How to Price Homes Like a Real Estate Appraiser

Justin Berry (00:00)
You don’t have to have competence to be confident. Con men don’t have to have products to sell. You know, they don’t have to fulfill. They just have to sell, right? But the best people in our industry, I think the ones that would make the industry look better are the ones that I think just need a higher level of competency. If they had the competency, they’d have the confidence to speak up and then they’d have the confidence to be visible and they’d have the, know, and it goes on and on from

Quentin (01:54)
everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host Q Edmonds and you probably can say it with me. Yes, indeed. I am excited to be here today. I’m excited. I’m excited about my guests. You know, we always have just some just fascinating guests and this is no different. mean, imagine real estate is out there ages, right? Just imagine if you had something that could help you price.

Houses like they could tell you the price that you need for the house like this is not my area expertise Hopefully I ain’t even jumping a gun because this guy got so much that he could talk about from so many different angles He may not even want to give you all this nugget. So listen, I’m gonna tease you but I’ll leave it up to him for him to Disseminate whatever information he wants the viewers to know but I’m super excited today to have mr. Justin Berry here, sir. How are you doing today, man?

Justin Berry (02:48)
I’m good, I appreciate you having me on, I’m excited.

Quentin (02:50)
Nah, man, me too, me too, man. You was giving me so many great nuggets, you know, behind closed doors. But like I said, I’m being very honest. I want you to tell the listeners what it is that you want them to know. I know you have a wealth of knowledge. You and your wife have built an incredible business. mean, and so I want to take the time just now to dive in with you, right? I want you to take us into your world, you know, get us familiar with what you’re doing. What’s your main focus these days and what markets are you operating?

Sir, if you don’t mind.

Justin Berry (03:19)
Sure. Yeah. So just to kind of real quick, I got into real estate appraising as soon as I got out of high school, didn’t go to college. I didn’t want to grow up. I wanted to be a traveling musician. So I got this opportunity to measure houses for an appraiser and I didn’t want to grow up. And then along the way I grew up and thank God I did get into what I got into because it was completely by accident, but it’s a, you know, it’s been great for my life.

go through the crash of the 2008 come out on the other side. I’m a, you know, I’m a hungry, hungry kid at that point. big old mortgage on my back. Somehow I got through all the, through all that praising comes back. I never say no to an order. I’m nibbling at all. I’m staying awake all night, getting caught up, right? paying off so much debt at that point. Well, you build this muscle that says I’ll never stop working. I’ll never turn down a deal. I’ll never ever, ever.

put myself in such a position again, and you end up building bad habits. My bad habit was working over family working over, you know what mean? Working over ⁓ importance and not even having a not even having a goalpost to get to it’s just, I would I would constantly burn the boats to go to battle and put myself in this position where I was always digging out because I was afraid one day I might quit. One day I might find out that I’m a quitter. So if I never stop

Quentin (04:17)
Yes, sir.

Justin Berry (05:21)
And I convinced myself I’m broke and I convinced, you know, well, I ended up doing that for eight years of ⁓ after I switched into real estate and we did really well. Every penny I made put back into my business because I never wanted to feel like I was ahead. I ended up ended up hiring. My wife starts working with me pretty early on, but I start like I’m used to carrying stress. I start watching the stress eat at her. Now she’s the one going to the chiropractor. Now she’s the one.

going to the Chinese medicine lady and taking funky pills and putting needles in her body and you know, anytime we hear about some you know, back then we’d hear about some chiropractor that does some special drainage massage, we’re like, let’s go do it. And we were chasing all of these, ⁓ you know, these all this snake ⁓ oil. And what it really boiled down to was we were stressed out and we had high cortisol, we’re gaining weight and we our bodies hurt and you know how we were still in our late 30s.

