Tech for Real Estate Investors

Mike Hambright (00:02.146)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today we’re going to be talking about tech in real estate, tech for real estate investors. It’s evolved pretty dramatically. And today I have Sharad Mehta with me. He’s at the forefront of that, runs the RE Simply CRM. And we’re going talk about AI today and a lot of evolution that’s kind of happening. It’s happening faster than ever right now, really probably across every industry, but especially for real estate investors. So Sharad, welcome to the show. Hey, Mike. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, glad to have you in the office here. pleasure. My pleasure. Yeah, yeah.

I want to talk about tech. You’re also a real estate investor. And you’ve done, I know you used to have rentals as well up in I do. OK. I do about 60 properties, OK. OK. Yeah, that’s great. one of the best things, and I think I have this too, like started as a real estate investor, have done lots of deals and stuff like that, is as a service provider, you often are building the product you wish you had or that you wish you had when you were coming up or that you need now, right? Right. Yeah, exactly.

I used to live in Chicago, so I invested in Northwest Indiana market. I started, bought my first property August 2010, a two unit rental property that I still own to this day. Then August 2015, I moved to Carlsbad, San Diego area where I live now. At that point, I was doing about 40, 50 flips a year. Once I moved, I started looking at my business. like, I need some sort of a system. I’m not in the area. There’s not an efficiency.

So Podio was pretty much the only software people using back in the day. I logged into Podio for like two minutes. I’m like, oh yeah, there’s no way I’m going to use this. just, it doesn’t work. It’s clunky. And then you need all these different software to just patch it all together. I just didn’t like the idea. you know, I kind of did more research, didn’t find anything that I liked. So 2016, I hired a couple of developers just to create something for myself. And we have…

we had three goals in mind. It had to be super simple to use, and that’s the name recently. It had to be an all-in-one software, meaning one login, I log in, anyone from my company logs in. That’s it. They don’t need to log into any other software. And third was, I come from an accounting background, that it had to give us really good KPI. So that was kind of the idea behind recently when we started. that’s great. Yeah. and there’s a lot of CRMs out there now. But you’re

Mike Hambright (02:24.942)
The only one that I know of that handles a lot of the accounting stuff. I guess that was one of your requirements up front. Yeah, we’re the only one that handles the accounting. It’s not something you have to use. You can still use QuickBooks. But as people start using us more, they start seeing more and more value of it, why they would want to use it. So I don’t even use QuickBooks in my business. I haven’t used it for about three, four years now. I just run everything.

on recently. And that’s what a lot of other investors are doing. That’s cool. So did you have any software background at all, or you just had a need as a real estate investor? I did not have any software background. People look at me, they see I’m Indian. I own a tech company. They just assume I must be the developer. But I’m not. come from a business background. I have not written a line of code in recently. Thank god.

Yeah for that. Yeah, that’s awesome. But yeah, the development team we have development team CS team and marketing team Yeah, but I I just I was was an active real estate investors sale selectively investing so I needed something for myself That’s what it came from. Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s how that’s how entrepreneurship works, right? You just like you need you have a need for something you see a need how other people could use it and then you

eventually you’re probably trying to solve your own problem. And then ultimately you’re like, you know what? Other people need this too. Yeah, that was, that was exactly it. Like the very first version of recently that we rolled out, it did not even have anything about wholesale assignment because I had never wholesaled a deal before. So it was just very acquisition and project management driven because that was my business. It’s evolved over the years. At this point I do about 20, 25 deals a year and we have many investors that are doing that much a month using.

simply so it’s definitely grown way beyond my needs personal needs but that’s that’s the evolution of kind of you know we have bigger teams using it so they give us feedback on hey this would be good so yeah it’s been very interesting so when I we were talking about this before we started like when I first started in 2008 there were zero CRMs I don’t think until really Podio started coming around which was probably 2013 or 14 or so maybe I don’t know

Mike Hambright (04:39.822)
But until that started coming around and people were customizing it, there was nothing. It was spreadsheets or some other contact manager that we were bastardizing. Yeah, there was no CRM4 real estate investors. It was something generic that we kind of bastardized to make work for us. It would have the wrong name, but let’s just say that’s the salesperson instead of or something else. Yeah. now there’s a ton of…

CRM is in a ton of technology, but let’s just talk about kind of where where we’ve been from a tech standpoint because I remember I told you I left tech startup to ultimately to get started in real estate investing I left that in 2007 started real estate investing 2008 and I’m not I Guess I wouldn’t consider myself a tech guy some people might disagree with that a little bit But I’m not like super tech savvy. I just know what I need, you know, but

