
Show Summary
In this conversation, Mike Hambright and Benson Juarez discuss the transformative impact of technology on the real estate industry, particularly for investors. They explore the evolution of tech tools, the importance of data in marketing, and the rise of hybrid agents who blend real estate and investment roles. The discussion highlights how technology streamlines operations, enhances marketing strategies, and simplifies content creation, ultimately reshaping the landscape for real estate professionals.
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Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode
Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Mike Hambright (00:00.802)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. I’m here with my buddy, Benson Juarez today. He is a jack of all trades, has all sorts of things you’re good at, buddy. But we’re gonna be talking about technology and real estate today. On a recent show, we talked about AI and using AI. We’re gonna kind of further that as to how technology is changing the real estate industry and certainly changing it for real estate investors. So Benson, how are you, my friend?
Benson Juarez – Privy (00:24.437)
Doing great, Mike. So happy to be with you. I love this. Love the studio. It’s, it’s like.
Mike Hambright (00:26.082)
Good to see you. Yeah, you were commenting on that. Our studios look similar. I told you I always wanted to be like you when I grow up and here we are. You got the memo. I got the memo. I changed my studio to look like yours. It’s coincidental, but so great to see you my friend. So we’re going to talk about a few things today, but tech in real estate. There’s obviously kind of a revolution going on, whether it’s
Benson Juarez – Privy (00:42.187)
I love it. It looks great.
Mike Hambright (00:54.382)
AI or just different technology improvements. And I’ve kind of made the joke a few times that when I first started in real estate, I actually, in 2008, I got started in a real estate investing company and I came from a dot com site that was very tech, very tech based. And I said, it felt like, you know, the wild west. There was no, at that time, by the way, 2008, there were no CRMs for real estate investors.
you had to just take some other contact manager and kind of bastardize it to work, or people were still using spreadsheets, or you even remember a lot of people still just using whiteboards to have their deal flow on and stuff like that, right? So it’s kind of come a long ways, but before we jump into that, tell us your background, tell us a little bit more about you.
Benson Juarez – Privy (01:42.662)
everything has changed so much. I was very active in 2008 as well. Do you remember a platform, I think it was called Sharkbait? It was almost entirely in like the foreclosure world. It was a CRM that we use for tracking foreclosures. And those were like, those were our contact records. And so we’d pull data from the county and filter it through this CRM. And so we could tell, and it would pull in different information and organize it for us so we could know when.
Mike Hambright (01:51.66)
I don’t think so.
Okay. Okay, okay.
Hmm.
Benson Juarez – Privy (02:10.955)
You know, once that notice of election and demand was filed, you know, we had a certain amount of time and I mean, we knocked on a lot of doors. got a lot of deals and foreclosures. those are the golden days. but I got started in real estate in 2002. I was active duty military at the time and I was listening to Carleton Sheets, CDs and reading books and listening to CDs on my Walkman. And, yeah, I just kind of caught the bug and.
before my stint with the military ended in 2003, started selling loans, which was like kind of my first experience working in the real estate world. started doing hard money loans, got licensed as a real estate agent, started doing my own deals. But my first taste was just kind of the education piece of it. And then my money making started with slinging loans. Yep.
Mike Hambright (03:04.237)
There we go. Yeah, if we have time today, I want to talk, that’s not topic I want to talk about. It’s just kind of multiple streams of income. think, you know, there’s been this evolution of more investors needing to be licensed because their states require it and more assuming it’s coming. So they’re getting licensed and a lot of agents that are not doing the type of business that they would like. they’re becoming more of investors and you know, maybe also
being a loan officers or lots of other kind of streams of income. But let’s come let’s come back to that. Let’s let’s talk about tech. So how did you get into obviously you’re an owner of privy. So how did you get into the tech space like how did that kind of evolution come about.
Benson Juarez – Privy (03:40.524)
Well, I went to school for technology. got my degree in computer information systems from Colorado state, Northern Colorado, Fort Collins. And, yeah, I wasn’t, I wasn’t the smartest person in the class, but I always had the business mind. Right. And that’s what was great about this, this curriculum for computer information systems is half the curriculum was CS computer science. And the other half was business, which is I’ve always been good at building relationships, sales management.
Mike Hambright (03:44.91)
Okay.
