Innovate Your Home Sale: How HomePie Transforms the Real Estate Game

Michael Stansbury (00:00.748)
Hello everybody and welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I have all the way from California, Mr. Brad Rice. Brad, how are you today, sir?

Brad (00:13.22)
I’m doing great, Michael.

Michael Stansbury (00:15.054)
Well, awesome. Well, we’re excited to have you on the Real Estate Pros podcast. But before we get started, we have to pay the bills. Guys, at Investor Fuel, the sponsor of the Real Estate Pros podcast, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs, 2 to 5X their businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted and to allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of.

Brad Rice, let’s get into the origins story. Now I’ve got a lot, I’ve got your bio here, but I want to know how did you get started in real estate? When did that, when did the whole, you know, go down the yellow brick road of real estate entrepreneurship happen in your life?

Brad (00:52.282)
Yeah, Michael, look, thanks for having me today. Appreciate it. was looking forward to this call with you. You know, I started in real estate right out of college. Believe it or not, it was 1993.

So I grew up kind of around real estate. My dad was an architect, a general contractor and a developer. So I would go to him to job sites and they were big buildings and that sort of thing. And I kind of got a little bit of a bug on that. But when I was going through college, you know, trying to figure it out along with having fun, you know, I was exposed to just a few different things that were going on in real estate in California, Southern California, in the San Fernando Valley specifically, there was a real estate

agency that was growing like weeds. mean literally where they were opening an office on almost every corner and it was called Mike Glickman Realty and I’d see these signs everywhere and it was really interesting and when I heard he was speaking at a local college I was like shoot I’m gonna go check this out. Turned out it was not only him but Arnold Schwarzenegger and a few others that were there talking about real estate and it dawned on me as I was going through college I went to this event I’m like shoot it

It seems that no matter where you earn your money, somehow it winds up invested in real estate if you’re making money. Why don’t I just cut out the middleman and I’ll just get into real estate? And so that’s how it happened. I didn’t really know anything as far as what vertical and real estate at the time, but I was toward the tail end of my college career and I was getting married, buying a house and getting a loan. And there was a loan broker across the desk from me taking our loan application. I thought this is interesting.

So I wound up spending a day with her and fell in love with that business and that’s how I got in the mortgage business. So I started really early on. I was an originator. I became a top originator that led to starting a company in 1999 that grew to a national lender. We were doing everything. It was a big company, not quite as big as Countrywide at the time, but we held our own and then fell victim to 2007, 2008 like many of my colleagues. But that’s how I started. It was really just kind

Brad (03:03.729)
hands on buying a house and saying, hey, this is something I’m interested in.

Michael Stansbury (03:08.718)
That was interesting and it’s really good for our listeners to hear that because so many people just listen and then they watch and they don’t take any action. It seems like what you did is you saw something, you went to an event but you also took that extra step of like I need to find out more but I also need to take action in this area and find out if this is for me. I love it, it makes me happy that you, what were you going to college for? What was the degree in?

Brad (03:32.976)
You know, was really prior to that. was just general education. And then I realized that they had in the finance major. So I declared a major finance. They had a minor in real estate. Very unique. I went to San Diego State to begin with. I finished up at Cal State Northridge and that was where they had this real estate minor. And so that’s what I chose. And it was an imperfect system because I graduated with a lot of knowledge, but I was

actually one credit shy of getting my broker’s license. So I could get a real estate license but the broker’s license you know gives you the ability to own a company and that sort of thing and so I wound up doing a corresponding course that took that class and then got my broker’s license. So I never held just a regular real estate license I always had my broker’s license. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (04:21.87)
How about that? You just skipped right to the top. I love it. Yeah. So now today in 2025, you had this career as a loan originator and in between 2008 and 2025, what did that world look like and then where are we are today? I can’t wait to get into a little bit about what you’re doing in technology and real estate, but what did those years look like?

Brad (04:44.505)
Yeah, look, 2007 was a rough, rough year for most people that were in real estate, especially in mortgage. mean, the blame for the entire collapse was really squarely on the shoulders of, at the time, they said mortgage brokers. Anybody that knew the business knew it wasn’t really them. We were just the patsy. Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (05:06.198)
Right? Hear what they pinned it on. Yes.

