What’s New at A.CRE

In this episode of the Adventures in CRE Audio Series, Spencer Burton and Michael Belasco catch up on what’s new—both personally and professionally—and share exciting updates from A.CRE. They reflect on Michael’s RV@Olympic development project, where they overcame challenges like building the largest septic system in Clallam County, while also teasing plans to expand the RV@ brand nationally.

Spencer shares his recent move to Miami and introduces his new venture, CRE Agents, which focuses on leveraging AI to streamline CRE processes. The episode also highlights key A.CRE initiatives, including updates to their glossary of terms, university profiles, expanded Spanish content, and the launch of Accelerator 3.0.

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Episode Transcript

Spencer Burton (00:08):

Hello and welcome back to the A.CRE Audio Series Season Five. In this episode, we’re going to cover what’s new at A.CRE. We’ll also talk about some personal updates between well, with you and I. What’s new in Michael’s world, what’s new in Spencer’s world, and then what’s new, of course at A.CRE. So you want to start, Michael? What’s new with you, man?

Michael Belasco (00:27):

Yeah, well it’s been a while. First of all, I’m glad that we’re doing this. It’s been what? A year and a half is it?

Spencer Burton (00:32):

That’s right. It was July in Washington.

Michael Belasco (00:36):

And that was in Washington. So a lot has been going on since the. For both of us. We did that last Audio Series or podcast out in Washington because we were just kicking off my first project in the RV park space, which was RV@Olympic.

Spencer Burton (00:53):

That’s right. Congrats on that, by the way.

Michael Belasco (00:54):

Yeah, thank you. That was, I think, our second time. And Spencer’s been, obviously we’re close, so he’s been very close and in the loop and we went out there together. I think that was our second time. You came out with me the first time, actually, I think.

Spencer Burton (01:08):

Yeah.

Michael Belasco (01:10):

So that was the second time. We didn’t have our funding yet. We didn’t have our subs picked out. Yeah, it was very early stages. We were still in design mode.

Spencer Burton (01:19):

You had entitlements.

Michael Belasco (01:21):

Yeah, we had entitlements.

Spencer Burton (01:22):

Most of your entitlements. You didn’t have permits, but…

Michael Belasco (01:24):

We had entitlements. We had a couple permits. And then what was actually interesting is that we were ready to go. We were out raising money and then we had, so a little quirky thing is we now are the proud owners of the largest septic system in all of Clallam County, which is funny but-

Spencer Burton (01:41):

I’m not sure that is a…

Michael Belasco (01:44):

But it actually paused the entire process. So this happens all the time in development projects. You’re moving along, something that seems like a rubber stamp. You go and you get a permit and that’s it. Because the septic system was so large, the county was very concerned and they wanted-

Spencer Burton (02:02):

Yeah, with good reason.

Michael Belasco (02:03):

Yeah, wanted to kick it up to the state and so that created a delay, something we didn’t anticipate. So we paused raising money. We had to commission a study. It took us about nine months. Think of it, nine months just for a septic system that we didn’t anticipate. So these things happen all the time in development as you’re well aware. So we got over the hump in January of 2024.

Spencer Burton (02:25):

Let me ask you something on that. Not exactly on topic, but I think it’s valuable because this is really about learning for a lot of folks. How do you work with a county like Clallam? Is that how-

Michael Belasco (02:35):

Clallam.

Spencer Burton (02:35):

Clallam.

Michael Belasco (02:37):

Clallam, yeah.

Spencer Burton (02:37):

Apologize for the residents of Clallam County. How do you work with the county on an issue like that? I mean, the largest septic system in the county, with good reason, they wanted to ensure that it was done right?

Michael Belasco (02:51):

Yes.

Spencer Burton (02:52):

At the same time you had time constraints, you had investors or some relationships or discussions happening with investors. So how do you manage the one side of it, the business side, while at the same time respecting the needs of the county?

Michael Belasco (03:08):

Yeah, it’s challenging. I think the top priority is getting this project done. And so how do you do that? It’s not just about providing the answer that you think a county or a person that’s going to approve this wants to hear. Again, I had mentioned this the last time, it’s really getting the right people at the table to talk about it. It sounds so inconsequential, a septic system, but having the right septic company at the table and John Carlson, who maybe one day you guys will meet, he’s an older gentleman, he’s part of our team. He’s actually the GC out there on-site. Also an owner. Has done probably 40 years worth of development projects. One with Spencer actually down in Panama.

Spencer Burton (03:45):

Years ago, yeah. Love John. Yeah, he’s like a father to me.

Michael Belasco (03:46):

So John, he is a great guy, but you have to listen and it’s not just between the world now, we found, and this is stuff you learn because it was our first foray into the RV park space. So how many gallons per day can an RV site handle and how many people are going to be on-site and what if this… And this an iconic area of the country. These people are so careful to protect the land out there.

Spencer Burton (04:15):

Yeah, for good reason.

Michael Belasco (04:16):

For good cause and I’m glad that they’re like that because we are out there. We’re coming a part of this community and the reason people are coming out here is to enjoy that very thing that they’re trying to protect. So I totally appreciate how they approached it. I wish it was faster and smoother.

Spencer Burton (04:33):

Yeah, of course, yeah.

Michael Belasco (04:34):

And we went out there. I went out and found studies that said, and this is getting into the weeds but it’s important, I found a study that says an RV site, the max utilization rate is 50 gallons a day. Well, the county wanted 120 gallons a day, but we had studies that proved it. And the reality is we already went down the road. So we had to commission a study. We had to abide by that. But what happens is we have a septic system that’s sized. It’s already the largest in the county, and we could probably double the amount of RV sites on our park and the system could effectively-

Spencer Burton (05:14):

Could have handled more, yeah.

Michael Belasco (05:15):

But we didn’t. We had to work with the county. We had to figure out… There were some things we had to do. Actually, we had, it was 100 sites, 100 full hookup sites. We actually had to reduce down to 90 full hookups and then 10 electric and water only. But we had to get going. We could have fought for those 10, but we could have been a year out. So there’s some give and take. It was a good compromise at the end of the day.

