Anthropic (the Claude family of models) just released Agent Skills. Agent Skills are a collection of instructions, scripts, and resources that you create to improve Claude’s performance on specific tasks and workflows in a repeatable way.
The instructions are created in markdown which is just an organized text file. Fortunately for us, we don’t need to create this from scratch. Anthropic created their own skill to create skills!
Market research for real estate investment memos is a common task for LLMs. Acquisitions teams and loan originators could use Agent Skills to instruct Claude on how to create the market research section of their investment memo by using the exact resources, steps, and structure that they typically use in their underwriting.
Let’s build our own and see it in action.
In Claude Desktop, open your settings and go to Capabilities. Scroll down and turn on ‘skill-creator’.
Create a new chat and instruct Claude on how you want it to build your skill.
Claude reads it’s own skill documentation to understand how to build the skill for us.
Claude gets to work creating the markdown files and resources for our skill.
The skill is complete and ready to use. Click ‘Open in Archive Utility’ to download the collection of files so you can upload it to Claude for use. An archive is just a ‘zip’ file.
Go back to your Settings and click ‘Capabilities’. Click ‘Upload Skill’. Drag and drop the zip file containing your skill into the box.
The skill will be enabled by default.
Create a new chat and ask it to analyze a market and property type!
Claude gets busy following your skill instructions, sourcing data, and writing the summary.
When its done, it creates and outputs the market summary.
Happy chatting!
-Professor Scott