Benson Juarez – Privy (04:10.379)
the business development side of where I focus a lot of my efforts now. And so I was like really good at both. Right. So I didn’t have to be like the smartest programmer, but I needed to understand it so I could help design and implement and test out technology. So I got it there and then I never used my degree. I started a business doing nutritional supplements. had nutrition stores. So I was kind of like GNC, but I implement, was looking for other streams of income. So I incorporated.
Mike Hambright (04:33.341)
Okay.
Mike Hambright (04:38.552)
Yeah.
Benson Juarez – Privy (04:39.591)
A consultation element and I would give people food plans and workout plans with their supplements. So kind of like a one-stop shop. I did that for many years. And then after I sold my share in that company and I was going to go and launch my own nutraceutical company, to have my own brand of supplements. And right before that ended, I got, went back to school to get a master’s degree in business. And then nine 11 happened.
Now I’d already been in the military for, as a reservist for many years. That’s how I paid for school, but got active, uh, activated and then had to do a two year stint of active duty, going to different places around the world and supporting the nation that way. Um, and then really started to get educated in, in, real estate, got that piece going. And then I didn’t really come back to technology again until 2010 ish when I met my
current business partner, Scott fall. And we’re both doing, REO properties, through a brokerage where we were getting first look at bank owned properties. And we were looking for a way of, of automating all the tedious stuff we had to do on a daily basis to find analyze and track investment properties. And that was kind of the birth of, of privy, but that’s, that was the evolution of it all the way back from getting my degree.
Mike Hambright (06:00.748)
And what year was that? did privy start?
Benson Juarez – Privy (06:04.12)
We were beginning the concepts of building Privy in 2010.
Mike Hambright (06:08.92)
Okay, okay, cool. So let’s talk a little bit about how technology is.
Benson Juarez – Privy (06:12.192)
Yeah.
Mike Hambright (06:15.382)
has evolved for real estate investors. mean, one of the things that’s happened is it’s making a previously very inefficient market more efficient, which is good for the industry, not necessarily good for the people. You know who it’s worst for, I think are the people that are willing to accept technology because like that’s not how we used to do it. It’s like, well, you’re to get left in the dust one way or another, right? But let’s, let’s talk about like how tech is changing the game. And maybe we can start by talking about some basic things like
Benson Juarez – Privy (06:37.257)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Hambright (06:45.957)
task management, process management, stuff like that. Tell us a little bit about how tech’s changing the game from creating SOPs and just all that kind of back office side of the business.
Benson Juarez – Privy (06:59.551)
Yeah, it’s unfortunately, I think where people make their money in real estate, it’s really in the sales side of things like going out and finding the leads, the acquisition of deals, the analyzation of those deals, and then what you do with them after the disposition, whether you keep it as a rental or you wholesale it or you, you you manage it in some way. But where people get caught up in the weeds and where most people fail is in the administration.
Right? The early things, the things that tracking leads, the follow-up, right? We all know the money’s in the follow-up. And so that’s where I think a lot of tech has excelled and why there was a boom the last four or five years in the CRM world. And with the foundation of like go high level, being able to have anybody can have their CRM now. Right. And we saw that we saw a boom of everybody and their mother had a CRM that was built on go high level.
I don’t know who came out of that, that carnage, but it was, you know, people, was something that was popular and they were like, Oh, I don’t have to be a developer to build this. so they thought, okay, well, this is a new revenue stream I can create. I’m already doing the things. This isn’t completely separate from what I’m doing, but maybe it’s a vertical integration, right? I use it myself and it works. Maybe I can sell it.
Mike Hambright (08:25.356)
Yeah, and I think just all that back office stuff, like, you know.
Everybody, not everybody, but a lot of people have different sales processes. They’re very different at building rapport. Like how they communicate with people is very different. Their skills are very different as a salesperson. But the back office stuff, you know, people are different as well, but it tends to be the types of things you can standardize pretty easily, right? And for a lot of people that are notoriously good at sales, they’re notoriously not good at the administrative part. So they appreciate a standardized process that they didn’t have to create, right?
Benson Juarez – Privy (08:59.435)
Oh, a hundred percent. know, you’ve got an SOP book that you created for the investor fuel community, which is just so powerful. It’s, know, it’s like that whole EOS system, like that foundation of the entrepreneurial operating system. Right. And, and that does some standardized things that you can customize, which you did for, for your group. But there’s a lot of stuff that you can transfer to any industry.
