Navigating Aging: 5 Key Insights from a Real Estate Expert

Dylan Silver (00:01.078)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is a Phoenix based real estate agent and founder of Parent Projects, an AI powered platform helping families navigate the challenges of aging parents and family. Please welcome Tony Siebers. Tony, welcome to the show.

Tony Siebers (00:19.842)
Hey Dylan, thanks for having me, buddy.

Dylan Silver (00:21.95)
It’s great to have you on here. This is going to be an interesting conversation for so many reasons, but I always like to start off at the top of the show by asking folks simply, you know, how did you get into real estate?

Tony Siebers (00:33.698)
Yeah, I know.

Real funny, as I got into move management and helping with an older parent and a grandparent, that led me into some move management to understand stuff. And the real estate agents kept screwing up the process. Like they would, the way they’d inject themselves and how it came through would slow a deal or confect a deal, like perplex a deal or make something so difficult. So finally I was like, forget that. I’m just gonna, I’m gonna go hang a shingle. I’m gonna understand this thing. And so I went out.

got an understanding of what that looked like from the real estate perspective. I got full picture, this is what 2017 or so and ever since have hung that hat. Started with EXP when they came out. I was really, really early, early EXP-er. And then have jumped down in my local market with a local family that’s been specifically focused in this vertical of the longevity services vertical for some time with Barnes-Worth Realty.

and with them right now.

Dylan Silver (01:35.774)
I’m an EXP agent. So it’s interesting that you got your start there. I want to ask you about you mentioned having a difficult experience maybe with some realtors before getting into the business yourself. I think this is such unfortunately, a common thing just on this show. I’ve had so many people talk about real estate agents and lenders and brokers and so many moving pieces thinking like this didn’t go as planned or if that person can do it. So can I what I think this highlights

Tony is how this is really, think, business. I think it’s a business for everybody. think if you like home ownership, you’re a real estate investor. And you kind of have to be at this point, especially if you’re younger, with the housing crisis where it is. But today I want to focus on the other side of it, which is where your business is, which is not housing for young people, but a lot of the issues that we deal with in aging, frankly, population, right?

You’re involved in that space.

Tony Siebers (02:36.878)
Yeah, well, and you’re gonna see, it’s not gonna take you long before you see where it comes across, right? At the highest level.

know that the fact that people want to age in place and are staying there longer because they’ve got morbidity problems, like they’re not living as healthy as they used to. what that does is it anchors them down in these neighborhoods that aren’t churning. They’re not turning over, right? And when that doesn’t turn over, mean, the city’s got to go build a new neighborhood with a new elementary school and a new junior high and a new high school. And like that is expensive, right? And it’s got all kinds of challenges for that. I think it’s, they end up,

Now you see everybody’s also, there’s that competition for first time homeowners with those people stepping maybe out of the family house into something that’s one story small. What could they work their way around? So the two just slam into each other, think, constantly.

Dylan Silver (03:29.214)
I wanna get some clarity. Morbidity versus mortality. I think we were talking a little bit before the show on this, for folks who might be confused by the verbiage there.

Tony Siebers (03:41.026)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we’ve worked really hard in America. We believe in great longevity, right? Living long and well and prosperous overall, we call that longevity from that. But inside of that, have mortality, like how many years you live. And now we’re living like into, really on average into our 70s and about 76, I think is around that average as it’s pushed through. And then you have morbidity, which is how healthy you are. And currently,

You know, that number has been, it gets measured by how many healthy, how many non-healthy years of living is expected. And that pop, in fact, in the last just two years coming out of COVID and normalized from COVID, that’s pushed up an entire extra year. So on average, we’re spending between 12 to 15 years not in health. as, those are our morbidities, right? Those are the impacts of that throughout our, whatever our mortality rate might be.

And the fact that that keeps growing is a challenge.

Dylan Silver (04:38.156)
Yeah.