I remember thinking like this is the absolute wild west. There’s like no softwares at all. There’s no technology at all. It was just like, you know, people were mostly using whiteboards and spreadsheets and like stuff like that, if anything, legal pads full of stuff, but techs come a long way. like, I guess talk a little bit about kind of where we’ve been and maybe a little bit about where, let’s not go too far into where you see things going. That’s probably the main part of the show today, but like, where do you think?

has it gone too far? Like there’s just too many technologies out there today for real estate investors where it’s confusing. Yeah, I mean, I would agree to it to some extent, but then people have different needs. Each company, each software is adding a unique value. I think that’s where the person that is starting a CRM company or software company for that matter, they need to be very clear about what value that they’re adding. Like our philosophy is whatever we’re doing, it needs to be

fully natively integrated. Like it has to be one login if someone has to use our platform and then we will not ask them to go create an account on this system. That just is against our philosophy. So that’s how you… Which is kind of how Podio was, that you had all these outside third party plugins. that’s how Salesforce is. They just give you basically a foundational piece, but then you have to go build it. a website, then you have to go get a dialer, then you have to go…

Mike Hambright (07:04.417)
get this for data and whatnot. Our philosophy is now, if that’s what you want, if you want a different dialer in this, then we’re not the solution. We have everything natively built in. That’s the value that we’re adding. You just log in everything you need. It’s just built in, you use it. And over time, that’s the biggest value that we see. We consistently ask our customers, hey, what do you love about Resemblee? The number one thing is, hey,

before I was using four or five different software. Now I just need one software. Everyone on my team is there. So I think that’s where you have to be very clear on any business. What is your USB that you’re offering to the customer? Why should someone use you? It might be a very, very specific need. We tell people that if you need something that’s super highly customizable, we’re not the solution for that. We build our platform a certain way for real estate investors.

And that’s who we add value for. But if you need something super customizable, that you have a very unique business that you’re running, and we’re not the solution for you, then you probably have a couple of other options out there that you should look into. How do you balance? Because we own Investor Machine, and people have asked us over the years, why don’t you create a CRM? And I was like, I have no interest in that. And part of it is because I know forever people are going to say, why doesn’t it do that? It could be like the perfect.

And you know and then people are like why doesn’t it do that or when I click this why doesn’t it do that? like how do you balance between? people wanting like features and You knowing you could build them, but keeping it kind of pure so that it doesn’t get so muddied up though Because a lot of tech has done that right it’s like you go to use it And you’re like this used to be easier and now it’s so complicated agreed And they just listened to somebody chirped in there you’re too much Yeah, to where they created created created, and now it’s like spaghetti you know

No, I agree. mean, that is a very tough thing for us to do. It’s easy to create something that’s complicated, but it’s very difficult to create something simple to use. So that’s the challenge that we run into in our platform now. In about two weeks, the only missing piece is list pulling, which is coming out. But to be able to have, imagine list pulling, list stacking, driving for dollar, websites, CRM, dialer.

Mike Hambright (09:29.94)
AI built in, just to be able to do that, like you can pull cache files, just to be able to do that without going into different software. Like that is the challenge that we’re solving as a company. Like it should be something natively built in, but not overwhelm anyone. Like it should be, I see why they have it like this. know, have we done the absolutely perfect job at it? No, you know, but that’s something we step back at times and like, okay, could we have done this better? What can we do to make it?

simpler, not over complicated. So we do have some investors that have been with us for a while, and then we look at their feedback. And if it’s something that people are asking, a majority of people are asking, then that’s something we need to consider. But there are certain things that we work on that people aren’t even asking, but we know it will add value. Some of the AI stuff that we’re working on that people are not asking. that’s our job as a company to see,

people are making decisions based on, what is it that they see right now in the business? But we’re looking at, OK, what is going to add value to them six months or a year down the road? So those are some of the things that people are not expecting, are not asking for. And we go back and say, OK, let’s work on this, because no one is asking for it. But we believe it will add tons of enough, yeah. Because essentially, when you have hundreds or thousands of clients, they all have opinions. And you just have to sift through.

those to know what’s gonna benefit the most people overall. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then if it’s something very specific to an individual because they have a unique way of how they want to run their business, then we have to say, we’re sorry, we cannot do that. That’s how it works in our platform. We don’t have any plans to include that in our roadmap. Right. Yeah.

So one of the other benefits that you offer when you have a platform like this, which we were able to do this at Investor Machine and Investor Fuel a little bit too, when you’re kind of gathering data across a lot of people. And so you can see trends based on having as many customers as you do as to what’s working and what’s not working. And then you can go back to your customers and say, we have a little bit of a crystal ball here.