Spencer Burton (05:44):

Yeah, and that’s the nature of development. These things happen. It’s one roadblock after another and a great developer is creative. And how do I get by those roadblocks? How do I ensure that all the stakeholders… And it’s not just my investors. It’s not just my people. It’s the county. It’s the future guests at your park. I mean, all those are stakeholders and getting around those roadblocks in a way that serves everyone is the challenge of the developer.

Michael Belasco (06:13):

Right, and there’s give and take. You get surprises on the upside, you get surprises on the downside. We went in this, I’ll give you a few examples. On the upside, we knew we were going to have fast internet. This is the things you learn along the way. Later on, I learned we’re going to have fiber optic, which is nobody in the county has fiber optic and Wi-Fi and internet connectivity and fiber optic is one of the most important things for these parks. People want to go where they’re well connected. So that was a pleasant surprise. The cost was very little for us because we’re right next to a substation that was provided. That was one. A downside, and I’m telling this because you always hit these things. We had a massive weather problems out there. I mean, rain just pouring down. I mean, our trenches filling up.

Spencer Burton (06:58):

But didn’t you expect that? This is Washington state, right?

Michael Belasco (07:01):

Well, it did, but it’s like, listen, you’re going to trench… So we had our electricians running conduits and everything like that, and the rain was coming down so much that they’d trench and it would just fill up with water. So we had to trench and cover and trench and cover. So this was an overage. It was $10,000 that went to $80,000. Now we had budgeted contingency for that-

Spencer Burton (07:19):

Of course.

Michael Belasco (07:19):

… and we have plenty. And these are the things you have to make sure that… You’re always optimistic, but you always have to have the contingency plan. So-

Spencer Burton (07:28):

When I was young, by the way, a young developer, I was told, “Your greatest risk is in the ground.”

Michael Belasco (07:37):

Yes.

Spencer Burton (07:38):

You don’t know what you’re going to get until you start digging. And so when I read your investor report, by the way, full disclosure, I’m an investor in what Michael’s doing at RV@, A, because I highly believe in Michael and his thesis, and B, I think it’s cool. But so when I read your investor report, it didn’t surprise me and I appreciated that you had appropriate contingencies to account for the uncertainty that you get in the ground. Again, if you’re a young developer, the greatest risk is in the ground.

Michael Belasco (08:05):

Yeah. And even when you’re seasoned like John. I lean on John heavily. I mean, he’s been there many times. And so we had that. The other risk in the ground was, I’ve never even heard of this, which this shows to my, as we go on, there was a lot of hard pan soil, which is very compact and also added to the cost. But what’s great is that everything, we brought in extra crew, extra equipment, we’re on schedule, we’re still on budget. Our plan is to open May and it’s just awesome. Maybe in this episode we can flash up a picture of the site. We got these drone shots and it’s just, you see it all taking shape and you’ve got the snowcapped Mountains and the Olympics in the background. It is very, very cool.

Spencer Burton (08:51):

So when can we do an Audio Series from RV@Olympic?

Michael Belasco (08:55):

Oh, man, may is the opening. So maybe we’ll do a launch and we’ll get the families out there.

Spencer Burton (09:00):

Get us an RV and yeah.

Michael Belasco (09:03):

That would be great. So yeah, I mean, that’s a good thing. We’re submitting offers for additional properties. We’re looking, we found a couple.

Spencer Burton (09:09):

Okay, so you have an RV@Olympic in Port Angeles, Washington?

Michael Belasco (09:13):

Port Angeles, yep.

Spencer Burton (09:15):

Okay. At the foot of Olympic National Park.

Michael Belasco (09:18):

Yeah, so closest to the Hurricane Ridge and Deer Park entrance, which is pretty awesome. We’re very well located in that park.

Spencer Burton (09:23):

But this RV@ brand, you’re taking national?

Michael Belasco (09:27):

National, yes. So our motto is seamless journeys, no compromises. And we want to build state-of-the-art RV parks that are very simple. It’s not over amenitized. We’re not inundating you with things. We’re never going to have F&B on site, things like that. We are trying to create a modern efficient parks that streamline your experience. You don’t come to Olympic National Park to sit at our pool. So we have things, and we’ve maybe mentioned this before, but we are going to utilize as much technology as possible. It doesn’t inundate the guest, but makes things seamless, like 24 cashier-less store. We’re working on our chatbot that’s going to integrate with a call center. So if hey, I want to make a reservation to go kayaking or I want to do some star watching or things like that, then it’ll do that. It’ll seamlessly work together. And there’s stuff that I want to let you do the… But there’s other stuff that we’re working on in tandem with you as well and the things that you’re doing and there’s a lot of exciting things going on.

Spencer Burton (10:29):

Well, you can think about guest experience, which is important. I mean, that’s how you build a successful brand and a successful operating company. But for real estate people, it also means what? Lower OpEx?

Michael Belasco (10:41):

Yes, that is a-

Spencer Burton (10:43):

Higher occupancy?

Michael Belasco (10:45):

Yep.

Spencer Burton (10:45):

Theoretically.

Michael Belasco (10:47):

You think of all those things. Every way that you can touch a guest in a way that streamlines and makes their experience better automates and there’s no… Maybe the manager on site is out looking at something or he is away or whatever. You get instantaneous gratification. You need something at the store, you don’t have to wait for somebody to check you out. You walk in, it’s cashier-less. You need to make a reservation, you need to connect, you need to find something, you can go right onto our website or you have an app. We haven’t developed the app yet, but you can interact with us through our website so that capabilities will be there come May 1st.

(11:23):

So yeah, but all of that reduces OpEx and that’s our thought process and our goal here is what ways can we optimize these parts? Because there are a ton of RV parks. I think there’s 80% of the owners are 60 plus. It’s very disaggregated. And there’s just a great opportunity for modernization. Even low hanging fruit, stuff like dynamic pricing, things like that. So we just see a tremendous opportunity and we got the right people on the boat, which is great. The right people on the bus or boat, whatever mode of transportation you want to take to get there. Or an RV.