I’ve seen it with my own family, know, medical advances. can keep people, frankly, alive for quite some time, but then at some point in time, it’s a, how well are they living, right? And you, and honestly, this on a, outside of real estate, it made me realize, having seen this now with grandparents and so on and so forth, that you really have to make the most of your years now. So I’m 31, and having seen this, you know, five, six times, I realized…

you gotta make as much time as you can because sooner or later you’ll be 60 and even 60 I mean talk about morbidity and comorbidities you could be unhealthy in your 50s and your 40s right so you really just have to take advantage of your time but I want to pivot a bit here Tony and ask you about the people who are encountering these situations with parents and with grandparents even who maybe they

Tony Siebers (05:28.92)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (05:39.212)
caretaking or with siblings. Right now, what are the resources for folks and how are they coming across folks like yourself?

Tony Siebers (05:50.016)
You know, in general, there’s about 34, 35 million family caregivers, people who are stepping up and providing a role either just out of love of it or out of necessity for the family, of monetary necessity, of what that need is. It’s really fascinating. mean, across the board, these are going to be just some real broad things that I can tell you looking across the country. But in general, there might be one and a half or two percent of people that really kind of geek out on it, right? Like it is, think

Like this is their calling and doing this really, really well. think just about everybody recognizes that this is a big part of life and taking care of our parents or grandparents maybe even, that this is a, you can just feel that. I mean, you know this is a part of life that you should probably be doing and how your family passed that down to the culture or the area you live in. Those things tend to really influence where you’re gonna look to and what you’re gonna look to for resources or what you feel your responsibility is.

In general, will say we have found that there are certain catalysts that get people involved. I’ll say by and large, the person who gets involved first is a 45 to 65 year old working mom that’s balancing home and school and work for kids. She’s sandwiched in the middle of all of that. And now she is a parent that needs a little more help today than yesterday and probably more tomorrow than today. And they’re looking for some solutions.

Originally, they were looking to understand what to do. Now with AI, they want the AI to take as much of that off of their plate as possible so they can continue to be with their own children and go to the football games or try to take them to college or travel and do those other items that came up. other pretext I think I’ll put into this is you and I were talking about, is there a planning issue? You’re seeing so many people with the morbidity. If this morbidity is going up, did they not plan well?

Dylan Silver (07:43.883)
Yeah.

Tony Siebers (07:47.33)
Did they treat their body like a playground when they were younger? Maybe some of that, but I think more of us are starting to see that there were lot of unknown consequences to things that we did when we were younger. And that door’s just, I mean, there’s people just kicking that door in now, right? all of that. Right? So, and you still have to understand you live in a world that is wrapped with this like,

Dylan Silver (07:57.932)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (08:01.588)
Right. I mean we traded cigarettes for vaping is one thing.

Dylan Silver (08:08.492)
Yeah.

Tony Siebers (08:15.146)
incredible Vegas level understanding of the human brain and why it does what it does and how to release even these things that we’re on right now, right? I mean, it knows how to release dopamine and to keep you off of there. And we’re all still learning that, right? Turn your phone off because blue light does this to your body as it works to this before you want to go to bed. And so, you know, what is the prolonged impact of that? What is going to create other problems with this? What what does it mean to be slamming your finger into a piece of glass, maybe a thousand times a day?

Dylan Silver (08:23.01)
Right.

Dylan Silver (08:30.796)
Yeah.

Tony Siebers (08:43.106)
to type something on a telephone? What’s the impact gonna be on our fingers when we turn 70 or 80? Like nobody’s ever done that before. Like this is the first, my grandfather didn’t sit there and slam his fingers into a window, right? So I don’t think they have anything to measure at. So those are, the needs really, really vary. The resources that people have, there’s generally in their area, there’s niche people that are great and there’s groups they can join, but there’s only, you know.

Dylan Silver (08:56.118)
Bye!