Mike Hambright (11:42.04)
Because we can see collectively what you’re all doing and how to benefit those of you that are not doing these things. That’s probably not something you thought of up front, but sure enough, you got there, right? Absolutely. Yeah, that’s something we did not think about as much as we should have probably. But you look at, go back, and look at the data of our users over the last four five years. One interesting thing is that DirectMail has been the number one lead source in terms of

the best performing in terms of lead generated and deals converted. Like that’s pretty consistent direct mail. Then you look at about four or five years ago how SMS was pretty hard. It used to be like, you know, in like second, third, but now like it’s in top five now it’s like number five, but you can see the trend that it’s on its way out as it’s getting more and more difficult. And then you see inbound marketing like PPC, PPL that people were not talking so much about.

four or five years ago, but now you see how heavily people are investing in it. But when you look at the investors that are doing 50, 100 or more deals a year, and you look at people that are starting out and that are struggling with, it’s pretty easy to see when you step back and look at the data and see, okay, what is different between people that are successful versus people that are not. There’s three things that consistently marketing, consistent with follow-up,

and they consistently track their KPIs and change marketing decisions based on that. Yeah, that’s great. That’s what it comes down to. It just consistently, there’s no, you know it better than anyone else, there’s no secret sauce to this. It just comes down to do Do the work. That’s it. You have it here. Ideas mean nothing. It’s without execution. Honestly, that’s what it’s all about. It’s like someone wants to lose weight. There’s no…

There’s no secret to it. Improve your diet, and you work out. Those are the only two variables that you can control. There’s nothing else you can do other than that. And that’s the same thing with real estate investing. The only variables are going to marketing. And are you answering your calls live? Are you getting back to the sellers on time? And as you start getting that data, you look at your data.

Mike Hambright (14:02.495)
and then make data-driven decisions so you improve your marketing. As long as you do that, it’s impossible not to get a deal out. Yeah, the only thing you can do if you’re doing those things is to force yourself into where you’re held accountable. Right. Or there’s a level of accountability. And I give this example, like several years back, I saw a picture of myself and I was like, gosh dang, I’m fat. I need to lose weight. And so I ended up, for the first time ever, hiring a coach, like a fitness coach.

And I lost, I’ve gained some of it back now, but I lost 50 pounds like six months. And it was like clockwork, but I had accountability. He was looking at my app, basically, not a CRM, but an app. He was tracking what am I eating? Am I on track? And then am I working out through the program? This guy was overseas even. I wasn’t even local. And I feel this level of I can’t let this guy down. And the real person that mattered was me. But when you have accountability or you have data.

Right? Absolutely. You can see. Because sometimes you’re like, I’m eating better. And it’s like, yeah, but what are you doing exactly? You need to track everything, which you can do with your CRM. They can, yeah. And you can also do, like obviously, you guys are a part of Investor Fuel. For our members that are the most accountable, those that come in that are vulnerable to share what’s working and what’s not, they’re tracking their KPIs. Like, they always perform better because it’s your dashboard. It tells you exactly what’s going on.

Now there’s a lot of also real estate investors, probably all entrepreneurs, that do everything they can to avoid accountability, even though all it is doing is hurting them. Yeah. I mean, it’s tough to have someone hold you accountable. Like that’s why I truly believe groups like InvestorFuel are so, important because it’s a very tough business. you get, you’re running this business. It’s not, and it can be very unstable. can be, you know, there’s

so many external factors that can influence the business and you’re in this own little world and it’s hard to, it’s hard not to have this downward spiral in your business that starts impacting your life. That’s why I truly believe anyone out there joining a group like Investor Fuel, that’s one thing when I look back, I’m like, okay, what would I have done differently? I would have joined a mastermind much sooner in my life.

Mike Hambright (16:22.442)
Because when you’re around other people, you see that they’re all struggling with very similar things. And then you’re collectively getting together and figuring out, what’s the best way out of it? And you see people that are successful, kind of what you mentioned, you know, I’m sure you look at people through investor fuel, investor machine, and you see people that are successful, they’re not doing anything that’s like a secret that they have their secret sauce. I mean, they’re just following the process. They’re consistently following the process.

And that’s the magic of being in a mastermind is you get that value from other investors where you may be struggling with something and you tend to, if you isolate that problem, you tend to make it bigger than it needs to be. When you talk to other people, you’re like, my God, other people have way bigger problems than I do. And the solution that I’m looking for is right there that this person has. went through the same thing. Rather than making my own mistakes, I can just learn from the mistakes of other people. There’s no better value than that.

hate to say it but as a guy like we don’t you know when I buy stuff we just did a bunch of stuff out at our ranch because we bought a bunch of you know furniture and we had to furnish a whole nother house right and my wife is very meticulous so she the first thing she’ll do when she has to assemble something is pick up the directions oh my god the last thing I do is pick it up I’m like I’ll figure it out yeah and it’s like you know but you do need to follow that playbook like you just follow directions follow most of us know what we need to do yeah

