The room of about 30 brokers was asked to identify their biggest business bottleneck.
For brokerage owner Andrella Pusha, it's hiring more residential agents so she can focus on commercial development deals.
The problem is, she's not sure who might be the best fit. Brent Scott, director of coaching at The Locker Room and CEO of Kale Realty in Chicago, explained how AI can help.
“The input is, here's my brand, here's my mission value and beliefs, here's my unique value proposition, here's my website, here's my social media—here's me,” Scott said. “What's the output? I want a defined profile of a real estate agent that would ultimately be successful in my organization.”
Satisfying Her Inner Nerd
Scott was leading a three-hour workshop, dedicated to leveraging AI in leadership, hosted by the Coastal Carolinas Association of REALTORS®. And Pusha, AHWD, MRP, owner and broker-in-charge of Bellstead Real Estate in Charleston, S.C., was there to build on what she heard the day before at the first Regional Carolinas Broker Summit.
“Because I'm a nerd at heart, I wanted to be able to come in and understand a little bit more about how to implement [an AI assistant] into my business,” Pusha said. “... I wanted to be able to get the information and then to be able to help my agents as well as my colleagues.”
Before entering the real estate business, Pusha served for 20 years as a nuclear engineer in the U.S. Navy. When she retired in 2018, she wanted a purpose-driven career and needed something with flexibility to care for her young children.
She worked hard and gained success in residential, then commercial, serving in leadership roles at her Charleston and South Carolina REALTOR® associations, receiving her broker’s license and finally launching her own brokerage in 2025.
Pusha came away from the AI workshop energized.
“I feel like they just gave me the blueprint on how to 10x recruitment—on how to allocate my time totally differently so I can focus on relationship building and going to find the next … agent or the next developer partner,” Pusha said.
Does Your Company’s Marketing Attract Your Ideal Agents?
Morning and afternoon workshops, attended by approximately 50 brokers total, explored the key aspects of AI and introduced products from tech companies The Apex Initiative, as well as Courted and BrokerBot, which are part of NAR's tech growth program REACH.
Chris Koppel, broker-owner of Oasis Realty Collective in Mrytle Beach, explained that she's also in search of new agents—ones who are experienced, collaborative and seeking to work in a boutique firm.
Using Koppel as an example, Jeremiah Taylor, co-founder and CEO of BrokerBot, used his company's software to analyze her firm’s website and social media to determine whether its presentation would attract Koppel's ideal candidate, and if not, make recommendations.
Taylor explained how Koppel could then use Courted, which gleans MLS data to identify agents who may be open to pivot, before doing more research and hopping back on BrokerBot to create weekly reports of your favorite agents' activities. That's where relationship-building begins, he said.
“So, you'll have this target list of four or five people, and as they have career high sales, or life events, grandbabies, kids graduate—whatever—I want [the AI agent] to send a note to me so that I [can] reach out to them,” Taylor said.
What Koppel took away was a sense of possibility. “I learned that I can do it, that it's not as complicated,” she said. “If you have a path and you have a process, it can be done.”
