrite that land and doing that at scale when you're trying to do a, you know, a deal a week is brutal, even a deal a month, right? It's just really hard to execute. And so we, just like everybody else in the land world, we had like eight different pieces of software and county websites and state websites and city websites were bookmarking. So we just got fed up enough. We said, we're going to go try to build our own. And so we started that effort five years ago. We put acres on the internet four years ago. Like right now. So it's our, it's our birthday week here soon. And then as that began to scale, we did recognize like, Hey, this is in fact a real business. Let's lean in. So we sold the land investing company to private equity and made this our full-time job.
Speaker 2Well, I want to get into some of the, you know, we've had people ask us like, Hey, when are you going to do an AI episode? And so this has been something people have been asking for on the show. We've tended to be more, driven by operators in the industry. I mean, you were an operator for a period of time and maybe you still are on the side. I'm not sure, but the, you know, getting into AI, so many people listening in will have already done things. Everybody's tinkering with it. Some people have built some sophisticated things using AI, but just in case we have somebody listening in that's not super familiar with AI and really what AI is, you know, how would you describe to somebody who's getting into this for the first time? Like what is it? What is artificial intelligence?
Speaker 1Yeah. When we talk about artificial intelligence today, we're usually referring to LLMs, right? Large language models. What those do to make its core is they extrapolate text. And so they, you, you speak to it, you write something to it and it tries to understand the context and then basically present you an answer that is relevant to what you're looking for. We've all seen that inside of Google and sort of the base six of AI, but at the frontier where a lot of our team operates, it is doing incredible, incredible things, right? So in our case, and there's a multitude of cases out there and the ways you can use it in our case, what that means is we, you have, I think of it as like a brilliant intern or a team of them, an army of them that work 24 hours a day that can go operate maps for you, right? So if you're in the business of finding land or doing deals in any capacity. You can now, in natural language, talk to the map inside of anchors and it will go execute whatever function you're looking for it to do for you. Go find that information and help you do your work in any of your work that's done on a map. It does it. It helps you do that dramatically faster.
Speaker 2So it's really, I mean, initially it's going to be able to speed up the process for developers. I mean, I know you operate a lot on the acquisition side. And so when developers are looking for land or they're trying to find the right piece of land, and I've always wondered this as well, you know, when you have developers that operate in a single market, right? They're, they're in a single market. They know the market really well. They probably know all the farmers and they know, they know who owns all of the land and everything. I've always wondered what, what benefits are there to those developers who already have a feel for their particular market in incorporating, you know, AI into their workflow at, at whatever level that may be.
Speaker 1I think to put it most simply. It helps you say no faster, right? Any of us that are deal people recognize that most of our time is spent on deals that ultimately die for one, you know, for a large host of potential reasons and what AI can help you do. And in particular, AI is equipped with the right data and geospatial technology as we provide is it can find the no really, really fast, right? So even if you are working in a Mustang, Oklahoma, and you know, all of the local folks in that market, by the way, you're probably looking to expand, right? Most businesses by nature, want to grow, want to go new places. And that is where we are particularly helpful. But what that means in the context of AI at this point in time, so I can go into acres and type in like, like in natural language, what are you looking for? Right? Find me 20 to 100 acre parcels under 25% flood and wetlands with appropriate topo for a development, make sure that that's within 1000 of sewer areas. And that has a like, it's either zoned for residential office, whatever you're looking for, and if it's not, it has a high likelihood of passing. And then what AI can do is go out and assemble all that data for you. And here, here's 10 parcels you should take a look at. So as you can imagine, you know, extrapolate that into any industry or any deal type that involves land and maps, and it just saves you a ton of time.
Speaker 2Do you think this makes it more beneficial or advantageous to the big guys out there versus the small guys? And I know the small guys now have access because of price points and stuff. They have access to some of the same tools that maybe only the big guys had access to before, but I also, you know, think about this sometimes that, you know, trying to provide some of these tools to really all these different development groups, but now these groups that are outside of your market, they can hop on these same tools and very easily find out like what's in your backyard, whereas before that was very difficult, time consuming, and a lot of times, unless they were pretty. Committed to going into a market, um, or had people dedicated to doing that, they probably wouldn't do that. And it feels like it's going to become easier for some of these bigger companies to have AI go and look in these different markets where a lot of these, uh, smaller developers may be operated and were pretty safe before. Do you think this creates a lot more competition coming into some of these markets like that?
