How AI Finds Off-Market Real Estate Deals That Match Your Buy Box | Grenville Lock

Grenville Lock (00:00)
After a little bit of time, it just becomes noise. And so what we’ve done is we’ve given the investor the ability to cut the noise and just focus on pure signal.

And when a wholesaler comes in and puts in a deal for an investor, it doesn’t—we don’t spray and pray. That’s not—that’s not our service. It’s—it’s cut the noise, catch the signal. And so pure signal for—for the investor. And we’ve taken that—that idea and we’ve flipped it on its head of the spray and spray, and we turn it into spray and pay. And so instead of an investor getting sprayed, we spray the wholesalers.

Issa Hanna (02:05)
Welcome back to another episode of the Real Estate Pros show. I’m your host, Issa Hanna, and today I have Grenville Lock here to share his new revolutionary tech for us. Grenville, welcome. Welcome to the show.

Grenville Lock (02:16)
It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me, Issa.

Issa Hanna (02:18)
I’m super excited and we were talking a little bit earlier. I said I looked at your bio, you’re a serial entrepreneur, been able to grow, build, scale multiple businesses, and now you’re in the tech space. So for our viewers at home, kind of give us a rundown of—of what you’ve created.

Grenville Lock (02:33)
Well, first off, thanks for having me on. It’s—it’s great to be here. We created something that’s a little different, looking at the—the real estate wholesale and investor systems. And we looked at the—some of the challenges. We talked to a lot of investors and some of the—the friction or pain that they feel, they get so many deals that don’t align with what they’re looking for.

They subscribe to a service and they say, okay, I’ve described my buy box. And they’ll get 10 emails and it’ll be maybe 10 or 20 properties, and none of them meet their buy box. And so now they’re having to spend time going through their inbox and going through each of these and going, that doesn’t fit, doesn’t fit, doesn’t fit.

After a little bit of time, it just becomes noise. And so what we’ve done is we’ve given the investor the ability to cut the noise and just focus on pure signal.

And when a wholesaler comes in and puts in a deal for an investor, it doesn’t—we don’t spray and pray. That’s not—that’s not our service. It’s—it’s cut the noise, catch the signal. And so pure signal for—for the investor. And we’ve taken that—that idea and we’ve flipped it on its head of the spray and spray, and we turn it into spray and pay. And so instead of an investor getting sprayed, we spray the wholesalers.

It’s the other way around. So the investor comes in and doesn’t say, here’s my buy box. We have the investor, whether they’re using agentic support—so if they’re using Claude, CoWork or their—or their—it doesn’t matter what the AI agent is. You can literally talk to your agent and say, go to my email, got this property I’m—I’m looking for a property, specifically a three-bedroom, two-bathroom in say Mobile, Alabama. My max ARV is 375,000.

I’d like to have a net inc—a net profit out of that business or that flip, specifically, $60,000. Go find it for me. That goes in, we receive that and we send out to the wholesalers that are actually wholesaling effectively in the state of Alabama and say, we’ve got a property we can probably turn around for 24, 48 hours if it meets this buy box. Who’s—who’s interested in finding it? And so now you get an army working for you as opposed to an army fighting.

Deals that don’t necessarily fit and just spraying them. And so now it’s spray out and now get paid. So it’s spray and pay as opposed to spray and spray. And that’s the value we provide for the investor. We’ve taken it a step further when we do send a deal out to an investor. We don’t just send the deal, we’ll—we’ll first start and say it’s the Fast Five. It’s basically the—the five most important things you want to know, centered around, what is—what’s my cost of entry.

If—if this is going to be a rental property, what’s my cash flow look like? What’s my DSCR rate? So we tailor the—the Fast Five specifically to the investor and to the deal type as well.

With that tailoring, in order to make it sticky, we provide the calculator in that deal. So when we send that out, you don’t have to leave our deal to go to your own calculator. The calculator is right on the system. So you can say, okay, let me play with the numbers. Yeah, I can make this work. This does work.

Or maybe I want to make an offer and adjust the deal. And so you—they can do that right in the system. So it’s immediate right there. So well, that—that makes it sticky. It makes it better for the investor and more streamlined. And then on the wholesaler side to make it easy for them, one of the number one challenges I think all wholesalers have is good data. You’re paying for this system, you’re jumping from system to system to system.

