Skip to main content

Inside Proposabid’s Bid Platform for Multifamily Investors & Property Managers

By November 19, 2025Real Estate Pros Show

Subscribe via:

Show Summary

The conversation explores the implementation of Proposabid within communities, focusing on the initial feedback from users who struggle with their identity and the concept of having their needs met. It delves into the resistance to change, the importance of building trust, and the future potential of Proposabid in community development.

Resources and Links from this show:

  • Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode

    Investor Fuel Show Transcript:

    RoDevia Brigham (00:00)
    So you have software and companies and people that are able to manage the small minutia of the problem, right? But then you have to crack open the wall, come to find out you’ve got black mold in there. And now you got to get somebody in there to do the black mold testing and then do the remediation for that. And then come to find out there’s a leak that went into another apartment down on the, let’s say it’s on the second floor,

    Dylan Silver (00:15)
    and that’s when they gotta put the bid in.

    RoDevia Brigham (00:26)
    the third floor, went to the second floor and come to find out that was a, this is a fentanyl, a fentanyl lab.

    Dylan Silver (02:06)
    Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today’s guest, RoDevia Brigham is the founder and CEO of Proposabid, a platform turning property repair chaos into capital clarity for investors and owners nationwide. Her team has managed over 2.5 million in bids and estimations across multifamily and affordable housing portfolios. She’s on a mission to modernize how investors scope bid and defend

    every dollar spent on renovations. RoDevia, welcome to the show.

    RoDevia Brigham (02:39)
    Thanks for having me, Dylan. ⁓ Good to be here. I’m sorry. I appreciate you having me on.

    Dylan Silver (02:48)
    That’s

    right. It’s great to have you. We were chatting a little bit before hopping on here about the history of Proposabid. Before we get into what Proposabid does today, I want to ask you how did you ⁓ get into this space and how did you come up with the idea for Proposabid?

    RoDevia Brigham (03:12)
    Yeah, real quick. My background is in fire science. I was a firefighter for a number of years for Cal Fire. So I’m really good at seeing things in between the smoke and the fire, holding support, being a foundation, and having leadership. After that, I kind of moved into IT, where there’s databases, algorithms, AI, and some flow there. So I did that also.

    In that, I always have a if this, then that mindset and also an automation mindset. So I was just in the shower one day, literally in the shower, brushing my teeth. And I asked my partner, hey, if you could automate anything, what would it be? She works in property management. And she turned to me like, if I could just get vendors to pick up the phone, give me three bids, apples to apples, so I could send them over to ownership so that we can get this roof replaced, that’d be great. I said, how hard could it be?

    Well, is little difficult from time to time, right? Especially for onsite staff that is not trained in sourcing bids and estimations. And that’s where Proposabid came from in 2021. Here we are in 2025-06. And yeah, just happy to be here supporting our ministry.

    Dylan Silver (04:09)
    you

    Thank you. ⁓

    So ⁓

    coming from the background firefighter, Going into IT and then ⁓ now in the intersection between contractors and real estate property managers and investors, how did you tackle ⁓ understanding the scope of the problem? It sounds like you knew that, there’s an issue here because

    Property managers might not know how to source those bids. But once you peel back the curtain, you see, my gosh, there’s 50 other problems over here too. Even the contractors themselves may be using methods of referral networks and follow-up that may be antiquated themselves.

    RoDevia Brigham (05:00)
    Mm-hmm.

    Yeah, so the way I came about it is that I just asked my partner, what is your day to day like? And then I just mapped that out and watered that down for mom and pop and then plug that up and uploaded it into the institutional setting. So basically you have, you got to make the phone calls and the emails, the hurry up and waits. Do the vendors respond? Do they not respond? ⁓ If they do respond with the bids, is the bids

    Dylan Silver (06:25)
    Yep.

    RoDevia Brigham (06:33)
    accurate based on the project that’s needed. If not, then you have to go back and ask for corrections. Once those corrections come in, then you got to compare the bids across the board and then submit those to ownership. so Proposabid takes care of everything before submission to ownership.

    So we take all that time that.

