Local wins: The handshake advantage in the age of AI

They’re going to be discussing local wins: The handshake advantage and the age of AI. And before I hand it off, just a couple of quick housekeeping items. Today’s session is being recorded, and everyone will receive a copy of the recording afterwards.

All attendees are currently muted, but please, we encourage questions, we love questions, so please drop them in the chat, and they’ll be addressed during the session. With that, I’m going to turn it over to Justin and Matt.

Justin Ulrich
Awesome. Thank you so much, Melanie. Matt, I don’t know, it might be worth just starting, like, kicking us off with, you know, a little bit about Evocalize and, like, why we do what we do, because I’m sure there’s a few folks on the call who maybe have not heard of us, just because we operate so heavily behind the scenes with a lot of our partners, and then maybe we can get into kind of the current state of, you know, what you’re seeing going on with trends and stuff in the market.

Matthew Marx
Yeah, happy to! Thanks to Melanie for the intro, and I’m sure we have lots of friends, lots of friendly faces on the webinar. 

But yeah, I mean, for those of you who don’t know what Evocalize is, I won’t, you know, make this an infomercial, but just for a little bit of background, you know, we’re a growth engine that automates complex marketing for the housing industry. 

We started out doing kind of lead generation at really large scales for the lead aggregators, the portals in the housing industry who generate leads and then bundle them up and resell them to real estate and mortgage.

That was seven or eight years ago, and we’ve gradually built technology over the years to make that same capability accessible to run highly sophisticated data-driven marketing programs that allow you to kind of own your own lead generation funnel, go out and do marketing across the major online platforms on your behalf. 

And then we extend it to loan officers and real estate agents as well. So you can not only run marketing, sophisticated lead generation marketing programs on your loan officer’s behalf, but you can also allow them to participate via kind of a self-service interface.

They can contribute their own funds. They can run compliant co-marketing programs with their real estate partners. And so it gets to be a way for an enterprise to unlock and unleash a lead generation capability of their own versus just relying on the sphere or your local kind of relationships, which are valuable, or buying leads from third parties and being subject to that.

And I think we’ll get into that, but that’s, you know, that’s, I think a little bit of what we’re going to talk about is like what’s going on in the industry today. Right, Justin?

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, for sure. I know there’s, I mean, this past year has been crazy busy, you know, with all the different acquisitions and stuff that are happening. You got AI coming on the scene and like, it’s just like infiltrating, you know, everything that everybody does, you know, I think it’s good to at least just kind of level set and maybe talk through, you know, with all these big mergers that are happening, like, what does that actually, why are they doing it?

Like, what does it mean for agents, for LOs, you know, and kind of maybe let’s kick it off there and take it from there.

Matthew Marx
Yeah. So when we think about what’s happening, it’s no secret to probably anyone listening live or listening to the recording of the, you know, the Rocket, Redfin, Mr. Cooper acquisition, the Lower/Movoto acquisitions, you know, I think everyone generally, you know, knows that Zillow’s kind of building out some of their own mortgage products. And so that’s no secret, right?

But the question is like, why, right? And so, you know, I think one of the things that’s become pretty clear over the last year is that there’s a battle for this first touch or for the relationship with the customer, right? So how do we, and this gets to a little bit of the intro when you ask, you know, what does Evocalize do?

Well, we actually run relationship building lead generation programs for a lot of these portals. Our first technology was built with Redfin to build out their lead generation pipelines and programs. And so, you know, really this is a battle we think for the top of the funnel.

Now these portals, Justin, are, you know this, right? But they’re powerful. They’re powerful platforms, right?

And they have a lot of data and they have a lot of reach. In fact, you know, we have data that shows the top, if you take the top five real estate portals, which again, trying to build a relationship, hook a customer in, a home buyer early, nurture them, and then be able to be kind of the one who doles out where that lead goes or where that relationship goes. 

If you aggregate the top five, so if you take Zillow, homes.com, Redfin, Movoto, and I guess that’s four, you take the top four, it’s about 800 million website visits per month that come into these sites. So like 800 million visits. Now it’s not visitors, that would be more people than we have in North America, right? But those are visits.