And it’ll, it’ll still work, whether it’s, you know, technology business, or if it’s just a sales organization, or if it’s, you know, something in the government, well, maybe probably the government’s not using any SOPs. They’d probably say they are, but there’s no efficiency coming out of there.
Mike Hambright (09:30.211)
Right.
Mike Hambright (09:44.267)
They’re probably about 30 years old. I have feeling that some of that’s going to be changing for the next few years.
Benson Juarez – Privy (09:49.77)
Yeah.
It’s true. So yeah, you’re right. The, the back office, the administration, they’re saving a bunch of time and money there, which allows them to focus on money-making activities, which is helping a lot of these organizations accomplish some pretty impressive things that maybe they wouldn’t have been able to do a few years ago.
Mike Hambright (10:08.834)
Yeah, right, right. Yeah, or they’re done inconsistently for sure, because you have different people doing different things and they’ve come up with their own processes, allows you to kind of standardize it, right? So.
Benson Juarez – Privy (10:20.299)
Yeah. And then they can, there is still some hands-on stuff that has to happen, even if you have a technology platform, but it’s so standardized, but now you can hand it off to, um, you know, an executive assistant or, you know, a virtual assistant, somebody who is in a completely different country that you’re not paying, you know, 50 bucks an hour to manage these things. It can be somebody who’s paying, you’re paying 10 bucks an hour who has a degree. They just happen to live in an entirely different country.
Mike Hambright (10:33.794)
Right.
Mike Hambright (10:43.117)
Right.
Yeah.
Mike Hambright (10:49.742)
Yeah, this is, I’ll be saying this after the fact, because this has been going on for years, but this is one of the big evolutions of having cloud-based systems that your team can be virtual all over the world and all access the same tool. Because it wasn’t always that way. Like it used to have to like get a VPN and somebody could log in to your computer from afar. And if that computer like turned off, the person just couldn’t work that day unless somebody could turn it back on. obviously there’s, it’s kind of crazy to think about how far we’ve come, but.
to have platforms that are cloud-based that everybody can access, irregardless of where they’re at.
Benson Juarez – Privy (11:19.914)
Yeah.
Benson Juarez – Privy (11:25.483)
100%. And that’s part of the, you know, the technology advances, but it isn’t like real estate specific. It’s just business in general. It’s taken advantage of many of these things. Like you said, you know, cloud-based technology. just saw a, it was a Superbowl commercial. They’re talking about how T-Mobile is partnering up with Starlink to provide access, you know, phone and internet to people who are out in the middle of nowhere.
Mike Hambright (11:47.598)
I saw that.
Mike Hambright (11:53.475)
Yeah.
Benson Juarez – Privy (11:53.926)
And for years, mean, decades, it’s been almost impossible for anybody who doesn’t live in an urban center to get good quality internet. And that’s all changing.
Mike Hambright (12:01.208)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We have Starlink out at our ranch in East Texas, which is kind of the middle of nowhere. The cell signal sucks out there, but my internet in our house is better than it is back in Dallas in town. So we’re super well connected out there, which is pretty cool. That was one of my big concerns is like, I love the idea of kind of being quote off the grid and feeling like you’re a million miles away, but gosh dang, I need a good internet connection. And so we were able to get it with Starlink. It’s pretty cool.
Benson Juarez – Privy (12:29.417)
Yeah, it’s, everything’s changing so fast. You know, and then the AI stuff is in the back of everyone’s mind right now. Right. Everyone’s talking about AI and deep seek made a big announcement last week and Nvidia and the stock market went crashing down at least temporarily because it’s, we just don’t know where it’s going to go. Like we thought we knew who were the first movers in the space and now we’re thinking maybe it’s not. And.
Mike Hambright (12:31.97)
Yeah, yeah.
Mike Hambright (12:37.318)
yeah.
Mike Hambright (12:51.426)
Yeah.
Mike Hambright (12:56.27)
Yep, well, it’s moving so fast that everything could change in a short period of time. So let’s talk about tech on the marketing side. I have some thoughts on that because we have a tech company as well. But what are your thoughts on how technology is changing marketing for real estate investors?
Benson Juarez – Privy (13:14.675)
I mean, it’s simplifying it so much right now that, really small organizations can now compete with large organizations and, you know, small organizations, they’re more nimble. They can pivot quicker. They can do a lot of things without having to go through all the bureaucracy and red tape. And they can implement some of these marketing, automations, more easily than some big corporation can. And so they can compete now.