That’s not so you know, so we were like, 40 is going to be hard. We’re making all those jokes because we were being really hard on our bodies. Well, when my wife starts getting sick, I look at her and I go that’s that’s not going to happen. It’s okay for me, but it’s not okay for you. So I ended up meeting somebody and they recommended or they were using a virtual assistant. And I hired a virtual assistant. I remember telling my wife I said if you had 15 extra hours a week, what would you do with it? And she’s like, I would go to the gym, I would

read a book, would, you know, personal things she would do, she would take some time for herself. And I said, Okay, because we’re working 6070 hours a week. Like, okay. If I hired a virtual assistant for four or $5 an hour, and we paid her 40 hours a week, but we only really got 15 hours a week, like if it bought you 15 hours a week back, would you know, would that be worth it? And she’s like, Yeah, so I did. And that that VA’s job solely was to

just organize Tara, my wife, Tara’s email into just some simple buckets, stuff that Tara has to do needs to be done today. Stuff Tara’s needs to look at probably has to do, but it doesn’t need to be done today. And then stuff that the VA already took care of. So that way you could go and see what they did. And, uh, that was it. It was just a very simple system. Well, next thing you know, the VA learns everything about our business because everything in your business comes through email. So she starts getting a pretty good idea of what’s going on. And next thing you know, it’s ma’am.

Quentin (07:26)
you

Justin Berry (07:31)
I could take care that for you. Man, would you like me to just go ahead and do that for you? And she’s starting to take things off Tara’s plate. Well, next thing you know, we end up growing out a team of those virtual assistants and they run of, they ran our brokerage. The whole back end of the brokerage was ran through virtual assistants of about five or six, give or take at the time. then next thing you know, my wife and I don’t know what our job is. Like, you know, I’m saying you replace yourself and you’re like, well, what is it that I do? And I kind of, I kind of.

Cause well, they ended up hiring one for me too. And, it’s kind of, you know, like on the office when Michael Scott comes back from the Bahamas and he’s been gone, he’s got the one braid and everything was running smooth until the boss came back. Like all of a sudden that’s me. I’m like, let me open that up. I’ll work on that. And actually I’m the wrong person to be doing this. They’re faster at it. And I’m, I’m getting everybody’s way. So, I found myself where I was only in real estate doing production. We were doing a six, seven investments a year. And then.

I had this free time. So we took Anne replaced her in the real estate company, because she just built all the SOPs and the trainings and now she oversees it, but she’s not in it every day. She works in the real estate company five to 10 hours a week, just like I do. And then we went and started a virtual assistant company where we help real estate agents do the exact same thing. cause I was told that your purpose in life is to find the one thing that you struggled with and then help other people overcome it. So like time collapse it down for them so they can do it faster.

That’s what we’re doing now. she’s, I just got really, really lucky, completely accidentally. Everything in my life’s an accident, like a happy little accident that, you know, that all worked out. And now I’m just trying to share it. I ended up getting through that. That company’s been up and running. And now to be honest, a lot of that, I don’t know what I do because they’re running the show. You wouldn’t hire me to come in. I’m a terrible employee. You wouldn’t hire me to come in and organize anything.

I’m the mess makers like in a lot of ways already made that mess and now they’re they’ve cleaned it up and it’s a running operation. So now it gives me time to go make another mess, which is this company Pricer Pro that we’re launching here in September. I’ve been in real estate 22, 23 years in the industry. I’ve been selling for about 12. I’ve yet to find a training, a class, anything that teaches real estate agents how to price homes the way an appraiser does.