Brad (05:09.205)
Yeah, it was a time where Wall Street was heavily involved in mortgages and securitizing them and they were hungry. And so as the 2000s elapsed, as we got into 2005 and the subprime market and the expansion of the mortgage product is really what set the demise because we were flying high. Real estate prices were going up all the time because demand was high and we were expanding

the mortgage product and those that were around at the time can remember the 100 % financing and then you 100 % financing and you could have credit scores as low as 650 then you could have credit scores as low as 600 then you could have credit scores as low as 500 and you could have a bankruptcy yesterday and then you don’t have to declare your income you can call stated income or what we called Nina no income no assets it was ridiculous and I wasn’t smart enough to know how to

short the market, but I knew it was coming. And I won’t get into the stories about, you know, having meetings with these Wall Street guys and just saying, hey, what are you going to do when the market values don’t go up anymore? But they were just they were just making money hands over fist. And we were all following the lead because they weren’t buying any other product except for that. And so we fed them what they were hungry for. But it was it was a hard time. know, companies were closing left and right. Investors weren’t buying loans anymore.

more and there was almost no way to survive unless you had, unless you were sitting on just a lump of cash that you could burn through. So there were very, very few lenders that made it through that. When you’ve got a giant company like Countrywide that collapsed and their only savior was Bank of America coming in and acquiring them, you know that it was a rough business. you know, it is what it is. I wound up being on forced retirement for a couple of years cleaning up

the mess but you know then I ultimately got back in the business what can I say yeah

Michael Stansbury (07:13.43)
Yes sir. And so now we’re back and now we’re solving the problem of that dreaded sometimes and real estate agents have a I guess this is a cuss word in their lexicon but the for sale by owner. What are we doing to help these FISBO these people that want to sell their house by owner today?

Brad (07:35.012)
Well, let me start by saying, FISBO has been around for a long time, okay? Since real estate sales started, FISBO has been around. And interestingly, and people that know these statistics, approximately 10 % of the sales in the market,

every year are agentless sales. Okay. And this is published by NAR in their annual publication. And it varies based geographically on where there’s more and where there’s less. But if we just use that as an average percentage, 10%, that’s a pretty big beachhead market. In your normal year where you’ve got volume of about five and a half million, that’s a pretty big market just to be dabbling in those that don’t have agents. Now,

Within that there are other types of transactions For example, you know some builders they don’t pay a broker co-op. There is no agent They don’t you know, they report as agentless, but for the most part these are people that are you know, maybe they’re savvy maybe they just like doing everything DIY maybe they just don’t like spending money and and you know I talk about there’s two type of there’s two types of people in this world people that value their time more than money and they’re

and people that value their money more than time and you can guess which is the larger pool, right? People that value their money more than their time. They’re willing to invest some time to save money and so these folks have been around for a long time but

Michael Stansbury (08:59.052)
Right?

Brad (09:08.235)
When you start pulling back the covers as I did in 2018, I started to investigate like who are these people? Why are they selling it on their own? What’s their background? What’s their experience? How are they doing it? And what I learned is that the vast majority of them had a connection in real estate through somebody they knew. It was a close friend, it was a relative, it was a husband that was in real estate, it was somebody in escrow, it was a title person. There was somebody that was that kind of connective tissue that was there to guide them.

A lot of times, believe it or not, it was somebody in the mortgage business. Because a good mortgage originator knows the entire process and could guide just about anybody through that without using a real estate agent. Not everybody can, but there’s a lot of them that are very good. And so that was the thing that was pretty interesting to me. But what was more interesting is how they accomplished.

that process and typically they would grab paperwork online, they would download some templates or they would hire an attorney. Those were the two main focuses. So I thought about it and I was like, gosh, you know, why isn’t there an easier way? And what are the struggles that they have? One of the major struggles was marketing exposure for the property, you know, using Craigslist, you know, of course, you know, in the last two decades using Facebook marketplace, which if you’ve ever

look for homes on there like you search for a home and all of a sudden you see a baby carriage like it’s just not it’s not really designed for that there is no real like there’s some sites out there that you can post on that don’t really do anything and then there’s these MLS syndication sites where you can just go on and it just pushes you the MLS to me that seemed like the logical way to do it because when you’re in the MLS you get put into a feed that then puts you on all the major websites

Michael Stansbury (10:52.174)
you

Brad (11:02.321)
And that’s where you’re get the exposure. So those major websites obviously 98 % of people you know are going to Zillow first but they might some people might prefer Redfin or realtor.com or you know homes.com whatever their their preference is but Zillow is the 800 pound gorilla and so I thought God there’s got to be an easier way to get people exposed to that number one.