So people are coming multiple times and that’s a lot of, those are a lot of visits that are happening. So what they’re doing is they’re trying to capture folks’ intent at the very beginning of this thing and nurture them. So they build the relationship over time.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. And they’ve got it dialed, right? These guys are the best at doing it.

They’ve been doing it forever and now they’re generating high, high, high volume of leads, but they’re doing it so much so that they can then, like you said, turn around and then dole them out to everybody else. They’ve really cracked the code and I don’t know, maybe it might be good to kind of talk through what they’re doing. Like how are they bringing folks in?

How are they attracting them? What are they doing to capture them? And then how are they kind of pushing those leads out?

Matthew Marx
Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that, obviously these are big companies and the 800 million number is a large number when we compare it to the number of home buyers a year, right? And so those are big numbers, but what I think most people don’t realize, and we only know because we’re in the middle of it and we run these programs for a lot of the portals.

Most people don’t know that those are small numbers compared to the actual numbers of the places where people are spending time online. So if you take Meta and Google and TikTok and all of their places that they control and the websites they control and everywhere they can reach online, you actually get to somewhere between 30 billion and 32 billion visits per month on those sites. So if you compare the $800 million number sounds really big, but the $32 billion number is a lot bigger, right?

And so when you look at how the portals get their 800 million visits per year, there’s actually a subset of folks who know the brand and have the app and go to it organically or get an email and go in. But between 30% and 50% of the traffic of these first relationships and multiple touch points that the portals get are coming from this 32 billion person or website visit pool, right? 

And so what the portals are doing is they’re casting out a line with some sophisticated data targeting and some other things to go find people who are likely to home buyers, likely to be getting into the process.

They try to find them early and they pull them into their portal or their website environment and they get them to interact. And Justin, to your point, they’re sophisticated. They have this thing down to a science in terms of going out and finding people.

Can we do that for them, for many of them? We’ve automated that process and then we pull them down on the site. And then there are different things that they ask users to do once they get them there.

And so that to me is really what a lot of people don’t understand about the industry. They buy a lead, but they don’t really understand what went into the process, where that person started, where they came from, what kinds of things they did to get down the funnel. But it’s everything from acquiring the customer to nurturing them before they submit a lead.

And then you have some sophisticated lead generation, lead forms, lead funnels. You get the lead and then you nurture post lead. So you warm them up and figure out when they’re ready to hand off.

And so all that stuff, they have down to a pretty good science. And that’s why they take these leads, they generate the top of the funnel and mark them up because they’ve done a lot of work. It’s a pretty big endeavor, lots of people and lots of technology to make that happen.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. And in past years, it’s been a lot more manual historically than it is now, right? We have the technology now where not only can the big boys like them do it, but now it’s available through Evocalize to everybody.

We have AI that we can leverage to help attract folks, bring them in. We’ve got other pieces that we put in place to help convert and so on and so forth.

Matthew Marx
Yeah. I mean, you mentioned AI, right? So what’s starting to happen just to like, I think we want to get into what we really want to talk about here, which is like, so what’s starting to happen is the portals, everyone, I mean, everyone hears the word AI every day, but what’s starting to happen is typically these have been huge teams of people at the portals that are creating content, distributing content.

There’s always been technology to help with that, but all these functions I just talked about, about this big nurturing process, AI is systematically being applied to different pieces of this process in order to personalize this at a level that’s never been seen before, make it more effective and frankly, to winnow down the number of people who are working on the process or to expand the business such that they don’t need to hire more people in order to do that.

And so that’s going on now. We see that every single day. AI is being applied at each one of these points and new kind of functionality comes on every week.

And so that’s happening, not just at the portals, Justin, I mean, you know this, right? But it’s, this is happening everywhere. In fact, like some stats I just looked at, in the last year, there’s been a 300% growth in the usage of AI.

