Fleur Prince: Hey everyone, welcome back to AI Insights. I'm your host for today, Fleur Prince, and I'm here together with Justin Hugh. So Justin, tell me, who are you and what do you do?

Justin Hughes: Yeah, so well, the short answer is I'm a tech guy building technical products. By and large, I've been focused ⁓ on the estate side of things, specifically real estate finance. My first venture company back in 2012 was realtmobile.com. We were one of pioneering companies that brought fractionalized real estate investing online, where we would connect sponsors with investors to ⁓ have access to institutional quality deal flow. also worked ⁓ a variety of other projects all across the PropTech field. And currently I am at Share Ventures here in Los Angeles as a general manager leading the Shareland team. And at Shareland, building a next generation real estate investment platform. And on top of we've built our AI agent Tycoon, which sits on top of marketplace and can service and identify ⁓ market opportunities ⁓ furthermore integrates with what's called agent commerce protocol, which can get into a little bit more detail, but that agents to transact with each other instantly. And so what ⁓ are really trying do is attack the various market inefficiencies and provide technology that our users to take advantage of those inefficiencies and make better moves on the market.

Fleur Prince: Yeah, because I remember when I got the email about you should really talk to Justin. He does AI in real estate. I was like, okay, that has not been an area that I've heard anything about where AI is being integrated. So that was why I got curious and I was like, oh my God, I this person on my podcast. Just talk about why should AI be real estate? Just in general would be my question.

Justin Hughes: Yeah, yeah, sure. mean, traditionally real estate market dynamics, they've really been driven by emotion and visuals. People were because they liked the kitchen photos on Zillow. AI changes the to be purely analytical. Algorithms don't care about the paint color. They care about the yield spread, the migration data, and the volatility. And so this can that the market becomes more efficient and less prone to emotional bubbles. And furthermore, with agent commerce protocol, we're entering an era where agents can transact with each other instantly. the old world, the market inefficiency, like Austin being under value versus Nashville, I that would take months to correct as humans slowly realized it ⁓ and, know, devised a plan of attack and, you know, went, went against that, you know, gap in an AI market, agents like tycoon can spot that arbitrage and execute a strategy in seconds. And so it moves estate from human speed to machine speed.

Fleur Prince: that's for me, I might be stupid in this part, but can you explain more like if I was a child in this case?

Justin Hughes: think about it this way with tycoon. an agent and ⁓ one that was launched in the blockchain space, it's having an agent that has its own bank account and you hire it out to perform tasks. this case, Tycoon sits on top of the Shareland ecosystem and it can help execute on behalf of users or other agents. then Tycoon ⁓ is actually monetized through the trade that it earns. on top of the platform. And then furthermore, money that it earns, it doesn't have to pay rent, it doesn't have to eat food, it actually buys back its token that was used to launch and finance the product to begin with. ⁓ the early adopters, the folks that have bought into Tycoon, they can expect to have that upward economic pressure on the token price as it its business And so, ⁓ In many ways, you can think about it as if it's just a customer support person that has a job and a bank account and they do a thing, but they've got people that have been supporting them ⁓ that get to, guess, economically participate in that success that they have. And that's one way of looking at it. But at the end of the day,

Fleur Prince: Mm-hmm.

Justin Hughes: AI is just really good at synthesizing large amounts of data and surfacing insights and allowing us to benefit from that massive computational power.

Fleur Prince: No, exactly. Thanks for explaining it, by the way. ⁓ Finance are not really my thing. I'm more on the tech side. So this is a great opportunity to more about it. Because you also said this fills up a few market holes that people are not ⁓ usually at by using your AI agent that created.

