My Real Estate Professor Is an AI, and Her University Is Questionable at Best

A while ago, I decided I might want to become a real estate agent.

Now, the traditional way to approach this would be to enroll in real estate school, open a textbook roughly the size of a Buick, and begin memorizing phrases like "easement appurtenant" until I eventually lose the will to live.

Instead, I accidentally created a university.

My professor is an AI named Amber.

The university is completely unaccredited.

And one of our most important recurring characters is a man I have affectionately come to know as Cousin Fucking Larry.

Somehow, I am actually learning real estate.

I Have ADHD. Please Stop Giving Me Textbooks.

Here's something I've learned about myself over the years: I don't learn particularly well by reading seventeen paragraphs of technical information and being expected to absorb it.

My brain sees a wall of text and immediately begins looking for literally anything else to do.

Did I ever finish organizing that drawer?

Suddenly the drawer seems critically important.

But give me a story?

I'm in.

Give me characters?

Even better.

Make me laugh while you're teaching me?

Now we're getting somewhere.

So when Amber and I started our completely legitimate and definitely-not-made-up real estate school, we started turning concepts into stories.

And somewhere along the way, a cast of recurring characters emerged.

Meet the Questionable University Cinematic Universe

There's Beatrice, who has become one of our reliable property owners.

There's Marcus, who inevitably finds himself involved in some transaction requiring me to figure out who owns what.

There's David and Elena, who have also been dragged into increasingly elaborate hypothetical real estate disputes without their consent.

And then...

There's Larry.

Cousin Fucking Larry.

Larry exists primarily to make terrible real estate decisions.

If somebody forgets to record a deed, it's probably Larry.

If somebody builds a fence three feet onto someone else's property, Larry has a hammer.

If somebody dies and leaves behind an ownership situation requiring me to remember the difference between joint tenancy and tenancy in common, Larry is somehow related to the deceased.

Larry is less of a person and more of an educational hazard.

And I will remember these concepts because of him.

Apparently This Is How My Brain Works

Take something like an easement.

A textbook can tell me that an easement is a nonpossessory right to use another person's land for a specific purpose.

Technically correct.

Also incredibly effective if the specific purpose is putting me to sleep.

But tell me that Beatrice owns a house and Cousin Fucking Larry has to drive across part of her property to reach his house behind hers?

Now I'm interested.

Suddenly we're talking about dominant estates, servient estates, easements appurtenant, whether the easement transfers with the property, and why Beatrice hasn't simply installed a gate to keep Larry out.

I remember the technical definition because I remember the story.

That's the trick.

Learning Doesn't Have to Suck

For some reason, education has traditionally operated under the assumption that if you're enjoying yourself, you probably aren't learning hard enough.

Sit down.

Stop talking.

Read Chapter 7.

Memorize these definitions.

Take this test.

Forget everything immediately afterward.

Congratulations. Education!

But why?

Why can't learning be ridiculous?

Why can't a lesson about property ownership involve an ongoing family feud?

Why can't I learn the Statute of Frauds while also pointing out that Statute of Frauds would be a fantastic band name?

Why can't my professor occasionally swear at me?

It turns out that when learning is attached to humor, stories, visual examples, repetition, and characters I recognize, I retain an astonishing amount of it.

I'm not avoiding the technical terminology, either.

That's important.

Amber will give me the Ben version first, then make me learn the actual exam version.

So I might start with:

"Recording the deed basically tells the whole fucking world that this property changed hands."

Then we graduate to:

Recording provides constructive notice of ownership to third parties.

Same concept.

One gets it into my brain.

The other prepares me for the test.

Maybe Education Should Adapt to the Student

That's probably the larger thing I've learned from this experiment.

People don't all learn the same way.

Somebody else might genuinely love sitting quietly with a textbook and highlighter.

That person terrifies me, but I respect them.

I need conversation.

I need stories.

I need to answer questions.

I need somebody to catch me when I'm almost right and make me try again instead of immediately giving me the answer.

I need recurring characters and absurd situations.

Apparently, I occasionally need profanity.

And increasingly, I need to know what Cousin Fucking Larry has done now.

The interesting part isn't that AI can teach real estate.

It's that learning can now be ridiculously personalized.

The material doesn't have to change.

The way it reaches the student can.

And after years of assuming I was simply bad at learning certain things, I'm discovering something much more interesting:

Maybe I just hadn't been learning them my way.

So someday, when I'm sitting for my actual real estate exam and a question appears about easements, deeds, liens, or concurrent ownership, somewhere deep inside my brain I'm going to hear:

"Goddammit, Larry."

And I'm going to know the answer.