From Marine to Mogul: Jon Nolen’s Journey in Tech-Driven Real Estate

Mike Hambright (00:00.824)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. I am excited to have my good friend, John Nolen. I usually say everybody on the show is my friend, but John’s a really good friend. John and his wife, Amy. I like Amy a little better than John, but we got John today with us. Just kidding. Just kidding, John. But we’re going to be talking about kind of tech in the real estate space. Like there’s obviously been an evolution going on here and there’s more and more tech coming out that’s helping real estate investors. And you’re going to get left in the dust if you’re not using some of these things.

Jon Nolen (00:13.353)
That’s kind of the consensus.

Mike Hambright (00:30.014)
And it’s interesting because when I first started in 2008, there was not a single CRM in the real estate space. We were using spreadsheets and whiteboards and bastardizing some kind of generic contact manager into a tool where we could manage our contacts, but the whole world has changed. And so before we kind of jump into the tech space, John, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your background for those that don’t know you.

Jon Nolen (00:56.192)
Yeah, thank you Mike. Former Marine, got out, got into IT and development for about a decade and I’ve been in real estate for don’t know 12, 13 years now. I work hand in hand with my wife Amy. As you said, she’s the consensus. Everybody would rather spend time with her. She’s a little bit prettier than I am.

But we do a little bit of everything. out of Oklahoma City. As far as on the investing side, we wholesale a little bit when we have too many properties for our appetite. But we mainly rehab and hold. We’ve got about 125 single-family doors all here in Oklahoma that we rent. And then last year we did 38 flips. And this year we’re pacing to hit 50 flips in 2025. So was the real quick breakdown background of me.

I like doing a little bit of everything. I’m always trying to solve problems. I like going out, having fun, going to fly somewhere, go up in the mountains, do something challenging, just started jiu-jitsu. 45 years old and just started jiu-jitsu. So I’m always up for a challenge.

Mike Hambright (02:03.054)
Yeah, yeah, no, it’s been inspiring, your journey lately. I don’t know about the cold showers, but obviously being a pilot, I’ve flown either before, I literally put my life into your hands and you didn’t let me die, so I appreciate that. And I know you’ve really been kind of on this journey of kind of just being more disciplined in your life and having more focus on health and stuff like that, so that’s really cool,

Jon Nolen (02:28.761)
Thank you. Yeah, it’s been a, I don’t want to say a struggle, but it’s been something I’ve had to work at. nobody is just blessed that I, at least I don’t think so blessed with having great discipline in their life and something we have to work at. And when you get comfortable, you kind of let that discipline go and you just kind of get along with it you start getting like my case, I was getting, getting a little heavy and just lackadaisical and everything. So

I’ve really focused over the last six months on improving my personal self so that my professional self can grow as well, because they’re going to go together. can’t have your personal life great and your business life not elevate some as well. So I’ve been focusing on that. When I was Colorado with Pat Frecourt in October, had an amazing experience there and really kind of catapulted me into where I’m at now.

Mike Hambright (03:07.088)
no doubt.

Jon Nolen (03:25.687)
mentioned the cold showers cold showers. I’m not doing them for health benefits. You know, they say that it releases chemicals and lowers inflammation stuff. It may be doing that. I don’t know. I’m just doing it because it sucks and it’s something hard to do. But when you’re doing something hard, the other things don’t seem as hard. Does that make sense? And that’s kind of carried over. Two of my three kids have started doing the showers as well.

Mike Hambright (03:46.508)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. That’s awesome.

Jon Nolen (03:54.606)
I hit 57 straight days last night or 56 days last night. My son hit 49 and one of my daughters hit 29 straight days of cold showers. And there was no prodding for me on that at all. They just saw that I was doing better in lots of things. Like even just having patience, know, anybody who has kids understands there’s times they get underneath your skin. just like,

Mike Hambright (04:04.034)
Wow.

Mike Hambright (04:18.317)
Ha ha ha.

Jon Nolen (04:20.398)
I don’t have that trigger anymore. I’ve really done a good job of getting myself back to just harmony.