Justin Hughes: Yeah, my pleasure. Yeah, mean, you know, a person to ⁓ ⁓ traditional way, parse through just a massive amount of market reports ⁓ or their research online, looking at listings, so on and so forth. I mean, to say that it's a heavily manual and time consuming process would be a massive understatement. And so in real estate, AI ⁓ being to attack ⁓ those. ⁓ heavily manual and also furthermore very prone to human error mean, you may may not be shocked to know that, you know, there's massive amounts of money ⁓ to this that's still being moved around based on humans punching and things on a keyboard on a spreadsheet. and so in estate has generally a slow to adopt sector ⁓ when it comes to technology. Although I feel like real estate has gotten a bad rap and it's doing doing much better. And in fact, in many ways it kind of leads the charge. I've seen a lot of really great products data analytics that help guide real operators, for example, just looking at portfolio and identifying opportunities where, you know, the expenses are ⁓ too high on a thing or ⁓ you know, looking at market sentiment and understanding that there's an opportunity to add value to your portfolio that tenants would appreciate, that would turnover and maintain your tenant base, like that, you know, on the commercial multifamily operations side. And then on the short-term side, I you know, a lot of applications where, know, you... might be thinking, ⁓ I'd like to have a cashflow property, but ⁓ which one do I pick? You know, there's a lot of tools out there that can just take a look at everything be able to give you insights and that you can then take action on those insights. And ⁓ how we see Tycoon. We see that as an integral piece that sits on top of the Shareland ecosystem. then, you where Shareland is a place where people get exposure to the real estate housing markets without actually having to transact houses in the analog manner. We've created a fully liquid, a fully liquid exchange that allows people to get exposure to market with as little as a penny. They could hold it for second. They could hold it for 10 years. It truly is the holy grail of getting correlated exposure to ⁓ the real markets without the hassles of tenants, toilets and

Fleur Prince: I think that for quite a few people who listen to this podcast, that would actually be a real solution because I've heard in the past where people indeed don't want to deal with renters because they're like, they always have questions. this sounds like a real opportunity for people to get into real estate.

Justin Hughes: Yeah, I mean, that's our goal. ⁓ our number one goal is just to, mean, our tagline real smarter real estate investing for everybody. you know, we, we, we do use web three rails. We do use AI technologies, but at the end of the day, that's all under the hood. we want it to be so simple that you can come to the exchange. You can do your social login. You know, you don't need a crypto wallet. You can log in with your email address. we have technology that. that allows that gap to be bridged between the Web2 audience and the Web3 audience. And then furthermore, just having an opinion. Do you think LA ⁓ hot? Do you think Miami is hot? What do you want to have exposure to? ⁓ And also gets really important for people that are digital nomads or renters by choice. There's a lot of people out there that just don't want to be tied down to a specific location. The financial commitment of primary residents is daunting. Also, you know, there are some neighborhoods where it just doesn't make sense to buy ⁓ purchase versus rent. There's really nifty calculator on the New York Times website where you can actually just move these things around and it'll tell you like, no, buying would be a bad idea. You should rent ⁓ or versa. And so you see a growing demographic of renters by design or renters by choice, investors by design. And so ⁓ they don't want miss out ⁓ on the the opportunities that real estate presents ⁓ an investment vehicle, but without being tied down to one location. And so, you if want to, if you have a tech job and you want to work out of a villa in Bali, but you still to get exposure to the hot market like Miami, you can do that.

Fleur Prince: god, that would be like the greatest dream ever for a digital nomad if you can still own some part of a house but you're not tied down to it. Because I think that's mostly what's stopping people becoming nomads. Because if have a house, you do something with it. ⁓

Justin Hughes: Yeah. Yeah. mean, effectively being able to separate the that like actually living in a house from its value as an investment and then being able to kind of pick and choose from both of those things as best you and your lifestyle. That's something we want to be able to empower. And then, you another thing I do want to mention, which ⁓ maybe not necessarily AI related, but I think is really interesting when it comes to real estate, there's few options for hedging. So if I have a house and the housing market goes down, there's really nothing I can do to protect myself from the market dropping and ⁓ protecting my ⁓ And if you know, if of my net worth is tied to my primary residence, well, that can be really scary. you know, I could see, you know,

Fleur Prince: Mm-hmm.

Justin Hughes: 20 % of my net worth knocked out in an economic downturn without, with very little to do about it. We share land with the financial instrument that powers it all, which is our square foot token, where each token is pegged to the dollar per square foot average of a given market. So, you know, let's say Seattle, if the average house up there is, you know, $800 a square foot, you could buy and sell Seattle tokens for $800. What you can do because it's a synthetic, instrument you can actually short it you can actually take a bearish a position where if you think that you know like The the markets are gonna go down you can protect yourself against that you can actually hedge the equity in your primary residence Or if you're a big developer you can hedge the equity in your portfolio there's a lot Interesting things that become unlocked with this ⁓ new financial instrument that can be very powerful for people even in just the traditional real estate space that using Web3, isn't using AI. We're to be able to empower a lot of interesting things there as well.