I’ve yet to see anything that teaches them how to fight an appraisal. If they got a bad one, they do happen. And we built the software and the training, that will, can, know, that anybody could use this software within an hour and be pretty. Pretty, it’ll be pretty powerful for them. and then we have, you know, deeper training if you really, really wanted to dive in deep, but within one hour, I can take an agent that has a comp range of this, you know, and we can at least get their opinion to shrink down. So like, imagine you had a.

you know, comparables between 450 and 550. We have a hundred thousand dollars spread. If I can get that spread to shrink down to 10 or $15,000, that’s all the opinion range you have now. That’s that makes, that makes pricing a home a heck of a lot easier for, for an agent or an investor wanting to know what’s it worth as is, what should I offer? What’s it worth cleaned up? What are the different stages in between? What does it cost to get to each one of those? It’s really not that hard to do. Um, it’s just having the software.

knowing how to input the information and then press the button. ⁓ there’s a lot of, ⁓ AI tools that are out there, but they can’t smell cat pee. They can’t, you know, they can’t tell that the neighbor’s house has junk cars in the backyard. can’t tell, that the basement walls are bowed in it. There’s a lot of limitations to what AI can do. And that’s one of the last things in real estate that I think AI is going to have a hard time tackling. So we’re going to solve it.

Quentin (11:12)
Hmm.

Yeah. No, man, I love it. I got to say this, man. You’re a great storyteller, man. So I love stories. I was riveted over here. Like you actually literally had me scrambling for my next question because the questions that I had prompted, I’m like, this dude is already answering these questions. great storyteller. But what I love about what you’re building. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But what I love about what you’re building and what I’m hearing and even actually what you said is that

Justin Berry (11:44)
Got you bobbing and

Quentin (11:55)
This kind of puts you in a position to pick houses that other people probably wouldn’t pick, right? Because of what you built and because of your experience. And, you know, one of the questions I was going to ask was, how do you keep the machine running smoothly? And you can answer that, but I think the VA’s kind of help with that. So you could answer that. But what I really want to know from you, Mr. Jerry, is what continues to keep you passionate, Because, you know, they’re taking the job, your VA’s got you sitting here like, man, okay, so.

Justin Berry (12:00)
Exactly.

Yeah.

Quentin (12:24)
That’s for me. So what keeps you passionate, Mr.

Justin Berry (12:27)
When I had a job for anybody else, I could do it about nine months to a year and I was bored. I’m a terrible employee. ⁓ I am the quintessential entrepreneur. I just took me a long time to get comfortable with the risk and, but, but a lot of, a lot of entrepreneurs suffer from ADHD. that’s how we end up where we get to because our dopamine is constantly looking for the next thrill. I I’m no different. So I have two choices. I can.

miserably like make myself become a miracle morning person, which I don’t want to be. I can, you know, I have a, an old broker that used to go and train with the Navy SEALs. I would love to have the body, but I don’t want to do the work. it’s just not me. I don’t enjoy grinding. I did that for a long time. I think that grinding hustle culture, is unhealthy, for me. ⁓ it might be great for other people. Like that’s your thing, like it’s like being an athlete, you know,

I’m not, I don’t want to be alignment on a football team. I’m the quarterback and that’s, that’s an ego. It’s wrong, whatever, but I’m just, that’s who I am. I like to lead, but, um, what, what makes me, you know, what’s passionate for me is chasing new ideas. like finding problems. So just like price or pro I’m going, I’ve been at these conferences on the road a lot and I’m looking around going, they’ve yet to do this thing that everybody in the industry thinks we do.

The number one, you know, the number one things that NAR says that clients are looking for is generally related around expertise around pricing. What should I offer on a house? What should I list my price? What should I list my house for? How do I sell my house the least amount of time for the highest? Well, when everyone, the average agent is shooting from the hips and you have a wide range of opinions. The other thing is I know that there’s a lot of really, really good real estate agents out there that just aren’t confident.

So like my product’s not going to be for con men. You don’t need this if you’re just a person that can talk. Um, and you’ll, you’ll have those people that will say, I don’t need this. I already know how to price houses because I’m successfully selling houses. And that’s, that’s true that they don’t necessarily need it to sell houses. Um, I’m really wanting to help the people that would treat this like a career and they just need the confidence to speak up. Uh, I was at a party not too long ago, a year ago.