And then number two, the pain point of the negotiation. That was the second thing that people were like, I just don’t know. I’m not comfortable negotiating. It’s an awkward thing. You don’t want to sit down across the table from somebody and talk about it. You might miss some of the terms. You want to make sure you do it right. And so I said, okay, that is something we can solve for. So I designed a system that allowed somebody to operate in a marketplace that’s just for sale by owner. So if you go to our site, it’s

It’s called HomePie, H-O-M-E-P-I-E dot com. And you can do it from your mobile device or you can do it from the website. It’s mobile friendly. But you can do all the things you do on the major sites like Zillow. You can search, you can save, you can share, can browse, you can go through photos, you can read. All of that’s there. But.

Then you can communicate directly with the seller through instant chat in the platform. Now the benefit of that is a lot of sellers, you know, if they list their property, let’s say on Zillow and they put their phone number on there, they just get pounded with phone calls, right? Maybe from some of your audience, like, hey, I’ll buy your house. But a lot of its real estate agents that, yeah, but a lot of it’s real estate agents are trying to gain the listing. OK, and so it gets really tiresome for them to

Michael Stansbury (12:27.779)
Right?

Michael Stansbury (12:33.006)
Definitely. Yeah, want to list it. Yeah.

Michael Stansbury (12:40.462)
Alright.

Brad (12:43.833)
you know to get that all the phone calls and filter through them. So by having instant chat on the site they don’t have to put their phone number out there until they’re ready and they have somebody that registers on the site so they’re a real person and then they can have that communication. That communication then leads to an inspection to a visit. You know do they want to visit virtually or in person to view the property so the sellers can walk them out around virtually using you know either FaceTime or you know some service, Zoom, whatever it is or

Or they can go out to the property and take a look. But here’s the significant thing that we constructed that is really our standout technology and it’s our offer negotiation tool. So you’re familiar, probably your audience is familiar with this process when you use an agent of creating an offer.

That is a bit cumbersome, it’s archaic. They might use zip forms and DocuSign and all that, but still the agent has to go in and fill out all the terms of the agreement, kind of review it with the buyer, and then send it to the buyer for electronic signature, hopefully. And then they have to get ahold of the listing agent and say, okay, how do you want to get this? And most of the time it’s email. And guess what? 50 % of the time,

Michael Stansbury (13:56.238)
you

Brad (13:57.996)
Email doesn’t get there or they say they can’t find it and you have to resend it and follow up. Did you get it? Yeah, all of that and in the market, it’s really robust and you have multiple offers. It’s like your offer gets lost in the shuffle. And then when the seller, when the listing agent gets it, they got to go to the seller, get a signature acknowledging receipt.

Michael Stansbury (14:02.196)
It’s in that spam box. Yeah. Yep. Right.

Michael Stansbury (14:11.629)
Right.

Brad (14:19.233)
and then fill out a separate counter offer, sign that, send it back over to the buyer’s agent. The buyer’s agent then goes to the buyer, gets it signed. So that whole process, it’s ridiculous. It goes back and forth. It takes days instead of hours or minutes. We digitize the entire thing. So the offer is done digitally. There’s a ledger that can be audited at any time, a digital ledger, but the offer is created with all the terms. It could be from a mobile device or your desktop.

you know how much you’re looking to offer, what’s your down payment if you’re getting a loan, are you paying all cash, upload your proof of funds, do what contingencies you want, do you want a contingency for appraisal, do you want one for inspection, do you need to sell your house before buying a house, all those same terms.

When they click the button to make the offer, the seller immediately gets a text and an email saying you’ve got an offer, congratulations. It’s also built for multiple offers. And they go in and they can then accept, decline each of those terms. That process goes back and forth till all terms are agreed to, creates one clean contract that then gets e-signed.

Here’s the beauty of it. If you’ve ever been in a transaction where there’s been multiple offers, maybe there’s three or four different multiple offers, guess who has to figure out the final terms? The escrow company or the attorney, depending on the state.

Michael Stansbury (15:38.444)
The closing, yep, yeah, the closing company. All the time.

Brad (15:40.194)
Errors get made you know maybe Michael I made an offer and you countered it and you said look you know I’ll you know pay for your closing costs but I’m not paying your real estate agent commissions and then the buyer comes back and says no I want you to pay both but I’ll offer you more and you come back and say okay that’s fine but remove your appraisal contingency you know these things are happening and then they have to decipher that by reviewing all the documents well you don’t have that problem with what we created.

There’s a lot more to it, but that just kind of gives you a glimpse into what we’ve done. We bring in all the different verticals and vendors that you need through the process to get you over the finish line. And we’ve closed over a thousand transactions since inception.