Spencer Burton (12:00):

Would it be an RV? Yeah, right? You got the right people in the RV. Good. Well congrats on that.

Michael Belasco (12:04):

Thank you.

Spencer Burton (12:05):

So RV@, it’s been 18 months, great progress. Again, I hope that the people that be put up some pictures so that the listeners and viewers can see what’s happening.

Michael Belasco (12:18):

I see this in-

Spencer Burton (12:18):

What else are you working on? How about on a personal level, where are you living?

Michael Belasco (12:21):

I’m living in the great state of Pennsylvania, right outside of Philadelphia in Bucks County.

Spencer Burton (12:26):

We went to, by the way, the Orange Bowl last night, two nights ago.

Michael Belasco (12:30):

Let’s not talk about it.

Spencer Burton (12:31):

Poor Michael, he’s a big Penn State fan.

Michael Belasco (12:32):

That was a hard one. So yeah, just for you guys out there, I didn’t go to Penn State, but my dad grew up in state college. My grandfather was a professor, so I’m a diehard Penn State fan. So that game, still a little knife in my heart, but it was a great experience. And congrats Penn State on an awesome season, by the way.

Spencer Burton (12:49):

I have to admit, so we’re sitting in Miami right now. We haven’t gotten to me, but I’ve since moved to Miami and one of the reasons that my wife and I and our kids moved to Miami is for the weather. We’d been living in Colorado. Colorado’s beautiful and what have you, but we really appreciate warm weather, especially during the winter. Here we are sitting in January, we go to the game, Hard Rock Stadium for those who are familiar is half indoor, half outdoor, and I’m expecting, okay, warm weather. In fact, my son and I have been going to Hurricane games there and it’s always been sweltering hot. And so I expected at least not to be cold. It was so cold to the point where I didn’t say this to Michael because I didn’t want… But I was so glad it didn’t go over time.

Michael Belasco (13:37):

I was going to say.

Spencer Burton (13:37):

It’s like Notre Dame intercepted the pass. I’m like, “Okay, good.” Someone’s going to kick a field goal and end this game because I had no horse in the race. Although I did pretty good as a fan, right?

Michael Belasco (13:48):

Oh, yeah. You were-

Spencer Burton (13:49):

I was cheering for-

Michael Belasco (13:50):

Well, to be fair I got-

Spencer Burton (13:51):

For your Nittany Lions.

Michael Belasco (13:52):

I bought a Boise State shirt when went out to Boise.

Spencer Burton (13:54):

Yeah, he did.

Michael Belasco (13:55):

And I was all in. Except not when they played Penn State. It was years before, to the Nittany Lions faithful out there. But I, not being from here, checked the weather before I flew down here to meet Spencer. So I was adequately dressed. I had a long sleeve and pants. I was ready to go.

Spencer Burton (14:10):

Okay, let’s get back to what matters. So that’s RV@, it’s very exciting. Anything else that you’re-

Michael Belasco (14:16):

There’s stuff that’s tangential to A.CRE. I could talk about it now. We can wait until we go into our A.CRE update, which is the consulting side. Should we get into that?

Spencer Burton (14:25):

So you’re running A.CRE consulting. We’ll talk more about that though here in a second.

Michael Belasco (14:28):

Yeah, let’s pass on that. So that’s it. Yeah, everything is good. We’re just living in a… I grew up in Bucks County, so when I had my kids, I moved back. I love it. It’s beautiful area. So I mean, yeah, on the personal front, everything’s, thank God, is excellent, right now.

Spencer Burton (14:45):

Yeah, good, good.

Michael Belasco (14:46):

… so we’re happy. Everything’s good. So yeah, so that’s my side. Should we shift gears and get into your world? Anything else you want to cover before?

Spencer Burton (14:54):

No, no, yeah. So updates for me, again, moved to Miami. My wife and I, we like to live different places. Part of it is like being a real estate guy, I’m not married to any one sub-market-

Michael Belasco (15:08):

Like I say, sub-market.

Spencer Burton (15:10):

Or any one market, yeah.

Michael Belasco (15:10):

You’re moving like, “What’s sub-market?” I love it.

Spencer Burton (15:15):

To me, it’s about experiences. And it’s not intentional, but we tend to live a place for four or five years and then get antsy and want to try something new.

Michael Belasco (15:29):

So since I’ve known you, well, you came in from Panama, Ithaca, Wisconsin, Dallas, Colorado Springs?

Spencer Burton (15:37):

That’s right. Well, kind of. Between Colorado Springs and Denver, yeah.

Michael Belasco (15:39):

And then Miami. Wow, so six places in 10 years have we known each other? No.

Spencer Burton (15:44):

2012, yeah 2012, so-

Michael Belasco (15:46):

Oh, 20212. Yeah, so 13 years.

Spencer Burton (15:47):

… 13 years.

Michael Belasco (15:48):

That’s quite a lot of moving around. It’s-

Spencer Burton (15:51):

We enjoy moving around. I will say though, so far, now it hasn’t been that long. It’s been what? Eight, nine months. We’re really enjoying it here. It’s got the Latin American component and I’ve spent a decade of my life in Latin America, so that’s fun. There’s a lot of energy, a lot of momentum. So, so far so good. For those who are South Florida folks listening and watching it, a great place, we’re loving it so far.

Michael Belasco (16:19):

Yeah, I would say I am… Last night because of… I love this. Spencer is here. There’s just a great energy here. I was looking at school districts last night.

Spencer Burton (16:29):

There is. You got to talk your wife into that, so good luck.

Michael Belasco (16:32):

Yes, okay, so you’ve moved here, big life change, although less big for you guys because you guys like to move and that sort of a thing, but it is a big change. There’s also some things going on on the career front that I think is quite exciting and I’d love for you to share a little bit more and we can get into more of what’s going on over there.