Mike Hambright (04:27.734)
Yeah, that’s great. That is great. I probably need more of that in my life. I’m still not sure on the cold showers, but we’ll see. We’ll see. We’ll see. So, you know, I’ve known you long enough to know that like other people that have created a technology that they provide a service for that usually it starts with trying to solve a problem that you’re having. Right. Like, I mean, that’s kind of the

A lot of entrepreneurs in that way, they tried to solve a problem they had or they didn’t think the solutions that were out there were good enough. And you guys have done that. like talk about some of the needs you had in your business.

Jon Nolen (04:53.421)
You know.

Mike Hambright (05:05.89)
that you thought that you could do a better, by the way, you had a software background, so it kind of goes hand in hand with saying, hey, I know how to solve that better than other things that are out there, but just talk about some of the needs you had as a real estate investor that you needed a solution for and weren’t happy with what was out there.

Jon Nolen (05:25.07)
yeah. I think the biggest thing was having separate systems, siloed systems, and trying to piece things together with Xaipier. mean, Xaipier can do a ton of things. It can bring a lot of continuity to different programs, but it still leaves gaps. We had issues where notes from acquisitions or the rehab scope would be in our CRM, but then they wouldn’t make it down to

through the pipeline when we were going to flip the house. And so we’d miss important details that would end up costing us money. And it’s an easy solution that people say, well, just give everybody a license to your software, to your CRM. Well, you start adding up users. And at one point we had, I think, 15 or 17 employees. And I was like, no, that’s a lot of software subscriptions that we shouldn’t have to pay for. And then the others just…

Connectivity, know, apps don’t always talk well together. You know, something, somebody changes something in one system, then it breaks on another. And it just, I like playing with things. I like fixing things. I like solving problems. And so I just started dabbling with making a solution for ourselves.

Mike Hambright (06:33.858)
Yeah, yeah. And I think some of it too is, mean, you know, there’s always systems out there that are really good at, I mean, most systems are good at a couple things and they do other things, but they’re not great. And I think, you know, a lot of real estate investors, they’re probably a lot of entrepreneurs, but a lot of real estate investors specifically, they like.

I’ve got a CRM, I’ve got task management in another tool, I’m managing my rentals in another tool, and tracking other things in other tools, right? And you guys have, because you’re a property owner, you’ve got rentals, and because you do a lot of fix and flip projects, and because there’s a lot of tasks associated with those things, you guys have kind of brought that all together,

Jon Nolen (07:14.776)
Yeah, we do. And an easy example there is, let’s say we get a that comes in, we end up buying that lead and we turn it into a rental, but we have to do a rehab on it. Well, two years from now, if there’s a question of, we replace the hot water tank?

When we did the rehab or not, we’re not going into different systems. We’re not trying to look at different things. It’s all right there in one place. Makes it so much easier. All of our communication with the seller, the tenants, all in one place. We’re going have to jump around. then, yeah, task in one place and not have to say, OK, we got the contract. Let me go over to Asana or ClickUp and start this template. Or somebody forgets to run the template for a couple of days and they end up behind.

Mike Hambright (08:00.076)
Yep, yep. So let’s talk about what are some trends that you’re seeing in technology? There’s obviously been a lot of evolution. We talked about when I started in 2008, there was nothing. There’s all sorts of tools out there now. There’s been a lot of evolution, but what are some trends you’re seeing in technology? mean, there’s a lot of CRMs on the market now. There’s a lot of…

apps to do different things, like what are some of the trends that you see of things that are coming out that there’s really not a great solution for yet, and there’s a bunch of stuff coming.

Jon Nolen (08:30.851)
A lot of people have been migrating away from proteo the last four or five years just because of the expense of keeping up with it and whatnot. So I mean, that’s been a change that’s been happening for a while. But more than anything, I mean, it’s no secret, AI is huge. It’s just getting larger and larger and larger.

investing quite a bit actually in P to grow the AI functions in P. Everything from automated call reviews to inbound and outbound agents. you know, nobody wants to really wants to listen to phone calls and know how their lead manager is doing on those, but they really, really need to. You’ve been there, I’ve been there. Most of the people listening to this probably have been there where they find out their lead manager just totally missed the ball on something.