And so it’s kind of a leveling the playing field so that, you know, some of these smaller companies that don’t have the, you know, the, the resources to hire like all the different marketing functions. know, you’ve got a VP of marketing and you got the people below them and they’re, they have all their minions going out and doing these things. now one or two people can run an entire marketing division within a company and get everything done. It has to get done.
And it’s really impressive.
Mike Hambright (14:13.986)
Yeah, yeah, I, you know, I’m a little biased and I don’t want this show to be about me, but on the investor machine side, we’re really a data company that does direct mail, you know, a platform that people think is like the buggy whip is direct mail, right? But it’s the most consistent mail platform, lead gen platform for real estate investors. And honestly, anybody that’s scaled up is using direct mail, but you know,
anybody could print mail. mean, there’s a ton of print houses out there, not to knock anybody, a bunch of them are good friends of mine. But what really matters most is the data that’s helping you generate the list that’s really kind of doing predictive modeling over who’s most likely to sell and targeting those folks. I mean, that’s been the evolution there from a tech standpoint is really using tech and even machine learning to try to figure out who is most likely to sell because of some data that we curated, you know.
Benson Juarez – Privy (14:53.76)
Mm.
Mike Hambright (15:07.156)
from lots of different sources and kind of mashed it together to try to predict who’s most likely to sell.
Benson Juarez – Privy (15:12.939)
So you created like a scoring system. So you’re taking, okay, well this, there’s some stuff that everybody has access to, right? Like, okay, someone went in a foreclosure, right? So we got that list of people and then you’re cross-referencing that list with some other data out there. Maybe it’s assessor’s data, like how long they’ve owned the property.
Mike Hambright (15:15.318)
Yeah.
Mike Hambright (15:31.662)
We have like 40 different lists. Yeah, we actually have like a whole data team. We have like 60 data miners that go into the, because a lot of the stuff is recorded at the county level. So a lot of the data that we get is at the county level. You can’t go buy it through national sources. And so we create our own data. then we found we used to use, obviously we use probates and stuff like that, right? But there are some lists that we find that correlate way better with predicting whether they’re going to
Benson Juarez – Privy (15:40.958)
Right.
Mike Hambright (16:01.616)
then
ones you would think. So we used to kind of have, you know, a scoring system that was nationwide, but now it’s different at the county level. So every county, our algorithm is different because we found that some data points are a better predictor than others in different counties. It’s crazy. It’s crazy to think that that’s even possible when we first started this like five, six years ago. Um, but it’s just how evolution works is you get in and you start to ask like, what if we could do this? Like, no, we could never do that. But as time goes by, it’s like, Hey, we figured
Benson Juarez – Privy (16:23.253)
Yeah.
Mike Hambright (16:33.412)
out a way to do that thing, you know.
Benson Juarez – Privy (16:35.477)
But also too, like the data isn’t, isn’t standardized across even counties within the same state, let alone counties across the entire U S so something that would be a good predictor of someone to sell a house in New York, that piece of data may not even exist in Dallas.
Mike Hambright (16:41.016)
for sure.
Yeah, for sure.
Mike Hambright (16:52.236)
Right. Yeah.
Benson Juarez – Privy (16:53.641)
So yeah, you’ve got to get pretty granular if you want to keep putting out good stuff for your people. But 60 plus data scientists or data people on your team is pretty impressive.
Mike Hambright (17:00.258)
Right, right.
Mike Hambright (17:06.07)
Yeah, yeah, it didn’t start that way. It started with me, Jason Lewis, some VAs and some Excel spreadsheets. now it’s whole different world. We’ve got 80 employees around the world and kind of cranking for folks. But yeah, it’s disrupting marketing for sure because it’s a lot of marketing that’s data driven, right? It’s just where the tech is at. Let’s talk about content creation. think for a lot of people that have…
Benson Juarez – Privy (17:29.545)
Yeah.
Mike Hambright (17:34.254)
service platforms like Investor Fuel or Investor Machine or Privy. Like a lot of those folks have used content like podcasts, I guess, just like this to kind of promote our brands and things like that. But more and more there’s real estate investors that are building brands to try to separate themselves in a market. And that content is, you know, not only easier than ever to create because you just have to have a…
Benson Juarez – Privy (17:44.587)
Yeah.