Tony Siebers (09:11.726)
1 to 2 % that care about that. I think really it comes down to those key catalysts. And those activities, I have found, they can communicate to us and to the AI, but even to a human being, and me as a real estate agent, understanding the lay of the land, those catalysts communicate to me what’s on the horizon and an opportunity coming that’s going to need to be dealt with so that I understand I can orient myself to start learning about what the needs of that opportunity are.

and then we can start piling things through and what’s the order that that family’s gonna have to get through what they’re doing. Kinetically is always going to be a part of this, but I eventually learned, well, once I could map that out kinetically, we could turn that into ones and zeros and we could use machine learning and now more advanced artificial intelligence to start doing some of that for us and to help families find the right person or the right task to do for the right person and their family at the right time. And that helps them.

move through the system, which in turn helps us as real estate agents, right? I mean, this is what’s going to allow us as real estate agents to get paid who don’t get paid to the end of it all. So the longer it takes, the worse it is, the more difficult it gets. I’ll take it.

Dylan Silver (10:20.065)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (10:25.898)
I mean, people can look at this in so many different angles. Tying in the real estate component to helping folks deal with so many of these other issues which are related is a brilliant idea. And anytime you can tap into people’s desire for longevity, you’re going to be on to something, right? You mentioned a couple words, catalyst, you know, points in the journey. I’m probably

paraphrasing incorrectly here on a granular level, Tony, without giving away all the gold, but maybe some of it. How does this work for, I guess, guiding folks when they’re interacting with the tools? And what does the process look like?

Tony Siebers (11:13.302)
Sure. And look, you and I, we’ve already agreed in the front end, we’re going to kick the door open on this, right? I think this is going to be an episode people are going to want to watch and understand for a long time, because we are going to deal with the difference between when we become predatory as real estate agents and wholesalers and when we really can genuinely help. And I think there’s a balance in the middle, but it’s going to take a

Dylan Silver (11:25.058)
Yeah.

Tony Siebers (11:35.628)
honest conversation between us to build a bridge over that and not just moats back and forth. We could fight that out all day. In general, the top catalysts, not to be, you I’m an army guy, right? So I’m always kind of breaking it down into something I can remember much quicker. We refer to them as the D’s that happen within the continuum, the longevity continuum includes really three areas. It includes your aging in place, your senior relocation, and your end of life.

and that’s the spectrum, that’s the continuum kind of aging. And most people want us to age a place as long as possible. The catalyst that move you in those moments is less about what you desire to do, but there are things like driving. They’re gonna start with a D, right? Driving, when driving changes, that’s an autonomy issue, right? When a new disability occurs, all of a sudden, you can’t do things you were able to do before.

of when there’s distance that changes between that primary point of contact family member and the person being cared for. So let’s say your primary caregiver was my sister and my sister had my mom, but I lost my sister to cancer. so losing my sister to cancer, that’s a lot of distance. Or if her husband would have moved and she would have left from that, now all of a sudden that changes. Who’s gotta step in and who’s gonna do what and where that comes? So distance steps in from that death, death of both.

Dylan Silver (12:48.363)
Yeah.

Tony Siebers (12:59.594)
advocates and death of one of the spouses. It’s one of the leading drivers, especially in the married couples. You’ll see one, the caregiver, honestly, oftentimes will degrade faster than the one they’re caring for. It’s crazy. And when you lose that spouse, you might have, well, if we look to real estate, especially for my grandparents’ generation, there, my grandmother didn’t buy a home. My grandfather bought the home and that was how real estate was done. So,

When it was time for her to sell a home after he had passed and they were gonna deal with that, she has zero acclamation to that. Never even seen it. Hadn’t sat it down, has no understanding of what’s going on. So death sits in. Disabilities, now I have a walker in where things go. Debt is another major one. So these spend downs, I’m gonna end up on the Medicaid or state sponsored a loan instead of having private insurance or a long-term care policy or being able to private pay and afford.

the things that I need to handle that morbidity issues we were talking before. So those D’s kind of indicate different pathways on care paths that are likely to creep up in that continuum. And there is a great groups of people out there, the National Association of Senior Move Managers, NASM, phenomenal group of folks who are just skilled. Most of them had been through a problem like this and just cared to do it. But I found over 100 different industries of businesses.

that have built this into their business. Some of them are real estate agents like me, some are their insurance brokers, some are, you know, some are landscape, right? Where the landscape guys just wanna work this niche. So they throw an AED in the back of every one of their landscape trucks and they teach their guys not to sign contracts with people that are aged and deteriorating and not in a healthy spot for it or how to just see something, say something, do something. They’ll just check in.