Speaker 1I do. I do not. I would say that it levels the playing field though, right? So it's going to make this easier for everyone. And look, let me make sure to say this out loud human. beings are necessary. to do deals right we're exchanging real amounts of money when you're talking about a land deal six seven eight figures uh you're not going to have a computer or a robot structure that transaction because by the way like who's gonna i don't know there's like real trust involved like sitting down at the dinner table with the farmer they don't care what tools you used right or or what you know uh nerdy applications you've used to go and find that uh they care about like who's the human sitting here and do i trust them so uh so like to call out like does it give particular players advantages yeah anybody that's using it has an advantage our goal is very simple uh we want transparency and that is in our mission statement it has been since day one as a company it's how we operate internally as humans among one another uh and the thing that we hope most to bring to the market which is transparency for everybody now what that means is oftentimes one person the other is not going to get as sweet of a deal as they thought they would but you know that that means that there's fair values there's fair prices so look in in any market sometimes the seller gets run over sometimes the buyer gets run over what what we think is more appropriate is everybody's equipped with rich information to make the right decisions so you
Speaker 2mentioned the human element to this as well that humans have to be involved in the process and everything and that was something i wanted to talk about today as well because it's you know there's obviously concerns and i think for most most tech companies that are thinking about how you're the value you're providing you also have to look at the other side of it too and think about just because we can do something should we does it make sense to do this you know what and and you're seeing that happen at the you know at the level of all these ai companies are trying to put a pause on things because things are moving so fast and i'm curious on your perspective when you think about the places in the land development industry where humans you know continue to exist it sounds like at the transaction level obviously or even sitting down at the table with the farmer when you're talking about buying their land the human still has to be involved there it's not a a robot that's going to go do that or some sort of automation that's going to do that where do you see i guess where else do you see that human element remaining or where do you think it's important for us to continue to have the human involved in this process
Speaker 1yeah i i think there's there's often um in media certainly there's sort of a false dichotomy or a set up where uh hey ai is going to take human jobs right the other side of that would be ai is just going to make humans much more productive now like if you are not using it you're gonna fall behind that is already happening uh writ large right and the reality is most businesses are adopting it in mass lots of them are doing a bad job of it we have done that ourselves we have implemented ai tools it sounded really great and they were a time waste they were slop right so there's plenty of that out there and and by the way like every guy that looks like me that's out selling data and software now says they are ai everyone and so um you know there's plenty of charlatans about and plenty of mismatched use cases but in general ai is already making a lot of us far more productive in our day-to-day and so you know i i'm not certain that the idea of replacing humans is as appropriate as it is accelerating humans so that means we can all do more we can do more deals right as an individual i undoubtedly can do more today than i can i could two years ago yeah
Speaker 2and i wonder too with the you know that race there's a race that happens right because you you do feel that you feel you know i see all these other people using it all these people are doing all these sophisticated things i'm not using it as much as they are so i need to speed up to hurry up and catch up with them and then they look at me and they say oh here they come i better i better implement even more so i can go faster and uh and i don't i guess i have some concerns like in general with it just because i i think there's still some uncertainty with the future of of where this continues to go because it does move so fast and everything but i also wonder where that race ends with everybody kind of looking at each other and realizing and it's legitimate that if you don't use this technology you're going to fall behind and like you said people are already falling behind and so you know where does that end for especially the development community right who traditionally have been relatively slow to adopt you know new technology and everything and so as this comes into place i've heard from a lot of people who are who have gone all in on it and they're they're doing amazing things with it i've talked to others who are just starting to dip their toes in the water and try to decide how far they want to go with it and everything but do you think it's this will be a healthy race as far as like continuing to push forward or do you think there's some responsibility from both the developers as well as the tech companies to kind of understand where you're taking ai next