And have an AI first, if you have a lead manager that’s live doing those calls, but not just scoring some of the calls, being able to score all those calls and be automated with it will be very valuable. But then at some point it’s going to be, I’m sure where lead managers start getting face down, people use AI voice agents for those incoming calls to get that basic information, have a conversation with people. But it’s not quite there yet. I don’t think, but.

Aya’s growing at such a rate, I bet it’ll be pretty soon.

Mike Hambright (09:54.06)
Yeah, yeah. And there’s obviously been a lot of pressure on…

just regulation around kind of AI and things like that, right? So, but a lot of it’s really more focused on outbound where people are, know, tech can figure out how to call everybody in America like within the next 15 minutes, right? So a lot of it is more outbound type stuff, but inbound, you know, I’m not aware of, you know, I’m not an attorney or I’m not aware of anything that’s going on there to prevent that from happening because people obviously reached out to you. They effectively

Jon Nolen (10:12.874)
Mm-hmm.

Jon Nolen (10:21.738)
it

Mike Hambright (10:28.474)
kind of raise our hand and opt it in, right?

Jon Nolen (10:30.801)
Right. And there’s still a lot of AI that’s going to be implemented for follow up with people. there is, like you mentioned, there’s a lot of stuff going into that on whether you’re allowed to or not. But yeah, a lot of people aren’t focusing on inbound, but we’re investing heavily in inbound as well as some other aspects in AI. wouldn’t it be nice when somebody calls to just know what data points?

Whether they’re on your mail list or not, wouldn’t it be cool to know what data points they have, what pain points they have right off the bat that can kind of help guide that conversation and then add in AI on top of that, being able to the AI agent being able to direct the conversation towards those pain points can be a game changer for people.

Mike Hambright (11:03.821)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Hambright (11:18.296)
Yeah, for most of the AI stuff, John, do you see that being around communications, like follow-up, maybe lead intake, mean lead intake and things like that. It’s more around the communication side and not, you know, other parts of the business, I guess.

Jon Nolen (11:34.901)
For the most part right now, I think that’s where it is. I think more more AI will get into data. I know there’s some providers that say they’re using AI for it. Whether they are or not, I don’t know, or how far they’re going on it. But I’m sure it will come into play more in other areas. imagine where a single operator who has their investing business can have AI agents doing all their follow-up, their lead intake.

looking at the photos through the program and saying, OK, this is most likely what your rehab scope needs to be. And based on your last 10 flips and the optimization of those, how much it’s going to cost you. I mean, just being able do it like that. It’s pretty freaking cool.

Mike Hambright (12:22.508)
Yeah, are you familiar with anything like that? Is that on the roadmap? mean, how far out is that? Are you playing with that stuff? Like looking at pictures and determining rehab budgets? A few months out. That’s incredible.

Jon Nolen (12:31.901)
We’re at least a few months out, but yeah, that’s something that we’re working on actively.

Jon Nolen (12:38.408)
Yeah, we’ll go into beta first, of course, but yeah, we’re really excited about it. Really, really excited about it. We have a couple of developers that are being dedicated to it.

Mike Hambright (12:48.204)
Yeah. So what, anything else on the tech front that you kind of see coming, maybe even outside of kind of AI, that’s even possible, but other things that are kind of coming along to help real estate investors either be more efficient or, you know, help improve their business.

Jon Nolen (13:06.258)
I think getting tools consolidated, you know, when people are jumping between different systems, things fall through the cracks. And I think in tech getting more and more, whether it’s a single platform that has all those functionalities like Pete, or just getting tighter integration between other platforms, I think is going to be another big, big step for tech.

Mike Hambright (13:27.33)
Yeah. So what do you, as an active real estate investor, you guys have done a lot of deals up in Oklahoma City. Like what impact do you see technology having on making the market, in some ways it’s making the market more efficient, right? Which basically puts pressure on, you know, as many real estate investors. maybe there’s some that…

Jon Nolen (13:40.936)
People are able to do more virtually. I think that’s the biggest thing. We saw that kickoff. Obviously people were doing virtual before COVID, but COVID really put that into fruition with people.