So like, not only are businesses optimizing using AI, but people are, this is not a surprise, like people are using AI more and more as they feel more comfortable with it. 75% of new webpage content last year was created using AI. 75%, right?

Isn’t that crazy? Three quarters of all website content was created using AI, right? And so, and, and I just read a stat the other day, which I thought was pretty fascinating that it’s not surprising, I guess, but 82% of Americans used AI, chat GPT, Gemini for housing research in their home search, right?

And so this stuff is like, this has become a new go-to tool, go-to tool in the process for, for, for shoppers and folks that are, that are using it as well as folks who are managing the machines to pipe out content to try and attract customers into the, into the, into the funnel, get them, you know, get them down into a known customer state.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, it’s a strange time, right? We have folks who feel like AI is going to take over people’s jobs, right? There’s that stance.

Those who leverage AI are going to take over people’s jobs who are not using that. The content folks, there’s tons of content out there. People are going, they’re searching for all sorts of information as like a buyer.

If I were to go try to educate myself, it’s very easy, but on the flip side, it’s also a wealth, it’s like an infinite amount of information that’s out there. Some of it is hallucination. It’s not even necessarily accurate or fact-based.

So I, as a buyer, I’m now getting inundated with all this info and how do I sort through it to try to get to the bottom of what’s reality? And I think that’s where the importance of this physical relationship with the LO still lies.

Matthew Marx
Yeah, not only that, Justin, like, I don’t know, I mean, you know, because we work together every day, but I don’t know how many people listening to this have had what we have happened. I have fake contracts, fake docusigns, fake agreements, fake, like all of this, like fake AI generated content is getting stronger and stronger every day. And so it’s not just like legitimately AI to use to create good content, like the portals do to inform.

There’s a lot of fake stuff. So you bring up the matter of trust, right? So, so the problem becomes we’re starting to get in with all this, this kind of broad-based content that’s being distributed and created with AI, the fraudsters, like you’re starting to become a little bit of a lack of, not just a little bit, a lot of a lack of trust in the process.

In fact, we just, we’re just working with a new lender the other day, and this probably won’t be a surprise to anyone on the call. This is a top 15 lender. And they said, Hey, we’re not just going to, we need to talk to a physical human being, your physical chief financial officer.

We need to talk to her on the phone in order to confirm all the wiring instructions, right? And so it’s a, this is an indication to me that not only, and this is not a surprise to the financial services professionals on the call, right? But this is a, this is what we’re starting to see in marketing too, right?

So the marketing world is starting to get a kind of a crisis in trust a little bit. And there are a few stats that struck me here too. You know, 70% of people in a recent poll just that came out in December said that AI content makes it harder to trust content and things online, right?

And 68% worry that it could be used to deceive and scam. I think that’s going to rise, right? And then 80% are concerned about AI powered fraud.

So there’s this like, to your point, there’s this AI can do a lot of good things. It’s doing a lot of good things to streamline the funnel, make it easier to create legitimate content, but there’s a, there’s a, there’s kind of a lack of faith developing in, in some online content that gets to your point about the, about the handshake. Right.

And so so anyway, we spent a lot of time as, as you know, Justin, we spent a lot of time thinking about that as a, as an AI power technology company. How do you, how do you, where’s the right middle ground between AI, AI systems and, and in the actual human in the loop?

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. If you, if you think through, you know, if I’m an LO, all these tools are incredible. I want to be able to leverage them so that I can, you know, scale my efforts, increase my bandwidth to do other things like interfacing physically with buyers, with sellers or with buyers specifically.

But there’s a lot of things that I can automate. Like if you could just maybe talk through, maybe give some ideas around like, Hey, in a, in a world of like, Hey, what if this existed, but it’s actual reality, like talk us through all the things that they leverage AI for today.

Matthew Marx
Totally. So the way we think about this at the end of the day, right? Like we’re not in the e-commerce industry. We are not selling Nikes. This is the largest transaction that people have in their life, right?

Just, I mean, this is not something that anyone takes lightly. And so we actually think again, you know, we think AI can counterintuitively for a lot of people is going to bring a return or resurgence of the in-person, the in-person, the agent. Right.