Dylan Silver (14:32.726)
Yeah.

Tony Siebers (14:53.388)
make sure that mom’s up, not laying on the floor, and if mom were down, they would know what to do. Like, they literally know who to call at that house. And that little bit of a tweak really matters.

Dylan Silver (15:04.244)
I will say this and we are coming up on time here, but I do want to make the distinction because I was a wholesaler first before I was an agent. And when you’re a wholesaler and not an agent, there’s rules, but there’s not the fiduciary anything. Your fiduciary responsibility is to yourself. I got to make some money. Then when you become an agent, now you have a whole other set, especially after everything with the NAR suit and all this, you have a whole other set of responsibilities now. And it’s, I would say if it’s not a lot harder.

Tony Siebers (15:20.162)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dylan Silver (15:33.986)
to be a wholesaler, there’s a lot more compliance and disclosure and disclosure and disclosure to where I’m not an attorney, right? But when looking at this, I was saying, well, you it’s harder to go in and to say, well, I’m going to buy your house, which is what so many wholesalers do with no intention of actually buying. have to if you’re going to do wholesale, in my opinion, as a real estate agent, you got to go in and say, look, I’m going to put your house under contract and I may assign the house.

or I may buy it myself, but that’s a low probability, right? And you have to go in with so much disclosure that the person may say, well, I’m just going to go with this other offer that’s on the table, but definitely a lot, a lot to unpack there.

Tony Siebers (16:14.222)
Thank

And I think what you have to do is you need to sit in the truth. The reason that that’s only going to get more and more complex because it’s good, true and right to be honest with the people you’re doing the end of that business deal with making money and there is money to be made in that deal. If you are somebody who can come to the table and can help a family who’s decided their only pathway to get mom into that next place is they need capital off of this house. This is that is what they need. It is a 20,000 is a $30,000 tab. Nobody in the family’s got that. This is the

asset, it was made as an asset. And the family may have come to the point where they understand that. So when you come into that and you’re able to support from that standpoint, they got it. It’s an asset. They understood it as an asset. They can make a well-informed decision. That’s what should be happening there. think those now that you’re seeing, in fact, and we push and we ask, if you’re going to work with a wholesaler, make sure they have real estate license.

Make sure that they’ve got that ability to understand that and they’ve got that, well, they’ve got the ethics and the kind of that check around it. There’s a reason they went out and did it. There’s a reason Dylan Silver, there’s a reason you went and got a real estate license after just being a wholesaler, right? And I’m willing forward and say, you got a good soul, not that nobody doesn’t, but you got a good soul down there and you understand that doing this professionally and informing people well, this can…

Dylan Silver (17:29.292)
Yeah.

Tony Siebers (17:40.558)
There is more than enough to be made here and now you can scale what’s right. Or you can claw out not. You could be trying to claw and work your way through it and fight everybody else. Or you could build something that scales and you’re not gonna have to look over your shoulder for the next thing that’s gonna knock your little avenue out of play.

Dylan Silver (17:46.625)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (18:00.852)
in the efforts of full disclosure and transparency when I got the license, I got it because when I was calling real estate agents with deals, they’d be like, you’re a wholesaler. Get out of here. And I’m like, these real estate agents, gosh, they’re so full of it. Their ego is crazy. They think they know so much. They can’t even tell me what 70 % of ARV is. They don’t understand comps for investing and all this. And they’re not talking my lingo. And so they think I don’t have a license. I said, you know what, if I can’t beat them, join them.