Just trying to find how do I comp this. Because the data—there’s data aggregators, but they’re expensive. So you’re either paying for a service or you’re jumping around Redfin or Zillow or Realtor.com, etc. So what we’ve done is we’ve aggregated a bunch of that data and given the wholesaler the ability, when they’re looking at a property, we’ll pull up the—the size of the roof. So if there’s a roof repair on that, you can—

You—you know the—the number, so you can calculate that on the fly based on average cost of roof repair, whether it’s tile or whether it’s three-panel asphalt, etc. So we—we have the calculator already built in there, so you can develop your max allowable offer. And then as the best wholesalers will be looking at what’s the best possible use of that property.

So it’s not just my max allowable offer. It’s what’s the exit strategy that’s going to make the most amount of sense for that property. So then we have an exit strategy calculator built in there as well. So you can figure out rule of thumb in there quickly. This is my MAO. And then I can go and I can figure out my—my exit strategy that makes the most amount of sense on how I could potentially package that property. Then we provide that to the wholesaler. We don’t say you have to dispose—dispel that—that property through us. That’s just a service we provide for you. We like it when you do.

But we would like—we’d rather you be working in our system. So we give you an opportunity and then as a wholesaler, if you do a couple of deals in a 90-day period, we’ll drop our—our—our fees for you on the disposition side. So that we—we’re looking for the—the long-term partner and provide, if—if you can dispose something and—and it’s 30% of your fee, and you never have to pick up the phone and—and—and you never have to spray or develop a system to do that because it’s already built,

It’s a perfect partnership. And so that’s—that’s what we’ve built and we—

Issa Hanna (08:33)
Well, as—as an—as an investor, myself who owns many rental properties, who’s always looking to—to buy more and invest, I sat here and you’re describing this and I’m like, this is—this sounds great. And I know a lot of investors at home are gonna—are gonna be sitting there thinking the same thing. I mean, you’re making it so easy, you’re bringing everybody in space, and the one thing all of us investors love to do—

We crunch our numbers, you guys. So they’re crunching your numbers. They’re telling you what it could be used for. I mean, they’re doing so much of the heavy lifting in your brain that you kind of gotta prepare for already that you’re just looking at already vetted deals kind of like, okay, this is for me, this is not for me. On both sides, whether it’s investors or whole—or wholesalers, if you’re a wholesaler, the use for the property, you guys can,

You got a couple of investor clients that invest in Section 8 rentals, and the use for this property is Section 8 rentals. Guess what? You can streamline those straight to your guys that—that are like that. So it’s definitely more organized and it’s definitely—I mean, it—it’s revolutionary. It’s gonna make buying, investing, wholesaling, ten times easier. So, and—and I didn’t ask you about the tech really in our pre-conversation. We’re just kinda having a conversation.

I said I’m gonna save that for the show. So this, you guys, is my live reaction to what Grenville said, how this app works. Amazing. And you’re a serial entrepreneur. You told me that you’re wired to see opportunity. So how did you see this opportunity? How did this all get started?

Grenville Lock (10:43)
Well, I joined one of the—the real estate mentoring groups because I was interested in getting into real estate. I just didn’t know where I wanted to go or what problems I want to solve. And, like a moth to a flame, I listened to what—well, what are the challenges that you’re having? Because you—if you want to go into a business you wanna ask what are the challenges you have to navigate through and whether or not that’s something that you’re willing to accept.

A lot of people don’t—don’t go into landlords because they don’t want to fix toilets. Well, the reality is you don’t have to fix toilets. They’re—th—that’s what plumbers do. And—and they’re good at it. And there’s a reason they have businesses. But there’s a perception there. And I wanted to cut through perception to—to real challenges and real pain and get a—get a full understanding of what I was stepping into into the real estate space. And the more I heard, I was like, this is easy to solve. Why aren’t—

Well, I—I—my—my first reaction was, why aren’t people solving this today? And the initial reaction with AI, people are using, whether they’re using Claude, CoWork, or Manus, or—or ChatGPT, and they’re building an agent to go in their inbox and sort of organize and then sort through and find the things they’re looking for. But what’s happening on the other end? On the other end, everybody’s trying to figure out how do I get by your agent. And so you’re in an arms race.