Fleur Prince: That's super good hair. I was actually wondering how you end up in real estate because I saw you had a background as a full stack engineer. So ⁓ really ⁓ that leap during this competition as well. ⁓

Justin Hughes: Yeah. Yeah, largely, I to school for cognitive science ⁓ and part that journey exposed me to computer science and I've always been, I guess, a computer But at the same time, I was curious about investing and... stocks and I really didn't know anything about any of that stuff. And so I started reading books about it and then real estate just caught my interest. It's it's an asset that you can cashflow. It appreciates in value. there's tax benefits depending on how you do it. And, and so thought, well, maybe I could make my money in tech, but I'll just make some real estate investments throughout my career. And that be, my path to retirement if, if I could be so lucky. And so. ⁓ So that was always kind of the two sides of my interest. But then in back in 2011, was ⁓ speaking with a friend and they were interested in starting a tech company and they ⁓ had a financial really about

Fleur Prince: Good old day.

Justin Hughes: and something that I was starting to get to understand more at the time had interest. But my background was in tech. And so we batting around ideas. ⁓ And one day she says, hey, what about crowdfunding for real estate? What if we built a that allowed folks to invest ⁓ in institutional deals online in a way that they wouldn't otherwise be able to do? I love the idea. I was like, say less. Let's do this. And so that's how Realty Mobile was born. And then since then, you know, just because I basically had to drink from the fire hose, uh, you know, when you're a startup entrepreneur, you know, you just have to think quick and adapt. And, and so that was a light speed, uh, time to basically learn everything about real estate finance and, and, uh, commercial real estate operations and things like that. And so, uh, so yeah, that's, that's how I got into real estate and. and how I, and I basically have just stayed here. Mostly, I don't know if it's just career inertia, ⁓ just that I've become in space and comfortable there, and I'm always looking for ways to add value to the space.

Fleur Prince: No, totally understand. No, but that's an interesting journey. That's also a thing that I always do with my podcast is that I also ask people like, how did you get into AI? everyone has a unique path. Like ⁓ I started in international communications, which is completely different from ⁓ ⁓ general. But then, yeah, I learned myself coding and everything. And I was like, ⁓ this is actually pretty easy compared all the ⁓ horror I saw on Netflix and stuff.

Justin Hughes: Yeah. And, and getting into AI, mean, I'm a broken record around my friends and family. tell everybody, I'm like, if you're not using AI in some way, or form, it's like, I remember, the.com era, there were people that would brag about like, ⁓ I don't use email. Like, as if that was like some kind of like thing to be proud of. Right. It's like, it's like, then get left behind. I don't know what to tell you. and.

Fleur Prince: you

Justin Hughes: just like little ways, like proofreading content that you're writing or in ways coming up with detailed project mean, there's so many things that, ⁓ that AI has empowered to that, you know, allow me to do more faster, with less time. I mean, I swear I'm like simultaneously more productive and have work life balance at the same time. It's just insane. and, so. ⁓ Yeah, I mean, when, when open AI, you know, a chat GPT open for people to poke around with, ⁓ you know, a years ago, I I was floored. you know, in my cognitive science days, we were, we were learning machine learning and some of these technologies, but this was, ⁓ this was 20 years ago and, and just to how far it's come along. is impressive and I don't even know how to guess where things are gonna go from here. You know, the fact that I think everything is just fundamentally changed and we're still waiting to see how much and how far. And every day it's just something new. So yeah, well tell me, how did you get into AI?

Fleur Prince: Yeah, that's always love that question when people ask me that So actually I was working at EY at the time as a pursuit manager And I really love auditing and everything but I was like, okay This is not really totally my and then I saw AI popping up or at least like the theory papers and I was like Maybe I should into this I'll start using chat GBT a bit. I was like, ⁓ okay I'll go look if I can do a master in it. So I found this master called media innovation which ⁓

Justin Hughes: Okay.

Fleur Prince: the aspects of AI versus media entertainment since that was the only place that my degree was allowed to join as a master. I was like, I should get a job in AI. So then I applied for a position at ⁓ a nonprofit Kickstart AI. And then ⁓ I like, This is actually the entire rules is going to change because of AI because they were like fully into working with AI, making sure that the Dutch AI ecosystem was getting connected with each other. And then they were like, you know, you can just learn coding online, right? You don't need to go to the university for that. was like, hmm, that was a lot of issues.