Sometimes we just wing it. A lot of times we just wing it. But for those that this resonates with, that you’re winging it and you’re not getting the results you want, maybe you should pick up that instruction manual. 100%. Yeah, I’m the same way. It was just funny that over the weekend I had to put something together for my kids. My wife’s like, hey, why don’t you read the instruction? I’m like, no, I’ll figure it out. I like some mystery in my life. I want to kind of see where this goes. But yeah, she’s ready. You’ve to follow the directions. But I mean, that’s something you’ve got to look back.

back and see, if I don’t follow directions in this part of my life, how much is it hurting me? But something simple like putting a piece of furniture together, yeah, I if you screw up, that’s not the end of the world. But if it’s like making decisions about your business and you make the right decision, the trajectory it can take you is totally different from where it’s at if you don’t make the right decision about it. Yeah, for sure. So you talked a little bit about lead sources a little bit ago. And so you mentioned SMS. So let’s talk about, I mean,

Mike Hambright (18:47.156)
SMS and cold calling is kind of living a slow death right now. was fast and it slowed down a little bit, but it’s still kind of probably on the way out. So what kind of trends are you seeing there across your platform? Yeah, I’m like for anyone who’s not familiar now, before you can text out from any platform, there’s this A2P10 DLC regulation that you need to do basically register your company with your EIN number, company information. So essentially you are

The best way to think of this is you’re creating a credit score with the carriers. So they look at how much spam you’re sending from your company. And the more spam you’re sending, the negatively it’s going to impact you. They call it trust score, which is pretty similar to your credit score. So that’s why it’s getting more and more difficult. The whole idea behind texting is

that you only text people that have opted in to receive text messages from you, which majority of the investors are not doing out there. With platforms out there, could pull, just like about a couple of years ago, or even like 18 months ago, you could go pull a list, skip trace, start texting all within 30 minutes. You can’t do that anymore. You can do the first two part, pull a list and skip trace, but in order to text them,

you need A2B10DLC registration. And then you could get that, takes about a week. But as you start sending spam messages, you can get shut down pretty quickly. So it’s actually helping bigger companies that are running a legit business. It’s helping them a lot because it’s reading out some of the spam artists in the industry. So it’s going to get more and more difficult. There’s going to be, based on what we’re hearing from Twilio, it’s

carriers are getting more regulating it more and more. So if they see that you’re texting someone without their prior consent and now how easy it is on like your phones like iPhone or Android that you get a text and you can just click a button and report it as junk. So that’s a big red flag. Imagine you text some couple of people and they’re in bad mood or whatnot, they report you as junk. So that is a big red flag for carriers. So you have to be very careful. Then what happens in that case is

Mike Hambright (21:08.138)
the cell phone carriers are coming to you and saying, hey, you texted this person, they reported it as a junk, can you prove that you texted this person after they opted in? So the burden of proof will be on you, and imagine for a typical real estate investor, they’re not doing these things. The same thing with cold calling. The carriers look at how many people you’re calling from the same number, how many people you’re actually connecting with, how long is your call? You either look at all of this, and then if they notice that there’s a

high number of calls that are being reported as spam, then they will start shutting you down. So that’s why I truly believe people should start looking to investing in more inbound marketing, like direct mail, PPC, PPL, and if you have the budget, then do TV, radio. Those are more of the marketing that where someone who’s motivated is actually reaching out to you versus you doing outbound calling and texting to them. So in terms of kind of best practices for people that…

you know, text is very effective when we get through to somebody. So, but a lot of our, a lot of times people would say, well, they called me from direct mail and I want to confirm an appointment via text. So the carrier wouldn’t see, all they see is you’re texting somebody for the first time ever, probably, right? So what are kind of best practices to move somebody kind of to SMS after they’ve kind of quote opted in some other way? Yeah, no, that’s a great question. So first of all, the opt-in does not need to be

happen from a website only? Yes, ideally if you have from a website, great. But when you’re speaking to that person, you can just literally ask them on the phone, hey Mike, is it okay? I’m gonna come look at the, is it okay if I text you for the details about this problem? And if they say yes, that’s an opt-in from them. So you can just ask them over the phone, you have the call recorded, so if it were to come to you and saying, Mike, you texted this person, did they opt in? You can go back to the call recording and say, here’s the call recording, this person opted in to receive a text.

So that’s totally fine. could be over a phone call. It could be through a website. Or it could be that they texted you, and then they nationally text conversation. Yeah. I know on the email side. So email is probably five years ahead in terms of the texting rules. And I’m guessing it’s going to be very similar. So for example, a lot of email marketers will try to get people on their list to hit the Reply button. Because then the ESPs see, they’ve communicated before. So I bet a best practice for texting.