Speaker 1i think this was particularly terrifying right so now like we look we are adverse to change quite often by nature as human beings right like i'm not sure i don't know the number of farmers that stood there and said hey the tractor is the devil but a lot of them did and they got left behind right and the same is true i think that's what i'm trying to do and i think that's what i'm trying to do and i think that's what i'm trying to do and i think that's what i'm trying to do and i think that's what i'm trying to do and i think that's what i'm trying to do and i think that's what i'm trying to do and i think that's what so you know i are these tools useful should people be using them absolutely um is the pace of development here concerning and uh the capability sets of these tools potentially concerning as you extrapolate forward like 6 12 24 months not six years like months yes there are some real uh conversations that we need to have at a level of like human race yeah
Speaker 2yeah and that's yeah that's kind of where my head is at as well is just kind of keep an eye on understanding where things are going and and even for the developers out there who are interested in these tools do want to speed things up but a lot of them seem to be doing exactly what you're talking about in that empowering their people not necessarily replacing their people and sure there are a lot of tools out there that are advertising get rid of your people you know become a company of one you know essentially because you don't need real people anymore but i don't feel i don't see that really happening in this industry i think people are empowering their people which is really good to see and uh i guess when you think about the ways that developers could start say they're not using ai really at all today they're not doing much with it maybe they've they've probably dabbled in chat gpt and just some some of the uh more of the the chat clients that they can use but they aren't they haven't really created any processes around it what do you think or where do you think that they should consider starting you know in that development process of starting to incorporate some more ai into their day-to-day yeah i think that's a good question i think that's a good question
Speaker 1yeah i think before looking at specialized uh tools like like acres or you know myriad of other workflow softwares and systems out there go get an account right go go to claude or anthropic and get an account and not a free account like look if at least a few people in your life are telling you there's a world-changing technology out there even if you disagree with them go spend twenty dollars not not twenty thousand twenty single dollars to get a subscription and try the stuff out and i think that's a good thing i think that's a good thing i think that's a good thing and and spend an hour of your life not a month of your life like an hour understanding how to prompt and how to interact with uh again what at least a couple of your friends are telling you is a world-changing technology it's
Speaker 2funny you say that too because i've heard from a number of people in the industry who have done just that and they and they just it just blows their mind right they do they just do some basic things i was just talking to a broker down in uh houston yesterday or the day before and he was explaining to me all the stuff that he was doing with it and i was like and he's just just hearing the excitement from him of some of the stuff that he can do now in a much short shorter time period to evaluate you know sites and things of that nature it's cool to hear and i think it will blow people's mind and yeah there's in some cases there's some of it there's still a little bit of a technical hurdle if you want to get all the way down into the code of things but man that seems to be that that seems to be a thing almost of the past where people who aren't super technical are getting in there and you'll hear him say yeah i'm in clod code doing i'm creating apps i'm creating tools to help me with my business um is there a certain spot do you think that it makes the most sense to start i mean you're in the acquisition side of course do you think the acquisition side is is one of those areas where people should explore first in the development space yeah
Speaker 1i think like very simplistically again using an off-the-shelf model like if you're working in acquisition uh well if you're going off the shelf you're not going to get great geospatial data and that kind of thing but what you are going to get is a great assistant so you got an llc or a landowner you want to go learn more about just go start talking to the robots about it you'll it's pretty amazing how how much work they can do in a short amount of time similarly i'm curious about this city council meeting uh or these members of city council and how they've been voting lately uh you know whatever that let's call it like general research project whatever that thing is that you do where you're clicking around and googling six different times and going to a bunch of websites at the end of the day you're going to be able to do a lot of at the very very very base level of using ai you should be you should not be doing that anymore you should just be asking that question one time to one robot friend and allow them to go do your
Speaker 2do you think people are relying too much on ai for overall decisions meaning like it can be pretty easy i feel like and this is just from personal experience i feel like it can be pretty easy when it gives you an answer and you start to see ai sometimes will tell you what you want to hear you know it'll even change its answer pretty quickly when you correct it and everything. How much scrutiny should people have when they are interacting with AI and they're getting some sort of results back to make sure that, hey, AI did some due diligence for me, but maybe I still need to do a certain level of it before I just jump into a particular site?