Michael Stansbury (16:23.008)
Okay, so there’s more than proof of concept when you have a thousand transactions. So what markets are you operating in right now?

Brad (16:25.379)
Yeah.

Brad (16:30.415)
So we’re in all markets, but our full product is only in California and Florida. There’s a process to kind of opening up each state and we’re still really at the beginning stages of this whole thing. And so the plan is to expand that. We’re raising money now. We’ve been kind of hunkering down and working on the product and getting customer feedback for the last few years while market’s been really in turmoil, watching what’s been happening with the lawsuits and then our settlement and now clear quality.

Michael Stansbury (16:41.836)
Right.

Brad (17:00.589)
and just kind of on the sidelines observing but really perfecting our technology. And we think that everything’s converging now. So we’re raising around a capital to really go out and start marketing.

Michael Stansbury (17:05.59)
Yeah, yes, okay.

Michael Stansbury (17:12.43)
I definitely feel like, so I’ve had my real estate license since the year 2000 and I just read yesterday that in our local market, I think 20 % of the agents dropped off, so they’re no longer agents. I do, and the other thing that’s frustrating is as somebody that does inventory, I have flips and I put them on the MLS on my own stuff. Our MLS system is archaic.

It absolutely hasn’t been updated in like eight or nine years. And I feel like there is a, I had this again, more than a feeling that at some place there’s gonna be a total disruption in this and it’ll be better for the consumers. And it just could be home pie. So it’s in operating in California and Florida. What is the, if I were to ask you, what was the vision like when you started and what’s the vision?

now based on kind of maybe some pivots that you’ve made.

Brad (18:11.459)
That’s a really, that’s a good question, Michael. So there have been some, you know, the idea when we first started is that we wouldn’t, we’d be purely a tech company. We wouldn’t be a real estate company. But what we found is that we were locked out of the ability to get on the MLS without being a real estate company. And a lot of things are changing with that right now, which I’ll get to. But so that was one thing we had to go get licensed, which is kind of the preventative factor in expanding.

the full product to every state, right? So you could list your property, you know, in any state in Tennessee on the site, but you don’t get syndicated out to the MLS. We got to go through a licensing process for that. So that gets us into the feed that gets us syndicated out to all the sites. So that was the first lesson. It was like, oh gosh, all right, we got to go back and get licensed. The second one was we got licensed, we got into the feed, we got our properties exposed on Zillow. Now we’re getting traffic. So the beauty about this two-sided marketplace is

is.

You focus on the inventory, you get the buyers, right? So you get the listings and you get the buyers. A lot of two-sided marketplaces is like, what do you do? It’s chicken and the egg. You know, one of the toughest ones was, you know, Uber and Lyft. Well, shoot, you need your drivers, but then you need your passengers. What do get first? If you get the drivers and no passengers, you get the passengers and no drivers. it’s, that was really tough. They solved a really, really tough problem. So this was a little easier for us. We’re like, we just want to concentrate on inventory.

But what happened was once we syndicated out to all the major sites, a lot of buyers already had an agent. And so we had agents coming into the site. And because it was built peer to peer initially, like buyer and seller,

Michael Stansbury (19:56.034)
Right?

Brad (19:56.888)
the agents were pretending to be the buyer writing the offer and they get to the end and they’d have to sign the document like and so we have to manually go in and change it and do all these things it was really tough so we had to build a bridge a connection between the agent and the buyer which we did so now a buyer can go in and invite their agent connect the account or the agent can go in and invite the buyer and connect the account and then the agent becomes their guide but then the signing is from the buyer so that was a big pivot that we had to make

Michael Stansbury (19:59.317)
Right?

Michael Stansbury (20:24.27)
And the seller is a seller still in control, I guess, at this point, whether or not that commission, there is a commission and commission gets paid and things like that.

Brad (20:31.47)
Yeah.

So yeah so really great question so the fallout of the lawsuits was decoupling of commissions you don’t take a listing and say I’m gonna pay X amount for the buyer’s agent now it’s negotiated so it becomes a line item. I’m writing an offer as a buyer or buyer’s agent one of the line items is I want you to pay you know X amount for closing costs and the other one I want you to pay X amount for real estate agent commission so it becomes a negotiable or negotiated item and so what we try to educate our sellers on is don’t think about

what you’re helping the buyer out with for commissions you know that’s always existed think about what your net is so if you’re listed your house for four hundred thousand dollars and then there’s ten thousand dollars of commissions being asked for what are gonna net on that property if you’re not happy with that net counter the price but obviously that buyer needs some help they may not have the cash for that commission so just think about the net on the property and not where the money is going and so that’s the education we provide.

