Ed Neuhaus 
Last June I was bored.
Not “slow afternoon” bored. More like “I have three hours and a new technology I want to poke at” bored. The technology was MCP, which stands for Model Context Protocol, and it’s basically the thing that lets you connect an AI like Claude or ChatGPT to an outside system, so the AI can read your data and actually do stuff with it instead of just talking about hypotheticals.
I use Follow Up Boss for my CRM. Have for years. It’s good software. But like most CRMs it has this kind of necessary awkwardness where you have to navigate to things. You know where something is, roughly, but it takes a few clicks and a search to actually get there. I kept thinking: what if I could just ask my CRM a question the same way I’d ask a person?
So I built it.
The Weekend Project That Got Out of Hand
The first version was pretty rough, honestly. It could pull contacts, log notes, that kind of thing. Useful enough that I kept using it myself, which is the only test that matters for something you built over a weekend. I kept adding to it because I kept finding things I wanted it to do. Create tasks. Update deal stages. Pull up everyone who hadn’t been contacted in 30 days and draft a follow-up sequence. The kind of stuff that exists in the CRM but usually requires you to know exactly where to look and have the patience to click through three screens to get there.
By the time I was done tinkering I had something with 157 tools. That’s a lot of tools. Probably more than I need on any given day, but it felt right to build it fully rather than stop at “good enough.” That’s kind of a personality flaw of mine, if we’re being honest.
So there it sat. On my computer. Working great. I was the only person using it.
The Outage That Changed My Mind
A few weeks ago the Follow Up Boss API went down. Not for long, but long enough that I was sitting there waiting, and I had this thought that I’m a little embarrassed took me this many months to have: why am I keeping this to myself?
Not in a dramatic way. Just… there’s no good reason. It works. Other agents use FUB. They’d probably get something out of it. I don’t sell software, I sell real estate. So what exactly am I protecting?
I put it on GitHub. Published a landing page at neuhausre.com/fub-mcp/. Wrote up the docs. And that was that.
It’s completely free. Anyone with a Follow Up Boss account can set it up and connect their CRM to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or any other AI that supports MCP. You can find it at github.com/mindwear-capitian/followupboss-mcp-server.
Why Didn’t Follow Up Boss Just Build This?
This is where I want to be careful, because I have a theory but I could be completely wrong. Companies make decisions I don’t have full visibility into, and I’m speculating here based on what I’ve observed from the outside.
Follow Up Boss has a pretty healthy ecosystem of third-party apps and integrations. Developers build tools that sit on top of FUB, add functionality, and charge agents a monthly fee for access. Some of them are genuinely good. A lot of them are doing things that an AI can now do in a three-second conversation, but they were built before that was possible, and they keep getting renewed because agents are used to paying for them and don’t always realize there’s a better option.
If FUB builds a native AI layer that does what those apps do for free, those partners don’t have a business anymore. That’s a real problem if you’ve built an ecosystem of developers who depend on you. It’s a reasonable business consideration. I’m not saying they made the wrong call. I’m saying I understand why a company in that position might move slowly on something like this.
But I’m not them. I don’t have an app store. I don’t have partners whose revenue I need to protect. I have a CRM full of contacts and a curiosity about what AI can do with it. So I built the thing and gave it away and moved on with my life.
What It Actually Does
The most useful version of this is the simplest one: you open Claude, you ask it something about your database, and it answers you. “Who are my top 10 leads by last activity date?” “Who did I add this month that I haven’t called yet?” “Draft a check-in message for everyone in my pipeline who’s been quiet for more than three weeks.”
That last one is the kind of thing that used to require either a reporting tool, a saved filter you remembered to check, or a VA who kept tabs on it for you. Now it’s a sentence you type and a response you read. Not because the CRM got smarter, but because you gave the AI permission to look at it.
There’s also the data side of it. If you’ve ever wanted to just understand your pipeline at a high level, “give me a summary of where every active deal stands and flag anything that seems stalled,” that’s a two-second question now. The AI reads the data and gives you a paragraph. Less like a dashboard and more like a briefing.
My personal version does a bit more than the public one, because I’ve added things specific to how I run my business. But everything in the public version is solid and tested because I built it for myself first and I’m not in the habit of publishing tools I don’t trust.
The Part About Your Data
Here’s the thing that actually matters to me about this, and I think it gets lost in conversations about AI tools.
That CRM is your database. Your contacts. Your notes. Your deals. Your years of work. You already paid for it. You’re already paying a monthly fee to access it. And yet to get something like a useful summary or a cross-referenced view of your pipeline, a lot of agents end up paying a third party to give them a better window into data they already own.
I find that a little strange. And I’m not saying it’s anyone’s fault. The tools came first and the AI came later, and the market works out the way it works out. But given that the AI capability exists now, given that it’s not particularly hard to connect it to an existing API, and given that I had a free weekend in June, it seemed like the thing to do was connect them and stop paying rent on someone else’s interface into my own data.
So that’s the philosophy, if you want to call it that. It’s your data. You should be able to ask questions of it the way you’d ask a person. And you shouldn’t have to pay a monthly subscription to do it.
Who This Is For
Honestly, you need to be at least a little comfortable with technology to set this up. It’s not a one-click install. You need a Follow Up Boss account, an API key from FUB, and an AI tool that supports MCP (Claude works great for this, and it’s what I use). There’s a setup guide in the docs and it’s not terrible, but I’m not going to pretend it’s plug-and-play like installing an app on your phone.
If that’s you, the docs are at the GitHub link and there’s more detail on the landing page here. If you get stuck, there’s a place to report issues on GitHub and I actually look at those.
If you’re not technical and this sounds like more trouble than it’s worth, that’s completely fair. Not everything is for everyone, and the last thing I want to do is talk you into a setup process that’s going to frustrate you. The tool exists, it’s free, and when you’re ready it’ll still be there.
What This Has to Do With Real Estate
I realize this is a real estate website and some of you are wondering why I’m writing about CRM integrations and open source software.
Fair question. Here’s my answer: the agents who are going to be great at this job in five years are the ones who are figuring out AI right now, not the ones who are waiting for someone to hand them a pre-packaged version that they pay $79/month for. The technology is genuinely useful. It’s not hype at this point. And the people who get comfortable using it in their actual workflows, not just prompting it for email drafts, but letting it help them think through their pipeline and their follow-up and their market data, those people are going to have a real advantage.
I’m not saying this to be preachy about it. I’m saying it because I am one of those people and I can feel the difference in how I work. That’s the only reason I trust it as an opinion.
The FUB MCP server is one tool in a larger set of things I’ve been building for my own use over the last couple of years. Some of it stays personal. This one felt worth sharing. So I shared it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Want to Talk About How I Use AI in My Real Estate Business?
I’m not shy about the tools I use or how I use them. If you’re curious about how AI is changing the way I run things at Neuhaus Realty Group, or you want to buy or sell a home and want to work with someone who’s actually paying attention to this stuff, reach out here.
And if you just want the MCP server, go get it. It’s free. You’re welcome.