Speaker 1Yeah, a whole lot, right? Like trust but verify. Absolutely, man. It is incredibly dangerous to actually make important decisions. Call those like one-way door decisions, right? Where you go forward with something and if you're doing that based on bad information or bad research, just the same as if you asked an intern or an employee to go do a project and then you wanted to go take action on that, you want to do understand what their work said and make sure that that checks out with you. And then the other thing you mentioned is the idea that these LLMs can be quite sycophantic. It's very, very true. If you imagine the business of creating AI, you're trying to please the users, right? At a consumer level, you're trying to bring them a great experience. And so the models tend to, and despite some real positive efforts by the developers of them, they tend to say, oh, you're right. You're so smart. You're so great. Let me help you discover that. And, oh, I'm wrong. And sort of like bend to your will a little too easily. And so it is definitely worth watching out for. You can write down, don't do that, right? Like literally don't use synthetic data is always a super important starting point. So they all, you know, more or less at this phase, like try not to make things up, what you're saying. So don't hallucinate, don't use synthetic data. Don't care about my opinion, right? Be factual. What you're looking for is a thought partner, a business partner that can help you.
Speaker 2You mentioned hallucinations there. That's another one of those big things that can happen with these LLMs. Can you describe kind of what, what hallucinations are for people that maybe aren't familiar with that term?
Speaker 1Yeah. That's when you see something that isn't there. Yeah. Pretty, pretty straightforward. I will say like the rate of hallucination has gone down pretty dramatically with the frontier models, with the best ones out there. But it means quite literally that, that this, this language model you're interacting with will create something that is not necessarily the truth, whether that is synthetic data or drawing the wrong conclusion or just flat out making something up so as not to have to go do the extra bit of work, right? Like everybody's fibbed before in their lives and we don't, we don't like it. We don't want to do that as people. The robots are absolutely guilty of the same, like, Hey, that looked like it was going to be a big chore. So I just swept it under the rug and told you something different.
Speaker 2Yeah. I, you know, and with your, your background, you know, again, being, you know, an acres really focusing on that the acquisition side of things, I think it would be interesting. You gave an example earlier of, you know, a prompt that you might type when you're looking for a certain, you're looking for a certain parcel or a certain site that you want to build and develop. I'm wondering if you could walk through an example, another example of maybe how developers could use AI in that acquisition side of things and really just kind of dig into that. So they, they get a feel for, okay, that makes sense. I do it this way today. This is how doing something with AI could potentially speed up that process for me.
Speaker 1Yeah. The easiest thing you can do ever is ask it that question. Hi, I'm in land development. I work in this region. This is what I'm looking to do. How can you help me? And you will be pretty surprised at the menu that it gives you back of things that can help you do. So it is always something just encourage having very open conversations with whichever LM you're using. And to make sure to caveat what you said with my experience, like I am not a technical person. In fact, I may have hallucinated some of the things I've said today. Right. So this is a, we have a very real data scientist and AI experts on staff. I am, I am not that deep in the weeds to actually know that the technical specs here.