Well, you’re in the real estate business, you’re in the investment business, you’re not in the—the tech business. When you—when you think about how does Instagram keep your attention for so long? Well, I’ve got thousands of engineers and—and psychologists studying how to keep you personally, you can’t win that battle. It’s an arms race you can’t win. And so I thought, well, why don’t we—why don’t we win it for the investor? Why don’t we solve that problem? If you’re looking and you’re always subscribing because you’re constantly fixing,

Flipping or—or running your operation, let’s remove that noise. Let me cut that pain for you. So that was—that’s r—literally how I found it. And as I’m wired to solve problems as a serial entrepreneur, I was like, I think I can solve that. Let me start there. And—and in a matter of, I’d say two months, we built the entire platform up.

Issa Hanna (12:52)
Amazing, amazing. And—and what, us real estate guys, we’re all—I like to say we’re visionaries, right? So we—we see the big picture, we don’t got time for the little detail stuff, we don’t got time to find these deals, or it takes us forever just to—to do what you guys already done do in the—in this tech for us. So basically, now you’re just logging on your phone, like, okay, not for me. It’s almost like a dating app for—for investment properties.

I love it. I love it. And go ahead, you guys.

Grenville Lock (13:25)
I—

Was—I was gonna say I love that analogy. I think that’s a gr—a great way of putting it. It’s a dating app for—for—for real estate properties. That’s great.

Issa Hanna (13:32)
Yeah, definitely. Yeah, I mean I’m—I’m visualizing it right now. Like I said, we’re visionary. So I’m—I’m visualizing using it right now and I’m like, how simple is this? It’s gonna make life a lot easier. So definitely, I’m definitely loving this new tech. And—and we got into a little bit of future talk. I said what future opportunities. We got into the AI thing. Rapid growing AI is—is something that needs to be embraced right now.

You said that five years ago, something that would have cost half a million dollars, AI can do right now. I always tell everybody, it’s become a creativity calculator, right? So five, ten years ago, if you wanted to design something, whether it be an investment memorandum, whether it be a—a design for a t-shirt that you wanted to do, you’d have to go to professionals to do it. Now you can just log on to your phone.

And whatever you can create in your mind, the—the AI will—will—will calculate it for you. So can you kind of give us a little bit more about where you see AI and what role it’s gonna play for us in the future?

Grenville Lock (15:16)
Yeah, I wish I had a crystal ball. I mean, what I tell you, you take it with a grain of salt. AI is so—it’s so incredibly powerful. I see the challenges in—in AI being, more human than—than—than the tech. Yeah, there’s tech challenges. There’s obviously gonna be privacy, there’s—there’s trust, big tech

Makes a mistake and it’s—it’s oops, we make a mistake and it—it, you know, you’re fine. So there’s a bit—there’s going to be a bit of resistance there. And but once we get through that, the sky’s the limit. You can literally build just about anything. Some of the challenges that I’ve—I’ve seen others and I’ve experienced a little bit of, you know, you go to an AI app to build—to build an app and you—you describe its vision and you get a great proof of concept, it—it looks beautiful.

And you can find out whether or not it works, which is fantastic because it’s, as you say, it unlocks the creativity in to find out whether or not this is a viable business or not. Whether it sounds good, feels good, my friends say it’s good, but will people actually, do it? You can roll that out in a matter of—of hours and start taking that to market. The challenge is it builds a great proof of concept. Getting it to scale is a whole other business. When you start adding other modules and it sort of fleshing it out,

The AI will just go back and rewrite your code and you’re like, well, it was working. Why did—what—what changed? And so those challenges are being sorted. It—it won’t be long before you can actually build a scalable app. I would imagine—imagine months where the constraints are, I built this module, it’s working, don’t touch it. Add on this, don’t touch, and so the automated test pieces, the maturity of app development is gonna be—be bundled in there. Because right now it’s—it’s a bit of a Wild West, which

I think it’s great because it—it brings anybody into the space. Whether—if you’ve never had any tech experience, you can actually see it get built. Then the maturity I think will come—it—it will come in this—in this year in—in 2026 where automated testing comes in. Where, I’ve built my app. Now you just say, I’d like some automated tests when I make changes. Here’s a

And you get into test-driven design. I don’t want to get too nerdy and geeky here, but really you have domain-driven design, a tech-driven—test-driven design from a—from a tech perspective, that’s going to come into the AI. So it’ll—you—better, more mature services will actually interview you and say, and—and it’ll walk you through, you wanna—you wanna solve this problem? Okay. And it’ll build the test cases around it. It’ll build a guard and it’ll build test harnesses for you.

