Why I’m Skipping AI Drips And Choosing Real Conversations

Pressure to reinvent yourself every January is loud, but it isn’t always useful. I’m choosing a calmer approach this year: fewer gimmicks, more conversations, and a focus on the basics that actually move the needle for real estate clients. If you’ve ever felt drained by lead gen trends, AI drip campaigns, or the constant push to be everywhere online, this conversation will feel like a deep breath.

I walk through the offerings that keep our community grounded—free Thursday meditations at noon CT, a gentle Mindful Monday text, and a twice-monthly newsletter—and then shift into the heart of the episode: defining what to stop doing and what to amplify. We talk candidly about vetting for reasonable, aligned clients, skipping impersonal mass emails, and resisting the urge to buy into every new tool. You’ll hear how small, curated gatherings create more trust than another algorithmic blast, and why a simple CRM used well beats a complex stack that steals your time.

We also explore a balanced take on AI. I use it where it helps, but I don’t let it replace my judgment or my voice. Real estate remains a human business—people still need to walk a block at sunset, feel a home, and talk through tradeoffs with someone they trust. You’ll get practical ways to audit your business spokes (SOI, open houses, farming, referrals, selective online leads), reduce friction, and commit to a 3–6 month plan before you evaluate results. Markets change; relationships endure. The path to a sustainable, “rested and rich” practice starts with clarity, boundaries, and doing more of what works for you.

If this resonates, subscribe, share the episode with a colleague who needs it, and leave a review so others can find the show. Your support helps us keep building a healthier, more human real estate business together.

You can find me on instagram @rested.real.estate.agent, and you can sign up for my newsletter to keep up with upcoming workshops and other offerings on my website www.suminabhatti.com. 

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Transcript

Welcome And Purpose

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to the Rested and Rich Real Estate Agent. This is a podcast that helps you navigate life as a real estate agent while finding some rest and balance along the way. I'm your host, Sumina, and I'm an active real estate agent with 19 years of experience in the Austin market. I'm also a certified meditation teacher. And this podcast was specifically created for real estate agents' brains to learn how to manage the stress and anxiety of our industry and the high emotions that can come from guiding buyers and sellers through a real estate transaction. Join me as we explore tools and techniques for building a more sustainable business so that you can keep doing what you love and find some rest along the way. This is the first episode in 2026, and I'm recording from a chilly Austin, Texas afternoon. My goal was to get this episode out in January, yet it is early February, and I'm getting it done. Thank you for joining me if you've been on this journey so

Offerings: Meditations, Texts, Newsletter

SPEAKER_00 1:06

far. I also want to start off this episode by talking a little bit about the various offerings I have. I realized recently as a fellow colleague had asked me where they could sign up for my med my um weekly meditations, and I said, Oh, yeah, actually weekly meditations every Thursday, and you can sign up here. And I also have a new offering that I'll tell you about in a moment. You can sign up here, and everything felt kind of scattered. And she said, I listened to your podcast, but I didn't hear you mention that. And I was like, you know what? I actually haven't mentioned it on the podcast. So I am trying to fix that today. Here are my current offerings and places you can find me in addition to this podcast. I I do teach meditation for anybody and for realtors specifically, every Thursday at noon central time. These are just 30 minutes and they are completely free. They're open to the public. I have everyone from therapists, other realtors in different places in the country attend, kind of think about it like my offering to the community. The classes are structured in the following way, which is that there's usually an intro for five to seven minutes. Um I will talk about something I'm contemplating, what we're gonna sit with in our practice today, and then we sit in a guided practice together for 10 to 15 minutes, and then we wrap up with a few minutes at the end with some conversation. And it's 30 minutes, easy peasy on Zoom. You can hop in. I will make sure I put the link in the show notes to sign up for that class if you're interested. The other offering I have is a mindful Monday text message. I started this service about a month or two ago, and it's just a text message that pops into your phone on a Monday morning. They are musings, mind wanderings from me. They are AI-free, algorithm-free. It's just what I'm currently chewing on that I want to share with everyone. Just think about like a gentle nudge to help set the tone for your week. You know, I also say this with caveat that don't feel like you have to sign up for any of these. I'm not trying to add more noise into our already noisy worlds, but if you feel like a simple text message once a week for me would be appealing, I will also include a link down below where you can sign up. The third offering I have is in addition to this podcast, which is about once a month at this point. I also have a newsletter that goes out about twice a month. It is the Rested Enrich Real Estate Agent. The newsletter sometimes has overlaps with topics from this podcast, but not always. Sometimes they're completely independent things I'm working on over there as well. So to recap, I have the weekly meditation on Thursdays, I have the mindful Monday, text message service, gift, whatever you want to think about it, and a newsletter. So those are my current offerings as of the earth as of early 2026, whenever you may be listening to this. So let's get into our episode for today.