Speaker 2No, no, that's fair. That's fair. But obviously you're, you're involved in a day to day with your team and everything. So you definitely get a lot of exposure to it. And you know, the, the piece we were talking about with, with the data coming back to the developer and then the trust, but verify, right. Related to what they're getting back. Is that just a matter of, I'm trying to think through this, right? Because if they have, let's say that a developer has 10 steps, they normally do when they're doing site selection and they're trying to find a site, each site, they do these 10 steps, whatever they are. And now they're going to have AI step in and help with, I don't know, X number of those steps. And then they're going to have AI step in and help with, I don't know, X number of those steps up front. But I would assume based on what you're saying, there's still going to be maybe step number four. You don't have to do a hundred percent of it, but you probably should do, you know, maybe 20% of it just to do some validation. It's not, we're not literally outsourcing everything to AI. Like we talked about earlier, you need to figure out the steps that are the most consequential to the business and your decisions. And don't just basically say, Hey, I said, this is a great site to develop this type of you know, to do residential here, to do you site, but it maybe overlooks something and you are able to catch that at that step number four or whatever. Is that how you would think about this? Or is there a different way you'd approach
Speaker 1it? I think that's incredibly appropriate, right? Which is just go, go find the, what is it? Like the highest effort, lowest value components of the job and start with those, right? Like things that take you a lot of time, you get a broker packet in your email, right? It's like six pages long. And you don't even know if you should be spending. Time on this or not drag and drop it into a model to say, Hey, verify this. Is this appropriate based on what you know about me? Is this an appropriate thing for me to go spend some time on? Uh, well, you know, whatever that sort of like, you know what I mean? Like there's parts of all of our jobs that are high effort. They take a lot of time, but they don't really do a whole lot positive for us. Um, research is what I mentioned earlier, uh, where, where the frontier models are incredible. You know, Hey, I want to go learn about this company. I want to go learn about this person, this process, this competitor, whatever it may be. Boy, uh, do you, that could be a one to 10 hour rabbit hole for you. And, uh, that is no longer the case should not be the case for you.
Speaker 2Yeah, no, I like that. And I think you said it earlier about, you know, you're thinking of the, you're thinking of AI as a, almost like a junior team member as far as, but they're, they're super thorough. They know everything, you know, they have access to a lot of information, but they will make mistakes. And so I think that is probably one of the more important things. To get across to people listening in right now is that, yeah, we should definitely be leaning into these, these tools and making use of them, but yeah, definitely, um, still use, you still need to use some of your intuition and some of your, your knowledge that you've developed over the years to continue to, um, make sure that you're getting into the right deals and everything.
Speaker 1Yeah. And I think that that extends quite a bit, uh, especially I'll use an example in the world of communication. So, you know, people are now with quite a bit of regularity using AI to draft their emails or their sales emails or their responses to their actual friends. Um, you know, it's kind of icky, right? Like we've all got those emails. It's like, oh, this feels, it feels very, very generated by a robot. And so, uh, it's, it's a great example where AI models can help you to understand, you know, the framing, the context, Hey, what's the history of this conversation with this person, but maybe let it give you some bullet points, but like write the email yourself, write the communication, like, you know, be human. I think, uh, we're, we're all very tired of the amount of, uh, slop you see out there in the world. Slop being like AI generated content. That just isn't helpful. It's a lot of words. Um, I think that too, too is a great example of this use case. Like it is actually helpful. It can be damaging to your business or to your, your, uh, need your desired outcomes to use AI slop. And it can be very helpful to do the inverse and be the person who actually still writes emails with their hands.
Speaker 2It's funny. You say that too, because I can't tell you how many emails I get every week of people like wanting to be on the podcast. It's usually like PR firms that are, they're probably mass sending these out to different podcasts and stuff. And they all sound the same. Like everyone that comes to me and they all, they all follow the same format. It's like, tell them, tell me something about a recent podcast episode. You know, a couple of things about the podcast episode.
Speaker 1It was so intriguing when you
Speaker 2said this. Yeah. It's like, you didn't listen to my podcast. Come on, stop, stop making that up. And so, you know, right from the beginning that it's, uh, that it's not, they didn't write it. And it's probably some sort of mass thing that's going out to several podcasts to try to get the guests, the representing to get on the show and everything. But you're right. Like if people would actually take the time to write something themselves and be real with it, they probably would get people's attention more. I know they'd get my attention more for being on the show. I mean, I, it stands out night and day for sure.
Speaker 1I will intentionally, my grammar is not amazing in the first place, but I will intentionally use bad grammar and emails. Like, you know, Google will suggest, Oh, change it to this. And leave it alone. Let somebody know this is a human.
