From UX Design to Real Estate: An Inspiring Journey

Dylan Silver (00:00.686)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. Today on the show, have Kristie DeLouise. Kristie is a real estate investor entrepreneur, co-founder of JMKD Ventures, and head of Dispo and User Experience for Luxmore Properties. Kristie, welcome to the show.

Kristie (00:18.985)
Hello there Dylan, I am so excited to be here today. Thank you for having me.

Dylan Silver (00:22.998)
I’m jealous that you’re in South Florida.

Kristie (00:26.633)
You should be. I would have said the same thing to myself two years ago, because that’s when we moved down here. So I get it. I get it. But at least you’re in Texas. That’s still pretty cool.

Dylan Silver (00:28.546)
Ha ha ha ha!

Dylan Silver (00:43.072)
At least I am in Texas, that’s right. Do you feel like the biggest benefit of South Florida is just the vibe in general? Or is it a conglomeration of things and the vibe is ancillary?

Kristie (00:54.453)
Man, I mean the vibe I think honestly the vibe is just ancillary It’s just the people are awesome. The events are you know far like above par the The real estate I mean you can’t beat the real estate down here, too. That’s one of the reasons we came down so

Dylan Silver (01:16.542)
I I had the experience Kristie of being in Fort Lauderdale coming back on a flight from Santo Domingo and Just walking around It’s like mid-march. It was freezing in it early than that It was February’s freezing in Denton, Texas, which is DFW area. We had just had like tornado warnings It was crazy. And so I’m coming back and I’m in Fort Lauderdale beautiful This is months ago and I’m like, this is the nicest place that I’ve been to in this cut. Everyone’s happy

Kristie (01:22.858)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (01:45.28)
I’m like, man, so that decided I’m moving to South Florida at some point. But I digress, Kristie. Let’s talk about how you got into the real estate space.

Kristie (01:52.085)
I

Kristie (01:57.587)
Yeah, so.

kind of interesting. It’s a little bit unconventional, but maybe more conventional these days. my background is in user experience design, otherwise known as UX. And I had worked for JP Morgan in corporate for about 10 years. I went to Parsons School of Design. So classically trained in all sorts of like digital design. And for those who don’t know what UX is, it’s essentially kind of like the psychology of how humans interact with digital products.

It doesn’t necessarily need to be digital products, but in my sense, it was. So when you go on Facebook or Instagram, it’s kind of when they change a button or a layout on you, they’re not just doing that to annoy you. They’re doing it to test if they’re able to help customers achieve their goals easier, so complete an action easier.

help the business essentially succeed in some sort of initiative or revenue growth activity or something. So I would help on the strategy side of that to help grow credit card shopping experiences.

Dylan Silver (03:07.128)
So.

Dylan Silver (03:10.584)
wish I had your foresight here, Chris D, when I was in school. So you went to a design school. Did you know at that point that it was gonna be, your future was gonna be in UX? Did you know from the gate? Or was it, have this passion, I like, you know, kind of the architecture of the digital world, if you will, and I see that this is a passion of mine. Or was it very open-ended for you when you first got to school?

Kristie (03:13.439)
Yeah.

Kristie (03:37.917)
Yeah, I think it was more open ended. I was somebody that was always interested in multi multiple areas of, you know, even any career. So I knew that art was my passion. So I was I had a background in fine arts, doing photorealistic painting and drawing. And I was like, well, you’re not going to make money on this in this world, at least. So what can I do to take that into and monetize it? So then I found the digital

Dylan Silver (03:59.843)
Wow.

Kristie (04:07.465)
digital world, this kind of crazy product.

combined with science, combined with research, and I fell in love and I knew that that was gonna be the direction that I would go. But I think that my interest in other multifaceted areas or multifunctional areas even came through in my thesis. I remember creating something called PEN. It was the professional exchange network. the goal was really to have people of different walks of life, like different careers or professions, go and swap places with other people in other professions.

so that they could kind of get a taste of what that other person would do. And I am a true believer that when you take somebody in a different discipline and you bring them into another one, they can absolutely add value too. They can look at it differently.