New Year Not New Me

SPEAKER_00 4:02

So this episode is titled New Year, not new me. And the reason I sort of went with this title is because I think there's so much pressure at the beginning of a year to say, I'm gonna do all these things, it's gonna be a new me, I'm gonna start working out and organize my desk and all these different kinds of things. Instead of that, as I've been thinking about where I ended last year and how I'm beginning this year, and as if you've been following the journey so far, you know that I went back to one of my favorite training programs in October of last year called Ninja Selling. Really helped. Get me re-engaged with my work, get me retuned in, and one of the biggest takeaways I had from there was really just getting back to our basics in real estate. This tends to be a relational business. Yes, it can be transactional if you're doing a lot of online leads and you're you know meeting people you don't know off the internet, but historically, this has been a word of mouth, human-to-human kind of business. Home purchase is for most people such a rare purchase in their lifetime. I think the average American buys, I think, three to five homes in their lifetime. It's not a very frequent purchase. It requires, for a lot of people, hand holding a expert or a guide to guide them through it. And so for me, it really came back to doubling down on the basics. And in especially in this time we're coming to with AI, automation, algorithms of being able to write our emails, create social media content for us, etc. Where does that leave us with our business? Are we all gonna be churning out more and more content because AI can generate, you know, one post an hour if we wanted it to? Are we all just gonna be racing down to the bottom in terms of visibility and um inundating people with more noise? For me, it's not really it's a new year, but it's not a new me. I think I am doubling down on human-to-human, person-to-person interactions. In our industry in real estate, we have so much that sales reps from different companies calling us to jump on their online lead sources. Now with AI, of course, we're getting more and more like let AI do everything for you. And so this year I just don't have a new me attitude. I'm not gonna employ some new sexy