Mike Hambright (13:48.492)
haven’t adopted tech and they’re the ones that get left out. what I guess is happening with the real estate investing business overall as kind of tech emerges with it?

Jon Nolen (14:10.811)
And tech just keeps getting better and better. So people are able to do more and more virtually and not have to be there to do it. mean, I know people that, you know, get 3d virtual tours of houses and they’re in a different state. and they are able to do it pretty quick. So I think that’s the biggest thing other than that. just getting more and more on our phones instead of relying on computers, more and more things are going there.

Mike Hambright (14:38.03)
Yeah. Yeah, that’s awesome. So, John, how’s your real estate investing business? Tell us a little bit about what’s going on with that up in Oklahoma City.

Jon Nolen (14:48.315)
It’s doing well. We haven’t added a rental in a little while just because ARVs went up in Oklahoma City over the last few years and rents went up a little bit, but not as much commensurate. We’ll add more at some point. So we’ve mainly been flipping. I think we did 10 or 12 wholesales last year and 38 flips. This year we’re on pace for 50. Now the key is we’re staying below the median most of the time.

Mike Hambright (15:16.109)
Yeah.

Jon Nolen (15:16.264)
Anytime we go above the median price for our, um, MSA, our days on market goes up, our profit margin goes down. Um, but we’re doing really good and Oakland city is a very low, uh, cost area. Our, um, I haven’t looked in a few weeks, maybe a month, our, um, average was like two 60, two 70, uh, for the median price. So, you know, if we’re getting a house for, uh,

for sale that’s under 250 or under, they’re going under contract for us most of the time in a week to two weeks. So it’s not what people are seeing all the way across the country. I know that. I know people here in Oakland City that are having issues, but we would just focus on getting in, doing what we need to do, not over rehabbing. You’ve seen it, I don’t know how many times, I’m sure, where people go in, they over rehab, they spend 10, 15, 20 grand more than they needed to on the rehab, and that ends up being what their profit would have been.

Mike Hambright (15:52.238)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (16:15.862)
Right. Yeah, I think the key is, I every market’s different, you’re in, know, one of the markets is still relatively affordable. So you’re attracting people that are moving out of like unaffordable markets. yeah, keeping it below the median price point in a market where it is still the most affordable housing. I mean, you have the widest part of the funnel in terms of like how many prospects could buy that, right? You start to go over the median price point and your potential customers, especially

with rates where they are now just starts to diminish pretty fast, right?

Jon Nolen (16:49.867)
Yeah, we’re seeing over the last year, we’ve seen more people ask for closing costs again and whatnot, which we negotiate with them. But generally, we end up going above asking on those to help compensate for it. I’ve never been one that gets hung up on the gross numbers. I want to know the net. What am I actually going to make?

I mean, don’t, you you can, I’ll give you a 10 % in closing costs. you increase the price of the house by whatever the, it would be like 13 % to make it commensurate. That’s what I care about.

Mike Hambright (17:21.494)
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s all that that’s all that matters ultimately. But of course you got to make sure you’re buying with with all that stuff in mind. Right. And sometimes if you have inventory that you paid a little bit too much for, you just start to learn, OK, we need to buy these deeper because now we’re paying, you know, we’re paying we have to essentially our costs are higher because we’re paying closing costs or things like that. That was pretty common. Oh, wait to, you know, 2011, 2012, something like that as well.

Jon Nolen (17:48.706)
Yep. And it’s a constant wheel. We’re always going back and checking. Our acquisition manager is good about going back and after the flips are completed, going back and looking to see where he estimated on the rehab versus where we ended up.

And not just the dollar amounts, but the line items, you know, did he have in there that we were going to replace the foreign throughout the whole house? And we ended up only replacing it in half the house. Okay. Well now he knows he can adjust as needed. having that constant wheel of feedback is, very instrumental as well.