Spencer Burton (16:55):

Sure, yeah. So for those who don’t know me, I’m approaching 25 years in the business, started in residential land, actually started as a land broker and then effectively went to work for one of my clients. Went back to school, that’s where Michael and I met at Cornell and came out, went to the institutional side of the business, been there for a little over a decade. But the past five years I have been at a firm that was one of the founding partners. Michael spent some time with us there as well at Stablewood. And Stablewood is a data and tech enabled real estate private equity firm, real estate operator. Slightly different model than is traditional, but I think in a good way. We partner with big institutions to deploy capital in the sub-institutional asset types. And we do that using tech and data. So I’ve been the president and my role has been to pair the right people with the tools and then develop very set processes, such that we can be efficient. You have to be efficient when you’re dealing with small assets.

(18:03):

Well one of the things that we’ve developed is what I’m now dubbing a digital coworker. Effectively, initially it was not powered in any way with large language models. It was powered, if you’re familiar with the term RPAs, basically automations. And we automated various workflows across sourcing and closing. So things like financial underwriting, market analysis, aggregating market data, then producing a score for a property. I think most valuable, automating investment committee memos. But what’s cool is when you develop this sort of technology, you can automate, you can create an investment committee memo for every investment you look at, not just the ones you decide to pursue. And so over the last four years, we’ve underwritten, with that digital coworker, over 50,000 investments.

Michael Belasco (19:01):

Now, when you guys started this process, there wasn’t the vision quite yet of a digital coworker, but it was this automation strategy of just where are the A, data and how can we aggregate that, clean it, organize it, and then create processes that help us streamline and become more efficient? But it wasn’t… I mean, generative AI wasn’t even a thing.

Spencer Burton (19:22):

Or at least it wasn’t on the scene. I mean, it was early. I think when we started it was GPT 2.0.

Michael Belasco (19:30):

Was it even out when-

Spencer Burton (19:31):

Well, it was in the periphery, but it was not in the… Anyway, so that would’ve been 2020. But you’re right, we had this vision, stablewood continues to have the vision of how do we take a repetitive task and push it to a tool that will automate it such that our people can elevate and focus, quite frankly, on the things that they enjoy and they do best. Managing relationships, thinking strategically and making key decisions. And I say key decisions, they could even be low-level decisions. So the first decision in an acquisition process is do we spend more time on this opportunity or not? That’s the screen in a traditional acquisitions team. And so we developed tools that got to that decision much faster.

(20:26):

So if you think about a traditional acquisitions team, you’ve got an analyst, an OM comes in the door and the analyst’s first job is to aggregate data. Go to CoStar, go to ComStack, go to their own internal database, pull all of these things in, maybe put it in a spreadsheet, put it in a Google Doc, put it on a pad of paper. That takes several days, fill out an Excel template. And on top of that, they have other deals that are also hitting their desk. And so they’re trying to prioritize what do I focus on first and second, whatever else. And so you’re two days in, maybe even longer, you have to call the broker and say, “Hey, I need this” or “I need that.” Or you take a vacation, whatever it may be. And it’s several days just to get to a point where you sit down with your director and the director makes adjustments to inputs and then says, “Nah, we shouldn’t spend any time on this.” And so that analyst has spent hours getting to a point where everyone says, “No.”

(21:22):

And so what we’ve done in the industry is we’ve said, “Okay, well we can’t do that. We can’t have an analyst spend 10 hours ultimately for us to say no.” So we created a screen. We say, “Okay, I’m not going to look at this sort of thing. I’m not going to look at that.” So let’s imagine I’ve got an apartment, a value-add apartment shop, and I’m not going to look at anything that’s not older than 1990. So if it’s newer than 1990, not that I’m suggesting that’s the right screen, but representative.

Michael Belasco (21:48):

Right, honing in on your buy box here.

Spencer Burton (21:49):

But what that means is a deal comes in from 1997, you immediately put it in the trash.

Michael Belasco (21:55):

Yeah.

Spencer Burton (21:56):

Well, as soon as you put it in the trash, there is insights from that that you could have gleaned had you had the time to extract it. So what we developed was essentially a digital coworker that would take that 1997 deal, by the way, we did not do apartments, so this is just hypothetical, that 1997 deal and extract data that could be valuable as we’re analyzing our 1980 vintage product. We’re building a database. And by the way, this is now a possibility for any shop to do. That’s where I go with this discussion.

(22:28):

So I’ve spent this time at Stablewood as president and in 2024, the partners group at Stablewood, we sat down and we said, “Hey, is there an opportunity within the tech that we’ve built to take any of it to market?” And we’d always imagined early on when we started Stablewood that there would be some technology that we could take to market that wouldn’t reduce Stablewood’s competitive edge. And this concept of a digital coworker, thanks to large language models, what is more broadly called an AI agent, became very real impossible. And so, we sat around, looked at each other, we were actually in Utah and the partner said, “Yeah, we should do it, and Spencer, we’d love for you to figure this out.”

(23:16):

And so from that came what… So we’re sitting here second week of January. January 1, I officially stepped down as president of Stablewood and I moved into a full-time role, a company I am the co-founder of, and I’m a majority owner of called CRE Agents born out of this technology that we developed at Stablewood. Stablewood continues to be my pre-seed investor and a key advisor and market ambassador. And we’re building a vertical AI agentic platform for commercial real estate.

Michael Belasco (23:53):

Okay, so for those that aren’t familiar with an agentic platform, and let’s keep it in the CRE or maybe let’s broaden it actually.

Spencer Burton (24:00):

Yeah, well keep in mind we’re going to do a whole episode on vertical AI, AI agents.

Michael Belasco (24:06):

All right, so maybe a little-

Spencer Burton (24:07):

Tease?

Michael Belasco (24:07):

One second, yeah, tease, just so people can, we’ll tease them into that. Just I think it’s important.