    Dylan Silver (06:53)
    when you

    When you talk about ⁓ being able to streamline that process, what was the time frame like ⁓ prior to propose a bid? Was there a process? this potentially a hassle chasing down bids, people saying they’re going to get back to you, you’re then having to go and compile and then now they’re saying, well, actually the bids changed because that was however long ago. Was it that chaotic or?

    Was there a system in place that people were generally following?

    RoDevia Brigham (07:29)
    So there is no system in place and that’s the niche that Proposabid has identified. And basically, if you have four staff members, you have the director, you have the ⁓ property manager, you have the on-site person that’s taking the rent, tending to the tenants, and you have maintenance. You have four people that are involved in this bid process. And each hour that the client spends money on

    these employees to source these bids, each one has a different dollar amount, right? And that’s to never get the bid sourced. That’s just lost money. So each property spends, or each person on the property spends three to five hours per week looking at repairs and bids, let’s say. Even at the three hour mark, across those four employees, you’re spending about

    Dylan Silver (08:09)
    Yeah.

    RoDevia Brigham (08:25)
    I think it’s $7,000 a month across those four employees because the director’s earning 250, well we’re in California, earning 200, 300K a month, right, or not a month, a year. You’ve got, you know, maintenance that’s probably earning, you know, maybe 5K. You’ve got your on-site staff that’s earning 4K. So you break all that out in the hourly frame. Each property that an investor has, they’re spending probably 100K

    or more to never close on the property repairs that they need. And so propose a bit. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And you.

    Dylan Silver (09:01)
    Wow. So, yeah.

    It’s coming in in that niche. mean, you’re spelling it out for me and I see it here succinctly, right? So when you have the property managers, they’re spending so much time to chase down bids, ⁓ physically, you know, reaching out to folks and this is effectively eliminating that process entirely so that they can focus on tasks that, you know, are equally as important.

    RoDevia Brigham (09:22)
    Mm-hmm.

    correct.

    Dylan Silver (09:30)
    but able to focus on a different aspect of property management. Like for instance, hey, let’s make sure that we don’t have any vacancies and that way we can increase cash flow and so on and so forth.

    RoDevia Brigham (09:40)
    Mm-hmm.

    Correct. Yeah. We basically eliminate, I believe it’s 368 hours per property per year.

    Dylan Silver (09:53)
    Is there a size of an apartment complex that would be best suited for a proposal? Is there a certain number of doors where this starts to make sense?

    RoDevia Brigham (10:41)
    Well, it’s about the budget. It’s not necessarily the door size. you could be a multi-family ⁓ that needs a roof replacement. That roof replacement is going to cost you $150,000. We could work with you on that. Or you could be a unit that or a ⁓

    what do call it, a complex, right, that has 260 doors and like in California, you need a balcony inspection, SB721. All those balconies need to be inspected. And that’s gonna be a package for you in which you have to source the correct vendors in order to do those initial inspections and then do those repairs. And that might cost you anywhere from, you know, maybe 250K to 600K. So it’s not the property size per se.

    Dylan Silver (11:17)
    Yeah.

    RoDevia Brigham (11:35)
    It’s the budget that you need to be able to ⁓ have your CAPEX infrastructure protected for your return on investment.

    Dylan Silver (11:45)
    When the contractors are making bids on these properties and you’re managing so many of the bids from multiple different areas, is there any feedback that you’ve seen either from the contractors or from yourself towards the contractors and things that you’ve adapted over time to make it a more streamlined process for everybody?

    RoDevia Brigham (12:08)
    Yeah, when we first rolled Proposabid out and started ⁓ implementing it within the properties themselves, the feedback was that this is amazing, I don’t deserve it. Because in this particular realm, we’re so used to being destitute and struggling that we kind of hold on to that identity. We’re not used to having our needs met. And so there is a lot of pushback on having your needs met. Like, yeah.

    You know, 15, we close bids and estimations from RFP cycle to bids, you know, in your inbox within 15 business days. So then when ownership wakes up and they’ve got bids in their inbox and they’ve got a comparable list of six vendors, which are our current, ⁓ how many bids we get per project is the average between

    five to seven bids per project, which is unheard of in this industry. It doesn’t exist. And so when they wake up and they’ve got five bids, now they’re overwhelmed with joy and they don’t feel like they deserve it. And so that was the pushback at first from the ownership side, like how are you able to do this? And I’m like, don’t worry about that. You just pick what you need. You do the approve and award.