Mike Hambright (23:33.582)
or somebody the first time you’re texting them is to say, just to ask them not just is it OK if I text you, but to say, hey, can you just reply to me? I just want to make sure you got it. Yeah, absolutely. So if the carrier sees that they responded to you, they’re like, oh, they’re good. Yeah, the more engagement you can get from people. So you could even change your text message to something that’s like a just get a yes or no.

Hey, can you just confirm that we’re good? Rather than saying, your meeting is confirmed and you leave it at that and there’s nothing is prompting that person to reply. We’re just saying, hey, we’re booked. was great speaking with you. We’re confirmed. Can you just please reply yes or no that we’re good for that time? just, mean, if you look at it from an AT &T, T-Mobile, Verizon point of view, if they look at your account and they see you’re sending thousands of messages, outbound messages, and you only get two replies,

It makes the cat like, OK, wait a minute. What are they sending where other person is not engaging at all? So it’s never going to be like 50-50. But if you can get more people to reply, that’s definitely going to help. And then asking some open-ended question, asking some questions where you get people to reply back to you, that definitely 100 % helps. Yeah, that’s good. That’s good. So what are some of the challenges or some of the mistakes on your platform? I know you have a lot of customers on your platform.

kind of give visibility into their business. It’s been a challenging couple years for some people. Some people are thriving. So what are some themes you’re seeing that’s working well? And then what some other folks can learn from this, some of the mistakes they’ve been making over the past couple years that they should go back and kind of reevaluate or maybe apply to their business. Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say when you look at this real estate investing business,

before anything, it’s a marketing business. It’s a marketing business at its heart. As long as you’re marketing, you’re getting leads. And then you go down further down the funnel. If you’re good with lead conversion, then you get deal. But if you stop marketing in your business, if you don’t have any leads, you don’t have any business. So one thing we notice is when people come to us and say, hey, what marketing should I start with? I would say the one that you can stick with the longest.

Mike Hambright (25:48.458)
If you’re going to start something one month, don’t see any result, you jump to another one, you try that for another month, you don’t see any results, you jump to the third one, then you might as well not do it. Just whatever you’re going to do, just pick a marketing, stick with it for at least six months, whether it’s direct mail. If you still want to do cold calling or texting, you could still do that. I do cold calling in my business, but I’m not doing it in-house. I have a company that I use, and they

do all of that stuff and they just kick leads over to us. But I’ve committed to them for six months. Even if I get one deal out of it, it’s going to pay for itself for the next two, three years. That’s the number one mistake that I see people make is they get all excited about, I want to do this. I’m serious. They send out direct mail, 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 mail pieces. They don’t get as many people to call them back. And they don’t get.

you know, a deal out of it. And they stop. Yeah, they’re like, holy shit, I just put like $4,000, $5,000 into it. I didn’t get anything. I mean, I understand it’s hard, you know, it’s hard to keep going when you put all this money out, you didn’t get anything out of it. But that’s the, you know, there’s like a stoic saying that obstacle is the way, like you have to do the hard thing. Like that’s where you need to have the belief that people that are at the top,

this is what they’re doing. There’s no secret to it. 80%, 90 % of what they’re doing is this. mean, then they have their list that they’re pulling, like some unique process that they have. Consistency. Consistency. if you’re not going to do marketing, commit to marketing for at least six months, would say just reconsider that if you really want to be in this business or I actually just recorded a show with Brandon Bateman yesterday. And I said the same thing. If you can’t commit to a channel, you should commit to a channel enough to do.

whatever it costs to do one deal a month. For example, if you know it’s going to cost you $6,000 in direct mail to do a deal, and you say, well, I’m just going to spend two, what’s the point? I realize you’re going to get one every three months on adverts. The problem is most people are going to quit before this one because they’re just like, it’s not working. But if you can’t stick with it for six, channel, invest enough to do a deal a month and invest in it for six months.

Mike Hambright (28:14.744)
with even if you don’t get a deal, just keep going, then you shouldn’t do that channel. Absolutely. Yeah. If you cannot commit to any marketing channel for six months, then don’t do it. Right. Because the other thing is, I say this all the time, we’re advertising to people that have been distressed for years and sometimes decades. Like, you’ve bought houses. I’ve bought houses from people that haven’t updated their house in like 20 or 30 years. was a slow deterioration with their house, their health, their financial situation, everything. they didn’t.

They didn’t get distressed overnight, so why would they respond overnight? They’ve been procrastinating for years. So just because they got a piece of mail from you, by the way, they got it from like 100 other people too, why are they going to just all of a jump on the phone? You need to kind of keep tapping them on the shoulder, because the time will come where they’re going to up that phone. It’s just not today. Yeah, mean, another example to look at this is, I like to talk about it. Let’s say if you’re getting.