Spencer Burton (24:14):

The crux of it is an AI agent is a bodiless robot that can reason and that can perform repetitive tasks for you. Vertical AI agent is a bodiless robot that can perform highly technical, highly nuanced skills, repetitive tasks within an industry. So you’re not necessarily, you’re not going to go and use Microsoft Copilot to build an AI agent that will perform quarterly reports for you or quarterly evaluations. That is a vertical AI agent. It requires specialized integration, specialized instructions, specialized retrieval augmented generation capabilities that you wouldn’t get if you used what’s called a horizontal AI agentic platform. We’ll talk about that in a future episode.

Michael Belasco (25:00):

Okay, great. All right, so these are major updates.

Spencer Burton (25:02):

Yeah, it’s exciting for me.

Michael Belasco (25:04):

Yeah, it’s very exciting. So anything else you want to add, personal? Professional? If not, we can move on to the updates, Adventures in CRE, which there are a decent amount as well. Anything else you want you want to share with us?

Spencer Burton (25:18):

Let’s see. My daughter’s living in Argentina. That’s pretty cool. My son’s heading off to Lithuania.

Michael Belasco (25:23):

That’s right.

Spencer Burton (25:24):

It’s fun seeing the kids lift out. Then I have one more.

Michael Belasco (25:28):

Got one more left.

Spencer Burton (25:28):

I got one more left. But yeah, that’s it personally for me. Let’s talk about A.CRE.

Michael Belasco (25:32):

Yes. Let’s get into it.

Spencer Burton (25:34):

So again, it’s been 18 months since we had an Audio Series. For those who are less familiar with us, A.CRE has never really been a business from Michael and I, although it is a business. We have a COO who runs it. We have a team of 12-plus people who make it all happen. For Michael and I, It’s a labor of love. It’s this avenue through which we can add value to people’s careers. And so anytime we have an initiative, it sprouts from, and it’s always been this way since we started A.CRE over 10 years ago, it sprouts from a personal curiosity that one or the other have and/or a desire for something to exist and therefore it sprouts. And so we’re not thinking, “Okay, what can we create that will produce the most revenue?” Which often means that we create stuff that doesn’t produce any revenue. 99% of the things we do.

Michael Belasco (26:27):

It’s not only that, we’ve learned that there’s opportunities to help. We’ve always been in this seat of giving back and our motto is give back without the expectation of getting anything in return. And when we see an opportunity to give back and we’re interested, I think it has to be a little bit of both.

Spencer Burton (26:43):

Yeah, it is, yeah.

Michael Belasco (26:45):

And so a lot of these initiatives spawn from that. And we can get into-

Spencer Burton (26:50):

Well, and what Michael means by giving back. Early on, it wasn’t so much about giving back as much as “I wish that thing existed when I needed it. Someone needs to create that or the next Michael will wish the same.” And so the whole reason we started sharing models, well, not the whole reason, we also-

Michael Belasco (27:12):

Wanted jobs.

Spencer Burton (27:13):

Wanted jobs, but one of the reasons was it annoyed the heck out of us that you couldn’t go online and download a model for free, these non-proprietary models that you need in order to learn an important skill. And so we started sharing those with the world. And that was the first of many.

Michael Belasco (27:27):

I remember first putting these models out and being like, “Is somebody going to come around?” You didn’t know. “Is somebody going to come around and be like, ‘You can’t use this’ or?” I mean, it’s totally non-proprietary, but at that point because it was never done, it was this weird, just always this thing in the back of my mind. But yeah, so to that-

Spencer Burton (27:44):

So what’s an example? Yeah, last 18 months, what’s come out or what are we working on at A.CRE that’s new?

Michael Belasco (27:49):

Yeah, I would actually like to start off with this glossary and I don’t even know if we can call it a glossary. It sounds mundane. It sounds we’ve always had this glossary, but it is so cool and you led the charge on this and I love… Why don’t we kick it over? Well, let me give the primer and then… When we first started-

Spencer Burton (28:07):

It was early on. You said, “I wish there was a glossary.”

Michael Belasco (28:09):

Yes.

Spencer Burton (28:09):

That’s what you said.

Michael Belasco (28:09):

That’s right.

Spencer Burton (28:10):

Well, so here if… I’m sorry to stop you.

Michael Belasco (28:12):

Go, go, go.

Spencer Burton (28:13):

So Michael and I grew up in a day, we’re old men now, where… What’s the name of the glossary that we all used?

Michael Belasco (28:23):

There was a Barron’s one.

Spencer Burton (28:24):

Barron’s, okay, so there’s this Barron’s glossary. And I mean no disrespect to the nice folks at Barron’s. It’s like this thick and it’s got to be 1,000 something terms and 90% of them are meaningless to us in our industry, more than 90%. And he’s neurotic. And so he’s sitting there at Cornell and he’s trying to memorize every one of these terms in this glossary.

Michael Belasco (28:45):

It sounds so funny, but yeah.

Spencer Burton (28:46):

He created flashcards so he could learn terms. 90% of them are irrelevant.

Michael Belasco (28:54):

Worthless. Worthless.

Spencer Burton (28:54):

And so a moment arrived where we’re like, “We need to create a glossary of the terms that actually freaking matter.” And from that came the A. CRE glossary of CRE terms. It’s been around forever.

Michael Belasco (29:04):

I remember we were looking at this plug-in of this… It was just so-

Spencer Burton (29:08):

Yeah, that was fun.

Michael Belasco (29:09):

It was this very primitive version, but it just, every month we commit, maybe it was every week, one or two, one or two glossary terms, one or two glossary terms.

Spencer Burton (29:17):

And we had other people came in and help. What was his name?

Michael Belasco (29:20):

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s right.

Spencer Burton (29:23):

And I want to give a shout out to him because he helped the first iteration of the glossary.

Michael Belasco (29:27):

Let’s put his name up.

Spencer Burton (29:27):

Yeah, we’ll remember his name and put it in there, yeah. Very helpful. So he’d gotten accepted to UNC’s MBA program and he had some spare time.