Speaker 2Yep. Yep. And I've been guilty of using, I mean, going down that path of using AI to like help with emails and stuff like that. And then you get to a certain point, like, like you were talking about and you're like, man, I need to reel this back in. This isn't even, this isn't even me anymore. Like what's, what's happening here. And I do sound like everybody else. And I don't want to, I don't want to be like that. And I mean, I had a point in time and I'm not ashamed to say this, but I had a point in time where even my podcast newsletter that I was sending out, like I was like, structure everything. And I finally got to the point where I was like, I have to write this myself. I can't have AI help me with it. This is going to be my words. It's going to be my writing style. and I'm going to do that, even if it takes me, you know, it doesn't even take you that long either. That's what's funny, right? Yeah. You can click a button and it can generate it in an instant, but maybe it takes you five to 10 minutes, depending on how thorough you're getting on certain things. But yeah, I think, I think that's really good advice from your, from your
Speaker 1standpoint. Yeah. Look, I, you know, there, there's a time to step on the gas and a time to not, right. And so just kind of flutter that, that break in that gas pedal appropriately through your professional life. And again, I would consider human to human consideration as a conversation, sorry, and communication is relatively low effort and relatively high value, right? So that's something you want to be a little more cautious about outsourcing versus these ultra time-consuming tasks that you can in fact stop doing.
Speaker 2Yeah. Do you think, I'm sure you think a lot about this just based on the nature of your company, but something that I think a lot about is the, the price that, these AI companies charge today and the fact that it is so cheap for what people are getting and thinking about when does this go up? Like when does it, you know what I mean? When does it get to the point where this $20 plan or this a $200 plan on cloud code turns into maybe the fourth of what it used to cost to hire an actual person where a lot of big companies will easily justify that. I mean, a big company could come in and say, yeah, I'll pay $20,000 for a AI agent to go and operate, you know, 24 seven and work. Whereas a small company is going to say, I can't spend $20,000 on this. So I've got to go back to this other older model and use this. And I can't truly keep up with the big guys at this point. Do you think that's something that could be coming at some point in the future? Or do you think they'll try to keep it, you know, relatively accessible for companies of all sizes?
Speaker 1You know, it's, it's really hard to see around corners with this stuff. It's hard to see like a few months in the future, much less a few years. What we've seen so far would suggest the other end of the spectrum. And I hope that can happen. Right. Which is that, uh, while the cost of compute is, is, uh, quite, quite variable these days, uh, generally speaking, the models are becoming more efficient at least like at a, at a, uh, a static level of, um, functionality, right? So I can get a six month or a year old model at a pretty sweet price these days. And it does a lot for you. So I, I, I'm not, I'm not, I'm actually convinced that it comes our direction further. Um, assuming, uh, the, the path we're on, the reality is these companies have terrible, terrible margins, right? And, uh, the competition is being venture funded for the most part, right? So like, are there price raises potentially in the future? Sure. Boy, you know, price to value on these things is pretty skewed in your favor right now. The, the, the hope is that everyone has access to full powered models, uh, in the future and that, that helps everybody out. Uh, but we'll, we'll have to see where things go.
Speaker 2Yeah. Well, next one's going to be a little bit difficult to answer because the, you know, it is hard to see around the corner and see where we're headed. You know, we're, we're talking in terms of the next 12 months or 18 months because things are changing so fast. But you know, when you think about the land development industry and how quickly things are changing, do you have any gut feel for where we might be in five years from now? And I know in the day of AI, you know, five years is seems like forever, but like, do you have any feel for where this is eventually going?
Speaker 1You know, I think the great news is, is, um, we will continue building things, right. As, as people. And so that is a, perhaps a happy in the world versus if you like me and you work in software, uh, there's some existential threats five years out there, uh, you know, may or may not, uh, come to pass. So in the world of land development, I think that demand is a thing that we've become used to for the most part, a few, few blips along the way. Uh, it feels like that's a pretty solid foundation for, for the next five, how we do our jobs is definitely going to change. It already has meaningfully, uh, and it will change a lot more in the next five years than it has in the last couple.
Speaker 2Is there anything else related to AI you think people in this industry should be thinking about?
