"If you want to invest in real estate, take someone on. Put on chemistry and recommendations. There's no shame in asking for help from someone who knows more about the subject than you do. The shame is in wasting money."
Maybe you know them too. They came into money and wanted to make their life's dream come true. To open a small hotel. Somewhere in the mountains. Or on the coast. They'd never done it before. But they had plenty of experience. I mean, they'd stayed in something like this so many times. And then they lost their illusions. And money.
Others worked hard on their business until it became small. So they wanted to start a new one. A better one. Bigger. They looked for land. A factory. Anything else. They signed a contract. Then they realized they'd overlooked something. Because they'd simply never done it before. And they lost money, too.
This is exactly what Jan Adámek from Jan Reality. is trying to prevent. Some would simply call him a realtor. But Honza does a lot more than that. He tries to guide his clients through the pitfalls of the real estate business. Whether on the buyer's or seller's side. And lead them to a thriving business. At least when it comes to real estate.
Real estate is not a frequent topic of conversation for my bubble. At least not in business. That's why I invited Honza to make it clearer for us. What did I ask?
🔸 How can the hotel industry inspire other industries?
🔸 How to deal with client feedback?
🔸 What to look out for when buying a commercial property?
🔸 As a buyer, why should you bring your own realtor with you?
🔸 How is he going to use AI in his own business?
TRANSCRIPT OF THE INTERVIEW
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. Today's one will be a bit special, because after a long time we will venture out of the uncharted waters and look somewhere most of my target group doesn't look that often. We're going to look at real estate, specifically commercial real estate, and most specifically the hotel industry. To do that, I've brought on a guest from the most knowledgeable people here, Jan Adamek, hi.
Jan Adámek
Hi, Martin.
Martin Hurych
Jan is the owner of two companies, JAN Reality and JAN Hospitality. As Honza told me, it has nothing to do with hospitals, but really with hotels. Honza is also here because he is a die-hard listener of Zah Zah, for which I thank him, and a lifetime optimist. Does that fit?
Jan Adámek
It fits, and I thank you for the Ignition, because you don't see so much inspiration and interesting guests and new fields, so it's a joy to listen to.
Why does he go on a hike with himself once in a while?
Martin Hurych
So we exchanged compliments. Before we get into you, your companies and real estate, I found out we have a few things in common. I found in my preparation that you like to walk in the woods, in the mountains, so I thought, come on, tell us where you like it best, where only you know, why you like it there and why we should go see you.
Jan Adámek
If I told you where only I know it, everyone would go there and it wouldn't be mine anymore, but there's really no such place. In fact, I'm finding more and more love and need for walking. I was pushed a lot by Covid, because when Covid was around I didn't want to take public transportation to avoid getting caught, so I was figuring out other ways and biking and walking. Suddenly I found that I could walk an hour, an hour and a quarter from my home to my office through parks and gardens. I got excited about it and have been walking pretty much every day since. In addition to that, I've started to fulfill this dream of going for a hike in the woods by myself once every six months or a year. I go without a cell phone, I go without a computer, without a connection to the modern world, and the goal is to walk and think, or not think, in short, let my head do what it wants, let my brain rest.
Martin Hurych
What's it like with yourself?
Jan Adámek
It's different every time, which is shocking to me, it's never the same. The first time I went, I took a notebook and said I'm going to take notes on ideas that come to me, and I wrote three sentences the whole time. The last time I was there now, I took a notebook just because it's nice to have when you don't have a cell phone to take notes and I described half a notebook. So it's different and it's absolutely amazing. I've had to come to that, I didn't want to be alone much before, I needed to be with someone all the time and the older I get and the more I sort of work on myself, I need to be alone sometimes. It's a wonderful cleansing.
How did he get into commercial real estate?
Martin Hurych
Congratulations, because a lot of people can't be themselves for that long. Let's get to the main topic that brought us together. Let's talk about how you got into real estate and how you got specifically into the hotel business and commercial real estate.