You’re not in the market to buy a car. You have this local Toyota or Honda dealership that’s sending you a postcard once a quarter. You don’t see this postcard and run to the dealership. They’re just planting a seed. That’s all they’re doing. Let’s say a year down the road, every quarter you’ve been getting a postcard. Whatever, they have July Ford sale, year in sale, or whatnot. Let’s say your car breaks down and you happen to be the market for a Toyota or Honda or similar car.

Just, guarantee you, there’s a very, very good likelihood, more likely than not, you’re gonna call that dealership, just because they’re blind or dizzy. That’s the same thing we’re doing with marketing. You’re not, I think sometimes people think that when you send out marketing or follow-up, you’re trying to create motivation. You cannot create motivation for someone, right? You are just basically trying to be in front of them when they actually have motivation. When that time comes, When that time comes, that’s exactly what I use a very similar example to you. I’ve used it for years about, like, you said cars, and I say, like, tires or.

Yeah, it’s like I don’t and they get match, you know get mattress like flyers all the time And I’m like how often you buy a mattress? Yeah, very often But when you need it when you need it, you’re like I these guys have been marketing to me Yeah, something about reciprocity to yeah, sometimes people will just go with whoever’s marketed to them the most 100 % yeah, no, there’s a lot of investors that send one or two postcards and then they quit Yeah, and then I because I get them because I you probably do because I have rentals so I get mailers from other investors

Mike Hambright (30:33.05)
And it’s like, man, are some companies in town that I’ve been around for a long time. I know who they are, like in DFW here. It’s like, they’re consistent as hell. They’re mailing me like clockwork for years and years and years for the same reason you just said. I’m not ready now, but they’re hopeful that someday I will be. Exactly. And then another thing is, when you’re consistently marketing, like in the example that I gave about mattress or tire change, I’d say you need a mattress or tire change. It’s one thing is,

that you’re trying to, this person has been consistently marketing. And another thing is, hey, I don’t have to do any research, they’ve been marketing, they look pretty good, I’m just gonna at least give them a call. So then you get the lead. Now the next part is how good your sales process is. If someone calls you, and let’s say you call the mattress company, you go to their website and their website is down, or you call them, they don’t answer the phone. That’s the next step of it. But at least you want to start getting people to call you. It’s not gonna happen with the first mail piece that you do. And that’s where people…

have this misconception with the follow-up that they’re telling people that, you know, in the follow-up, hey, we can offer cash, you know, quick clothes, everyone can do that. You’re not trying to get their motivation to go up, you’re just trying to stay in front of them when actually they have their motivation. It has to come from within. If you try to force them into a motivation, then you’re gonna have contracts falling through because people are like, hey, I don’t feel they’ll have buyer remorse or seller remorse at that point. So as long as…

you let them get to the point where they feel comfortable, but you’ve been in front of them the whole time. That’s the magic. Yeah. And instead of representing yourself as, pay cash in close fast, which everybody can do, or everybody says at least, not everybody can do it, but is to really kind of build a relationship with that person and really try to build a rapport, right? Absolutely. Because there’s a ton of people that are just like, how much you want for this dump? Yeah. It’s like, that person’s never going to.

get any deals. But if you build the relationship with them, they feel like this person really cares about me or this person can help me more so than the other folks I’ve talked to, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, if you’re talking to a seller and then you had an appointment with the seller and the seller says, hey, I’m sorry, I cannot make this appointment. My dog just died, for example. And you just completely gloss over it and say, OK, when are you available? And they’re like, did you just completely miss that opportunity? Did you just not care? But if you step back and you’re like, oh.

Mike Hambright (32:57.298)
I’m so sorry to hear that. No worries. Take your time. I’ll call you in a week or so. Can I help you with anything? And just send them a text message afterwards. Or send them flowers or something. Yeah, you could send something, a personal handwritten note. Just such a simple thing. Just to be able to do that, that’s definitely going to help you. I you’re not doing it to close deals. You’re just doing it because it’s the right thing It’s the right thing to do. It’s amazing just doing the right thing. We’ve talked about it in the show so far.

follow the process that you know, just do the right thing. Like these aren’t leaving. This is just like regular, this is just like obvious, should be obvious. Exactly, yeah. Sometimes the most obvious things are, yeah, like common sense is not very common. But that’s what it is. mean, there’s no secret. It’s just following the process, sticking with marketing, having good sales process. And then as you have some deals that you’re closing, looking at the numbers on

what is it that’s working and double down on that. Anything that’s not working, cut that out and take that money and put it towards what’s working. Yeah, yeah. So I do want to talk about AI. I know you guys have made some evolution there. This is a fast moving space, kind of state of the union on AI. And specifically, there’s a lot of AI that’s kind of working its way into our industry now, especially

you know, voice agents and stuff like that. I know you guys are rolling some of that out and it’s kind of everywhere these days, right? It’s a little bit kind of scary. It’s a combination of exciting and scary as to what’s going to happen with AI. But what are kind of State of the Union here, what are you seeing that you’re in and what are you guys doing? Yeah, man, when ChaiGPD came out, what, 18 months ago, right? Yeah, 18 months ago or so, I was like, man, there’s this.