Dylan Silver (04:56.086)
I’m absolutely on the same page with you. think you probably feel this to your core as I do that as real estate entrepreneurs, you’re problem solvers, but you also have to have this intellectual real estate neuroplasticity. Like you can’t be so locked into what you’re doing today that if you’re if Airbnb is no longer allowed in your wherever you are that you’re up a creek without a paddle, right? You have to be able to adapt. And it’s hard for some people. It’s hard when you

Kristie (05:10.805)
Yeah.

Kristie (05:22.206)
right.

Dylan Silver (05:25.582)
Let’s say you love doing fix and flips and the margins are getting slimmer and you love interacting with your crew. I even tell this to people, I learned Spanish so that I can interact in large part with contractors and so on and so forth. then when I’m, yeah.

Kristie (05:34.899)
Wow.

Cool.

Kristie (05:42.677)
Oh my god! Goal! Goals, man!

Dylan Silver (05:47.438)
There’s a lot of Spanish out there, yeah?

Kristie (05:49.653)
Oh, my god, yes, it would be a huge advantage to you for sure. So so lots of houses that way.

Dylan Silver (05:56.824)
So yeah, for me, when I started seeing less and less fix and flips, I had to realize that there has to be a new way for people to make money in real estate. And I’m seeing a lot of people who were doing high volume and fix and flipping go into other strategies, whether that’s new builds.

which is great, but then you need to find the land, the vacant land, or it’s note buying, hard money lending, so on and so forth. And so going in to your education as someone who had a passion, enthusiasm for art, and you’re talking about, know, it sounds like heavy, art.

before it was digital, right? So you weren’t like all in on digital, you just, very passionate about it. But you knew, as much as I love this, and you probably saw this, Kristy, there were probably people who were so in love with the actual artwork, like hand to tablet or pen to paper, that they had a difficult time transitioning into like the quote unquote business side of it.

Kristie (06:38.121)
that.

Kristie (06:52.723)
Mm-hmm.

Kristie (06:58.265)
absolutely. Yeah, I think that…

It’s interesting because I did have a love for the pen to paper and the artwork. But once I went into more of the UX world, I was more interested in how you achieve large scale projects and how you get them done and what are the customers needs that we need to actually build that are the non-negotiables in those products and how do we advocate for those customers. So it did flip a little bit. And then in that, you definitely need to

to understand, well, what are the businesses needs in this too? Like what is the business trying to achieve and what are they trying to get out of it? And then how do we balance those needs with the customer’s needs? And sometimes they’re not the same. Sometimes they’re at the odd. So the UX person is the person who comes in and says, well, hey, I understand you’re trying to grow your revenue and get your credit card account growth much higher.

but you might also be doing that by throwing ads in people’s faces. Okay, you’re gonna increase your click rate, but you’re going to piss off a lot of customers and then you’re gonna get a lot of abandonment. are you looking to really…

put it in front of everybody or can we put it in front of a specialized segment, a group of people that are going to be appreciative of that? then we like, how do we also talk to them? How do we let them know that we think that this is the right product for them? Not just look at this, Chase has this.

Kristie (08:34.719)
big flashy, know, brand awareness. This is not that this is, well, hey, we see that you are making some purchases towards your sense of Domingo trip. Can we get you a travel card that you can earn X points back for this trip? Right? And, right. And is that creepy or is it not? So there’s multiple levels of research that needs to go into that.

Dylan Silver (08:53.389)
I would love that.

Dylan Silver (09:00.214)
At this point, everyone has foregone their privacy in the name of free utility of these services, right? Everyone’s just aware that our phones are listening to us. One of the questions that I have in hearing you talk about this, haven’t had any, I don’t think I’ve spoken with anybody who has your background ever. And so when I hear about UX and I’m thinking about this, is this a thing where more and more you’re seeing

Kristie (09:07.849)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (09:28.056)
people who are in that field who have a development background as well as far as interfacing with, you’re talking about like web development. Do they have a type of software engineering acumen or is that an entirely different role?

