Ed 
The Follow Up Boss MCP server ships 160 tools and turns 136 of them on the moment you install it. Not one of those 136 can write an email or a text message and send it to your client. That is not a gap I have been meaning to get around to fixing. That is the design (and yes, I re-ran the tool count against the shipping code the morning I wrote this, before I let that sentence stand, because getting my own software wrong in public sounds like a great way to ruin a Tuesday).
Both numbers are on the download page at neuhausre.com/fub-mcp, and the code is on GitHub under an Elastic 2.0 license, so you do not have to take my word for either one. Version 1.0.0 went out on February 23, 2026 with 152 tools. As of November 2026 it is on 2.0.0, with 22 forks and 33 stars on the repo, and a developer I have never met has already found and fixed a bug in it.
So here is what I actually want to get into. Every few weeks another agent asks me some version of “what does it even mean to automate your CRM with AI,” and the honest answer is pretty boring, which is probably why nobody is posting about it. It does not mean a robot runs your database while you sleep. It means the machine does the looking up and the typing, and you keep every single decision a client would notice.
What it actually means to automate your CRM with AI
Lets be honest about the pitch you have been hearing for two years now. “AI-powered CRM” gets sold as autopilot, like you wake up Thursday and 400 contacts have been nurtured overnight by a machine that understands them. That is not this. That was never going to be this.
What it is: your CRM stops being a place you navigate and becomes a thing you ask. You type “who in Lakeway have I not touched since June” and you get names, not a smart list you have to go build first and then remember to check. You say “log that call, he wants to see the Bee Cave listing Saturday, follow up Thursday” and all three of those things are in the record before you have pulled out of the driveway. Reading, and internal writing. Notes, tasks, deals, stages, tags. All of it is fair game for a machine because none of it leaves the building.
Outbound is a different animal. Outbound has a human being on the other end, and a human being cannot be un-emailed. So when I say automate your CRM, I mean everything up to the send button and nothing past it.
Michael Gerber’s whole argument in The E-Myth Revisited is that small businesses stall because the owner keeps doing the work instead of building the system that does the work. He is right. I would just add one thing he did not have to think about in 1995. When you build the system, you also have to decide on purpose which parts of the job you are deliberately NOT handing to it. That decision is the actual work, and almost nobody does it out loud.
Task by task, what moves and what does not
Ok so here is the specific version, because “automate your CRM” is a phrase that means nothing until somebody shows you the rows. This is the routine CRM work in a normal week: what it used to cost me in clicks, which tool handles it now, and the piece I did not hand over. The tool names are real. I pulled them out of the shipping code, and you can go read them yourself.
| The task | What it used to be | What the AI does now | What stays yours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finding who has gone cold | Build a smart list, or scroll and hope | listPeople plus listNotes, filtered, answered in a sentence |
Deciding which of those names is worth a call today |
| Prepping for a showing | Search the contact, click through the whole timeline | getPerson, listNotes, listCalls, summarized before you park |
Reading the room once you are actually in the house |
| Logging the call you just had | Open FUB, find them, click, type, or just forget | createCall or createNote from one spoken sentence |
Being honest in the note about how it really went |
| Moving a deal | Open the deal, change the stage, update the number | updateDeal, listStages |
Whether the deal moved, or you just want it to have moved |
| Setting the follow up | Remember, then create the task. The first part fails a lot | createTask with a real date on it |
Doing the thing on the day it comes due |
| Drafting the follow-up email | A blank compose window at 9pm | mergeTemplate fills your own template with their data |
Reading it, fixing it, and sending it yourself out of FUB |
| Texting a client | Type it on your phone | Nothing. createTextMessage is a log-only endpoint and does not deliver an SMS |
Every text you send, you send |
| Starting a nurture sequence | Find the plan, add the person, hope it is the right plan | addPersonToAutomation |
Deciding a human being deserves an automated sequence |
| Cleaning up junk records | Delete and pray | Nothing by default. The 24 delete tools are off | Turning them on, on purpose, after a backup |
| Segmenting the database | Click every contact, one at a time | listAvailableTags, searchPeopleByTag, bulkUpdatePeople |
What the segments are supposed to mean |
Read down the right-hand column for a second. Every item in it is judgment. Not one of them is typing. That is the whole trade, and I think it is a good trade, but you ought to see it clearly before you make it.
The one line I do not let it cross
My rule is simple and I do not make exceptions to it. Nothing goes out to a human being under my name until I have read that specific message and said yes to that specific message. Not “yes, you can email the Johnsons.” Yes to this email, to these people, right now, this one.
That sounds a little paranoid until you look at what a standing approval actually is. It is you pre-approving a message you have not read, going to a list you have not seen, at a moment you are not watching. Send is the one button in this entire business with no undo on it. That is enough for me.
