This AI Did 3 Weeks of Zoning Research in 25 Minutes (I Never Touched the Keyboard)

THE SELF STORAGE REPORT — FULL TRANSCRIPT Episode: Ep. 9 — "This AI Did 3 Weeks of Zoning Research in 25 Minutes" (The Zoning Agent) Format: Solo — Chris Berg (Abernathey Development, "The AI Storage Guy") Topic: Live demo of a Claude-built AI agent stack — a CRM as source of truth, a buy-box agent (Agent 1), a zoning-feasibility agent (Agent 2), and a scoring agent (Agent 3) — running an autonomous zoning feasibility study on 3 sites via Reonomy, Zoneomics, GIS, and Google Maps. Closes with the Storage Demand Score. Recorded/aired: ~July 21, 2026 CTAs: storagedemandscore.com · cb@abernathyholdingco.com (CA + AZ storage dirt for a quick underwrite) Source: original recording transcript (auto-caption, lightly cleaned for readability — single speaker throughout) ======================================================== Chris Berg: One of the most powerful things I want you to take away from this demo is the fact that this is doing all of this by itself. You can be sending emails, on phone calls, going to meetings. So you really want to start to think about these three agents — or whatever it is you want to build — as employees that you're onboarding into your business. Just like any new employee, you have to have an onboarding process for the things you're asking them to do, and they continue to get better and better the more you coach and train them. It's the exact same thing with these agents. Today I want to see how many of you can relate to this. If you're in acquisitions or development like myself, you're out there looking for dirt. How many times have you gotten a great site from a broker, or found one on Crexi or LoopNet, and thought, "I've got to take this to a TractIQ or some software and see if it hits my buy box"? Does it have the right demographics? You put the address in, it runs through, and you're like — okay, hits my demographics, the rates look good, it's got low supply, this could be a really good site. And then you're like: now I've got to go see if this piece of dirt is actually zoned for self-storage, whether there's any possibility I can build storage on it. And if you're like me, it's a nightmare — arduous, confusing, laborious. I could go on and on. So today I want to share how we're solving that: building an agent for zoning. Very, very powerful — and not just zoning one at a time. Imagine you could have an agent out there doing the work for you, zoning multiple sites, every single day, every single moment. We're going to walk through that today here on the Self Storage Report. I'm Chris Berg with Abernathey Development. If you've got a piece of dirt in California or Arizona you think might work for storage, send it my way — we'd love to do a quick underwrite on it. I also want to invite you to check out storagedemandscore.com — again, that's storagedemandscore.com — and of course subscribe to this channel so you get this content as we put it out. So let me start with what we're currently doing. I'm building about three different agents. I'll walk through two of them very briefly, because I really want to focus on Agent No. 2 today — that's my zoning agent. But first, for context and foundation: this is a CRM I built to manage the deals I'm looking at. You can see deals I've sourced. When I run deals through these agents, I bump them into screening or underwriting. What's beautiful about this CRM is that it becomes the foundation of truth for our sites — because I've got it set up so the CRM can actually communicate with my Claude. And look — if I get into some tech lingo today, I apologize upfront. I know nothing about tech, literally. I built this by basically talking to my computer using Replit. It builds it, and I have no idea how, but it works and I'm loving it. Let's just leave it at that. If you have questions, reach out — I'm more than happy to have a conversation and see if I can support you on any of this. So as we go through this, you're going to see actual notes from Claude that go right into the CRM. One thing to keep in mind: this continually compounds. Right now I've got a little over 1,000 deals in here, and it'll get to the point where I can say, "Hey Claude, re-underwrite every single site in zip code XYZ" — or break it up however I want — and it will do the work for me and continue to add notes. It's compounding every single time we work on it. Now let me share the zoning agent we're using to solve what I feel is one of the more challenging aspects of this industry. On Claude you can see we've got Agent 1 — that's the buy-box agent, where we put a site in and it runs through some basic metrics using the TractIQ MCP and says, yeah, this actually meets some of the variables we're focused on. Here's the zoning agent we're going through today — that's Agent 2. And