But then what I didn’t know is when I got, then when I got licensed, I said, you know what the test probably similar in Arizona, the test in Texas was kind of hard. I know a lot of people from other States who said that Texas exam was hard. didn’t pass it right. And then on top of that, I saw you actually, I think it’s a good thing. I think it’s not for the reasons that it went in. I kind of went in again. I can’t beat them, join them. If they’re going to talk trash cause I’m a wholesaler, I might as well join them. Right. But

Tony Siebers (18:43.992)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (18:57.858)
Then I saw, you know, it’s good to have license. It’s good to have a process. It’s good to have people that you report to, not just a broker, but you know, a board of realtors or something similar, even on a regional. So I’m, I’m positive and bullish on all those fronts.

Tony Siebers (19:14.188)
Well, you know, I think…

Also, you look at the changes that’s happened, especially post COVID. I you went from an average agent doing maybe three or four sales because there was a lot of just, you know, agents that really didn’t do much out there. They just had that license or it was easy to come in. And now it’s that average is closer to like 10 and is moving upwards, right? You want to see good agents that can move maybe 20 houses in a year or something into that avenue, right? Those are, I think that professionalism, they come together. think a lot of the pushback you probably get upfront is,

is that person beholden to something if they want to if a wholesaler wants to get involved and start working with an established area and I’m not just talking about MLS. I’m not just talking about kind of the monopoly that that group’s got because I got problems off of all that too right I mean that’s I think you have to call balls and strikes right as you see it that quasi governmental agency whatever you might call where that sit it doesn’t always serve the market it’s not going to serve the market well long term they’re going to have some adjustments that they’ll have to continue making off the existing model.

Dylan Silver (20:01.878)
Yeah.

Tony Siebers (20:16.26)
But in general, what’s good, true, and right is the establishment of self-regulation that got so darn good that states turned around and said, yeah, that’s a good model for that. And I ultimately like that because when we can self-regulate as industries, man, the government, I’m looking at anything the government tries to regulate. I’m former army officer. I’ve worked in it. I’ve managed funds from it. I get it. And I’ve run not-for-profit organizations. It is, if you can solve this at a commerce level first,

Dylan Silver (20:35.338)
Yeah.

Tony Siebers (20:43.992)
Absolutely, let us come together, let us work it out that way. That’s a lot of what Parent Projects was built on. Could we build bridges over those modes? Could we attraction over promotion, not just in what we sell to stuff to people and services to people, but to ourselves and to get people to come on board by building this really great ecosystem that sat in what is good, true and right to help people through the problem and then just capitalize on the value. Then they understand the value of the wholesaler in there. You know, this person’s here, they can offer you cash right now.

Dylan Silver (21:14.664)
On that note, Tony, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go maybe to reach out to you if they want to get in contact with you or maybe just to learn more about the business or if they’re facing maybe a situation like we’re describing with aging family?

Tony Siebers (21:15.15)
That’s big.

Tony Siebers (21:29.826)
Yeah, so parentprojects.com or at parent projects, plural. You can hit us on any of the social media apps. You’re gonna find us down there and we’re on them always and constantly. If you’ve got a question, if you’re in your market and this is a group, you really feel called to serve. Maybe you’ve watched a loved one go down. Maybe you’re dealing with a challenge or maybe you wanna make how difficult it was for you matter for the next person. So it’s not so hard off of that, that helps us deal with stuff and jump into that. I mean, look at the guild, look at what we work with.

We really, really like the Seniors Real Estate Institute out of Oklahoma. They’re certified senior housing professional accreditation. I would tell any real estate agent or anybody interested to really understand what’s going on the market, you should learn from that Dr. Nikki Bucklow and group. And we tie really closely out with that group in looking for credential management. But parentprojects.com is where you can find us. And yeah, and love to continue the conversation. And just professionalizing what you guys do is.

as wholesalers and all of us in real estate and how we work together better to bring these solutions and some confidence to caretaking.

Dylan Silver (22:35.146)
Tony, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.

Tony Siebers (22:39.287)
Hey, David, thanks so much for having me. You did a great job and appreciated you filled the conversation, brother. God bless you.