Jan Adámek
These things are related. I once started working for a British company and I had several business networks that I was in charge of. We sold Swatch watches, Body Basics cosmetics and Blue Prague quality tourist souvenirs and there was more. One day I had a bit of work done and the owner decided to buy the Jalta Hotel on Wenceslas Square in Prague. He told me to do it with him and I didn't really want to. But then he talked me into it, and I got excited about the job, so I became a hotelier, although I didn't really know much about it. I was training in England and I absolutely loved the job, and it turned out that the meeting with Yalta was fateful. When I was working at the Yalta Hotel, one day it was time to buy an apartment. I wanted to buy an apartment, but the service from the real estate agent in 2002 or 2003 was absolutely disastrous. I was asked to pay a lot of millions, and on top of that to pay commission to the real estate company, which is not quite right for a buyer to pay commission if he hasn't ordered anything. It was awful, but I eventually picked the flat and bought it and I'm thrilled I bought it because I bought it well. But then I thought how can anyone exist with such services. So I started thinking about whether I should leave the hotel business and pursue this business. Then a friend of mine had been persuading me for years to go into it with him, that we would be competitors together and buy a Century 21 franchise. That's an American chain, one of the largest real estate franchise chains in the world, very successful, so I said yes. So I left the British ones where I had been working and started my own company, or JAN Hospitality to sell hotels and commercial property, factories and land, and JAN Reality to sell housing. My goal was to be kind of a white swallow, a white dove in that real estate market and do things the way I thought they should be done. I'm a pretty demanding customer and I'll tell you quickly how I want it. If you serve it to me, that's great, but if you don't, I get angry. So we decided to do it the way we think is best for those clients, and the clients keep helping us improve it. It was a struggle in the beginning, because it was a forest, it was a terrible jungle, but it's much better now. The standard of real estate service today is infinitely higher than it was in 2010 when my wife and I started this company.
How do you do business in an industry that doesn't have a great reputation?
Martin Hurych
You took the question off my tongue, that's what I was going to ask. I see a lot of smart real estate agents around me, but the industry as a whole still doesn't have the best reputation, I'd say. How do you go about doing business and building a reputation in such a market segment?
Jan Adámek
I've gotten used to it, but I can tell you that if you're the manager of a hotel on Wenceslas Square and you have such a nice business card and the next day you have a business card saying you're the owner of a real estate agency, nobody even looks at you. That was a shock to me, because I didn't think it was that much. On the other hand, I kind of didn't care, I have my database of friends, I have my sphere of personal influence, these people know me and they know who I am. They know that when I do a hotel, I do it the best I can, and when I do real estate, I do it the same way. However, real estate is a field that was not regulated at all, anyone could do it. When it wasn't regulated, all you had to do was get an I.D. and anyone could do it. Today it is freshly regulated, but probably not enough. By the fact that anyone could do it, a lot of people who don't know anything about it were really doing it. I'm of the opinion that real estate is one of the few fields that is the most complex of all the jobs you can do because you have to have legal, financial, technical, construction, business, marketing knowledge and you still have to be able to communicate. The communication is the most important part of it. It's a really multidisciplinary overlap and to have all that knowledge and to have that practice is challenging, it's terribly underrated and it's a shame.
Martin Hurych
Do you have to, or should you, if you want to do it well?
Jan Adámek
To me, it's the same thing. In our business, it's that you have to, and as I say, the operation of networks like Remax, Century, ERA and other enlightened smaller real estate brokerages because they take up more and more of the market, that knowledge is increasing. It's really becoming a more professional field, which it deserves.
How did it rise to number one in the segment?
Martin Hurych
You've built yourself up to be number one in hotel sales, if I understand correctly.
Jan Adámek
Sales of Czech hotels. It sounds interesting, it's not by the book that you always have to find some industry to be number one in the market. It's more about the fact that the Czech hotel market is basically divided into Czech hotels, which are everywhere and a little bit in Prague, and international hotels, which are mainly in Prague and a little bit in Brno, Pilsen, Ostrava, Olomouc, Budweis. The difference is that the big international hotels are owned by big international investment groups or investment funds, pension funds. These are taken care of by large international consulting firms like Cushman & Wakefield. Then you have the rest of the market and that is not interesting for Cushman & Wakefield and these big companies. If it's a business below EUR 15 million selling price, they are not interested because they are not going to make a living out of it. There is just as much work here, but the margin is small. So that's our space and that's where we're the biggest in the Czech market, but frankly, we're also the only full-service agency. Whatever you need in a hotel, either we can do it directly with our own forces or we have our partners.
How does the hotel business work?
Martin Hurych
Something tells me that when I walk into a hotel, the person who owns the hotel is very likely not the person who runs the hotel. Come make it a little clearer to us when we go to stay somewhere how that hotel business works.