Kristie (09:42.587)
No, I would say that you have to have you have to be well versed in both or at least know how to speak the language. I’m not going to go and code a full backend system. mean, I work with people and engineers that build everything, but you have to understand somewhat how the how the sausage is made in order to say.

like understand dependencies or what technologically cannot be achieved because you don’t want to go and scope out this big project where you have to throw, like we always say build the right thing first instead of build it, sorry, what is the terminology?

Dylan Silver (10:26.818)
build it first, not build it fast, or something along those lines.

Kristie (10:29.331)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. It’s build it right first, not build it right fast. So you really wanna understand the sentiment and then based on that, understand the sentiment, understand what’s achievable, de-risk yourself, and then from there build. It’s okay if it takes it a little bit longer because you’re not spending all this money to get it done and then build it again. You’re learning as you go.

Dylan Silver (10:53.88)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (10:58.134)
I’m a… I’m-

Kristie (10:58.365)
And also failure is a great thing in this process. Like failure and learning. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (11:03.0)
have so-

have so many thoughts about how tracking and being able to design interfaces with specifically the advancement of technology in the real estate space. The biggest one that comes to mind for me is Airbnb. mean, Airbnb, their user experience is unbelievable. Like, no one is a close second. And the way that they do it from…

booking to then you’re you’re engaging with the host to then adjustments to then you can see it’s just utterly incredible what they’ve done and I’ve traveled Airbnb is in like every country practically it’s it’s global people are unaware of and so you know you you have being in the being in the space you have to see these trends and you have to say okay well this is clearly the work of not just a great business model but also great UX.

Kristie (11:46.665)
Yeah, it’s ubiquitous.

Kristie (12:02.613)
correct. Yeah, I mean, t seat at the table. I reme and think that they had the head of Airbnb. I’m had some meetings that that conversation. Unfortuna meetings just eclipse absolutely lauded for the done and understanding how shopping, know, shop

Dylan Silver (12:22.03)
Yeah.

Kristie (12:32.597)
is to stay by segmenting them by different types, prioritizing different.

Prices of places, allowing you to save different lists based on when you’re going. So there’s a lot of different features that Airbnb has definitely considered. And I think that real estate really should start moving towards. And absolutely in my business, I am prioritizing as well, right? Innovation, technology, processes, systems.

Yeah, all of this needs and then the customer experience needs to all be accounted for.

Dylan Silver (13:14.062)
So super unique background, but super beneficial, especially in the, I think there’s probably not too many, although you may know a lot of them. There’s not too many real estate entrepreneurs that I know that have your specific background. And most of the time people are.

Kristie (13:29.275)
I don’t know many.

Dylan Silver (13:30.932)
Yeah, people are finding the partners. Hey, how do I find someone who can help me design this specific piece of what I’m doing? I had someone recently ask me about like pixel tracking and probably that has a lot of overlap with that field. So you get out of school, you decide, hey, this is something that I’m passionate about. I can make a living doing this. Where did real estate come into play? How did you decide I want to be a real estate entrepreneur?

Kristie (13:58.463)
So real estate came quite a bit of time later. I was with JP Morgan for about 10 years and loved the job. During the pandemic, I was working remote. So I was working remote for about four years or five years at that point. And essentially, John, my husband, he is my business partner as well. He wound up losing his job during the pandemic. He was in healthcare and x-ray.

tech and I was working remote so we wound up you know coming down to Florida a little bit and I was like like you well how do I make this a reality and we were living in New York so what a stark difference it was from you know literally we look at New York because both of our parents still live there and we facetime them and we’re like it’s gray it’s literally gray

Dylan Silver (14:38.702)
you

Dylan Silver (14:50.954)
It is literally gray.

