Nobody in Washington is going to fix the housing shortage.

They've had decades. They've had hearings. They've had task forces and summits where people in suits said the word "affordability" 50 times. The median home price was $165K in 2000. It's $430K today.

A modest single-family home, the kind your grandparents bought on one income, cannot be built profitably in most of America right now. Honestly, think about that.

It's not because lumber is expensive. It's not because contractors are lazy.

It's because by the time a builder pays impact fees, permit fees, utility connection fees, environmental review fees, and whatever the local municipality invented last Tuesday, the math doesn't work on anything under $400K. So nobody builds it. The shortage gets worse. Prices go up. Everyone acts confused.

The government built this problem. Slowly, deliberately, and with enormous bipartisan cooperation.

Good news: the robots are coming to fix the housing crisis. Bad news: they will almost certainly enslave humanity by 2035. But let's focus on the positive.

A UK company called AUAR figured out how to fit an entire robotic micro-factory inside a shipping container. One operator. One robotic arm. It frames a complete house in a day. A traditional crew takes four weeks to do the same job. Cost is 30% lower.

Reframe Systems, built by the guy who deployed 500,000 robots at Amazon, is automating 60-80% of the framing and panel process using AI. Promise Robotics builds homes twice as fast without adding a single worker. And Hadrian X, a bricklaying robot, built an entire house in Florida in one day. Pulte Homes is using it.

This isn't vaporware. These machines are on job sites right now.

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AI is moving so fast that the tool I used last week literally didn't exist two months ago. And it already changed how I run my businesses.

Claude Cowork. Dayum! For those who haven't seen it yet, Cowork is the latest tool from Claude/Anthropic that lets you work with AI on real projects. Not just "hey write me an email" stuff. It reads your files, builds spreadsheets, writes documents, searches the web, and remembers everything across sessions. Think of it like a really really really sharp analyst who never sleeps, never forgets a detail, and never asks you to repeat yourself.

Quick sidebar for anyone still using ChatGPT as their daily driver: Claude isn't a little better. It's not marginally better. It's like 2-3x better. I have been in disbelief daily what I am seeing from it.

Here's what I've actually used Cowork for in the last 7 days:

🤖 Built a full 6-tab conference budget in Excel for the Ohio Mortgage Bankers Association Annual Conference. Formulas, scenarios, a live dashboard, the works. I fed it a hotel contract PDF and a sponsorship tracker and it just went to work. When I said "project 230 attendees" it redistributed every registration line and updated the dashboard on its own. I didn't touch a formula.

🚀 Analyzed OMBA's bylaws top to bottom and produced 20 prioritized recommendations. I added my own items, we went back and forth, and I had a board-ready memo and a draft email to the executive committee in minutes. Not hours. Minutes.

🤖 Created a LinkedIn content playbook for a client. 62 post ideas across 6 content pillars, a 30-day content calendar in Excel, all tailored to her voice, her goals, and her conference travel schedule. That would've taken me a full day. It took about 14 minutes.

🚀 Pulled my entire LinkedIn network (30,000 connections) and cross-referenced it against our client list and prospect database to figure out who I should grab dinner with on a trip to Columbus this week. It even flagged people I didn't think of.

🤖 Drafted board emails, sponsorship follow-ups, and committee communications. All with full context of our budget, our sponsors, our bylaws, and our team structure. No re-explaining anything. No copy-pasting background info. It just knows because it remembered everything from the sessions before.

What separates Cowork from regular AI chat is the …

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Nobody knows how the LinkedIn algorithm works.

Not me. Not the people selling LinkedIn courses for $997. Not the guy with 847 followers who just published "I cracked the LinkedIn code" last Tuesday.

LinkedIn itself releases almost nothing about how it actually works, which means everyone confidently explaining it to you is doing so with vibes and a prayer.

What I do have is 20 years on this platform, a concerning amount of time spent staring at analytics, and a bunch clients who share analytics with me.

Here is what actually seems to matter:

🚀 Show up every day and do things.

Post. Comment. Like. DM people. Scroll. The algorithm rewards activity because activity keeps you on the platform and keeping you on the platform is how LinkedIn justifies its existence to advertisers. You do not need to post every day. You need to exist here every day.

Think of it like a gym membership except LinkedIn actually notices if you stop coming.

🚀 Your opening hook is why your posts are dying.

I have reviewed hundreds of underperforming posts. Almost every single one has the same problem: a first line that would not stop anyone from doing anything.

My fix costs you nothing: finish the post, drop it into Claude, type "give me 10 potentially better opening hooks for this LinkedIn post for max impressions without being clickbait-y." Read the options. Pick the best one. Stop writing first lines like you are filing a memo.

🚀 Personal brand is the unlock and nobody wants to do it.

