I've been walking into broken buildings since I was seven years old.
This is the story of what I found there, and what I built because of it.
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My parents owned property. Which meant weekends, I was the kid riding along for maintenance work. Holding the flashlight. Handing up tools. Watching men who knew exactly what they were doing fix things I didn't understand yet.
I didn't know it then, but I was getting an education most people never get: what it looks like when someone has real judgment about a building.
I never left the buildings. I started doing property management at nineteen, my second year at USC. That was twenty six years ago. By 2021, at the height of Covid, I was the third principal at SoLA Impact, head of acquisitions and development. When I left, the portfolio I built was 2,000 units of multifamily real estate in South Los Angeles: 1,500 units acquired, and land for another 500 in development.
SoLA is a high performance real estate engine. In an engine like that, every dollar matters. And there was one cost I could never get under control: maintenance.
Nothing worked.
And I couldn't do my job if I couldn't properly evaluate and control our maintenance costs.
The next step at SoLA was leading the expansion into new markets. I walked away instead. Not because I gave up on the problem. Because I saw the opportunity in it.
Why did every fix fail? Because I was treating a symptom. I kept pulling the thread, and underneath the industry I found the real disease.
The cost to build, develop, and maintain property only goes up, and it's not because materials got expensive. It's because the people who know how to do the work are disappearing. Boomers in the trades are retiring with no succession plan. Every retirement takes decades of experience out of the workforce, permanently.
Go look at the stonemasonry on a building from the early 1900s. Then look at what we build now. You can see the skill leaving with your own eyes.
And here's the part most people miss. We have surplus labor in Los Angeles, eager for work. We aren't losing labor with these retirees. We are losing experienced labor.
And nobody was catching it on the way out.
So I made it my mission to fix the gap.
I wanted to bring people into the trades. I wanted kids choosing trade school over college and being proud of it. I wanted to own trades businesses, not as an investor watching from a distance, but as an operator who understood the work.
So I enrolled in trade school to become a plumber. LATTC, Intro to Plumbing 114.
And I'm telling you, plumbing school was harder than both. I didn't have the skills to match the education. I read the textbooks and laughed out loud at the sections on pipe fittings, how many kinds there are, and the code for every single one of them.
No wonder so few people go this route. We made some of the most essential work in the country the hardest to enter.
Then I found my shot. A 0 year old plumbing company, up for sale. Over 0 bidders came to the table. The owner chose me.
The deal fell through in diligence.
The company didn't come with me.
The mission did.
Then AI happened.
And I realized something that changed the shape of the mission. The thing walking out the door with every retirement was never the hands. It was the judgment. Which repair matters. Which one is dangerous. Which one can wait. Which one turns a $0 problem into a $0 disaster overnight.
Hands are hard to replace. Judgment, for the first time in history, is something we can capture, preserve, and hand to the next person who needs it, at the exact moment they need it. But judgment has to be built on knowledge. And AI became the funnel: it took the knowledge of the entire internet and turned it into a consumable bite.
That's where the story of Uncle AI starts.
This is
It looks like a repair assistant. That's what it does. What it is is something else: the tool that's writing the Bible of how to fix things.
Every repair that runs through it becomes a verse. Verified, structured, permanent. The judgment of a retiring generation, written down for the first time instead of buried with it.
For ten thousand years, craft knowledge moved one way: master to apprentice, hand to hand. Uncle AI is a new kind of link in that chain. A new application of AI. Not generating answers. Recording judgment.
You use it to fix your sink. It uses your sink to write the book.
TUESDAY · 9:00 PM
A tenant finds water pooling under the kitchen sink. She doesn't know if it's dripping or flowing. She doesn't know where the shutoff is. There are two doors in front of her and they look identical.
A loose P-trap. Ten minutes, hand tighten a nut, done tonight.
A failing supply line that lets go at 2am, floods the unit below, and becomes a claim with a displaced tenant.
Uncle AI is the difference between those doors. It runs the diagnosis, makes the call, and stands behind it. Fix it right, with the traps flagged before they cost you. Or stop early, contain the damage, and get the right pro moving.
Escalation isn't a failure. Done at the right moment, it's the save.
Market
0
Multifamily units in this country, each generating a steady stream of repair decisions.
Maintenance per unit / month
$65
AND CLIMBING
$65 when I was underwriting deals. Closer to $90 today.
Estimated waste
0–40%
Unnecessary dispatches, misdiagnosis, wrong parts, repeat calls.
Small problems get deferred until they stop being maintenance and become capital expenses. A supply line ignored isn't a line item anymore. It's a renovation.
I didn't read any of this in a market report. I underwrote these numbers for 26 years.
Every one of those failures happens before the truck rolls. They're not execution failures. They're diagnostic failures. That's the layer we own.
Every day the Bible gets thicker. Every repair adds a verse, every verse is outcome verified, and the judgment gets sharper with each one. A competitor starting today doesn't start behind on features. They start behind on recorded judgment. You can't scrape it, you can't synthesize it, and you can't buy it.
But a moat only protects a business. This book powers something bigger. Millions of people who never trusted themselves with a wrench, guided through their first repair. Then their second. That's an economy nobody has ever tapped, because fear kept it closed.
And follow the money to where it actually lands. Every failed repair, every late escalation, every flooded unit ends up on someone's balance sheet: insurers and warranty companies. A subscription that provably drives claims down doesn't need to be sold to the homeowner one at a time.
The risk holders will pay to put Uncle in every home they cover. The app is how the Bible gets written. The Bible is what makes that math work.
The mission never changed. Preserve the judgment. Pass it forward.
Live today
Uncle AI triages repairs, live at askuncleai.com.
Institutional pilot
Deploying across a multi thousand unit South LA portfolio, run by people who know my work because I helped build theirs.
The path
Pilot data → per unit institutional contracts → licensed outcome intelligence for insurers and warranty providers.
But triage is chapter one. The same Bible that walks a tenant through a P-trap tonight becomes the curriculum that trains the next generation into the trades tomorrow. The kids I wanted to see choosing trade school? Uncle AI is how they learn a master's judgment without a master standing over them. That's the gap I set out to fix five years ago, and I never let it go.
Every family used to have that uncle. The one who knew what was wrong, what it would cost, and whether you could handle it yourself. Most families don't have him anymore.
Now every home does.
Ask Uncle first.
I've been walking into broken buildings since I was seven.
Now I'm building the thing that walks in with everyone.
Fix Smart.
Andy Chao · Founder, Uncle AI · achao@askuncleai.com