    Dylan Silver (13:07)
    Hmm.

    RoDevia Brigham (13:30)
    Is it comparable, all that? And so therefore, now they can release that conflict within the properties, within the staff. the vendor side, what they experience at first when they first meet proposal bid is now I don’t have access to the owners themselves. But did you ever really have access to the owners? Or did you have access to the people that manage the

    Dylan Silver (13:52)
    Right.

    RoDevia Brigham (13:59)
    property. And so I have to have a couple of conversations with the vendors. say, look, why don’t you submit to this bit to this RFP? Go through the process and let me know what you think. And then in the future, when we have more from this particular property, regardless if you win or not, because it’s not proposed a bit that chooses the bids. It’s the property that chooses is the ownership that chooses the bids.

    Dylan Silver (14:02)
    Yeah.

    RoDevia Brigham (14:23)
    And so then they’re like, ⁓ okay, that makes sense. So you’re not the one that’s choosing them and I don’t have to pay you to get more leads. It’s just leads to them that they don’t have to pay for. And then what Proposabid does is that we give them a detailed ⁓ breakdown of how they compare to the other vendors that were submitted, which the industry doesn’t do. It’s not baked in.

    Dylan Silver (14:50)
    I mean, it’s a win win. The worst thing that happens is they submit a bid and they don’t end up winning it. But they have extra leads in their system that they did not have to to pay for. And ⁓ based off what you just explained, they’re also getting feedback as to hey, here’s why you might not have won this bid.

    RoDevia Brigham (14:58)
    Correct.

    Yes.

    correct, not only from proposal bid standpoint, but also once the winning bids are chosen, because the owner gets guaranteed four bids that they can choose from. Right? And they choose their four bids out of the seven bids or eight bids that they get, and then it’s ownership feedback also. And ownership doesn’t… I’m still working on ownership to give me better feedback, right? ⁓

    From Proposabid’s ⁓ on the RFP, their reputation in the community, what employees are saying, what we can find on Yelp, what we can find on Better Business Bureau, what we have matched up as far as terms across the board, the conditions across the board, the payment schedule, did the materials match the RFP, what are the materials like versus other?

    versus these other vendors. That’s a lot of information. This is the same information that ownership gets, which you’re not going to get anywhere.

    anywhere in the United States.

    Dylan Silver (17:02)
    When

    we talk about multifamily properties, and I’m thinking about some of the biggest ⁓ property management companies that are out there. I’m a Texas licensed realtor. Grey Star, for instance, is huge. I actually lived at a Grey Star community. And so from the moment you have a work order as a… ⁓

    RoDevia Brigham (17:16)
    ⁓ huh.

    Dylan Silver (17:25)
    a renter of that apartment to, you know, much larger, you’re talking about, you know, hail damage in Texas, you might have hail damage, right? These, it needs to be managed every, every step of the way. The, the larger apartment complexes and

    RoDevia Brigham (17:31)
    Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    Dylan Silver (17:43)
    ⁓ Residential spaces like that do they typically have like their own people in-house that they maybe have on Contract or w2 or something along these lines to manage their complex or are they even still? Outsourcing it and having to do this kind of very manual process of sourcing bits

    RoDevia Brigham (18:05)
    They, the people who work with me, the companies that work with me, the property management companies that like the John Stewart company, shout out to John Stewart, we just did a lobby refresh with them, FBI management who we’ve worked with, they don’t have a system in place. And if they do, it’s leadership, meaning directors that feel like they have a system in place, but because it’s,

    It’s proposed a bit is so simplified and they’re used to the overload. They say that they have something that already works, right? Because they don’t have anything else to compare to.

    Dylan Silver (18:45)
    Mmm.

    RoDevia Brigham (18:49)
    So that’s the barrier there. because you have a work order for a pipe that busted in apartment 102, now you have a leakage that’s gone down into the basement and subsectioned across to another apartment.

    Dylan Silver (18:52)
    Yeah.