Michael Belasco (29:39):

He did some book reviews for us?

Spencer Burton (29:39):

He did some book reviews I think as well. I’m so sorry. We’ll flash it.

Michael Belasco (29:44):

Keep talking it, keep talking it, I’m going to, I’m going to…

Spencer Burton (29:45):

But anyway, the point is we had A.CRE readers help us in the early days populate this glossary.

Michael Belasco (29:53):

So fast forward, we decided that we were going to produce some of these glossaries and we were going to give them out to students that joined the Accelerator, universities, companies that were part of the Accelerator. It was really cool. We made this really cool book. I’m sure some of you have it out there and it’s just like this really cool take behind-

Spencer Burton (30:12):

We never sold, right?

Michael Belasco (30:13):

We never sold it, yeah.

Spencer Burton (30:14):

We lose money on every single one of those books we print and give away, but-

Michael Belasco (30:17):

But it’s cool. It’s a cool-

Spencer Burton (30:18):

It’s fun.

Michael Belasco (30:18):

It’s really cool. It’s cool to see a lot. And remember when Tucker was around, we’d have hats. I miss Tucker because I’d have all this gear that I don’t have anymore.

Spencer Burton (30:26):

All right, Tucker, if you’re watching, I am wearing backwards an A.CRE hat.

Michael Belasco (30:31):

Tucker Wells, by the way. We were fitted. We were fitted with Tucker Wells on board. We’re no longer fitted the way we used to be with A.CRE gear, but we used to have hats. We’d get all these things, thanks to Tucker. So we would give this glossary out. And I think it must’ve been within the last year you had started creating… Back to the point of you’d have this big book. None of the terms would mean anything and even the terms that were valuable if you’re new to the industry or it just was a gap in your knowledge, it’s hard to run to ground.

(31:04):

So it was about eight months ago, probably within the last year, Spencer decided to start taking every one of those terms and putting a case behind it, like the Accelerator, putting a real-world example. So anytime you go to look up a term, you get the term, you get the definition, and then you see how it’s put into practice. Which I thought, I mean, it sounds simple, but I think it’s like, I mean, I don’t want to… It’s not revolutionary, but it’s awesome. So we took a book that was, I don’t know how many pages, I’m going to guess 100 pages. Probably turned it into 400, but it’s incredible.

Spencer Burton (31:38):

It’s valuable, yeah.

Michael Belasco (31:41):

It’s not even a glossary, it’s a total education within itself.

Spencer Burton (31:44):

It is, so-

Michael Belasco (31:45):

Very cool.

Spencer Burton (31:45):

Yeah, let me… It’s called putting the term in context. So every term, let’s say the term is cap rate, it’s putting cap rate into context. And then we create a case study just for that term, a real-to-life case study. And that case study is added to the glossary term because the case study itself is three or four or five times as long as the glossary term are. Now you can see this online, we have our glossaries in a digital form, but then there’s a book.

Michael Belasco (32:18):

Coming to a university or institution near you.

Spencer Burton (32:22):

Yeah, or if you want a copy, let us know. We’ll send you one. The book’s quite big now.

Michael Belasco (32:25):

Maybe we can make it wider.

Spencer Burton (32:28):

Well, we are making it… Yeah. So Kyle, our COO, he is expanding it so that the book isn’t quite… Anyway, it’s going to be a thick book, but it’s valuable terms. Now how did we build it? This is where it gets cool. The reason this became possible is because of AI. So prior to this, remember how I mentioned how we had support from A.CRE readers helping us create these glossary terms? And that’s fine and that’s good, but it’s just tedious writing definitions. Well, writing case studies, there’s 10 times as many words and you have to put some thought to whether it’s what property type and who is the protagonist in the case. And so what we built was a digital coworker to write case studies. And that digital coworker had some instructions. We did some fine-tuning, if you will. And it had some basic instructions so it knew the types of cases and how to write a case in a way that was consistent but also credible.

(33:34):

So that was the first step. It would write the first draft, we would then run it through o1, which is like a reasoning model. The reason we do that is that’s like a validation step. So it would write a case, it was powered or it is powered by GPT 4.0 which is all fine and good, but for instance, yield maintenance. It would create a case study for yield maintenance. Maybe the protagonist is a bank plus a borrower. And the borrower requests a payoff and the bank has to calculate a payoff. And the prepayment is a yield maintenance prepayment. And so then 4.0 would actually calculate the yield maintenance, but its math skills are not quite as good. And so then we’d run it back through o1 and we’d say, “Hey, validate this for accuracy and for realism.”

Michael Belasco (34:24):

So explain, I want to just go on, let’s tangent a little bit. There’s the LLMs, there’s the reasoning models. Are they different? Are they the same? Are they… Let’s talk about it because you’re saying these things are important, I think people should learn this.

Spencer Burton (34:35):

Well and we’ll get into this-

Michael Belasco (34:36):

Yeah, we will.

Spencer Burton (34:37):

… when we do the AI Agents. So the difference really between a single shot model, like a 4.0 and a reasoning model like o1 is reasoning acts somewhat like a human does, which when we think about a problem, we unpack the problem and then, in a way, we solve the problem in chunks and the solution to one chunk helps us solve the next chunk. They call it chain of thought, but there’s this chain of thought reasoning. And so one of these reasoning models, they’re more expensive, they take longer, but you get a better output. And so anyway, coming back to the glossary, we had the draft, we fed the draft to the o1 reasoning model, it validated.

(35:21):

And then the final step, and this quite frankly was the longest, is I would then personally read every one of those case studies. And I would say they were 100% accurate in terms of math, but there were things that just to me weren’t realistic. So the foundation knowledge in 4.0 feels like it’s living in a 2021 world. And so it always used a 10-year treasury of 3%. Well, to me that wasn’t realistic. I think we’re living in a world where the 4% plus 10-year treasury’s around for the foreseeable future. Today, I think it’s 4.7. It’s high fours right now. And so you might think, “Oh, well why waste your time on that?”