Kristie (14:53.513)
Yeah, there’s no palm trees. There’s no beauty. No, no sun. So we were like, how do we make this a reality? And at that point I started looking into, know, YouTube started serving me up all the things because it knew that I was searching and it wound up serving me up. Peace Morby.

who I’m sure most people know, but if they don’t know, he is the king of subject to transactions. subject to has been around for years. It’s not something that’s new, but he really commoditized it and brought it to the forefront, especially with these high interest rates and the need for investors to be able to cashflow because nothing’s penciling out anymore. So he attracted me because I was like, well, interesting.

I could look for a property and only come into it with, you know, $20,000, $30,000 down and not have to deal with a bank. And it can be basically turnkey. I don’t have to worry about flipping or renovation, which I have no idea about. Like I was coming in as basically a real estate state baby. I knew nothing. We were living in my mom’s basement apartment, so I had not experienced home ownership. So at that point we were like, well,

let’s get something where we can rent it out down in South Florida and we can go visit it whenever we want. So we wound up getting a, we use some agents. We learned that in South Florida it is actually much harder to do any sort of creative financing. Just because there’s higher equity, sellers are a little bit less motivated because there’s still an influx of people coming in. So the demand’s high. Days on market are pretty normal.

Dylan Silver (16:27.842)
Hmm.

Kristie (16:42.101)
especially at that time. I mean, it was 2023. So we’re coming down from the 2022 heyday. But you know, things were still moving. So seller finance, if we really wanted to get into something or subject to was not yet, it was not really an option. So we wound up going traditional, and we got a condo right outside of FAU, Florida Atlantic University. And our strategy was to rent to two college students. Now,

Dylan Silver (16:48.91)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (16:56.184)
was difficult.

Kristie (17:09.673)
That was our strategy that did not happen until a year later because we decided to move into it because we were so compelled to be here. So that is how we became Floridians and that is how we actually got into real estate. From there, John, you know, he was not employed by the hospital anymore. essentially I was, I kind of pushed him to go on in on real estate. said, you have a

Dylan Silver (17:18.349)
Yeah.

Kristie (17:39.765)
Huge background in public speaking, in social media. He had also run for Congress right after he lost his job. No small feat going from, yeah, I know, healthcare worker to US federal Congress politician, and then down to South Florida into real estate. So our story is,

Dylan Silver (18:00.11)
you

Kristie (18:06.533)
Once again, multifaceted, multidisciplinary, multidimensional, entrepreneurial. So yeah, I pushed him into real estate and I said, I think you’re really going to be good in this space. We wound up going to one of the meetups, which was, you know, hosted by one of the sub two South Florida, pace Morbid community members. And we wound up just hitting it off super, super well with this team owned by Luxmore properties.

And from there, John wound up talking to them. started, you know, they trained him a little bit in acquisitions and he just kind of hit the ground running. He was awesome. He started talking to sellers. He’s actually created an innovative contract, which changes the game a little bit. It allows us to have 90 days, marketing the deal, co-marketing the deal with the agent. So it is, it’s pretty game changing. It allows us to have.

the ability to wholesale about seven, I’d say probably 80 % of our deals that we get in-house are able to close just because of that longer time period. And he also creates.

Dylan Silver (19:17.196)
Now when you say marketing it with the agent, what agent are you referring to? Are you referring to something that’s listed on the MLS?

Kristie (19:24.081)
Yeah, so the deals that we target are usually direct to agent. So they do have an agent involved. It is on the MLS and we’re going to the agent and saying, hey, we believe that your seller might be benefiting from a subject to transaction. We said there’s a low, low equity in the deal. They might be motivated. There’s higher days on market. Do you think this would be a good fit for your client? And we work with the agents to

obviously pay out their commission, we pay out the seller their equity, and then we’re very transparent in the fact that we’re gonna be wholesaling it and finding a buyer. We are not the end buyer. We are going to be working on your behalf to chop those terms and assign them.

Dylan Silver (20:10.252)
Yeah, that’s huge. think traditionally a lot of people were going in and this is kind of where wholesalers got a bad rap. There’s a rooster over here on the ranch. don’t know if our listeners can hear this.