Justin Hughes: Yeah, well, yeah, you can even use AI to learn AI, man. nothing else, just to... synthesize a bunch of data, turn, can, I always laugh that like if, you know, if you've got ADD and you want to learn something, just use AI to make a movie that teaches you, like you can make your own educational content nowadays, and spend the weekend and become quite, knowledgeable a, particular domain. ⁓

Fleur Prince: Yeah. did the, ⁓ it was, I don't know if you're a lot of Replet, but they have like these challenges that you can do. So I learned myself coding with Python by doing their 100 days challenge. And then by the end of it, I could code with Python. was like, that was actually not that hard, but it just takes a long time.

Justin Hughes: Mmm. Yeah, you know, I think the main ingredient to be a good programmer is just desire to tinker with puzzles. Like if you're the kind of person that just, you know, loves to solve puzzles, then you'll find a way to become an engineer. think then it's just semantics, you know? And that's... not that challenging and I mean shoot nowadays with vibe coding it's kind of crazy. now it's like If you have an idea and you know, if anybody in your audience ⁓ interest in becoming a startup entrepreneur, I back when started my first venture back startup, like these, ⁓ was huge You needed a lot of money to, and the right people with the right talent to even get a prototype in front of the right investors. Nowadays, you know, natural and an afternoon, you can get a pretty decent clickable prototype to at least like share your vision with other people in a way that would have taken. a lot of money and a lot of time and a lot of risk. so now barriers to entry have forever changed. And then on top of that, can... product test your idea, can it in a prototype form and put it in front of real users and get real feedback. Run some test ads. With the money that you're saving on engineers, you can just run some test ads and see what kind of traffic you can get. And if at the end of the day, you can put up a run some basic marketing, social media, or or whatever, and then calculate out what an estimated cost to acquire a customer would be and what the lifetime value of customer would be, that's it. That's like, that's a startup pitch deck. you can, if you can do that and put that together and there's nothing stopping you from getting something done like that within like a month. If it was like, you're doing it on the side after work. and if, and if you've got real signal, you can talk to some folks ⁓ and, get team together and get that idea off the ground. It's a exciting time. And so. I love AI. mean, it's changed the game ⁓ the better. I think it'll create some really exciting things.

Fleur Prince: No, I totally agree. Like there's so much happening and I'm seeing it lot in the startup world here in the Netherlands as well, where people are just building prototypes with vibe coding. do want to say one thing though with vibe coding, it can only get you so far. ⁓

Justin Hughes: ⁓ gosh. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's like, it's like each prompt cuts the distance in half. So like you're theoretically never going to cross the finish line. You're only going to the remaining distance only gets cut in half and half and half. yeah. So, but it you close enough, for a particular milestone. And then of course, you know, like I would never, if there was personally identifiable information in my, in my backend, like I, know, without.

Fleur Prince: Mm-hmm.

Justin Hughes: without somebody that understands and best practices taking a review, like I would be too nervous putting out a production with it only being vibe coded without personally understanding the base or having somebody else take a look at it, especially if there's valuable information or information that's that you're for protecting the people that use product. So yeah, no, and I've definitely had those bug loops where it's like, you know, some kind of an error and it goes, let me fix that for you. And then the same error, let me fix that for you. And then the same error. And you're like, okay, I'm going to leave my computer for a second. Cause I'm going to, I'm going to lose my mind. I'm going to grab a coffee, take a walk, and then I'll come back. But know, the good and the bad added all together and it's really cool. It's still a lot of fun.

Fleur Prince: Exactly, and I did make a of that possible as well. I learned the rubber duck method where you can have like a duck. If can explain it to the duck, you can it work. Or you can throw one of the two. ⁓

Justin Hughes: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you know, there, there is the cognitive science, behind the rubber ducking actually, by speaking out and like having to verbally formulate the situation, you engage more of your brain. And so ⁓ that's why, like times out of 10, when you're rubber ducking, ⁓ as you're explaining, be like, I got it. And then you run back to your keyboard and get it done. Like we used to, uh, uh, I was working with a dev team at one point in time in my career where we would always do this. Like some would be like, Hey man, I'm trying to figure this out. Do you mind looking at this for me? And they'd be sitting there explaining it and they go, Oh, I got it. And then you'd be like, you just say quack quack, guess. And then walk away. Cause it was like, I didn't do anything. I literally was just a warm body sitting here while you engaged your brain. And so ⁓ yeah, rubber ducking. yeah. If, your listeners aren't familiar with it, I think it works for everything. It's not just coding. mean, if you have something that you're trying to talk through or think through and ⁓ know, you don't have a friend around to, to bounce an idea off of an inanimate object still performs shockingly well, because at the end of the day, the neurological fundamentals remain the same that you are engaging more of your brain and, an opportunity to reword it and from a different perspective.

