For most of the past two decades, real estate technology has followed the same playbook: a search box on the website, a chatbot bolted to the side, and a CRM running quietly in the back. Three disconnected tools an agent has to operate, with leads slipping through the gaps. A Myrtle Beach company is betting that era is over.
Ghostly Labs, a digital agency on South Carolina's Grand Strand, has launched the Phantom Realty Engine, a real estate platform built around Sarah, an intuitive AI made up of more than 50 specialized agents working as one. Unlike the chatbots that have become standard on real estate sites, Sarah is not a single tool bolted onto a website. She is a network of specialists acting as one intelligence, greeting buyers out front and working the agent's database behind the scenes.
The platform exists because its founder got tired of the alternatives. For years, Josh Shampo ran a digital marketing agency, and realtors kept coming to him with the same question: how do I rank, run ads, and generate leads on a platform that hasn't been meaningfully updated in over a decade and still leans on web practices Google deprecated years ago?
The tools weren't any better on his own side of the desk. He was paying for services where he used maybe half the features, that didn't actually know his data, that made him bounce from screen to screen to assemble a single answer. Onboarding a client, he realized, usually meant handing them more dashboards to check, not fewer. He was adding friction where he was supposed to be removing it.
So he built his own, first the real estate platform, then the CRM, on one shared data set so the two never had to be reconciled. And he built the AI the way he had always wanted it to work. "I wanted it to feel like the AI from the sci-fi movies," Shampo says, "working while I slept, prepping my competitor data, telling me what was working and what wasn't, and pointing me to where my expertise actually mattered." Over more than a year, that became a network of more than 50 specialized agents that now runs much of the company's own operation. Real estate was the first place it was packaged into a product.
Underneath all of it is a principle Shampo repeats often: foundational marketing. Everything, he argues, starts with and is built off the website. Get that foundation right, put it on one data spine, and everything else, the AI, the CRM, the lead generation, has something solid to stand on.
That philosophy shows up in how Sarah behaves. Where a typical search tool waits for a visitor to type, filter, and guess, Sarah anticipates. She reads how each person searches, infers what they are looking for, and surfaces it in conversation, the way an experienced local agent would. She answers from the live MLS, so every response reflects real listings at real prices. "She physically can't make a number up," Shampo says.
That is possible because Sarah is not one model answering a prompt. She is the conversational layer over those 50 specialists: one analyzes the market, another pulls comparable sales, another models a visitor's intent, another drafts the follow-up, all coordinated by a central system and grounded in the live data. It is that architecture that lets one intelligence run both the consumer experience out front and the agent's pipeline in the back, without the handoffs where leads usually disappear.
The early numbers are what have begun to turn heads. In its first deployment, Sarah took a database of more than 15,000 cold leads and went to work. She warmed nearly half of them, 49.5%, into engaged leads, and turned more than 1,400 into active buyers returning to the site multiple times a day. Across the database, the average user now spends 6.4 times longer on the site, and organic search traffic has grown 167.6%.
"Most real estate AI is a chatbot on the website or a tool in the back office. Sarah is the first that runs the whole house," Shampo says. "She greets your buyer and works your lead on the same data, so she can't make a number up and she can't lose the thread. Everyone else is bolting chatbots onto old software. We built the first intuitive AI in real estate."
The company is making that claim at a moment when the ground is shifting under the industry. Buyers no longer only search Google and the big portals; they ask AI assistants which homes and which agents to trust, and those engines can only recommend what they can read. The Phantom Realty Engine is built with that in mind, structuring every listing so search engines and AI tools alike can understand it.
Whether you are an individual agent, a growing team, or a full brokerage, the proposition is the same: a platform that begins with the website, runs on one data spine, and puts an AI on top of it that works every lead, day and night, until they are ready to talk. And for Ghostly Labs, real estate is only the beginning. The same engine, the company says, is built for any business that lives and dies by its leads.
The Phantom Realty Engine is available now to individual agents, growing teams, and brokerages. More information is available at ghostlylabs.com.