Kristie (20:17.171)
Yeah. I do here and it’s pretty funny. I love it though.

Dylan Silver (20:25.282)
The issue that a lot of real estate agents have and had with wholesalers is that people were coming in and still doing it and saying that they’re the end buyer. This gets tricky though because real estate agents themselves are held to a higher standard, this ethical standard where they can’t engage in that type of gamesmanship. It would be a deceptive trade practice for them to say that they’re the buyer and then to assign it with the full intent from the beginning to assign it and never to be the buyer.

that you guys are upfront about that differentiates yourself substantially and having a unique strategy where it’s not you know you don’t just have three or five days or two weeks to dispo it really helps you guys out too.

Kristie (20:58.345)
Yes.

Kristie (21:07.901)
absolutely. And that’s why we’re able to find buyers that are not just investor buyers, but we occasionally come across a homestead buyer tip or two as well.

So I think that it really does game change the industry and we’re highly committed to ethical quality processes and practices. It’s something that we also wanna help educate and instill other investors. So John does a lot of trainings for other partners. We do a lot of JV work now, joint venture work and co-hostsailing with partners. So we have people bringing us leads, bringing us deals. John is an awesome closer. So they’ll bring him in to help

Dylan Silver (21:20.728)
So.

Kristie (21:50.183)
pitch it to the agent if they need help and he’ll train them and then it’ll go on our option contract and I will go and dispo it and I’ll find a buyer for it. So that’s my specialty.

Dylan Silver (22:00.076)
So what’s the, and we could probably dive into a whole other podcast about this specifically, because I’m a wholesaler passionate about it. What are the lists or the avatar of people that you’re…

Kristie (22:06.536)
I’m sure.

Dylan Silver (22:16.077)
targeting for for acquisitions? Is it a distress list of some kind? It’s South Florida, so I’m not sure what type of distress these properties may be in. And so is is there an avatar or is it very much you’re able to be very flexible and a lot of these deals come to you? How do you come across these these acquisitions?

Kristie (22:35.497)
I would say definitely a lot more inbounds these days from the JV partners are coming in, which is awesome. Just because they know that we’re going to be super helpful in the process and transparent and teach them a new way of doing things. So that that’s great that we’ve had the generation come in. I would say additionally in terms of avatar acquisitions wise, that is not necessarily my area per se.

I’m more on the Dispo side, you have to once again consider your customer as you’re looking for deals. So who are the people that are going to be buying these things? These are investors. These are people who want cash flow right away. So a turnkey home with low repair value or low repair amount is going to be key. You want a deal where you’re able to create about 10 % entry in the purchase price. So if the purchase price is $100,000, you want to

Dylan Silver (23:02.862)
Sure.

Dylan Silver (23:10.531)
Yeah.

Kristie (23:32.359)
keep the down payment right around $10,000 for people to be comfortable, meaning that, well, you have to have an assignment fee built in there too. So you have to offer the seller and the agent less. So really the target is more equity. I’ve seen a lot more buyers come in, especially in this economic shift where I think there’s a little bit of a slowdown. We’re looking at potentially getting into a recession. People want more equity in their deals, which is kind of contradictory to sub two because a lot.

Dylan Silver (24:02.019)
Yeah.

Kristie (24:02.303)
of what you’re looking for is low equity lists and people that are maybe higher on market, higher days on market. And then you might also have different types of

situations, maybe it’s distress, maybe there are divorces going on, maybe it’s a VA being redeployed or they need to move for some reason. So I think that there’s a few different criteria that you can look for in order to shop for these deals to make them attractive for your end user, which is the buyer.