Mike Hambright (17:59.2)
cell phone, right? But the editing and the production and all that stuff has gotten way easier through technology. So let’s talk a little about how, you know, investors that you know are using tech to create content or more of it or more appealing content or whatever it might be.
Benson Juarez – Privy (18:15.657)
Yeah. Well, the content creation thing wouldn’t even be a thing if it wasn’t because of the explosion of social media and how we all become basically our own publishers. And so, you know, in the olden days, you know, the way you sold was just through your own sphere. like you could only reach as many people as you could talk to at the, the meetup or, know, the, the
Mike Hambright (18:25.592)
sure.
Yep.
Benson Juarez – Privy (18:43.271)
networking event that you went to or the RIA. And that was about as far as you could get without spending some pretty big cash on, I’m just kind of traditional marketing channels. And now with social media, you know, you could do one video and it can go viral and it can change the entire direction of your career or the direction of your company with just some good content that people like. And so now there’s a lot of effort being spent on, you know, content creation and
You know, what, what do people want to hear? you know, not having to spend as much money on, traditional marketing or maybe just having sort of like an Omni marketing approach where you do all these different things in tandem. So maybe you’re, you’re all running PPC ads, but then that goes in conjunction with a piece of content that you push out through social media and then you do a YouTube video and then you’ve got a podcast. And so all these things working together and get your message out there. And people are hearing from.
about you and your service from different angles. And it’s reinforcing those multiple touches that you had to do the old fashioned way, which would take forever, right? Seven to 10 touches for someone to take action through one channel. That’s, that’s six months of time, but with multiple channels and the ability to create one piece of content, like a podcast, push it into some AI tool that chops it up into reels as captions does all the SEO.
And then all you got to do is push a button and it’s distributed to all your different channels with very little work is so exciting. Like I’m loving the way that content creation has become so simple and anyone can do it.
Mike Hambright (20:25.368)
Yeah, yeah. And I think, more than ever, like I’ve always, when I’m hiring people, I usually go look at their social media content. I just want to see, is this person a weirdo? Like how do they align culturally with the stuff that they’re posting or sharing or saying, right? And I think that for employers, that’s certainly been a thing for a while, but I think more and more with sellers, people that are trying to sell a house, if they find out who’s coming or what company they’re…
you know set an appointment with are going out to look for a lot of times you know just people are showing who their team is or the about us page like who is the owner who am I dealing with and then maybe go you know stalk them on social media as well to say I’m gonna sell a house here who should I sell it to and it’s like who do I most align with or you know might be do they have bad reviews or good reviews for their business but it also might be personally I’m meeting with Benson and I want to see
Benson Juarez – Privy (21:20.426)
Mm-hmm.
Mike Hambright (21:24.886)
what kind of person I’m gonna let in my house to sit at the table and talk to you about selling my house, right? Or an agent, even like, who am I gonna list my house with? Do I see eye to eye with this person who’s gonna be representing me?
Benson Juarez – Privy (21:39.958)
Yeah, I think more and more people are identifying with individuals rather than companies and brands. And so, you know, the, the person just with the example of real estate agents, like they’re not so worried about listening with Kelly Williams or remax or eXp. They’re thinking about, okay, who’s the agent that hangs their license at eXp and does that person have my have similar values? Do I, do I know
Mike Hambright (21:45.132)
Yeah. Yeah.
Benson Juarez – Privy (22:08.189)
who they are, do I trust them? Do I want to do business with them? And that was really challenging in the past. If it wasn’t just your own sphere. And so now you can, you can use a piece of content from a podcast and put it out through all your social media. And now you’re putting your, your personal beliefs out there and you’re showing who you are and how you think and, you know, sharing your ideas with people. And that goes a long way.
Mike Hambright (22:33.048)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I mean, we all, think, you I hate to say it, but the political climate over the last few rounds of elections is like force people to just like, I wanna work with people that, sometimes people are like, sometimes people really crave, I wanna work with people that are different than me and have different thoughts. But I think more commonly people wanna work with people that ideologically have similar views or beliefs to them, right? Yeah.