And so we actually think, I’ve become certainly convinced of this, that a lot of people think that the local professional, the realtor and the loan officer are going to be displaced in world AI because you can personalize things centrally. I think the opposite, right? I think that people are going to demand to know the local reputation.

They may ask to meet in the coffee shop, right? There’s, there’s going to be an in-person relationship with your local professional and an in-person, a local neighborhood reputations can be required because you’re not going to do the largest transaction of your life with what could be a bot, right? You’re just not going to do that as people get more and more concerned about this thing.

You’re not going to do it. You need the handshake. You have, you want to, you want to have a coffee and you want to have a local relationship and you want to have a social network that affirms the you know, in your neighborhood, that affirms the trust in your, in your local professional, you just not going to do a deal when you’re afraid that it’s going to be a bot because bots are going to be everywhere.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, they are. I mean, there’s a massive percentage of accounts on social, just as an example, they’re all bots, like everything out there is bots and it’s becoming increasingly harder and harder to tell the difference between what’s bot and what’s human.

Matthew Marx
I mean, it’s just so, AI is so good at writing content and so, and it can do it at like massive scale. So yeah, I mean, I think that’s, that’s the concern. That’s a lot of the concern.

There are concerns about AI around job loss, rightfully so. I think personally, there’s going to be a shifting of jobs, not, you know, but I think this like online trust or trusting digital content, you can already see with, I don’t know if anyone has played with Google’s Nano Banana or VO3, but like, these are image creation tools that are outstanding. They’re incredible.

And I can take you Justin and put you right beside me in the picture. And it’s like, we’re talking and interacting and no one can tell the difference. Like we were actually friends. Like we were actually shaking hands.

So I think, you know, to me, that’s really what we’re, I mean, I think everyone realizes it, but I don’t think most people realize is that we think these two worlds are kind of converging where we talked about the portal and you asked the question that I didn’t answer, which is like, okay, what does this mean? Like, what is the future look like? And we think these two worlds merge and the secret sauce becomes the kind of AI augmented, like the super agent, the super loan officer, right.

That’s AI augmented. And so like they’re, they’re using AI to do the things that AI does well, generate content, educate, get their word out, become present. And then they’re spending time shaking hands in the neighborhood.

And those two combined together to be a really powerful force. And, you know, there’s some like really interesting things that are starting to happen there that, you know, I can talk about, but that that’s like, I think where we really feel like this thing is going and not too long in the future, it’s already starting to happen too.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah. If you think about how much time is spent, if I get a lead that comes in, like how much time by spending like 10 plus hours trying to figure out, is this person even real?

You know, we have a lot of tools actually today in place that we can leverage to actually do a lot of that work for you. And it’s just a lot of the calorie burn is now gone. So you can actually focus on closing deals and actually that face-to-face interaction like you’re talking about.

Matthew Marx
Totally. Well, I mean, imagine what I talked about earlier and all the things that a portal does and all these lead generators that people are buying leads from, right? Imagine all the things that they do every day.

And all the steps basically today can be automated with an AI, right? So think about that. Think about that for a minute.

Imagine if, and I’ll just paint a scenario for you. Imagine if AI builds all of your marketing materials, your images and your videos. It builds them all for you, right?

They’re authentic, they’re yours, they’re localized. It builds them for you. It can run marketing to the right places. It can go into TikTok when it needs. It can go into Google. It can create a search ad when it needs.

It can go into Gemini. Soon it will be able to go into ChatGPT, right? That’s coming.

And so it’s going out and finding the right places to put the right content. It’s optimizing that. So it’s showing the right messages to the right people.

It’s building automatic landing pages and lead funnels with the right questions for every product you’re talking about. Every veterans product gets its own specific veterans funnel. So it’s building all those for you.

And then it’s capturing the lead and then it’s calling them for you. It’s already happening, if you don’t know. It’s already happening, right?

We’re doing it already in our products. It’s already happening. It’ll call you the lead.