Fleur Prince: By the way, for any listeners who are listening, look up the rubber duck method. I definitely do recommend using it. Also, if you read more about it, it also sounds less dirty. I remember when I heard it the first time, I was like, okay, either this is a tech thing or it's something else. I'm going to look it up.

Justin Hughes: Yes. I do as well. Yeah, no, purely clean. not even sure why became rubber duck and not any other inanimate object. wonder if it's a Bert and Ernie throwback for, I don't know, if any millennials want to validate that one for me.

Fleur Prince: who's in the comments, let us know if it's a millennial thing, gen Z thing, boomer thing. ⁓

Justin Hughes: Yeah, I that's true. me, I always thought it had to do with Sesame Street, because and Ernie, there was a rubber ducky song. Anyway, I'm really dating myself, but...

Fleur Prince: for me, you really answered a lot at the beginning also about like need about AI and in real estate. How many people are actually the tool that you guys built? I'm not familiar with it in Europe, so I was just curious.

Justin Hughes: Yeah, yeah, so we're actually still, you know, we haven't launched ⁓ platform. So it's not, I can't say that there's X number of users with Y dollars transacting through the platform. We recently migrated to base and relaunched our test net. We're running season one points program. So there's a contest going on.

Fleur Prince: Mm-hmm.

Justin Hughes: what we're looking to do is get feedback from the community features that they like, features that they don't like, features that they would expect, help us guide the product roadmap for the future of Shareland, as well Tycoon. then furthermore, before we go main net live, ⁓ we're gonna have the vote on which neighborhoods we're gonna support first. ⁓ The ⁓ technology works for neighborhoods, zip codes, what have you. And so,

Fleur Prince: Mm-hmm.

Justin Hughes: We have a couple dozen markets on the test net right now that people can play around with. If you come to the test net, we give you $100,000 of fake money so you can buy, sell, trade these different markets and challenge yourself. See how well you do at predicting where the markets are moving. Some users, they're doing a really good job of predicting certain markets that are dropping and they short those markets and then there's some markets that are rising and they go long on those markets have a nice little PNL. so yeah, I would invite everybody to come check it out. And in 2026, we'll go Mainnet live. It may not be available ⁓ in everybody's country first, just as we roll it out. You know, ⁓ but you know, you can follow us on socials, ⁓ join our discord, you know. email me. I'm always to, you share what's the least and greatest.

Fleur Prince: Yeah, awesome. think it's definitely, yeah, I recommend to use Indeed Sign Up to check out. If you have Justin is your guy to have all the answers to your questions. I want to thank so much for being on the show. It was really cool to have you here and talk about AI and real estate

Justin Hughes: you ⁓ can't hog AI from every other industry. You gotta let others ⁓ a turn with the toys. you know, anytime you've got an industry that's full of manual processes that are rife with opportunities for human error, you gotta ask yourself, ⁓

Fleur Prince: you

Justin Hughes: what can be done about it. And AI is a great solution in a great many ways for so many things that people are doing in real estate. For us, we're the finance side, creating innovation the financial markets, trying to create liquidity and give exposure to people that want to participate in the markets. you know, agents writing listings, you know, there's, you know, underwriters that are doing loans. I there's just so many applications for it real estate. And so I would ask ⁓ out there that are building cool tech, think about where you can really add value elsewhere and give over in the real estate world a thought. I'd much it.

Fleur Prince: so much for being on the show ⁓ everyone else who was listening definitely out Justin Hugh and His company gonna be really cool share ventures ⁓ And don't to subscribe Leave a comment if have any questions and see you again next ⁓

Justin Hughes: Awesome. Well, thank you for having me. And bye, everybody.

Fleur Prince: Bye bye.