collective excitement about it. Are we gonna do something? We’re gonna do something. But then you have to figure out, okay, there’s something you can do. Yes, you you can do on the content side, like writing emails, messages. Is that the best use of it? No. You we wanted to work on something that’s like truly gonna add value, that is gonna help people buy back their time. So just 10 days ago, March 1st, we rolled out a voice AI.

Mike Hambright (35:13.358)
And more people than we were initially anticipating. We didn’t make a big push about it. We just did a preview of, it was part of a bunch of updates that we rolled out, and we just did a preview. then more than enough people, more than the number of people that we were initially expecting in 10 days are using us. And just the fact that how good the AI is. I mean, you can tell it’s AI. The prompt is, when the AI picks up the call, it says, hey, this is

Joe, I’m an AI phone agent with ABC company. you just say it upfront. Yeah, no, that’s just to be compliant. always have, that’s something you cannot even change. We’re not trying to pass it off as a real human. So we want to make sure that the person who’s answering, calling in, they know, they’re aware that this is an AI answering the call. If you ask the AI, hey, who are you? He’ll say, hey, I’m just a digital assistant. I’m not a real human.

So say all that thing, but honestly, we’re noticing majority of the people that are calling in, they don’t even care. They have someone that’s answering the call. I was telling you before the call, one of our investors messaged me the second day that we rolled out. He had an 80-year-old person call in, speak with the AI for 12 minutes. Imagine that. And I was just there, like, OK, sounds good. People just solutions. Exactly. think at the end of the day, if we can.

So some people probably don’t even hear that. like, what did you say? I don’t even know what you just said. But there’s also people that are like, so this is a side note, but this is out at our ranch. We had a power outage. This is like four or five months ago. And I called into the Encore, which is our TXU, one of the two that provides the power. And it was an AI agent. And it was clear. I don’t think it said it was, but it was kind of robotic. My first thought was I was kind of irritated.

And then it just helped. Literally, I used my voice. Tell me your address. I told them my address. I didn’t have to type anything in. And they were just like, we see there is a power outage. There’s somebody will be there within 60 minutes to solve the problem. was like, dang. They just totally solved my problem, and I didn’t have to talk to It was nice. Yeah. Exactly. And then it’s going to happen more and more. for sure. It’s going to happen more and more just because it’s so much more efficient. Imagine you’re not the only one with a power outage.

Mike Hambright (37:34.51)
probably a bunch of people, they’re all calling in at the same time. If all the calls are being answered by humans, you’re gonna be on hold. On hold for an hour. Yeah, exactly. Now you don’t have to do that. If you’re getting the solution, people will start getting more and more comfortable with it. yeah, you can have the AI, most of the calls that we’re noticing will last about two, three minutes. The AI will ask their name, the address, why are they wanting to sell the…

the other motivation like price of that they’re looking for any repairs done, the timeline. It’s asking all these questions and it’ll say, then you can have the AI transfer the call to you. You can have AI send a booking link or you can just have AI say, okay, thank you so much. We’ll have someone from our team call you back. And it just does that. So at this point, it’s not actually scheduling appointments. It’ll like send you a link. It’ll just send like a Calendly link or something just to do that. Yeah. Just because.

depending on who wants to go on the appointment. We didn’t want to make it super complicated. This would just roll it out 10 days ago. So we’ll already have a bunch of people with feedback. Hey, this is great. I love it. Can we do this? So we’ll be adding more and more of that when I’ll book an appointment. That’s great. Yeah. Yeah, I happen to know. I’m sure you see this too because of your platform. But we know on the investor machine side that we have customers spending a lot of money with us collectively and individually. And we track their calls.

most investors on average are still answering the phone less than 50 % of the time. part of it is they’re either on another call, or they’re busy, or that person that was supposed to do it is out sick today. AI eliminates all that, right? Yeah. So if you don’t use a good number of our investors are using it as a first answering response to it, and then you can have, if the person calls back for the second time, you can have it go to a real human.

if you want, but just at least having it as a backup in case you don’t pick up. Like we had another call, I listened to another call, this was somebody in Texas. The person called in after hours. If AI was not there, he would have missed the call. Maybe or maybe not the person would have left a message, the caller, but AI picked up the call. He talked for like good four, four and a half minutes, sharing everything about his condo that he is going, the tenant is not paying.

