I Spend 1,500 Hours a Year Building With AI. Here’s Why.
I spend 1,500 hours every year building software with AI.
That's 2–4 hours every weekday and another 10–20 hours every weekend.
And I do it every day.
On the surface, that probably sounds crazy.
I'm the Visionary at Real Estate Webmasters. I'm not traditionally a software developer, and we have talented developers who can build software for a fraction of what my time is worth.
I value my time at a minimum of $1,000 USD per hour.
That's not an arbitrary number.
If I took 100 focused hours and dedicated them to enterprise sales, I would need to close $500,000 in total contract value to justify that valuation. At a 20% profit margin, that's $100,000 in profit—or $1,000 per hour.
In enterprise real estate, $500,000 in contract value could be one contract. It could be two smaller contracts. It's an entirely realistic outcome.
So I invest $1.5 million per year of my personal opportunity cost into this work, in addition to the millions Real Estate Webmasters invests in R&D every year.
Why?
Because I believe AI is too important to learn from the sidelines.
We Are an AI-Powered Company
Every employee at Real Estate Webmasters is expected to use AI every day.
We provide our teams with access to leading AI capabilities, including OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini. Our programmers use AI. Our designers use AI. Our project managers use AI. Our copywriters use AI. Our QA teams use AI.
If I'm going to ask that of our people, I need to do it too.
I've always believed that if I'm going to tell someone something is possible, I should be able to do it myself—or at least understand it deeply enough to know exactly what I'm asking of them.
And in my role, that matters even more.
We run EOS at Real Estate Webmasters, and I sit in the Visionary seat. My five core responsibilities are:
- Research & Education
- Product Vision
- Define Culture & Brand
- Enterprise Partnerships
- Operations Software
Building with AI directly touches almost every one of them.
I'm Not Trying to Become a Software Developer
This is an important distinction.
The purpose of spending 1,500 hours a year building isn't to replace one of our developers.
It's to become exceptionally good at understanding what is now possible.
And AI has changed something fundamental.
It gives people with deep domain expertise the ability to translate that expertise directly into software.
I've spent more than two decades building technology for the real estate industry. Real Estate Webmasters has completed more than 60,000 custom projects in real estate.
But my experience isn't limited to running a real estate technology company.
I run a real estate team. I'm a Realtor. I sell homes. I work with buyers and sellers. I've hired and fired agents. I collect commissions.
I'm also a real estate developer. I've developed commercial buildings, built and renovated homes, own investment properties and dealt with the operational realities of real estate from multiple perspectives.
All of that experience comes with me when I build.
A traditional developer can be extraordinarily talented, but they don't automatically have that experience.
And without it, they don't build the same product.
Because great software isn't just code.
It's thousands of decisions about what should exist, what shouldn't exist, how people actually work, where friction occurs, what information matters, what can be automated, what shouldn't be automated, and what makes a product genuinely useful.
AI allows me to take decades of accumulated domain knowledge and express more of it directly in working software.
That is incredibly powerful.
The Software Is Only One Part of the Return
Every time I build something, I learn.
I learn what AI is great at.
I learn where it struggles.
I learn what can be automated and what still requires human judgment.
I learn where context matters, where instructions break down, where AI makes mistakes and where quality assurance becomes critical.
I learn where AI can make an experienced professional dramatically more productive—and where the hype gets ahead of reality.
That knowledge feeds directly back into Real Estate Webmasters.
It affects our product vision.
It affects our R&D.
It affects how we train our people.
It affects how we build internal operations software.
It affects how we advise our customers.
And it affects the conversations I have with some of the largest real estate organizations in the world.
That's why the return on those 1,500 hours isn't simply the software I produce.
The knowledge multiplies across the organization.
Education Requires Experience
One of my responsibilities is Research & Education.
That means educating myself, but it also means helping educate our staff and our customers.
There is an enormous difference between teaching something you've read about and teaching something you've actually done.
I've built with AI.
I've broken things with AI.
I've spent hours trying to make something work that the internet would have you believe takes five minutes.
I've seen incredible results.
I've also seen the limitations.
That experience makes me a better educator, a better product leader and a better partner to our customers.
And the more I learn, the more knowledge I can transfer to the rest of Real Estate Webmasters.
That's the multiplier.
There Is a Lot of AI Marketing Right Now
Almost every technology company suddenly seems to be an AI company.
AI is being attached to products, services, consulting practices and marketing campaigns everywhere.
But using AI terminology and actually becoming AI-powered are very different things.
This technology is extraordinarily powerful.
It is also nowhere near as easy as much of the internet makes it sound.
Becoming genuinely good at it takes time.
It takes experimentation.
It takes failure.
It takes iteration.
And it takes actually building things.
That's why I believe credibility in AI has to come from experience.
You have to do the work.
Why We Opened an AI Agency
Real Estate Webmasters has had an agency for decades.
We already have one of the most experienced custom real estate technology teams in the industry, with programmers, designers, project managers, copywriters and QA professionals who have spent years solving complex problems specifically for real estate.
What's changed is how those people work.
Our teams are now AI-empowered.
They're trained to use these tools and have access to leading AI capabilities.
That means we can combine experienced professionals, decades of real estate domain expertise and modern AI capabilities to accomplish things differently than we could before.
We can move faster.
We can explore more ideas.
We can improve quality.
We can reduce costs.
And most importantly, we can help our customers determine where AI actually creates value instead of simply adding AI because it's fashionable.
That's why we opened our AI agency.
Not because AI became a good marketing term.
Because we changed how we work.
Leadership Has to Do the Work
I am an innovator by nature.
Building things gives me energy.
Learning gives me energy.
Teaching brings me my greatest joy.
Taking an idea that doesn't exist and figuring out how to make it real is one of the things I enjoy most.
So while 1,500 hours sounds like another full-time job, it doesn't feel that way to me.
But enjoyment isn't the business justification.
The justification is what those hours allow me to bring back to Real Estate Webmasters.
Better product vision.
Better education.
Better leadership.
Better internal software.
More informed enterprise partnerships.
And a much deeper understanding of the technology that is going to reshape our company, our customers and our industry.
AI is too important to our future for me to understand it from a PowerPoint presentation.
I don't want to tell our staff what AI can do because someone showed me a demo.
I don't want to tell our customers what AI can do because I read about it.
And I certainly don't want to stand in front of the leaders of the world's largest real estate organizations and talk about AI because it's the topic everyone wants to hear about right now.
I want to speak from experience.
So I build.
Every day.
I experiment. I break things. I rebuild them. I test. I learn. And I bring those lessons back to our products, our people and our customers.
Real Estate Webmasters isn't going to be a company that simply talks about being AI-powered.
We're doing the work.