    RoDevia Brigham (19:11)
    you’ve got your onsite maintenance that come in, you have that work order. So you have software and companies and people that are able to manage the small minutia of the problem, right? But then you have to crack open the wall, come to find out you’ve got black mold in there. And now you got to get somebody in there to do the black mold testing and then do the remediation for that. And then come to find out there’s a leak that went into another apartment down on the, let’s say it’s on the second floor,

    Dylan Silver (19:30)
    and that’s when they gotta put the bid in.

    RoDevia Brigham (19:41)
    the third floor, went to the second floor and come to find out that was a, this is a fentanyl, a fentanyl lab.

    Now you got to close that off and get hazmat in there. So who’s going to take care of all that? That means that you’re on site. These are real problems. is that on site staff is going to be able to manage this whole process. This isn’t just about work orders. It’s about how do you speed up the process in order for you to make sure that your property stays online.

    Dylan Silver (19:52)
    Yeah.

    RoDevia Brigham (20:12)
    Right. And so that.

    Dylan Silver (20:13)
    You’re

    exactly right. mean, one problem like that, like you mentioned, you know, a leak, right? You can have on site, but then once that trickles down and now you’re having like compiling issues, then it becomes and now you’re dealing with tenant issues, potentially complaints and so on and so forth. I’ve I’ve done this myself and I’ve said, you know, hey, this is frustrating that this isn’t getting fixed. And a lot of it, I can imagine on the other side has got to be, hey, well, you know, we’re having difficulty because

    RoDevia Brigham (20:19)
    huh.

    Yeah.

    Dylan Silver (20:42)
    these issues are becoming larger and our systems aren’t built to handle successive issues like that.

    RoDevia Brigham (20:42)
    Mm-hmm.

    Yeah, and that’s what we’re here for. We are here to streamline the process and make it so easy that we, what Proposabid does is that we fit in the top part of the property maintenance pyramid, like that very narrow, and then we funnel down to the foundational piece. So you plug us in even before you know that you need problems.

    Like I was in the fire service, so what I like to say is that we are the, we are the, we are the, ⁓ we put out the financial fires before it even starts. Right? Because we’re able to plug.

    Dylan Silver (21:26)
    Yeah, I mean, if you’ve

    got a bunch of bids going, if you’ve got a bunch of bids going, that’s the that’s the solution. Otherwise, you’re thinking, okay, I’ve got this work order, our onsite is going to handle that. But what about this other issue on another floor that’s being impacted by this, we have to get this and now you’re putting out fire. Now you have feel like you’re short on time because you’re maybe part of a small property management team. Now you’ve got issues. So being able to say, okay, we’ve got this issue, I need to have this

    RoDevia Brigham (21:30)
    Yeah!

    Mm-hmm.

    Dylan Silver (21:56)
    inspection done I need to have this professional over here boom boom boom you put in the ⁓ Request on proposed bid and now you’ve got that handled you wake up tomorrow morning and rather than having a panic attack basically saying okay I’ve got to deal with this hurricane now you’ve got solutions coming in and you can maybe focus and shift back to Hey, this is the smaller issue that we that we can address on site

    RoDevia Brigham (22:05)
    Mm-hmm.

    Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    Yeah, and just to be clear, like, this is not just about getting bids. It’s about being defensible for investors, property owners, asset managers, and then being able to submit those bids to institutions like insurance claims, right, or court proceedings, which people don’t really think about until they need proof, right?

    that these things are getting done or the fact that the state comes on your property and now you’re red tagged because you could not get the bids and estimations or the vendors to be for the state of the city of San Jose to approve those vendors to start the work in the first place, which has been a thing, which we’ve worked in. So proposal bid is multifaceted. Yeah, go ahead.

    Dylan Silver (22:45)
    That’s right.

    Yeah, the aspect of being defensible. The

    aspect of being defensible, I think is is is huge. And again, people don’t think about it until they’re hit in a situation where they have to now address it. But if you have, you know, needing to have records is like needing to have books owning a business. Right. So if you’re hiring contractors and you’re now having to have all of these things, maybe

    brought to court in some variety, you don’t want to have to go back and dig through all your records. So it’s really killing a lot of birds with the same stone. You’ve got, we’re going to put out a fire relatively quickly in 24 hours. We’re going to have some bids out here. We also don’t have to worry about ⁓ the follow-up process and hassling everybody down, chasing everybody down, proposal bids are going do that for us. And then when it’s all done, we’ve got this record thing for us. So we don’t have to worry about making

    RoDevia Brigham (23:55)
    Mm-hmm. Yeah.