So you’ll be able to scale your app into something much better than what—what we’re getting today from a scale—scale perspective. That’s what I see coming this year. You’re asking me for next year.

Issa Hanna (18:02)
We don’t know. It’s—it’s changing so much. Yeah. It’s—it’s unbelievable how fast, how—how—how much is changing. It’s just like you said, you don’t know where it’s gonna go. But I probably put my money behind exactly what you called for ’26 just because I see exactly where that’s going. I’m seeing the maturity in real time of—of every AI app that we use just on an everyday basis. So then you being able to build, scale

Multiple businesses across multiple different markets. Why would I doubt what you say? Now I want to talk about future of—of your—of your new tech, right? Of your new app. Five years down the line. I can see myself already using it. Like, I—I met you, I want to sign up right away as an investor. So five years down the line, how many users do you want to see on the app?

Grenville Lock (18:51)
All of them.

Issa Hanna (18:52)
Everybody under the sun.

Grenville Lock (18:54)
Well, quite honestly, what I’m trying to enable is a business for anybody who wants to do wholesaling, it—and a biz—a simplified system for investors who want to continue to invest. Where I see it going for our particular app is essentially you just talk to your agent because everyone’s gonna have an AI agent that’s gonna manage their email and you’re—you’re—you’re literally gonna say, I’ve got this under contract, put it in for disposition. And it’ll be bundled into

CoWork, it’ll be bundled into Manus, so it’ll be bundled in into any of the agentic services. We’re already integrated with them now, so you can—you can do that today. Where I see our app and other apps in AI is it’ll be literally you’ll go into something like CoWork and you’ll—you’ll just say I want to do A, B, C and the apps are already there.

And it’s—it’ll ask you questions, do you want us to integrate this or do you just wanna—you wanna register? And it—yeah, I do. Okay, and boom, you’re in and now you’re running. And that’s where I see it, where it’s—it’s literally as frictionless as possible.

Issa Hanna (19:57)
Yeah, and—and when you make it easy for people, guess what? You make it sticky, like to quote you, and make it easier for people, you’re gonna make it easier for people to make money. So man, I just—you’ve got me so excited. You’re the first interview I’ve done this morning and I’m already like where do I sign up? And—and for people at home who—who are feeling exactly the same way,

Where do they sign up? How could they get a hold of you? How could they get involved with this tech?

Grenville Lock (20:23)
aggreigator.com And we misspelled aggreigator, we put an ‘I’ in it because it’s real estate investment in the right—in the middle, right in the—the—the full middle of that. So it’s aggreigator.com. That, and right there, we—we—it’s a simple sign up. You can use your—your Google account so you—we don’t have to capture your—a password for you. And it’s the same thing if you don’t want to use your Google account, you can use your email, but again, we only use a one-time password.

So every time you want to log in, it’s gonna send you a PIN. That way we never have a—a password for you. So if your passwords ever get compromised because you’re someone who uses the same password or the same pattern of passwords across multiple apps, we’ll never have that.

Issa Hanna (21:04)
Well, so once again, guys, aggreigator.com and he’s making it easy for you to sign up and—and—and sign in. So and then he’s already thought of we’re not gonna have your passwords compromised because we’re gonna do this system. Hence successful serial entrepreneur has been able to build multiple businesses. I am super excited for Aggreigator.com that you might see my email coming in within the next twenty minutes signing up.

And—and you can take that one to the bank. I’m literally gonna go sign up for this just because it—it sounds right up my alley as an investor, and I know a lot of investors who are either part of Investor Fuel or even the ones that watch this show are gonna love Aggreigator. So with that, Grenville, thank you so much for coming on, sharing this with us. It was a true honor, a pleasure to host you. And—and like I said, I’m super excited for this tech

That—that you’ve created.

Grenville Lock (21:58)
Thanks for having me. Appreciate you.

Issa Hanna (21:59)
Thank you. And to my viewers at home, if you guys enjoyed my conversation, want to see more like it, make sure to hit like and subscribe. I talk to people every day that can bring us different knowledge on every aspect of the real estate industry. Until next time, the pros are out.