Michael Stansbury (21:31.32)
That’s great. That seems to be if I’m projecting when they’re on the site and they go through all the calculations they can see it in real time and go, okay, I know what I’m netting now and so I’m happy or not happy. I’m interested, this is maybe a left field question, but is there any assimilation with blockchain or crypto or I know there’s a, in Florida there is a Proppy which is a supposed to replace title, they want to put the title on the blockchain. there any assimilation on there or technology that assimilates with some sort of crypto part of it?

Brad (22:13.581)
Yeah, there isn’t today. Look, I do know property and I know they’ve been for a long time trying to solve that and they had the first crypto purchase that they kind of marketed and

you know, blockchain is still a ways off. I had somebody on my podcast yesterday from Tidal, national Tidal rep for one of the, you know, one of the big three. And we talked a little bit about this. And so we’re still quite a lot, although it makes sense. If you think about blockchain, especially from the Tidal point of view, it’s like, why not? Why should we have to pay Tidal every time transfer property or we get a refinance? You know, it should be so easy. And if you put it on the chain, you have guaranteed Tidal, right? Nobody can break that.

But the problem is that the municipalities across the United States, the ones that are not, let’s say, expeditious in their recording.

Michael Stansbury (23:04.556)
And they’re just small town folks, yeah.

Brad (23:06.127)
Yeah, right. I mean, it might be a year before some items get recorded. So it’s not uniformly solvable at this time. I think inevitably it will get there. Will it get there quicker with AI? Will it get there quicker with other things? Likely. But, you know, like most things, they take longer than we suspect they will. So if we put a label on it and we say, hey, in five years it should do this or in 10 years it should do that, you never know. It’s purely a guess. And like most

economists. You’re gonna boast about it if you’re right and you’re just gonna ignore it if you were wrong. So I don’t try to guess at the time at the timeline but I think that ultimately will be there for now. We just got to do it. We got to use title insurance and those things that already exist.

Michael Stansbury (23:52.994)
Right, yes, so I agree. I like where they’re going with it. I understand it completely, but I had the same, you know, the blocks that are involved in it, because when you have three or four different people you gotta get to in order to get the title work done, times all the properties that exist and the addresses that exist in the United States. It’s a pretty daunting task. Okay, so I.

Brad (24:18.927)
But I do just put a cap on that, Michael, and then we’ll move on. With AI, I think it does get expedited. That’s all.

Michael Stansbury (24:26.062)
Right, yep. So Brad, tell me a little bit about what does family life look like for you? What is your world like outside of real estate? What do we like to do there? I always like to kind of dive into this before we end the show to kind of give a little flavor for what Brad Rice is all about out of entrepreneurship.

Brad (24:44.567)
Okay, well, I’m happy to answer that.

I’m a proud family man. I’ve been married for 31 years. And we’ve got three adult children. My youngest is 22 and then 26 and 28. And I’m proud of them. They’re all contributors to society. They’re good people. They love each other. We live close to each other. We spend time together year round. We like camping. We like going to the lake and spending time on the water.

Michael Stansbury (25:07.483)
that’s great.

Brad (25:17.123)
you that’s what I do and I’ve learned at this point in my life I’ve learned that that really is the most important thing. I love business and I you know it’s not it’s not purely

It’s not pure fun to be in business. There’s trials and tribulations and all sorts of things that you don’t account for when you start a company and when you own a company. But at the end of the day, it’s all about family and it’s about enjoying your life and we’re here once and you don’t want to regret it. And, you know, I think about

I think about the folks that have made a lot of money in their life and just didn’t have the other fulfillment and regretted at end of their life. So I try to live a full life every day and regardless of all the crud that happens around me during the day, I go home and I rest easy at night because I built a pretty good life and I’m pretty happy with it.

Michael Stansbury (26:13.283)
That’s awesome. we’re at where can people reach out? Learn more about you, learn more about HomePy.com. Where are all the places where we can find you?

Brad (26:21.923)
Well, probably the easiest way to navigate to any of these things to home, you know, you can go to home pie.com to see what home pie is. But, you know, my podcast, my mortgage company, all these other things that I’m kind of involved in, you could find on my personal website. It’s the Brad Rice.com.

Michael Stansbury (26:40.664)
TheBradRice.com, we’ll put that in the show notes, Brad. Thank you for being a part of the Real Estate Pros podcast. Folks, like and subscribe. Go down to thebradrice.com, go check his stuff out. And folks, we’ll see you next time.

Alright, brother.