If people know what you stand for AND know you have a dog and strong opinions about things completely unrelated to your industry and a sports betting record that your financial advisor does not know about, walls come down.

People who like you but have never hired you will start to. People who have been ignoring your cold DMs will stop. It is the highest ROI thing you can do on this platform and it requires being a normal human in public, which is apparently terrifying.

🚀 Use AI to get better at content, not to write it for you.

Ask Claude: "Tell me how you can help me create authentic LinkedIn content to support my business goals that doesn't sound like you wrote it." Then actually do what it says. Then ask make sense follow up questions every day.

Because the AI slop detector is real, it is getting better every month, and it absolutely has your number if you are doing any of the following:

🤖 Capitalizing Every Word In Your Post Title Like A Motivational Poster.
🤖 Starting a sentence with "Here's the thing:" when there was no thing that required introduction.
🤖 Writing "And honestly?" before a paragraph break that did not earn that level of drama.
🤖 The long dashes no one in the world ever used before ChatGPT are littered throughout your posts.

Use AI wisely, ideally Claude. Show up every day. Listen to what the analytics are telling you. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Most mortgage industry speakers are speakers. I am a practitioner who happens to get on stage.

Everything I talk about I am doing right now. Today. Not theory from a book I read. Not a recycled deck from last year. I am in the trenches on LinkedIn, AI, content, and business development every single day and the presentation I give this month is different from the one I gave last month because the algorithms, the AI tools, and consumer behavior are evolving that fast. I talk about what is working right now with zero filter.

And every single thing I talk about on stage can be implemented by anyone in the audience that night without spending one penny. Not next quarter. Not after a budget approval. That night.

Here is what I tell every room I walk into. The mortgage industry is sitting on the biggest opportunity in a generation. The tools to get better at AI, digital, and LinkedIn than 95% of your competition are free. Right now. The playing field has never been more level for someone willing to put in the work. Ever!

If you are not adopting this stuff, someone like me is slowly or quickly bleeding away your referral partners, your prospects, and your relevance. Not because I am smarter. Because I showed up and you did not. That is the brutal truth and I do not sugarcoat it from the stage.

What I have found is that combination opens peoples eyes. It terrifies some into action. It inspires others who have been on the cusp. And it leads to immediate changes in behavior that lead to changes in results. Not in six months. That week.

Because if your team leaves an event and nothing changes on Monday morning, you did not have a speaker. You had entertainment.

If you are planning a sales kickoff, a conference, a leadership retreat, or any event where your audience needs someone who has actually done the thing and will tell them the truth about where this business is headed, I would love to talk. I have availability in Q2 and Q3.

I have an incredible team.

Heidi G. Belnay. Will Gatchel. Abigail Villegas. Three people who make me look a lot more organized than I am.

We need one more.

10 hours a week to start. Real potential for much more if you're the right fit. The work is fun, the people are great, and the growth is real.

Must be a hard worker. Must be Claude-fluent. Bonus points if you've ever explained to someone why it matters.

Mortgage background a plus. Everything else is a conversation. Email me if interested.

February job losses caught everyone off guard. 92K shed. Unemployment ticks to 4.4%. Fed rate cut conversation reignites.

The Great Housing Reset is officially underway

MIT Technology Review's five big bets for AI in 2026. World models, regulatory wars, and Chinese open-source pressure

Samsung's goal: 800 million Gemini-powered mobile devices by end of 2026.

The 2026 pop culture ins and outs

2026 Topps Baseball Cards are now out

Tiramisu wedding cakes are now a thing

Mar 4-17 - World Baseball Classic (Miami & Houston)

Mar 6 - Jobs Report (February data)

Mar 8-11 - MBA Mid-Winter Housing Finance Conference (Avon, CO)

Mar 10 - Existing Home Sales (February data)

Mar 11 - NFL Free Agency Opens (new league year begins 4 PM ET)

Mar 11 - CPI Release (February data)

Mar 15 - Selection Sunday (March Madness brackets announced)

Mar 16-18 - ICE Experience (Las Vegas, NV)

Mar 17-18 - FOMC Meeting (rate decision Mar 18)

Mar 19-22 - NCAA Tournament First/Second Rounds

Mar 26 - Traditional Opening Day (earliest in MLB history)

Apr 4 & 6 - Final Four & Championship (Indianapolis)

Apr 9-12 - The Masters (Augusta National, Rory McIlroy defending)

April 13-14 - MBA State & Local Conference

April 14-15 - MBA National Advocacy Conference

Apr 23-25 - NFL Draft (Pittsburgh, first time since 1948)

Apr 26-28 - Texas MBA Annual Conference

Apr 27-30 - HousingWire’s “The Gathering” Conference

“If you can’t be kind, at least be vague.” ―Judith Martin

Until the next one,
Swerb
[email protected]