Jan Adámek
People think Marriott owns Marriott hotels and Hilton owns Hilton hotels, but that's almost never the case. It's a little bit different in America, but generally speaking, if there's a hotel owner, that property tends to be very expensive because it tends to be big and in a good location. So if you're paying 200,000 for a square metre and you've got 10,000 square metres, that's billions and of course not just anyone can afford that. So usually there's some owner of the property itself and they're letting somebody run it in some form. Either it's a lease, that's easy, that's like stores, or it's an operator agreement, which can be a franchise, that you lease a franchise. Marriott is a franchise, Accor is a franchise, Novotel, Hilton, Fairmont, now there's going to be a new most luxurious hotel in Prague, it's going to be Fairmont, which is also a franchise. Or you have a management contract, so you hire a manager, a hotel expert, to run the hotel, but all the revenues and expenses go to you. It's like any franchisee. A franchisee protects their brand very well, they don't have a lot of responsibilities and they have a lot of rights. That came up a lot in Covid. When Covid was around, a lot of these franchisors were still demanding fees even though they knew there was no business because Prague was closed. In our country, for example, there is a Czech chain CZECH INN HOTELS, they run it on their own in the form of rent, or OREA, everybody knows OREU, or CPI. CPI has international brands like Clarion, OREA has its own brand and OREA has a parent company that owns the properties that it operates for. But if we were to leave those companies out, with those independent individual hotels, it's usually the case that there's a tenant that takes care of you as a guest, or it's the case that it's run directly by the owner or the owner's family.
What can we take inspiration from in the hotel industry?
Martin Hurych
You do other commercial real estate besides hotels, so you have insight into other types of business. What good can we, for example, who only go to a hotel a couple of times a year at most to stay and enjoy a weekend or a holiday, take from this business? Where can we take inspiration from in the hotel business? We talk to manufacturing companies, we talk to IT people, we talk to the construction industry, and in this business there is an idol of efficiency in manufacturing. Is there anything similar that we could take a cue from in the hotel industry?
Jan Adámek
I think it's the business side of it in the sense that it's absolutely crucial for a hotel not to have that first guest stay, but to have that guest come back and tell all their friends to go there. As is well known, our human mind works more on a negative basis, so you share a bad experience with 18 people. If it was great, you tell two, maybe three, and you have to try that much harder to make those people happy. When I was the boss of the hotel, I loved it so much when guests were unhappy and they said so, because 99% of the time we were able to turn that dissatisfaction into extreme satisfaction and loyalty that they wouldn't go anywhere else. What I think might be interesting is that by making it about the client coming back to buy your car again, or ordering the software from you again, it's not about the product itself. It's about how I deliver that product. In a hotel, three moments are absolutely crucial, check in, check out and breakfast. Check in is the arrival, the first meeting with the hotel, how they look at you, what they say, how they smile, if they know anything about you, if they could. Check in is the same thing, check out is the last moment you are connected to the hotel. If you leave excited or full of good emotions, you're very likely to rate it well on TripAdvisor, on Booking, post it on Facebook, tell your friends. The last one is breakfast, and whether you want it or not, breakfast makes you happy, even people who don't eat breakfast on vacation eat breakfast when it's varied and local. I always try to tell hoteliers to do it the way their grandmothers who lived there did it. Don't make cakes from Lidl or Macro here, bake a local speciality and make it fresh every day, let everyone see it and make it varied. We managed to do that with a client in Krásná Lípa, where we really fine-tuned the breakfast concept to a fantastic level, I would say exaggerated, and for me that's the best breakfast in the Czech Republic. It's the Hotel Lípa in Krásná Lípa, it's kind of the back of the world, northern Bohemia on the border with Germany, but the experience and the service of the staff and the breakfast is great.
Why did he add a consulting business to his real estate services?
Martin Hurych
I can confirm that. I was there. You said you advise hoteliers. Does that mean you're not just a real estate agent, but you're also a real estate and business consultant?