Back To Basics And Human Connection

SPEAKER_00 6:23

approach to my business. I'm not gonna chase down some AI-driven lead generation and mass email campaign. I will not be sending out seasonal emails to my entire base to remind them, database, to remind them about, you know, daylight savings times or whatever these automated drip campaigns can do sometimes. I mean, can things get more impersonal than a Happy New Year email from your insurance agent or your realtor? And I think we can all agree that these ways of outreach and touches are so impersonal that they more likely alienate a relationship than cultivate it. They just leave me with a general sense of meh, like nothing about that feels interesting to me. But you know, I kind of started off thinking about here is what I don't want to do. I'm pretty clear on what I am not putting money toward, which is again AI, lead campaigns, online leads. I'm also not gonna work with clients who don't resonate with me, people who have an unrealistic expectation of the market, of what I can do for them, um, and are not willing to listen to reason. The number one thing I've been doing, especially in particular with sellers in our market, uh, because we've been so seller-heavy these past year or two, is my assessment for whether I'm going to work with a seller or not is really are they reasonable? That's it. I don't care about the price point. I don't really care whether they what the property condition is. Right now, for example, I have a property that is essentially a teardown. It's a boarded up teardown. But the sellers are, you know, it's an estate, they are reasonable about paying attention to the market, listening to my expertise, and making adjustments from there. It doesn't mean that every client has to be perfect. There's no such thing as a perfect client, right? Or that they have to 100% align with all my values. But if they seem high drama, if they seem unrealistic, that is someone that I just can't work with at this time, especially if they're sellers. I recently did have buyers come to me who said, you know, we're looking for a house in central Austin and we want it to be under 400,000, and we want it to be, you know, newer, built in the past 10 years, and and and and. And I was like, that is not realistic. I'm happy to set you up on a search, but that just to let you know is not gonna be very, you know, easy to find. And they said, well, you know, we were trusting you to find us something. I don't have that kind of power, right? If I did, I probably wouldn't be in real estate. Or if they're gonna be high drama, those are usually not people that I prefer to work with. And thankfully, for the most part, my vetting process is pretty good. I rarely end up with people like that. And so I have been really fortunate to work with just amazing clients, buyers, sellers, where yes, we may be frustrated with the market, we may be frustrated with a lack of showings, or you know, depending on the market we're in, but they are not blaming me for a lack of showings. That stuff I am not doing, okay. Um what I am doing, though, is working on more more smaller format events. I can't even call them events, they're just gatherings, four to six people getting together, going deep, seeing what's going on in their world. Uh, their world in particular feels pretty chaotic and unstable right now. I work with a lot of people who are like me, which is to say first generation or second generation immigrants, they may be the first people in their family to purchase a home. A lot of them are concerned and worried about what's going on. And so having these smaller group ones, and this is not based on an algorithm that my CRM is going to spit out to me. It's based on what I know about my clients. What are commonalities they have? What stage of life are they in? What kind of interests they have? How would it feel to get these smaller groups together, inviting them to a kind of more intimate sit-down tea time type of a thing? And in thinking about how AI fits into this, I'm not someone who is against AI altogether. I do use it. I try to be clear when I am using it, um, and I try to balance it. I use it as a tool. I still try to apply my humanity to it. I take the input it gives me, I think about whether that aligns with what I'm thinking or not, and I make sure I add my own voice in there too. I am interested and curious about what AI is going to do for all of us, but I'm also worried about it for reasons that a lot of people are, right? The environmental factors, the reliance on automation over automation and speed and productivity over slowing down, taking time to think through things, meandering with a particular thought or idea on a walk, those kinds of things. Um, and I thought the other thing that would be helpful to talk about in this episode is the tools that I use as I'm going about my business, as I've been going about my world. And this could be in a more extended topic if you all have interest in that. Just let me know. What are the tools that I do use? I do use a CRM, a client relationship management tool. I work at Compass, they provide us one, it's great.