Michael Belasco (36:09):

Because somebody could read that five years from now and it’ll be back to-

Spencer Burton (36:12):

Well, that’s true. And we’ll probably go through and update the cases five years from now though. But I wanted to make sure that it was as real as possible. That was my step. And so that was what I did on airplanes. I flew a ton last year and that was one of my favorite things to do was vet these case studies. Point is we finished end of 2024 and so you can find it digitally on the A.CRE website and the A.CRE glossary of terms. And this mammoth of a book is coming out this year-

Michael Belasco (36:43):

Which is awesome.

Spencer Burton (36:43):

And those who want one, let us know.

Michael Belasco (36:44):

Very cool.

Spencer Burton (36:44):

That’s the glossary.

Michael Belasco (36:45):

All right, so what’s next? You want to talk University Profile Series?

Spencer Burton (36:50):

Yeah, I think we can be quick on this one. 10 years ago, in the same way that Michael wanted a glossary, I wanted some profiles of real estate offerings at universities. When I was looking at graduate school, there was nothing, there was a lot about MBAs, there was very little about real estate offerings. And I wanted to understand, okay, what the MBA programs have credible real estate concentrations and what masters in real estate programs are credible and/or how do those programs add value to someone? And so we created this University Profile Series. It’s a combination of facts about programs as well as some interviews that we’ve done with students.

Michael Belasco (37:33):

When you started that, you did that all on your own as a first step. You did the first seven or eight of the master’s programs and that was your genuine curiosity-

Spencer Burton (37:43):

It was six programs. They were masters in real estate programs that I thought were the most credible.

Michael Belasco (37:49):

I loved it. So I was like, “Maybe we take this.”

Spencer Burton (37:51):

That’s right.

Michael Belasco (37:52):

And we created the template, but we got the universities involved and I remember there was a couple of universities where we had the students help us fill it out and it was like, what is this like from a student’s perspective? And then I remember some universities got involved, the actual admin-

Spencer Burton (38:06):

And Tucker was a big help.

Michael Belasco (38:08):

Yeah, well some of them were very like, “What is this website? Why are we being… One of the Ivy leagues. I won’t say which one, but took them a year to be like, we want to put our stuff on.

Spencer Burton (38:18):

They can be a little persnickety for sure.

Michael Belasco (38:19):

But they ended up coming around. They’re one of our, I would say, closest universities today. So it ended up working out really well, but as for-

Spencer Burton (38:26):

So we’re up 200 and something universities today. The reason why it’s on this list though, since we last spoke, we had this big push. First off, we created an entirely new section of the website that was hand-built by Luis Fernandez. He’s one of our website guys specifically for filtering for university profiles. Prior to that, it was on the front end of A.CRE, which technically didn’t exactly have the tools that we needed. So Luis built that. It’s cool. So there’s a design component that makes it easier for you to filter. And then we had this big push to bring in universities. Our vision is if there’s real estate taught at the university, it should be in our profile series. If your university isn’t on the profile series and it has some real estate offerings, let us know. Let’s add it. And we’ll do our best to keep it updated. So that’s the University Profile Series.

Michael Belasco (39:17):

Great, great. All right, well maybe we save the best for last in the AI tools and tutorials and we go-

Spencer Burton (39:24):

Yeah, well talk to us about Spanish content and why that matters or why it matters to us.

Michael Belasco (39:29):

So the Spanish content, contenido en espanol.

Spencer Burton (39:33):

There you go. Look at that. Gringo Spanish.

Michael Belasco (39:35):

Si estoy hablando es correct?

Spencer Burton (39:41):

Michael’s wife’s from Peru.

Michael Belasco (39:44):

And Spencer spent a ton of time in Latin America’s. He’s totally fluent and I’m aspiring to get there.

Spencer Burton (39:49):

Ahi va. Poco a poco.

Michael Belasco (39:50):

Poco a poco por supuesto.So my Spanish is horrible. I have an even worse accent, but I’m working on all of it.

Spencer Burton (39:59):

I don’t think it’s so bad.

Michael Belasco (40:03):

Poco a poco. But we’ve always had an affinity for just Latin American. If you think about it, I’ve always had this thought, I’ve always envisioned this map of the world and every time you learn, it’s almost like when you start a board game, it’s like things are locked.I always picture the map like that. And every time if you could learn a language, it’s like you unlock the map of the world. I always thought it was cool. Anyway, so a Latin America, it’s like, I mean, we’re in Miami right now. This might as well be… I mean, there’s so much Latin culture here. I mean, it’s incredible. So we have this affinity and closeness to just Latin America in general, and we’ve brought on some amazing talent, incredible. Just Emilio, Arturo, Alejandro. I mean, it’s incredible. The people that we have just brought into this company, and I mean it. They have elevated us.

(40:53):

And so one of the things we wanted to do was branch out into Latin America and just get more exposure down there. It wasn’t necessarily like we think this market is the market. We need to break in here. It wasn’t so much of a business decision as it was just a passion. We wanted to connect more with that part of the world. And by the way, the industry is nascent down there comparatively. And this is broad generalization that I’m making, but it’s broadly and generally it’s a little more nascent or it’s a lot more nascent than it is here in the United States. And so there is an opportunity down there to help support and educate people in just all different sorts of stuff.

(41:35):

So we’ve created all this content in Spanish. We’ve converted a lot of our content that we’ve created over the years, our models, everything with the help of Arturo and Emilio who many of you who, if you’re in the Accelerator, I’m sure have interacted with both of them. You’ve probably heard their voices occasionally or seen their write their articles. They don’t just write in Spanish, they write stuff in English and it’s incredible content. So we have an affinity for that part of the world. So there’s a ton of content we’ve created. God, I don’t know how many articles.,

Spencer Burton (42:09):

Oh, it’s into the hundreds now. Yeah, and you might be listening to this going, “Well, you just use AI to translate everything you have on the website?” But like with the glossary, there’s one thing that’s just a raw translation. Another is to bring context. And so for instance, they go every year to this conference in Bogota, which is really cool. I went down one year, this last year. You went down the year before. They do case studies specific to Latin America, and they bring a context that you wouldn’t otherwise get with just a pure straight translation.