then Agent 3 basically scores the site and tells us this is one we'll want to do a deeper underwrite on. But let's jump into Agent 2. A couple things to know. One, I have instructions in here that guide it. One of the things you'll hopefully see today is that I've also got Zoneomics, Reonomy, and Google Maps. What's beautiful about using Cowork here on Claude is you'll see it actually start to open up Reonomy or Zoneomics or whatever, and go do the research it needs to do from a zoning standpoint. It gives you a really robust idea — not just the zoning, but, based on those instructions, "what can we build here?" Say there's a 0.8-acre site and we're focused on building 100,000 gross square feet. Depending on FAR and setbacks, how high can we build? Is there a probability we could build 100,000 gross square feet on a little postage stamp like that, or not? That's part of what those instructions do. Sometimes it does a pretty good job giving you that; sometimes — ugh. The other thing: I've got Whisper set up on my computer. If you haven't heard of Whisper, I'd encourage you to check it out. Now, remember in my CRM I've got Sourced, Screening, and other columns. So here's the live demo — let's see how it goes. [To the agent:] "I want you to grab three sites from the screening column that you've not already done an analysis on, and do your full zoning feasibility analysis on those three sites." We'll hit go and see what happens. You can see what it's doing now — going through the instructions and the tools available to it. It's going to talk to the CRM itself, look at the sites in screening, and find three that haven't already been through its full zoning analysis. There — it went to what I call the AH CRM. Wow, it's opening tabs. In a moment you'll see a window off to the side showing you what it's actually doing online, by itself — which to me is absolutely incredible. You can see it's pulled up three different sites it's going to do a full feasibility study on — three that never had a full zoning pass. And there it is — I obviously didn't ask it to do this, but it's now opening up Reonomy and it's going to take these addresses and run them through Reonomy to check zoning and grab as much information as it can. I've got access to Zoneomics, it'll have access to Google Maps and the GIS. So it's going out online to do as much data-grabbing as it can to find out: what's it zoned, what's the FAR, what are the setbacks, what's the buildable envelope from a self-storage perspective — if self-storage is even viable on this particular parcel or parcels. Hopefully you can see that little yellow cursor there — that's Claude moving this thing around, digging into the information, and it's going to give me a full zoning feasibility study on this site, which then goes into my CRM and lives there. We can update it, change it, use it for whatever in the future. That's where the real compounding begins. Now it's going to try a GIS, which didn't work — so it'll just keep hunting, trying to find other places it can go to get more information on this parcel. You can see it fetching different pages, continuing to think. One of the most powerful takeaways from this demo: it's doing this all by itself. So while it's giving you a full zoning feasibility study on different parcels, you can be sending emails, on phone calls, in meetings — whatever you want. Think of these three agents as employees you're onboarding — you walk them through the basic steps, and they get better the more you coach and train them. I think I'm on probably version 8 of instructions for Agent 1, the demographic agent. I just keep making it a little bit better as I get more feedback on how Claude is working with the tools it has access to. Here you can see it's going to Google Maps — going to the site, doing an analysis on the parcel: is there a current business sitting here, is it open land, is there maybe an older business where this could be a demo opportunity to then build self-storage? It's grabbing as many pictures, data, and as much information as possible to put into the zoning feasibility analysis. So think about me trying to go through Reonomy, GIS, then Google Maps — all these things it can do while you're off doing something much more productive. Now Claude is going through the listing — all these different codes, Zoneomics, planning, a bunch of different sites and data. Think about how long it would take you to go through all these sites and find the correct information. If you've ever been through the zoning process — going to look at the codes, "this one needs a CUP, this one does" — for me that's extremely arduous and laborious. That may be a gift of yours; it is not my gift. Here's what's interesting — you never really know what it's going to do. It found a link at CBRE for this particular property that may be