Vetting Clients And Setting Boundaries

SPEAKER_00 11:25

That's what I use. They have an app that goes with it, and I can use it on my phone. I don't think you have to use anything fancy. I think you could totally use an Excel spreadsheet or a pen and paper. Use what is comfortable for you and use something that the world you're already in. If you are a Google user and that is a world you're comfortable in, just use a Google spreadsheet or a Word document. You know, for most of us, what I find is that for most of the CRMs out there, they provide so much functionality, it's usually overkill for a lot of us, and we get lost in trying to understand it, and then we don't use it, which is the opposite of what you want to do when you're paying for a piece of software to help you make more money and be more connected to your people. And other than relying on my CRM for birthdays and kind of milestones for what's happening with my clients, their home anniversaries, things like that, I do have uh reminders set up in there to say every couple of months I do want to follow up with these people in my database. I don't automatically follow up with every person that I get prompted to do so. So if I log into my CRM tomorrow, it's like follow up with these 12 people. I'm like, you know what? Actually, these three people feel like the really ones I want that I feel connected to following up with today. The other ones, for whatever reason, maybe it's been a really long time and I need to sit with reaching back out to them. Um, I might sit on that for a little while to make sure it feels aligned with me before I reach out to them. And I know that this is a little bit mushy and nuanced, right? There aren't like bright lines between I'm gonna sit here and crank through my 20 people I gotta follow up with regardless of how I feel about it. It's balancing both things. Part of our business is that staying in connection with our people is important, and balancing that with I'm gonna grind through this no matter how it feels to me is also important to me. And yes, our income and livelihood does rely on people buying, selling homes with us, and referring us, etc. But I also really don't take lightly the trust that people have placed in us to not spam them, to not sell their data, to not just continually be inundating them with just kind of more and more noise. And I have to check myself because my brain likes order in organization. And I can spend a lot of time fixing, tweaking systems, working on templates, thinking about the flow of email orders and things like that. And sometimes I can feel myself after, you know, two or three hours of heads-down work, just mired in it, having to pull myself out and say, okay, what if this is really important of my time right now? Yes, it's important to look at your templates, important to look at your flow to make sure things are making sense, that you are making things clear and easy for your clients. But if you're spending so much time there and less time reaching out to them or creating events or finding kind of finding your wheelhouse or what's interesting to you, then it might be time to assess and rebalance those things. And it's a wisdom of knowing like what feeds your soul and how do you keep your business going at the same time? And how do you like to do business? What are your juicy places in this career? Some people love doing open houses. It puts them in a nice home that they get to present, it puts them in front of potential buyers and potential sellers. It kind of gets you in the flow of things. Some people hate doing open houses, some people are much happier doing, you know, online lead gen. And so balancing your particular preference for how you operate your business and knowing how to pull yourself out if you find that you're getting mired in the details is kind of that wisdom that we need there. What practices can you do to work with this, right? I've talked through here are things I'm not going to be doing this year, and here are things I am going to be doing, and I am going to be doubling down on. What do those look like for you? Where are your strengths? Where do you feel a lot of resistance when it comes to doing the work? You know, do you feel a lot of resistance when it comes to open houses, getting your assigns, putting them up, maybe examining where the stickiness lies with it, right? One of uh the members on my team, she does not like doing open houses because she doesn't want to be in a

Small Gatherings Over Mass Marketing

SPEAKER_00 15:18

property by herself. It wasn't till I asked the right questions that I knew that, understood what that was. And it's like, oh, so if you're actually partnered with somebody to do the open house with, that makes you feel a lot more comfortable. And she said, Oh, yeah, way more comfortable. Okay. That to me is different than someone who doesn't like doing open houses because putting the signs up is a pain, and they'd much rather just talk to people online than to holding a two-hour open house. The actual whole process is three to four hours, depending on what you're doing, right? You're getting there a little early, you might be scouting other similar properties in the neighborhood, you're putting your signs out, and then you're taking everything and breaking everything back down again at the end of the open house. For some people, they really don't like that part of the process. For me, I used to hate putting the signs out, and now we have a sign company that will go do it for you for I think it's like 50 bucks. They'll put up 10 signs around the neighborhood. And that, especially in Texas in the summer, uh solves a lot of the resistance I had to doing open houses. But think through the different spokes of your business, right? Your SOI, open houses, neighborhood farming, online leads, what for some of you might be social media. What do you enjoy doing? What can you feel committed to doing? And what do you not enjoy doing that you could either change a little bit, remove the aspects of what you don't like about it, or just remove it completely from what you're doing. And really start to untangle yourself from this idea that we need to be reinventing ourselves all the time. We need to be re in, you know, re-um picking up new ideas and new ways of doing things. Yes, learning AI can be helpful. Yes, learning how your MLS works and updates they're making to it, and learning how to use a stats module in your MLS or is important and helpful. Which of those are things that you want to focus on this year? Because there can be so much noise in our industry. I don't want to spend