    Dylan Silver (24:03)
    sure that are effectively our books are in a line because we’ve got it right here for us.

    RoDevia Brigham (24:08)
    Correct.

    And these are all the things that I thought about when I built ProposalBid out for the first six months. Because these are all the things that ⁓ my partner was speaking to. So I didn’t think of none of this stuff. I’m just borrowing from the industry. I’m asking the industry, what does the industry need? And then ⁓ baking that into the business and baking that in for my clients, which are on the both sides for the vendors and the property side too.

    In five years, I see that every property fund and leader will require a CAPEX data and that Proposabid will be that operating layer at the very top ⁓ to where those portfolios trust Proposabid to be able to deliver and defend on the property’s behalf. So even if the property changes ownership, we’re still baked in because we can

    stay with the property and go with ownership wherever they choose to go.

    Dylan Silver (25:14)
    Well, I appreciate everything that you’re doing. It’s definitely needed, especially in the multifamily space, which right now is very, there’s a lot of interest in multifamily for so many reasons. Affordable housing, ⁓ a lot of the arm adjustable rate mortgages that have been placed on these properties are now, know, ballooning. And so people are having to do capital calls and there’s a lot of turnover with these multifamilies. So as you have more interest in multifamily, you’re going to have more people saying,

    RoDevia Brigham (25:39)
    Huh?

    Dylan Silver (25:43)
    how do we defend our asset and look at ⁓ tools such as Proposabid. We are coming up on time here though, ⁓ Rodivio. Where can folks go to learn more about Proposabid or maybe if they’d like to reach out to you directly, how can folks get in contact with you?

    RoDevia Brigham (25:52)
    Sure.

    Yeah.

    Yeah,

    yeah, I’m on LinkedIn slash RoDevia Brigham, all one word, Proposabid.com. ⁓ Those are my two, and then YouTube is Proposabid. That’s P-R-O-P-O-S-A-B-I-D. And just today, I signed on with ⁓ Damon Johns, Insider Access, ⁓ next level CEO. You know who Damon Johns is?

    Dylan Silver (26:27)
    Absolutely. Who doesn’t know that, Damon John?

    RoDevia Brigham (26:28)
    Yeah,

    I signed up like three to four days ago for a casting call, pitch proposal bid. didn’t think, you know, they picked me and then got green lit and just signed all that paperwork. So you’ll be able to find me on TV. So I’m excited about that. You better catch me while you can, folks.

    Dylan Silver (26:43)
    Wow, congrats.

    RoDevia Brigham (26:51)
    You email me, call me, my phone number is on the website. But yes, I’m here for the industry long term. This isn’t about me, this is about y’all. This is about you guys, ⁓ you know, just making sure that you’re able to maximize your dollars ⁓ on the vendor side and on the property side. But you’ll be able to catch me online at any time, hit me anytime. We would love to be able to work with you and see how we can make life easier.

    Dylan Silver (26:51)
    Ha ha ha.

    RoDevia Brigham (27:21)
    for everybody with these property repairs.

    Dylan Silver (27:29)
    RoDevia. Again, thank you so much for coming on the show here today. Thank you so much.

    RoDevia Brigham (27:34)
    Yeah, I appreciate you. I’ll talk to you soon. Thank you, Dylan.

Tags:

Share via
Facebook
X (Twitter)
LinkedIn
Mix
Pinterest
Tumblr
Skype
Buffer
Pocket
VKontakte
Parler
Xing
Reddit
Line
Flipboard
MySpace
Delicious
Amazon
Digg
Evernote
Blogger
LiveJournal
Baidu
MeWe
NewsVine
Yummly
Yahoo
WhatsApp
Viber
SMS
Telegram
Facebook Messenger
Like
Email
Print
Copy Link
Copy link
CopyCopied