Dylan Silver (24:37.4)
For me, and I’m in DFW, mean, we’ve door-knocked. When I was living in San Antonio for five years, we did a lot of calling on various lists. Tired Landlord was one that we had. High Days on Market. In Denton County, we have the Roddy Report, which is like the foreclosure report. So there’s lots of different ways. But being on the Dispo side, and again, Kristy, we could really dive into this on a whole podcast here, but being on the Dispo side,

Kristie (24:49.545)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (25:07.244)
What’s your strategy been as far as disbowing these deals? It’s different for every deal, right? You’re gonna have a different buy box for every investor that you work with. But I’m imagining that as you’re finding the deals, you’re of course having to build your buyer’s list as well. so, especially for someone who, this wasn’t your initial career, right? You,

Kristie (25:23.593)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (25:31.296)
you you really stumbled upon it right that might not be the exact right verbiage but you know this is this was newer to you so how did you develop the the Dispo Acumen?

Kristie (25:34.165)
Absolutely.

Kristie (25:41.429)
Yeah, I mean, once again, it comes back to delivering good quality service and well understanding the product of what you have. So understanding subject to understanding what people are looking for and just starting to put it out there. think Facebook is one of the main places that the community of buyers exists. So leaning into that, starting to talk to people and network from there. I also think that communities of buyers are huge. So we have worked with

Rob Episolo before in his creative camp community trying to pitch to short-term rental buyers. We have Lame Kenikini who has a community. I work to bring him a lot of deals. So different types of niches. I would also say identifying a deal that might be what…

Dylan Silver (26:15.918)
Yeah.

Kristie (26:38.557)
a newer interest is identifying deals that have criteria that fit newer interests as well. So short term rental is one. Co-living is also a huge one. And that’s a model built and popularized by pad split where people are renting out different rooms and they need to create different types of structures in the property. So they need to create maybe common space. They need to add in furniture and furnishings. They also need the house to

have more than three bedrooms, usually around two bathrooms, over 1,500 square feet is the criteria. And so we have a lot of buyers looking for those types of deals. So thus we target those types of deals as well. So knowing the buyer for that and then being able to match them to deal is important as well.

Dylan Silver (27:29.528)
Yeah, the pad split is so interesting. I heard about this about two months ago and hearing about this idea that you have this home, you can make additional bedrooms out of the home. You can have multiple people living there. They’re, you know, professionals in their field. And it’s like doubling or tripling. Even the Airbnb profits was unbelievable to me. I looked this up to see if it was real afterwards. I was like, man, this is incredible going on all over the place. And people are, like you mentioned, Christie, specifically buying these properties with

Kristie (27:52.234)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (27:59.434)
the intent of turning them into a pad split. Really incredible stuff. We are coming up on time here. Kristie, where can folks go to get a hold of you?

Kristie (28:02.357)
Thank

Kristie (28:07.667)
Yeah, absolutely. So my name is

Kristie DeLouise

You can reach me on Instagram at Kate Eloise.

you know, at K D E L O U I S E. You could also find me at k.louise.gmail.com. Reach out to me for any sort of subject to deals, owner finance, if you need help closing, if you need help dispelling, we’re happy to do either. We’re looking to break into the cash space as well. that is something to come on the horizon as well.

I would say also if you want to do any sort of partnership with us, we’re looking 100 % for strategic partners to grow out our operations in terms of, you know, buyers and sellers as well.

Dylan Silver (29:03.384)
Kristie, thank you so much for coming on the show. Go ahead.

Kristie (29:04.357)
And then, how could I forget? And then of course, there is a huge marketplace of deals that we have designed at luxmoordeals.com. So if you want to see my inventory of deals, check out those deals through Luxmoor Properties at luxmoordeals.com.

Dylan Silver (29:21.486)
Visit LUXMore.com.

Kristie (29:24.053)
yes, LuxmoreDeals.com and then you’ll be able to see all the creative deals that we have and then you can reach out to me on any of those platforms and yeah hope to talk to people then.

Dylan Silver (29:38.008)
Yeah, absolutely. Kristy, thank you so much for coming on the show, for giving us some value. Learned about UX, learned about Dispo in South Florida. So thank you so much for your time today.

Kristie (29:48.453)
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Dylan.