Mike Hambright (39:55.042)
you know, when they did the last repairs, how long have the tenants been paying for, when did they stop paying, how much are they looking for that? Like you have all that information. Like imagine having all that information, where if you’re using AI versus if you were not, then you just completely missed that opportunity to speak with the seller. And that person did not care. Like, it’s a, I’m an AI phone agent, how can I help you? And then people just want solutions, like you said. And then just because it’s going to become more and more common, if you’re not adopting to it,

Like, you’re going to be left behind. That’s right. In my experience, what makes a super successful real estate investor financially and kind of happiness-wise, freedom-wise, I guess, and somebody that is either failing or just surviving is doing a bunch of things a little bit better. Yeah. It’s not like some transformational thing. It’s like they answer the phone live a little bit better. They do follow-up a little bit better.

They just do all these things a little bit better on the fringe. their results aren’t just a little bit better. They’re double or triple. And it’s so inexpensive. It’s like $0.25 a minute. And you pay for when you actually use it. And those leads, depending on where they’re coming from, are probably anywhere from a few hundred to 1,000 plus dollars. It’s insignificant. $0.25 a minute. So even if you have an AI on the phone,

for full hour, that’s like 15 bucks an hour. So imagine you’re paying an employee only when they’re actually on doing the work. So that’s what it is, like 25 cents a minute to do that, which comes to like $15 an hour, but you’re only paying for the time that AI is actually on the call. And you never, like you never ever are gonna miss a call from a person, from a leader again. So pretty amazing stuff. in addition to AI, like where’s tech going? What do you see things going over the next?

even just kind of short term year or two. I think AI would be big part of it. We’re looking into, like right now the AI can take the initial call. It doesn’t have any contextual information. So we’re working on adding contextual information. So when a person calls back and you’ve had a bunch of conversation, like AI doesn’t have any context of that. So we’re working on adding that contextual information to the AI so it can just pick up whatever you left off. So it doesn’t ask the same questions again. And then looking at like outbound stuff.

Mike Hambright (42:17.858)
You know, that’s where a little bit more regulations are. Inbound, it’s a little bit less regulated, but when you’re having an AI make an outbound call, it’s more regulated to that. Just more automations, I think. What else are you doing in your business right now that you can have AI or some sort of a tech automate that? That’s kind of what we’re looking at. just, you basically set it and forget it and, you know, re-simply or whatever platform you’re using, just…

does this stuff for you just without you having to think about it. I think that’s the stuff I’m excited about. And then the biggest risk always is, after you have looked at everything that’s out there, what else is out there that you’re not even thinking about? For example, when COVID happened, no one was planning for that in 2019. Oh, next year COVID is going to happen. Let’s just do this. So that’s the stuff that I’m not.

to me that’s the risk factor is after you’ve looked at everything, okay, what else is beyond your control that may happen? You the political environment, you know, it could be the war, it could be like the tariffs, or it could be any of that. Like how do you, like how would you handle that if and when that something beyond your control were to happen that you’re not even seeing right now? Yeah, I think the biggest thing is just do the reps now, like do the work now, build the foundation now so that.

If something bad happens, you’re better off. If something good happens, you can fly forward even faster. Exactly. 100%. Awesome. Well, Sherad, thanks for spending some time with us today. Thank you. It’s been great. It’s an exciting space. So if folks want to learn more about you or RE Simply or anything else, how do they find out more? Yeah, if they want to learn more about what we’re at RE Simply, RE Simply is an all-in-one software. helps you everything from your data, list pulling, list stacking, driving for dollar, your marketing.

your sales side of it, operations side of it. So basically a true, true all-in-one software. So if you have anything you want to learn more about, can go to resimpli.com and learn more about it. You can start a trial, book a demo with our team, and get any of your questions answered. Awesome. Good stuff. Everybody, tech is moving fast in this space, in the real estate space. I think you want to make sure you’re on the forefront of it as much as possible. And the reality is you don’t have to know how to do all these things. You just have to know.

Mike Hambright (44:46.104)
who to work with to do these things, right? You don’t have to go create your own CRM. You don’t have to do all your own marketing. At the end of the day, I think what does separate a lot of professional, like really successful real estate investors and even entrepreneurs is they just find the right partners to work with to do the things that they’re never gonna be as good at. Like you’re never gonna be as good at a marketing agency that has hundreds of customers to do it yourself, right? You just don’t have that learning curve to learn from those things. So make sure you’re following kind of leaders in the tech space.

And Sherad, thanks so much for joining us today. Thank you, Mike, for having me. Yeah. hope you got some good insights from today. We appreciate you a bunch, and we’ll see you on the next show.