Jan Adámek
Absolutely. It came about partly because I enjoy it so much. I have an amazing team of people, experienced hoteliers, I've been in the hotel business for 20 years, one of my colleagues for 32 years, which is absolutely incredible. She worked at one place and worked her way up to the top. All of my colleagues have many years of different experiences in the hotel industry and that's one thing. The second thing is that we enjoy it immensely, we have experience from abroad and we follow trends a lot, we go to conferences, we sometimes give lectures ourselves, we are more often listeners and now there is a lot of It's happening. It's happening everywhere, artificial intelligence, energy, digitalisation, automation, it's happening everywhere, but the hotel industry and real estate in particular are extremely rigid. There, before something is accepted, before something changes, it must hurt a lot. It's already hurting, so suddenly it's going and that's one reason why we do consultants. The second is quite pragmatic. When I opened the company in 2010, the reverberations of the financial crisis were still reverberating here and my idea was that I would sell hotels because I was good at it. By then I had sold two. Suddenly it became clear that I wasn't going to sell hotels because nobody could buy them because back then people didn't have the money they have today, they weren't making as much money. Secondly, the banks weren't financing, so the bank didn't give you any credit, but then the first Russian banks came and started lending to hotels because they had nothing else left to grab that market. From 2012, 2013 it started to work. So I had to be a consultant because I had no choice.
How to become a good hotelier?
Martin Hurych
I sometimes feel that when it comes to money, a lot of people want to pursue their dreams. I personally dream of a little bar in the mountains. A lot of people see themselves in a boarding house, in a little hotel, whether they had someone among their ancestors who had a pub or they feel like it's money well saved. What's it really like? Because I often see that the first enthusiasm ends very quickly, and the quality drops very quickly. How do you think you become a good hotelier and what do you need to do that besides money?
Jan Adámek
The field itself is a wonderful thing. If you enjoy serving people in a good way, you provide a service, those people enjoy consuming it, and they smile and talk to you for it, then you're the right person. If you don't enjoy it, then don't do it, or hire someone to do it. The hotel and restaurant industry, the food service industry in general attracts people with heart who love the work, their mom and dad did it, they'll do it too, but it's missing that brain. Then again, there are investors who just have that brain and an excel spreadsheet and it has to work out for you down there. But you need a combination of both, the heart has to be there and the brains have to be there and if you can put it together, you have a chance to succeed at it. You have to remember that often the business is 7 days a week, 24 hours a day and the biggest inconveniences usually happen at a very inconvenient time when it's not convenient or you're on vacation. Then it's about having a system of how I deal with things when I'm not present and that's no different than having a system, which is not a difficult thing. If you're willing to invest your money, buying a hotel can be an interesting form of investment. Some of our clients have it so that the wife is making good money and the husband would like to do something too, so he buys a hotel and works in that hotel, or vice versa. Some clients have it that they want to give back to their hometown where they came from. They make money in Chicago, or Prague, or Brno, but they're from Veselí nad Lužnicí and there's a hotel on the square, so they buy it, renovate it because they have the money, and rent it out. The tenant then runs a hotel there and they repay the town by making it nice and getting good food and good accommodation. Interestingly enough, a lot of people are a little bit afraid of it because they feel like they don't understand it. The others feel that if they've slept in a hotel ten times, they understand it, and both extremes are too much. What we say to that is just get a consultant or put a plan in place. Investors sometimes hire us to help them keep an eye on it all and we do an analysis once a month, quarter, six months, or a year. We look to see if sales are going where they're supposed to, occupancy, average price, if costs are on track, how they should be, and how client reviews are doing. That's an increasingly important thing because Generation Z is only driving by reviews. I myself don't go anywhere below 8.5 on Booking because the range is great, I can afford it and then you can see the service. We're there to serve as somebody to help with the professional stuff and the owner or investor doesn't have to worry about not knowing how to do it and not knowing what to do if there's trouble. That's what we're here for, but There are plenty of those companies, of course, so you can arrange for someone who is sympathetic and who can help you make sure that the investment is the right investment.
How to handle feedback from clients?
Martin Hurych
I'll come back to the stars. That's another thing that I think a lot of businesses can take inspiration from, by the way. On the other hand, given how open it is and everyone can comment on everything, is that fair? You said you don't go below 8.5, I personally don't go below 9, but sometimes when I like it I look at the negative connotations and see that there is complete bullshit. Like how do you combat that or work with that?
Jan Adámek
This is a complicated thing, but basically you can only work with it if you do your job well, the people you employ enjoy it and they are willing to do something about it. I always advise even hoteliers to rate their people and give them star bonuses. I have one experience, because Michal Tučný used to sing with Annie Rattlesnake, Anka Chrestýš, and I didn't know that when Anka Chrestýš went to Czechoslovakia, she always stayed in a particular room at the Jalta Hotel. We bought the Jalta Hotel in 2003, Anka Ch rattlesnake came and said she was going up. We told her she had to come to check in and she said she always had room 610, but it was just occupied. Somehow we worked it out and she ordered coffee. She then called me and said the coffee was too black, too bitter, too hot, too expensive and that she would not be coming back. They probably had some contacts there, but it was with the previous owner and the previous staff, which you can't respond to. The only way is to actually work it off. I think the principle is right, but the truth is that the anonymity of social media allows that bile to get out and sometimes it's really unfair.