And it is, if you haven’t tried it or haven’t experienced it, it is phenomenal because you know what that AI caller doesn’t get? It doesn’t get frustrated. It doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t get sick. It’s not sleeping. And so it can nurture the customer’s lead and call.

We capture, you must capture consent to have AI call back. If you’re not doing that, you have to do that in order to use AI calling. Should do that for all your leads today.

But then it can warm transfer to you. And they’re actually super cool, right? They can call you in advance while it has the customer on the phone.

Once it gets signals that the lead is warm, it can call you and tell you a little bit about it and say, are you ready to take a call? Or it’s like to send it to your calendar booking, right? And it can make those decisions for you.

And then it can warm transfer you right in and introduce you. So it’s insane, right? We’re using it today for those purposes. And then it can, the even cooler part is this entire thing, AI can train from those calls. So it can learn every call. Was that a good lead? Was it a bad lead? What signals? And then you can use that to influence who you go after and where you go after next.

And AI can do all of that today. And you know what that sounds like to me? It sounds like the portal, right? Like that’s a portal. That is what a portal does. They reach out, they generate all their custom content.

They’ve had historically teams of people do this. And so what we looked at that and said, this is coming. In fact, this, what I just painted, that picture is here today.

And then if that can happen, then like what can we free the loan officer to do? We can free the loan officer to work in their local neighborhood, as I mentioned earlier, shake hands, develop relationship, close loans. And the AI does everything else, right?

And so then they can put the trust stamp. You know who can’t put the trust stamp? The lead sellers. They don’t have the local presence. They don’t have the local neighbor. They’re trying to build their brand, the national brand.

You as a loan officer can build your own local brand in conjunction with your lender, like our partners at Rate do, like our partners at Guild do, like our partners at Atlantic Bay do. And so you can work hand in hand with the national lender to put these systems in for you that use AI to do the whole thing. And you can kind of return, again, we think this is gonna get more important to a handshake in your local neighborhood.

Loan officers can be spending time doing that.

Justin Ulrich
And the conversations you’re having are with leads that are exclusive to you. You’re not paying 5X for them and you’re not competing to try to get to them much faster than everybody else. 

I do like that. If you think about from, there’s some stat around follow-up to leads and it’s something along the lines of, if you get back to them within the first five minutes of them submitting their information that you actually improve your chance of connecting with them by like 120X, something crazy. 

And so having these tools, when we first talked about launching these products, I was amped because to be able to have the call come in to you while it’s still finishing the qualification and teeing up the warm transfer, that’s incredible. It’s much faster than what can happen with an actual human being taking the information, then relaying it to you and the warm transfer isn’t quite there like it is today.

Matthew Marx
And I think it weighs on, like even if you submit a lead and we’re asking loan officers, we as an industry want loan officers to be closing loans and be making relationships, right? And I think the industry wants that. But you also have to have the marketing going behind the scenes.

And then we’re asking loan officers to 24 hours a day, pick up the phone for a lead coming in and be ready to work them and to make outbound calls associated with leads that are coming in. And then to make multiple calls a day, in some cases, right? To your point, speed to lead.

When you’re buying third-party leads, you really need to be calling them within one minute. It’s not five minutes. In some cases, some of our partners call them within 15 seconds, right?

How do you work the neighborhood? I’m looking outside of my neighborhood in Austin, right? How do you work the neighborhood when you’re having to make all these calls, right?

You just can’t do that at volume. So anyway, so that’s the exciting part to me is that this tech, we talked about it as like, how do you make yourself the superpower that have AI supercharge you at the local? We believe in AI, but we believe in the local relationship even more, right?

The real power becomes when you put those two things together and the biggest, best lenders are starting to do this for their loan officers and equip them with it and get them rolling. And so anyway, so we thought we’d come on, Justin, I see Melanie popping back in, so we’ll probably get close to time. But I thought we’d, as you can tell, we get excited about this because we feel like it can make a real difference.