Benson Juarez – Privy (22:57.535)
Yeah. Yeah. I think you’re right. And it’s also coming to a point now where I don’t know how new this is, but people are now aren’t afraid as much to talk about their political views as they were in the past. Like they say, don’t talk about religion politics. know, when you’re, when you’re someplace networking, like there was like these taboo subjects you shouldn’t talk about, but now those are some of the things that create, you know, relationships.
Like once you figure out how people are in their private life, that’s what’s creating bonds, but it could be a slippery slope.
Mike Hambright (23:33.646)
Oh, for sure. Yeah, it could create those bonds or it could tear them down. Unfortunately. Yeah. Well, this isn’t so much tech based, but let’s kind of talk about this evolution of what I’ll kind of call the hybrid agent, which is real estate agents becoming more investors because I think I think you told me ahead of time here, like 70 71 % of agents did not list did not also they didn’t list it, but they didn’t close a deal.
Benson Juarez – Privy (23:37.707)
Yeah.
Mike Hambright (24:03.414)
last year, something like that, right? And I think there’s a lot of investors that are like, yeah, obviously real estate transactions are way down. So there’s a lot of people that are agents that want to do more investing activity. And there’s also a lot of investors that might even be required to get licensed now in their state because a lot of states have passed that over the past couple of years and more coming or they assume more is coming. So I might as well get licensed now. So there’s this kind of merging together of the agent world and the investor.
world and let’s and it’s not you know tech is probably driving some of that I guess or making it easier for sure but it’s also just the idea of having more tools in your tool belt right
Benson Juarez – Privy (24:47.417)
yeah. And then it also goes with the multiple streams of income that you mentioned earlier too. this, this transition that’s happening now is I think is a lot of it’s consolidation because there are just so many agents out there that it was the 80 20 rule, right? You know, 20 % of the agents were doing 80 % of the transactions and that couldn’t be more true right now, especially with the NAR lawsuit where they said that, you know, agents now
are not guaranteed to get a commission on the buy side, unless they negotiate it with a seller in advance and negotiate their commission has to be pre-negotiated basically. And so agents are now having to work harder to demonstrate value to their clients and not just be a glorified Uber driver who shows houses. And so in the, in kind of the retail space where, know, you got a first time home buyer who’s got an FHA loan who
is going out and they can barely afford, you know, the three, three and a half percent they got to put down on an FHA loan, let alone pave the commission of the agent who’s showing them to communicate value to someone like that, where they don’t even really understand real estate in general is difficult.
But in the investor world, investors are transactional. They understand that if someone can help them make money, that’s a good investment for them. And so there’s like this, I don’t want say consolidation is one, but that’s the past thing. is more of like a redefining of what an investor friendly agent really is. And part of it is that
I would rather work with an agent who’s done their own deals. Like they understand how to run the numbers. They understand the risks. They’ve been in my shoes before. Then an agent who has some three letter, you know, acronym on the bottom of their business card, cause they took a class, but they’ve never done a deal. So things are definitely changing and you know, with the, with technology and data.
Benson Juarez – Privy (26:55.123)
It’s easier now than ever for an agent to get up to a level where 10 years ago, it would have taken them years and years to become a local market expert in one market and be able to communicate effectively with an investor and actually provide value where now that can happen in days because that the access of the information, but also the ability to distill down the universe of data that’s happening in say Dallas, Fort Worth.
and really make sense of it and be like, okay, this is a market where we should go look for deals and here’s why. And here’s what a deal looks like. It just wasn’t like that in the past.
Mike Hambright (27:34.946)
right. And I think more than ever, investors who spend a fair bit of money on marketing to generate leads are like, hey, I to find some other ways to monetize these leads because they’re not all going to turn into investment, you know, deals for me to buy as an investor. But in a minimum, if I can make some money on it and help liquidate my marketing costs, that’s a good thing.
Benson Juarez – Privy (27:55.18)
Yeah, it’s, really interesting. I’ve been licensed since 2005. And, I mean, everything just changes so quickly, but there’s this big movement right now to the world of, of, you know, retail being separate from the investor world. It was just, it was really just separate. And now there’s a lot of crossover and people on the other side of the fence now are trying to figure out how they can get into real estate investing.
themselves because they see the opportunity, but also how do they provide value to their clients? And, um, if they can do that, then they can start to provide more value and, and, you know, get through these hard times when it’s so hard to find a deal or only, you know, let’s some 30 % of agents did a deal last year. mean, how are we, how is anybody surviving?