And here is the part that is easy to miss, which is the only reason this section exists. The public server cannot send an email and it cannot deliver a text. That second one is not even my rule, it is theirs. Follow Up Boss’s own API documentation puts it about as plainly as it can be put: “Text messages created through the API are recorded as logs only. No actual text messages are sent.” But the server can add somebody to an automation. Follow Up Boss says on their own features page that Automations “can trigger email sends as part of a workflow.” So enrolling a contact is a sending decision wearing a costume. Same goes for createEvent, which is how a lead event gets logged. Follow Up Boss’s documentation for that endpoint says new leads sent in that way trigger action plans on the registration, inquiry and open house event types, and trigger automations on the registration and inquiry types. So you can log one and start a sequence without ever touching an automation tool. And one more that version 2.0 spells out: createAppointment can email the invitees an invitation (and text them too, if reminders are on), but only when sendInvitation is set to true. It is off by default, which is exactly how I want it. I read the sequence before anybody goes into it, same as I would read a single email. That is not that hard right.
(I learned that one the boring way, which is the good way to learn things. Nothing blew up. I just noticed one afternoon that “add them to the plan” and “email them” were the same action with different paperwork, and it bugged me enough that I changed how I work.)
The parts I would tell you about over coffee
Five things, none of which are in any marketing copy, mostly because I never wrote any marketing copy.
You probably need a broker-level key. A Follow Up Boss API key can only see what its user can see. An agent’s key reaches only the contacts assigned to that agent, so if you want the whole database, the key has to come from a broker or account owner, and you have to go ask. Some brokers will say no, and honestly that is a legitimate answer. It is their database too. (I say that as a broker who would probably want to know why one of my agents wanted to point an AI at the client list before I handed over a key, and I built the thing.)
It runs where you put it, and you have to put it somewhere. On your own computer it works with Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code, Cline and Google’s Gemini CLI. Version 2.0 added a second option: a one-click install on Hostinger that puts it on a small server you rent and control, with a secure web address and a password. That is what lets Claude on the web and the Claude phone app reach it. ChatGPT and Grok only connect to remote servers like that one, so the same install is the route for them (Claude is the one I have run end to end, so that is where I would start). What I am not going to do is host it for you. The Follow Up Boss API terms of use bar monetizing delivery of your FUB data, the system key they issue is not transferable to anybody else, and my own license bars offering the thing as a hosted service regardless. So the server is yours, with your key on it, and there is no version hosted by me. There is not going to be one.
Affiliate link: if you buy through it, Hostinger pays me a commission. Your price is the same. The software is free; the server is a paid Hostinger plan.
It has full read and write access to your CRM. That warning is sitting in bold at the top of my own README, and I put it there on purpose. Back up your Follow Up Boss data before you turn this loose. I am not being falsely modest. A server with 160 tools and an eager assistant behind it will happily do 160 things you did not quite ask for if you are sloppy about how you ask.
Leave Safe Mode on. It hides all 24 delete tools and leaves you 136. You will not miss them. The day you truly need to delete something you can go find the switch, and having to go find it is the entire point.
It is not autopilot, and I would trust it less if it were. You still read what it did. If that sounds like work, it is. Just a much smaller pile of it than the one you have now, no big deal right.
So why “quietly”
Because the agents doing this are not posting about it.
There is no dashboard to screenshot. Nobody films themselves not clicking. The entire experience is that a thing you used to dread on Sunday night now takes about forty seconds, and forty seconds of not dreading something is not content. So it moves sideways instead, one agent mentioning it to another agent at a closing, which is how most of the genuinely useful stuff in this business has always traveled.
The Texas piece of it, I would argue, is just that we have an awful lot of agents running solo or on small teams with no operations person, doing their own database work at 10pm because there is nobody else to do it. That is exactly who gets the most out of a setup like this, and it is why I think the pressure to automate your CRM lands hardest on the smallest shops. That is who this helps most. Not the mega team with three admins and a transaction coordinator. The agent who is also the entire back office.
I have been selling real estate in Austin since 2009 and building this kind of thing for the last couple of years, and the most honest summary I have is this. The AI made me a much faster clerk. It did not make me a better agent. I got better at the agent part because I stopped spending my evenings being a clerk, and that is the whole return, right there. Nothing more mystical than that.
If you want the install, the one-click Hostinger setup takes about 15 minutes, and if you would rather keep it on your own computer, the Claude Desktop version is a single file. The Follow Up Boss MCP server page has both. If you want the backstory on why I built it and then gave it away, that one is written up here, and this is why it stays free. If the acronym is new to you, start with what MCP is and why agents should care. If you want the bigger why behind all of it, I wrote about making Follow Up Boss actually work for you a while back. And if you are still picking an assistant, here is why I use Claude instead of ChatGPT, plus seven ways to use it past the chat box. Listings are a separate rabbit hole and that one lives at Austin MLS data in your AI, with ten prompts worth bookmarking.
Frequently Asked Questions
createAppointment with sendInvitation set to true, which emails the invitees. That one is off by default.Lets compare notes
If you are an agent who has been messing with this stuff, or who wants to be and does not know where to start, I am genuinely up for that conversation. It is one of my favorite things to talk about and my wife will confirm that I talk about it too much.
If you are a licensed Texas agent thinking about where to hang that license next, here is how our brokerage works. You keep your commission, there is no non-compete, and when you call the corporate office you get me, because I am the whole corporate office.
And if you are buying or selling around Austin, the Hill Country, Lakeway or Bee Cave, reach out here or call the office at (512) 366-3270.
Be safe, be good, and be nice to people.