And we know it’s making a difference because we have the ROI data to show that. But whether you do it with, whether we help you with it or whether you’re doing it some other way, this is a really, really critical thing to combine forces of the local relationship and kind of the AI supercharge.

Justin Ulrich
It’s honestly life-changing. And from the aspect of if you don’t do it, it’s going to significantly impact your life because those who do do it are going to far and away take off ahead of you. And it’s gonna be very difficult to catch up.

Matthew Marx
I think so, right? And so, I mean, you might have fewer loan officers doing more work eating your lunch if your loan officers aren’t there doing it. But I think the local retail loan officer is going to win in this AI transition.

I just really do. Because the spam and the misinformation and disinformation and trust that AI is going to create at the national level is just going to make it hard for consumers to trust what’s going on. And when you know they worked with your neighbor, you know they know your local neighborhood, they know you’re in the school, right?

Shaking hands. They know you’re at the sports game and you’re doing this. The two of them combined is really, again, I think the secret sauce.

Justin Ulrich
Yeah, a hundred percent. Hey, speaking of AI, can I even trust that Melanie’s in the desert right now? 

Matthew Marx
She may not be in the desert.

Melanie Thomas
I don’t think I am in the desert.

Justin Ulrich
Look at that background.

Melanie Thomas
But I will be soon, February 22nd through 24th, Scottsdale. Thank you.

Matthew Marx
Justin, tee her up for a plug. I love it. Do we know what Melanie, is Melanie, are you real today? Are you in AI?

Melanie Thomas
I am real. 

Justin Ulrich
Your hair looks awfully smooth on the edges. I don’t know.

Melanie Thomas
I know, it’s strange. It’s strange. Don’t question it, Justin, don’t question it.

Justin Ulrich
Awesome. Well, I guess, do we have any questions that have come up or is it, if anyone is still by yourself, you wanna ask them?

Melanie Thomas
You guys were so passionate and so excited and thorough that there’s no questions in the chat. So, great job. 

Matthew Marx
I think that’s a sign of doing a poor job, Melanie.

Melanie Thomas
I’m trying to help you guys out. I’m trying to build you up.

Matthew Marx
What do we all think here? Like, what do we all think about?

Melanie Thomas
We’re gonna do a poll later on LinkedIn. Stay tuned.

Matthew Marx
There we go, let’s do a poll, let’s do a poll.

Melanie Thomas
All right, well, thank you so much, to Evocalize for your time today. As a reminder, everyone’s gonna get this recording later in the week to reflect back on it and to come up with some deep questions for Matt and Justin at a later time. So, get excited.

But we really appreciate Justin and Matt’s time today. Do you guys have any last remarks you wanna go?

Justin Ulrich
I’ll do one real quick and then Matt, I’ll let you kind of close it up. I’m gonna send an email out to everyone who’s registered and attended. In that email, obviously a quick thank you, but we’ll have a link for, if you wanna try out Evocalize, you could just create your account real quick.

You could log in, you could poke around. You could actually create ads and not even have to worry about any money until you actually wanna launch your own ad. It’s all kind of pre-baked and ready to go.

So, we’ll have that link in case you wanted to try a lot of these tools that we talked about today. It’s already created for you and ready to go.

Matthew Marx
Yeah, and I think we’ve found a way recently in the past six or eight months to find a way for you to just dip your toe in and as Justin said, just do it right from our website. You don’t have to commit today. We realize the industry wants to see, so unless to try it.

So, you can do that right at our website and then we’re happy to have conversations with y’all. We work with a lot of enterprises as you’ve heard and expect. So, we love the TMC community.

We’re in Boston, we’re going to Scottsdale, right? And so, look forward to having conversations with you here and there and just don’t be afraid. Give your teams and your loan officers confidence because the loan officer is not going away anytime soon.

This is a handshake business. This is a large monster important transaction and we really think there’s a lot of reason to be super optimistic about the next decade for the local professional.

Melanie Thomas
All right, perfect. Well, with that, that’s the end of the first partner webinar of 2026. Thanks so much for everyone’s time today and stay tuned for the next partner webinar. Thanks everyone.