Mike Hambright (28:29.804)
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Mike Hambright (28:45.728)
Right, well they’ve got to do other things. They’ve got to find other sources of income, right? So yeah, could be any of a lot of things, but some of them are turning into investors and not just agents. Yeah, I have this, I’ve always kind of said, have a feeling there’s a high number of people that are realtors or agents that think investors are slimy, but they all secretly want to be one. And by the way, there are some bad ones out there, but there’s plenty of amazing investors for sure as well.
Benson Juarez – Privy (28:50.88)
Yeah.
Benson Juarez – Privy (29:08.298)
Yeah.
Benson Juarez – Privy (29:14.505)
And then from the investor perspective, they’re like, I don’t want to work with agents. You know, they waste my time. They don’t know what they’re talking about. So it’s like this weird kind of chasm between investors and agents, but really if they were speaking the same language and the expectations were set properly, then they could live in harmony. You know, cats and dogs living together.
Mike Hambright (29:24.247)
Yeah.
Mike Hambright (29:37.218)
That’s right, yeah. Hey, Benson, really appreciate you joining us today. How do people learn more about Privy? Maybe just take a moment and just tell us what Privy is and how they can learn more about it.
Benson Juarez – Privy (29:45.194)
Yeah.
Benson Juarez – Privy (29:48.618)
Yeah, it’s a data platform, right? So we take data and we analyze it. Maybe you didn’t hear, but we actually finally got our patent. So we filed for a patent over four years ago on a comparative search algorithm that basically allows people who use our system to find deals automatically by leveraging what’s called investor activity.
Mike Hambright (29:59.49)
Nice.
Benson Juarez – Privy (30:12.757)
So taking all of these closed deals that happened and using those as a model for what a successful deal looks like, and then reverse engineering it to find deals you can buy today. And so for many years, people thought, well, you can’t find deals on the MLS and the data tells otherwise depending on the markets, anywhere from 50 to 70 % of deals are coming from the MLS. And so the reason why people didn’t like that is because it was such a manual process where they had to go in. And if there was a hundred new deals on the market tomorrow,
They’d have to go analyze all 100 to find the three or four that we’re worth looking at. So you just wasted 97, 96 % of your time on deals you’re going to say no to anyway. So now algorithmically, we can eliminate all the stuff that has no data. It says it’s a deal and then just focus on the ones that do and then eliminate some of those outliers based off of our local market knowledge and you know, knowing our buy box, we can adjust it. So we
Mike Hambright (30:53.838)
Mm-hmm.
Benson Juarez – Privy (31:12.799)
built Privy many years ago as agents looking for a way of automating all the tedious tasks. And then the plan was always to build an ecosystem where investors and agents can work together. And the data becomes the love language, right? That’s what goes across these two worlds and builds a bridge where they can work together now. And as long as we can educate investors and agents and get them up to speed on the expectations on who handles what,
then now as Privy, we can deliver these deals, we can deliver data to analyze any property, whether it’s off market, on market, off market leads is something that we do as well. It isn’t something that we focus on a lot, but as far as low hanging fruit, being able to basically analyze the entire nation and find properties that you can write offers on every single day is where we really excel.
And so we’re partnering up with agents and we’re educating investors and just creating this really cool place where they can operate together and everybody makes money.
Mike Hambright (32:19.842)
That’s awesome. Well guys, we’ll add if you want to learn more about privy.
Benson Juarez – Privy (32:20.095)
So if you do want to check it out, yeah, you can go to privy.pro and we actually just launched some new pricing. So now you can get privy on it, just like a per state basis instead of just the whole nation. And that can cut the cost down for anybody who’s just, you know, getting started or you’ve really niche down into a specific market. You can get local data access for a less expensive price.
Mike Hambright (32:45.07)
Yeah, that’s awesome. And we’ll share a link down below in the show notes, everybody. So Benson, thanks so much for joining us today. Always good to see you, buddy.
Benson Juarez – Privy (32:51.797)
Yeah, of course, Mike, great discussion. Appreciate you having me on.
Mike Hambright (32:54.838)
Yeah, everybody have a great day. Hopefully you got some value from today. Like technology is going to continue to keep coming. So if you’re not loving it, it’s not going away. You got to find ways to integrate it into your business because you don’t want to get left in the dirt. So appreciate you all. We’ll see you on the next show.