What other commercial real estate does he do?
Martin Hurych
Let's turn the page. We said right at the beginning that you don't just do hotels, you do other commercial real estate. What kind do you do?
Jan Adámek
Clients contact us either with an offer or an inquiry. The offer is that they have land, they want to sell it and it's some fields. Right now it was an example in Kladno, where we found out that the fields are a future building plot in the zoning plan, so the client was expecting a price of around CZK 50 per metre, and in the end they were in the thousands per metre. So we just made him happy, but we completely ruined the family relationships because there were more than one co-owner and suddenly the loving sisters-in-law got involved. Now we are in charge of an office building on an interesting plot of land in Prague 4, where we have again found that there is building potential. So one of these will be a wonderful development project, probably rental apartments, of which there will be plenty. But we also had a client come to us saying they needed to sell a factory, a joinery factory, we sold a food company, logistics centres, we did three retail parks. There was a piece of land, the seller didn't know what to do with it, we got in touch with a potential investor and we did the whole thing together so that the land was sold, a retail park was built there and it was sold to the final investor.
What to look out for when buying a commercial property?
Martin Hurych
So if my bubble wants to accelerate and wants to acquire something, what do I need to look out for when buying commercial property?
Jan Adámek
There are a number of these things. First of all, we need to examine the legal framework, whether the owner is really the owner and what liabilities are there from the past. When you buy a factory today from privatisation, there may be environmental damage, for example, or there may be some liabilities to the land authority, the municipality or the neighbours. I would be very careful about ecology, I would be very careful about driveways, cadastral things. You buy a factory, but the land around it could be state land. We were just doing a project somewhere near Chomutov, which is a fantastic place to have a Billa and a shopping centre, only the road is owned by a private owner. If you don't make a deal with him, you're out of luck, and making a deal doesn't mean signing a contract to drive there. To agree means to have an easement in the land registry, or even to buy some part of the ideal share. Those are basic things. The third is what your intentions are, what you want to do with it. Do you want to build something there, or do you have a factory where you have a lot of people who have to live somewhere, they have to park somewhere, maybe you're going to bus them, they have to eat somewhere. We Czechs have to have our own canteen and managers have to have a company car, it's in our DNA and you have to have these things thought out. If you want to build a warehouse and you're going to have that modern 12-metre or even 18-metre high warehouse, you have to look at the zoning again. You also have to figure out if you're going to be too noisy and disturb the neighbors. Then there's the logistics, so you have to deal with whether a big truck can come to that location, if you have 150 deliveries a day, people are going to complain. All of those things have to be taken into account and if you don't have the capacity to do it yourself, I would recommend you get a consultant, whether it's a lawyer or a broker who has experience.
Martin Hurych
That's what I was just about to ask. So you do these consultations as well?
Jan Adámek
We always do these consultations with regard to what the client needs. Recently, we have been making a logistics complex near Dobrichovice, which will be used for the production of screws. It's an interesting thing with a small problem, you can't drive a big car there. In addition, at the request of clients, I have become an expert in the valuation of real estate, because everyone needs that sometimes. Often you need it when you're renting it out for taxes, or when you're selling it, you want to keep track, or you need it for financial statements or audits. I chose to be a specialist in valuing hotels and factories and more complex things. Single family homes aren't that much fun, but when you have to turn your brain on and really think about it, that's what I enjoy.
As a buyer, why bring your own realtor to the purchase?
Martin Hurych
It's so amateurish to me that a classic realtor tells you how beautiful it is, that it's on sale and to buy it quickly. But I would never think of asking a realtor to do those things you're talking about.
Jan Adámek
You're supposed to ask the seller to do that, the realtor who represents the seller has his own interests. He can't keep anything from you, it's in the law, but there are things he doesn't necessarily tell you at the first meeting. For that reason, I recommend having your own realtor if you're buying something for millions. If you have any a development plan, if you're thinking about packing it all up and renting it out when you're old and you don't like it, you need a little more. You can't rely on a broker to represent the seller in this regard because they have completely different responsibilities. He's defending his client's interests. I'm defending the interests of whoever hires me and whoever I have a contract with, and I'm defending them to the hilt. Commercial real estate is different than housing and there are plenty of experts out there to advise you, and it's worth it. Compared to the millions you'll put into that investment, the consulting fees aren't that great, but they can save a lot of grief. There have been many times when a client bought it and had to sell it right away because they couldn't do what they wanted.
