Tuesdays are 3 AI updates, one hot take, one action. Weekends are 1 practical real estate agent workflow.

On Tuesday I told you that Claude now opens its own browser inside the desktop app. Here’s an idea for what to point it at. Every town in America publishes what's about to get built next to your listing, buried in planning board agendas and zoning appeals that no agent has ever read. Your buyer's attorney finds that in due diligence. You can find it before you take the listing.

What you need. The Claude desktop app on a Pro, Max or Team plan. It started rolling out August 26 over about a week, so if you don't see it yet, that's the rollout rather than anything you did wrong. You'll want one address you're about to list or show, plus the town it sits in. No logins, nothing to install.

Open the desktop app and look for the small globe icon near the message box. That's the browser. If it isn't there, check Settings, then Cowork, then Preferred browser, and make sure it isn't still pointed at the Chrome extension. On Enterprise plans an admin has to switch it on first.

Fill in your address and town, then paste this:

"Go to the official town website for [town, state] using the browser in the Claude desktop app. Find the Planning Board, the Zoning Board of Appeals and the Conservation Commission. Read every agenda and set of meeting minutes posted in the last twelve months. List any application, hearing or decision involving a property within about half a mile of [subject address]. For each one give me the address or parcel ID, the date, what was proposed, and where it stands now. If a document won't open, or you can't find a board's page at all, tell me that instead of guessing."

It opens a dozen pages in the panel and grinds through them while you go do something else.

Most of what comes back could be as simple as a deck permit or similar. Ask this next: "Of everything you found, which items would a buyer's attorney raise at closing, and which would change what someone is willing to pay for this house? Rank them and give me one sentence on each." Usually there's nothing. Occasionally there's one item, and knowing it early is the difference between being a top agent or having a deal fall apart.

Open that document yourself. Claude read a web page, it didn't call the town clerk, and minutes get amended. One phone call confirms it, and then you know something the agent on the other side doesn't.

This works great in some towns and barely at all in others. A town with a tidy records portal hands you a year of history in four minutes. An unincorporated county area may give you a phone number and a fax line.

Don’t stress if it doesn’t work. Either way there is a pile of public information about your market that nobody reads because reading it is miserable, and you now have something that doesn't mind. Permit files, assessor records, school committee budgets, state environmental filings. Send me an email with great ideas you come up with!

Thursday, September 24 I'm running a one-day Claude workshop in Boston. 9-5 pm with a light breakfast and quick break for lunch. A jam packed laptop-open kinda day that will transform how you work with AI. We have some great agents already signed up from a few different brokerages. It’s just $499 for the full day. Grab your seat here.

Reply to this email with an example of how AI has changed your day to day work, and I'll send you an early bird code for 10% off.

-Matt