another listing link. It's just scouring the web for more and more information to bring back as robust a zoning analysis as it can. There have been times where there are listings of more than one parcel — an assembly — and it'll go take a look at those parcels together and talk about the buildable envelope, whether it's 0.8, 0.9 acres, whatever. Now — is it perfect? No. It says right here: "Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check." So I wouldn't call it perfect, but it does a phenomenal job of leveraging your time. Now you can have this really wide funnel, get it down to sites that actually have viability, and then spend your time and energy underwriting the sites that may actually become opportunities. You can see it's now moving on to the second site, going back into Reonomy. For this one it went into LA City Planning, all on its own. It's a — Salt Lake Oil Field confirmed under the parcel. Don't know what that means yet, but the good news is it's writing all of that into the CRM. As it gathers this information, it puts it right into the CRM, so it lives there basically forever — becoming our source of truth. We can keep adding notes and re-underwrite. All right, now on to site 3 — back into Reonomy, same process, then the full zoning analysis on all three, put back into the CRM. Okay — we're back, thanks to editing. Quick overview: all three sites are done and written into the CRM. Zoning blocks, field updates, and it gives me its own zoning status summary within Claude, which is fantastic. Here's where it becomes really powerful. Even though we edited the video, I didn't say anything — these are in the instructions: when you're done, write these things back into the CRM. So all these notes based on the zoning analysis are right here in my CRM now. Other people on our team can go in, see these notes — and they're here basically forever. Sometimes we want to go back and re-underwrite, and it already has this information. "Can we build here? No practical storage path." The parcel's rezone, buildable gross square feet — we're looking to do 100,000 square feet; no, 80,000 only with below-grade in a methane zone — probably not one I've got to fight that battle on. So it's got all these fantastic notes, plus the Google Maps information, the FAR. It would have taken me — I don't know, weeks — to do this. And the really powerful thing: it took maybe 20, 25 minutes to do these three sites, and the entire time it was doing that, I could be making phone calls, sending emails, talking to brokers — doing other things that make an impact for our business. If you've got questions or want ideas on how this was done, please reach out — more than happy to visit with you about it. This is where the real leverage comes from: you can start looking at tens, hundreds of sites in a very short period, get this big funnel, and then say, "these are the ones that meet our criteria, the ones we want to spend more time on." Your time is valuable — now you can spend it doing things that get you closer to making offers. Yes, if that were a site we were going to underwrite, we'd still reach out to the city; there's still more to do. But it helps us get through sites much more efficiently and effectively. As always, if you're in development or acquisitions, please check out storagedemandscore.com — again, storagedemandscore.com. It's a phenomenal tool I built using the Self Storage Association demand study metrics, to help you understand demand — because so many people, especially lately, have been building in areas that aren't good, where their assets are going to end up in trouble. This gives you one more metric: is there actual demand, a need for the product I want to build in this marketplace? A score of 3 or higher is good; 2 to 3 is healthy; 1 to 2 is moderate; below 1, probably not enough demand for your product. You put your address in, put in the net rentable square feet you're looking to build — thank you to TractIQ for powering this — hit the big blue button, and it gives you a Storage Demand Score and walks you through the metrics so you can see exactly how you're getting that score. Again, Chris Berg, your AI Storage Guy. Hopefully this was valuable — some different options and opportunities to go out and use Claude and AI to maximize your time, focus on the things you're gifted at, and get out more offers to do more quality deals. Which is why I stress storagedemandscore.com: it's one thing to go build it, it's another to build it and have a well-performing asset for yourself and your investors. Reach out to me at cb@abernathyholdingco.com — that's CB, Charlie Bravo, Chris Berg, at abernathyholdingco.com — and get subscribed to this channel so you get all the great information as soon as we put it out. We'll see you back here again soon on the Self Storage Report. [END OF TRANSCRIPT]