What did Honza do well in business?
Martin Hurych
Now we've discussed how you help others build their business, let's focus on yours. What's been extremely successful for you lately? What are you proud of?
Jan Adámek
I am most proud of the team I work with. I have to say that we have all positive people in the company who bring happiness to life. We have what we call a horizontal structure, so we all make decisions together. I'm the owner, some things are reserved for the owner, which is naturally a lot about finances, but the improvement ideas on how to better serve customers come from colleagues. We come up with those things together and the team is amazing, I'm proud of that and it's taken a good few years to build that up as well.
Martin Hurych
How many of you are there?
Jan Adámek
13 and we're all on the same level. Even the cleaning lady, who I've never seen before because she always cleans when I'm not there, but we don't play games. We're all as equal as we can be in some way and for me it's a personal joy as well because I really like a team of people around me where it works and it really works for us. In addition, I was once a dictator, when I was a young man working in Carrefour, so I ordered and dictated who would do what. But one day I noticed that these people were laughing at it, they were doing it differently anyway, and I found that I wasn't using the potential of these people at all. We're all different, that's also difficult for me, but we all have some potential and I was actually stifling it in them. That was the point where it started breaking down in me and then I read some books on horizontal leadership and I've been trying to practice it ever since. The other thing I'm proud of is that we've finally gone digital and it's got momentum. It's challenging, but the results are stunning.
What does digitalization of a company look like in practice? Martin Hurych
Martin Hurych
Digitization is a terrible buzzword. Tell us something specific, what you are digitizing in your company right now, so that there are some tangible ideas and inspiration.
Jan Adámek
The first step was CRM, which we implemented three or four years ago. It took us a long time to choose it, then we chose it and it completely changed our lives. We have eWay, which is an add-on in Outlook, a Czech thing, but pretty cool, it's very technical, so it's more for guys. Back then Pipedrive was too expensive for what it could do at the time, otherwise we wanted it too and today we would probably go for that solution. The second shift is that we have a programmed system for how we communicate with clients. When we have a new offer, we send you a very personal offer, even though it's a partially automated thing. We're also just now moving to paperless circulation of documents, accounting, invoices, management accounts, management reports, and so on, so we're going paperless on July 1 and moving on to other things. Now we're implementing the notion system, we're doing our internal database. We have the types of quotes and from the summer onwards we will only send clients a link to the website. There will be no more PDFs, no more extensions, no more cluttering up the internet world, but a totally pro offer that people can access and even comment on. I believe this will be a shift for both us and our clients.
How will artificial intelligence change the industry?
Martin Hurych
At the same time, you've said several times in between speeches that AI will change your industry. How do you think it's going to change your industry and are you using it in any way?
Jan Adámek
It's exciting for me, it's a bit of a side job, but it's insanely time consuming. I have a brother who is a developer at Google and he called me one day in November and said they were in terrible trouble. GPT Chat came out and they were completely out of it, it caused a huge uproar at Google. I laughed about it and he told me to try it myself. That's how it started and it continues through various apps where you type text and the result is a believable video of your face. I've now tried my first Facebook and Instagram ad through Chat GPT and it was awesome, I had him process a few versions. Of course it is much better in English, but we have most of our communication in Czech. English is naturally better because it's a bigger market and a bigger reach. The real estate world and all new things are tested in America and when in America, it's in California. California is the cradle of these things. I go to America regularly for training because it's fantastic and you're there for 4 days and you're concentrating on it, you're not doing stupid things, you don't have to answer hundreds of emails and you're concentrating on that. When Covid came along I was unhappy because I need to soak up that information every year, every other year, so I found podcasts. The problem is there's like 100 million podcasts in America, so it takes me the most time to find one that's quality. I'm getting to the fact that they've been testing artificial intelligence for commercial real estate sales in California for quite some time, the philosophy is that most things are still the same. Those things that I was saying before, what a buyer should look out for, there's basically a finite list of those. Those neural networks can handle that, and the advantage is that in America, brokers have a buyer side and a seller side where you pay 2.5% to one side and 2.5% to the other. You save that combined 5% by connecting directly through that artificial intelligence that creates the heads of terms, the booking agreement, the basic terms of the deal for them. Then you hire a lawyer to put it together. The point of it is speed, in real estate it's often about speed and often brokers won't answer the phone, you leave a message, they don't answer and it's about you saving money.