Speaker 1Um, I think what we discussed earlier is like that price to value continuum, right? Like, like the frontier models are incredibly inexpensive. Like Googling something and clicking the AI button is not really using AI, right? Like go get a login, go, go use a, a real model, give them your 20 bucks, you know, try it out for a little while to, to, to go discover like where that value really, uh, can be and how, how far that can go. I'd say like the other side of that, right. Is again, there are a lot of people that look like me that, you know, talk about AI and talk about the tooling they have and they charge lots of money or they sell things that are claimed to be AI and they're not. Uh, so at the end of the day, you have to ignore salespeople, right? Ignore, uh, the folks trying to get you to buy their product and just go discover, like, does this bring me a lot of value? Uh, and again, I think the frontier models are like the easiest place for you to start that journey. And then you can dig into specific applications, right? And like market Intel and Landak, it could be, uh, acres or other solutions out in the market. Uh, and that goes through all the way to, you know, horizontal development, monitoring, vertical construction. There's a lot of really cool stuff happening right now.
Speaker 2Well, I, on these episodes, I usually do a segment at the end called the lightning round where I have five questions. Uh, we dig into, I think we're going to have, and I lately, it feels like because the conversations kind of go all over the place. I don't necessarily just, just have a list of questions that we go through sequentially. There's going to be a little overlap here, but I'm going to still walk through each of these questions. And, uh, uh, first one for you, what is one task you would never completely turn over to AI?
Speaker 1I, my one-on-one meetings, right? Both, both with people I work with, uh, as well as with my family. And it's just, that's, uh, you know, be humans. Come on.
Speaker 2Yeah. And I have to add something to this. Cause it's pretty funny. I feel like I lately I've been reading a lot of people online talk about how they, uh, like their performance reviews at the end of the year have all been written by AI. So like their managers are literally it. And so they, they read it and it's like, no, there's no, it's all generic, you know, feedback that they're getting. And it wasn't even any thought put in by their leader to actually help them, you know, progress in their career and everything. So I feel like that's very much in sync with what you just said there as well.
Speaker 1Yeah. There's a simple underlying message there. Care about the people around you, right? Like show them some respect and love.
Speaker 2All right. Second one. Do you think that AI will make land development easier or will it mainly make certain parts of it faster? It has already made it easier. All right. Third one. What is one skill young developers should make sure they continue to learn even as AI gets better?
Speaker 1Negotiation. That's that like super, super core business skill and how to have empathy towards the person you're negotiating with and how to approach those conversations respectfully and appropriately. That is a critical skill that you've got to, you got to hone over your years.
Speaker 2All right. Fourth one. What is one question about AI that you think every land developer should be asking right now?
Speaker 1What can it do for me right now? Like we've talked about earlier, you should just ask the AI that question. But, but absolutely. Dig in. Yeah.
Speaker 2I like that. So you guys listening in, make sure you go ask AI that question and the paid version of AI, like we've talked about, ask that question and you'll, maybe it'll open up the door to several different things that can help you with. All right. Let's see here. Last one. What is something developers do manually today that you think will seem crazy 10 years from now? And 10 is probably way too far in the future. You can say five years from now, two years from now.
Speaker 1Most of the things that you do today will feel bizarrely redundant and old school in five years. Most. So, so that, that I'll leave it at that.
Speaker 2All right. Well, I think that brings us to a close here, Carter. I appreciate you hopping on and sharing, sharing your knowledge and everything on the industry and everything. What's the best way for people listening in to connect with you and learn more about Acres?
Speaker 1LinkedIn is great. You can always shoot me a note and our website is acres.com. So they're pretty easy to find. Perfect. All right, guys, if you
Speaker 2look in the description for this episode, you'll see a link to the show notes page and on the show notes page will be, uh, those links there to LinkedIn and also to the Acres website. But as Carter said, it's very easy to find the, the Acres website. So you shouldn't have a problem there. Um, yeah, thanks again, Carter for joining and guys, if you not are on, if you are not already subscribed, please click that button. We'd love to have you back for the next one. Otherwise we will talk to you all next week. Take care.
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