Thoughtful Use Of AI And Its Limits

SPEAKER_00 17:13

time learning about Instagram's algorithms, I don't want to spend time learning about what new trending sounds and audio there are, but that sounds like a nightmare to me. If I'm using social media, I'm using it for not business purposes, but news, cat videos, whatever. To me, learning the ins and outs of all the other components of it is not where I find joy. If you're in this business for the long haul, if you are really trying to refine these are the lanes I really enjoy being in, how can you double down on that? How can you maybe turn the volume knob up a little bit on those and turn the volume knob down on the things that suck your soul or cost too much money and you're not getting the results you want, or are just not aligned with where you want to be business-wise? To recap, what we talked about today in this episode, number one is figuring out what you don't want to do this year. What are ways that you don't want to be engaging with your business and start making a list of those? That usually comes easier to us because we typically have resistance to and we've been avoiding doing some of these things anyway. Now I know that there's some things we can't avoid doing, like taxes, finances, administrative stuff, compliance, but um, in terms of lead generation, what do you want to say bye-bye to? And then figure out what you do like to do. Is it small form gatherings? Is it one-on-one coffees with your people? Is it more open houses? What of those things are things that you know what? These are the things and parts about this business that I like doing. Is it looking at stats and pulling those for clients in particular neighborhoods or past buyers in a particular neighborhood and dropping off little reports? Where, what's your gem? What do you like about this business? Where you get to be creative, where you get to showcase your expertise, and what would doing more of that look like for you? And then find your lane and stick to it. Every shiny object is gonna come around and try to lure you away from your path, your job, which is tricky, which is hard in our industry, because you see your colleagues at the office signing up for a new coaching program or paying thousands of dollars for a new online lead generation thing, and you think, wow, well, they closed two deals with that. Maybe I should look into it. And maybe you should, but put that on the own sticky pad to look at later. Really think about what you're doing now and assess whether those costs and time investment are worth it. And maybe even giving yourself a particular amount of time to say, you know what, I am just deciding to do this. I'm gonna stick with this for six months, and I'm not gonna question this process till the summer, and then I'll reassess where business came from, how I feel, what effort, money, and time did I put in, and do I want to continue going down that path. But for these three months, six months, whatever, I'm gonna stick with it. The other thing is that the thing that we are learning today is gonna change, right? The market for me in Austin changed a lot in the past five or six years. We went from a balanced to slightly stronger seller's market to a heavy, heavy buyer's market in the span of a year. All of 2023 was that, uh, which was interest rates were up, buyers pulled back, sellers, you know, were left with their homes on the market, activity was slow. And so things are gonna change. The strategies and things that I'm using today, the tools I'm learning today may not be the tools I'm gonna need in a year from now. And some things are not gonna change, right? The human-to-human connection piece is is never gonna change in our industry in particular, which I'm glad about. Um the more that AI comes down the line, the more I am glad that my hu my business is so human-focused because real estate getting outsourced to AI is a very unlikely thing to happen. I still think people need to walk through homes. They need to feel it, smell it, touch it, and obsess out the neighborhood and walk the streets and really feel comfortable where they're gonna be making their home. And then you're just doubling down on what brings you connection to your business. Here's where you feel aligned, here's where you really feel like you are connected to your business, your work, and yourself. And then it doesn't feel like as much of a slog. And just as a reminder, here are my current offerings that I mentioned at the beginning of the episode. I have meditation class every Thursday at noon for 30 minutes, which is totally free for realtors. Um, I have my mindful Monday text message that gets sent out every Monday. AI algorithm-free, musing from my mind to yours. Just think about like a gentle nudge on a Monday morning just to get your week started off on the right tone. And I have a newsletter that goes out about twice a month that is you can sign up for all these things on my website. The link will be in the show notes below. So thank you for joining me on this journey. Thank you so much for listening. I am ever so grateful whenever I see that people are actually listening to this. I appreciate you subscribing. To it, and if you have a couple of agents in your office who you think this message

Tools And CRM Without The Overkill

SPEAKER_00 22:04

would resonate with, I would so appreciate it if you would do me a favor and refer it to them as well. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you have any questions, you know where to find me. All my information will be linked in the show notes, and I'm wishing you all a very good start to February. Take care, everybody, and stay well.