Are they worried about their jobs?
Martin Hurych
Worried about your job?
Jan Adámek
No, not at all. First of all, it won't be that fast and secondly, I have children in ScioSchool and ScioSchool says that life is change and in ScioSchool they teach children to adapt to change. If you think about it, since I started my business, the three years were not the same. Since Covid, it's been a complete ride and it's all about change. Now it's about being optimistic and tuned in to the fact that those changes are coming and they're coming and some of them may hurt you, but fundamentally it's always an opportunity. You can take it to the next level or even in some other direction, so I'm not afraid of that. I've now written several articles for professional journals with Chat GPT. I've entered the tasks, then I've corrected it, they got the data wrong, they can't do the numbers, I've added those from my knowledge or from the database, but it helps me tremendously. So far it's been a help, so far I'm not worried.
How is he going to use AI in his own business?
Martin Hurych
I know there may be another model coming out with GPT in three months that we don't even know about yet, but where do you see yourself in two years and how are you going to saddle these tools in your company?
Jan Adámek
I'm looking forward to what the mail order company and Amazon figured out a long time ago, that stupid human work that you don't need a brain and body to do will be replaced by someone who can do it much better and more accurately. What I'm totally excited about is 3D printing concrete. It's completely ridiculous that we've become used to having some bricks or blocks and building something out of them, even though it doesn't fit at all, it doesn't fit dimensionally, and it doesn't have thermal insulation. You can print it all out and the computer can handle it. Skanska is now building its first project where 80% of the building material is from the demolition of the original buildings. That's what I can get excited about, it's the opportunities, it's green, it's sustainable and it's pretty people- free. What I'm looking forward to in two years is that a lot of the work that is done by people in the company today will be done by someone else. We'll be able to focus on what the machines can't do yet, which is emotions, experiences, improving service and deepening our knowledge in the business that we do.
Summary
Martin Hurych
If you had to wrap up today's episode in a few sentences so we could put it right under your picture on my website, what would it be?
Jan Adámek
You see, I've listened to so many of your podcasts and I didn't realize you were going to ask me that too. I would say, if you're going to do something in real estate, don't be shy at all to look around. Either look at podcasts, or websites, for some advice, or just hire someone. It's absolutely best to ask if you don't know yourself. I'm a huge believer in chemistry and referrals being the biggest thing, by the way, we get 98% of our business from referrals ourselves and we hardly have any advertising. The other thing is, if you're going to invest in some bigger things yourself, make sure you get someone who knows more about it than you do. It's not a shame, it's more of a shame to lose money unnecessarily or to worry about a bad investment afterwards. Take someone who can take into account all the influences, all the things that are important to you, all the parameters, and your future plans for the factory, office building, or ultimately the home you want to get. The third thing I would say is that change is life and let's look at the world with optimism. Let's try to take those changes as a boost to that boring normal operational life, to improve ourselves and to respond to our surroundings. Then we can tell ourselves we've had enough, we don't want to do it anymore and we'll sell it to someone bigger, or we can tell ourselves we're going to go ahead and give
it a new direction and prepare for that change again.
Martin Hurych
Great, thank you and I wish you that your optimism in life continues to hold and not rust.
Jan Adámek
Thank you, Martin.
Martin Hurych
I have one final request. I was wondering, as I was listening to you even now during the conclusion and throughout the episode, if I could ask you for a bonus for listeners on what to look out for when buying or selling commercial real estate. Is it possible to work something like that into a couple of points?
Jan Adámek
We'll be happy to set it up and make it available to all your listeners.
Martin Hurych
Thanks a lot, have a good one.
Jan Adámek
Thanks, Martin, bye.
Martin Hurych
That was a trip a bit off the beaten track here in Zážeh, but I hope you enjoyed it, that you got a lot of inspiration and that you might have seen some other business. The bonus has already been mentioned here, be sure to download it at www.martinhurych.com/zazeh, where of course you'll find not only the episode with Honza, but the other episodes as well. If you liked us with Honza, be sure to like, share, subscribe, the world doesn't work without it, so we'll definitely be happy. I just keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thanks.