Mike Hambright (18:21.922)
Yeah. Do you guys put, I don’t know if you, if you do this or not inside of Pete, I’m familiar with your, your CRM called Pete that we’ll, we’ve been talking about a little bit here is do you, do you put actual expenses in there for your rehabs? I mean, I know, you know, for all the houses we’ve rehabbed, we would have the, the estimate on the, for the acquisition in our CRM.

but we would have the actual costs are stuck in QuickBooks. And so it makes it a lot harder, certainly for an acquisitions person, because they don’t have access to QuickBooks, to go back and see how far off were you or how close were your estimates. But are you guys doing that inside of Pete?

Jon Nolen (19:00.6)
We don’t go line item by line item, but we do track the overall cost of the rehab and other costs associated. And then our project manager is able to put in kind of a

version of the scope that’s line-itemed and put estimates on how much things work. We use crews that will do multiple items. So we don’t get down to the exact, the drywall cost this amount versus other, but we get it pretty close. And we see that in beat.

Mike Hambright (19:24.833)
Right, sure.

Yeah, as long as you have what and even if you don’t have that information, if you get in the habit of having your acquisitions team go back and say you estimated this and you were off, but what were what were you off the most? Like what were the big items that you missed or or that you either overestimated on or typically underestimated? But just to be able to kind of compare that, it’s a great it’s a great practice to get into.

Jon Nolen (19:50.064)
They both can, yeah, because they can both hurt you. mean, if they’re overestimating on rehab numbers, then you’re losing out on deals likely because you’re coming in too low. And that’s something, I mean, it frustrates our acquisition guy sometimes. And he understands it, but it’s still frustrating when he loses a deal over, you know, five grand. But it’s like, we’re already at our max and we’re not going to let our margins go too low. Because if there is a correction, we don’t want to get caught with our pants down.

Mike Hambright (20:17.686)
Yeah, no, for sure. Yeah, you got to stay on the safe side too. And the good thing is if you’re staying below the price point in your market, especially in Oklahoma City, like, you you could turn it into a rental. They may not be the greatest rentals that you have, but it’s not like you’ve got something that’s 2X the median price point that’s going to be a terrible rental. Yeah. Yeah.

Jon Nolen (20:36.343)
Right. Yep, exactly.

Mike Hambright (20:40.054)
So John, if folks want to learn more about you, they want to more about Pete, which is your software, maybe just take a moment and tell us about what Pete is and how they can learn more.

Jon Nolen (20:49.836)
Okay. Pete is an software for real estate investors. Starts with CRM, but it takes it all the way through the lifecycle of the property. rather than just focusing on the seller, you know, the customer, everything’s focused around the property. So you can estimate your rehabs, you can manage your rehabs, keep all your files, your e-signature has embedded phone system, really trying to bring everything into one place. So once the lead comes in, you’re not having to jump around.

Makes a lot easier when you’re training people as well, because they can just focus on one software, not seven or eight. If you want to learn more about it, can go to our websites, thepeat.io, or they can check me out on Facebook or Instagram. I’m the flipping IT guy.

Mike Hambright (21:24.739)
Yeah.

Mike Hambright (21:36.214)
Yeah, cool, and we can see you getting out of a cold shower and stuff like that. Yeah, awesome, John. Well, hey, thanks for spending some time with us today. Always good to see you, buddy.

Jon Nolen (21:39.737)
Yep, occasionally, yes, there are.

Jon Nolen (21:46.455)
I appreciate it Mike, you have a good one.

Mike Hambright (21:50.914)
Have a good day. Everybody. Hey, thanks. You guys. Hopefully you got some good information from today. If you have problems in your business, like there’s software solutions out there. So check out Pete, check out some other tools that make your life easier. If you’re, if you are avoiding technology, you’re going to get left in the dust. So don’t, don’t be that guy or that woman. That’s like just thinks that this is some sort of fad that you’re going to go back to using spreadsheets soon and just whiteboards and stuff like that. It’s not going to happen. So make sure you’re following us along here and we’ll try to.

Jon Nolen (21:51.78)
You took.

Mike Hambright (22:21.141)
keep you on the top of the technology curve. So hope you guys had a good day today. We’ll see you on the next episode.