Michael Belasco (42:43):

Perfect example is multifamily, which we teach the Accelerator, the core first course, the foals is a multifamily deal, and that actually doesn’t translate that much into Latin America-

Spencer Burton (42:51):

Very little, yeah.

Michael Belasco (42:52):

… because multifamily is not really a thing down there at this point.

Spencer Burton (42:57):

In almost every market with a few exceptions. And even those, those are-

Michael Belasco (43:00):

So that doesn’t translate. So there you go. So the content in Spanish is there. It’s something that we’re going to continue to do. We have such a great team that’s supporting us on that. And then let’s move in to something, Spencer, that you’ve really been the tip of the spear on, which is the AI tools and the tutorials and all of that. I mean. You’ve shifted A.CRE, kept us on the cutting edge of just what’s coming. And you were right?

Spencer Burton (43:29):

Yeah, so when we started, we had three pillars, real estate financial modeling, education, and careers. And those had been the three pillars of A.CRE for its first seven years. Over the last three years, we added a fourth pillar. And that was strategic. It was strategic to the extent that we added it as a fourth pillar, but it came around in the same way that everything else came around, which was curiosity. A.CRE for Michael and I, as an outlet, we can explore things that we find interesting. Pre-ChatGPT, but at a point where large language models, I’d always been interested in robotics and automation-

Michael Belasco (44:12):

There’s a whole other life that you… Yeah, it’s actually quite… It’s fascinating.

Spencer Burton (44:16):

So I’d always been interested in it, but when there were all of a sudden tools that we could use to make our lives better as professionals in real estate, we began to share content that we found interesting around those topics. We’re now up to dozens of articles, tutorials, tools that we built around AI as it relates though to commercial real estate. And it’s a passion of mine, clearly. And I think it’s something that’s important for our A.CRE readers to understand, to embrace. I know it’s scary to embrace it, but you embrace it or you get left behind. And that’s the reality of it. And again, we’ll have episodes in this season that will cover these topics more in depth, but we have a lot of AI. And we say AI, AI almost means nothing now. Largely generative AI content on the website that is valuable. And that’s been a big push.

Michael Belasco (45:23):

Yeah, and I would say spend a lot of time focusing on that. Spencer’s a catalyst in this and I mean that genuinely. And obviously many of our readers, listeners, viewers know that. And so to be next to Spencer and see it all unfold, even just this trip down here, you really are aware it is coming. I mean, you shared some videos with me. I’ve watched them. One’s a 35 minute video. I spent three hours on 17 minutes because I’d be on chat GPT going deep. And it is absolutely coming. It is something that all of our readers, listeners, viewers need to get on top of. And it will change. It’ll change the world quite honestly.

(46:15):

And it’s something… There’s a ton of positives and we, Spencer and I spend a lot of time talking about the downside of ramifications and risks, and we spend a lot of time thinking about how to mitigate and even I would say, I don’t want to say protect our viewers and all that, but honestly, how do we keep people current and shift them? It’s coming. It feels like “Ugh, I got to learn something new.” But you do. You have to. It’s just a thing. And the sooner you adapt, the better off you’re going to be. And I know it sounds like crazy for me to say, but I’m saying it from someone that’s usually a slow adapter. Spencer’s been pounding away at this for forever

Spencer Burton (46:56):

Years, yeah, yeah.

Michael Belasco (46:57):

And I’m a little slower along, but now I’m seeing it and I’m like, first of all, I’m blown away by what it really is when you really look at it and you have someone to really show you like, “Look.” It’s insane. Actually, and I’m not like huge AI person, I got the chills watching some of this stuff last night. It was mind-mindbogglingly exciting. And also there’s some fear.

Spencer Burton (47:21):

Yeah, it’s scary.

Michael Belasco (47:21):

Scary stuff. So anyway, check out the AI tools that we’re putting out. Spencer’s put out a ton. I’m going to start diving in.

Spencer Burton (47:29):

So let’s finish this episode getting along. But the biggest announcement is January, 2025, rolled out the Accelerator 3.0.

Michael Belasco (47:41):

That’s right.

Spencer Burton (47:41):

Right? So every three years we try to bring a new version of the Accelerator. We’re really big on updates. You’ve probably seen that in our models. Every one of our models has gone through numerous updates. Some of our models have gone through dozens or even hundreds of updates. And that’s because the world changes. We learn things as we move down the road with something. And we’ve learned a ton. Thousands of people have graduated from the Accelerator. Even many more thousands have taken the Accelerator to some degree. We now work with many of the largest real estate firms in the world. Very, very name brands who use our program to train their incoming analysts and associates. I don’t use their names simply because I want to respect them, but likewise with universities. Pretty much every major university-

Michael Belasco (48:37):

That has a serious real estate program.

Spencer Burton (48:39):

That has a serious real estate program, I would say that if it’s a top-20 university with a real estate program, they’re using our program right now and dozens of universities use our program. And then there are hundreds and hundreds of individuals, whether it’s young people entering the industry, career pivoters, real estate entrepreneurs that are using the program to learn this all-important technical skill, real estate financial modeling. And so we know that we have to be improving it. 3.0 is coming out. We’ll have an episode that talks about what that means, why and so forth. But that’s probably the biggest update on the A.CRE front.

Michael Belasco (49:17):

Yeah, yeah, it’s really exciting. So hopefully those that are on it at this point are enjoying it. And yeah, I guess we’ll save the details of that for when we dive into that episode.

Spencer Burton (49:30):

So with that, let’s go on to the next episode.

Michael Belasco (49:32):

Let’s do it. All right.

Announcer (49:35):

Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Adventures in CRE Audio Series. For show notes and additional resources, head over to www.adventuresincre.com/audioseries.