And there’s the one of our friends, kids walking around with a, you know, an iPad, you know, face down on the iPad and everybody’s asking them, know, like, are you going to start school soon? Are you gonna, he’s like five, six, something like that. And, you know, what grade are you in all those questions and he’ll just talk, but not look up, know, and I’m a teaser. So when I mess with kids, I’m, I’m, talking to him like they’re adults and all, you know, I’m always, I’m always throwing smoke at them. Maybe it’s a complex that I have, I don’t know, but

Quentin (15:39)
Yeah.

Justin Berry (15:42)
I look at him and I say, I bet I could beat you at fortnight. You know, watch that kid light up, man. All of a sudden, that was like, no, here’s seven reasons why you’re wrong. And I was thinking about that. And I go, he’s competent. He’s not just confident because he’s not confident in the room, right? But his competency at fortnight is so high. He doesn’t even know my skill level, but he knows he can beat me. Right. And I look at it and I go,

Quentin (15:44)
Yeah,

Yeah, yep.

Yeah.

Come on.

Justin Berry (16:05)
You don’t have to have competence to be confident. Con men don’t have to have products to sell. You know, they don’t have to fulfill. They just have to sell, right? But the best people in our industry, I think the ones that would make the industry look better are the ones that I think just need a higher level of competency. If they had the competency, they’d have the confidence to speak up and then they’d have the confidence to be visible and they’d have the, know, and it goes on and on from

So for me, I’d like to shore up the industry with

you know, with professional skills training. And I think we’re moving into a market where mediocrity, your mediocrity isn’t going to be relevant anymore. People don’t need us to look at, you know, to look at houses online. They don’t need us to answer their questions anymore. In fact, our brokerage now has an AI built out that the agents can ask the AI bot any question that the broker probably could answer. And unless it’s a strategic one that we need to talk about.

It tells them how to, like the other day we were filling out a contract. The agent forgot how it’s been years since she had done a bridge loan. She couldn’t remember how to do the math on the bridge loan. AI could answer that question. The math was done right. so if it’s able to do that for the agents, it’s going to be able to do that for clients and clients will have all the questions they need answered in their pocket. It’s going to be like web MD versus doctors and the doctors are going to say, you know, just like your doctor, stop reading web MD, come talk to me. We’re going to be doing the same thing except AI might be right.

AI might be able to answer the questions at least as good as the average real estate agent who may only sell a house four times a year or last year, what 70 something percent didn’t sell a house at all. So how was an agent that hasn’t sold a house in over a year that much better than AI and a person that’s by, you know, representing themselves. ⁓ so I want to raise that up and I want to, I really want to highlight the people that do the right thing when nobody’s looking. And I think that’s who should be on our industry.

and they just need the confidence boost around their skill set to stand out.

Quentin (17:52)
Absolutely, absolutely. I want to apologize to you, man. I don’t know if you noticed, I took your first name and your last name and slammed them together and I was calling you Jerry. So I took Justin and Berry and I slammed them together. was like, listen, Jerry, so I want to apologize. I don’t know if you caught that and not Mr. Justin, but yeah. Got you. Absolutely. ⁓

Justin Berry (17:56)
Yeah.

That’s okay, It’s my grandma’s name, it’s okay. I got a Jerry Berry and a Larry Berry in the family. Another Jerry. It’s not, it wouldn’t be quite

a junior, but it’d be a grandma’s name.

Quentin (18:15)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So I’m going to ask this question. You alluded to it. I don’t want to just answer the question for you because I hear how you want to empower people. you talked about competence and just confidence, right? And so you really want to empower people. You talked about you want to coach people up. And to me, it’s not like you’re an incredible coach. But I do want to ask this question just to frame it and put it out there.

What are you most focused on starving or scaling next? Like what’s the next real goal for you?

Justin Berry (18:44)
Yeah, I really want to see how, most of my career, I’ve been focusing on, you know, three or four zip codes and I want to have large, you know, I want to have larger impact in the world. ⁓ I want to, I have this belief that like, this is how I teach my kids about life. I tell them that life’s a condo tower and that you start on the first floor. The most amount of people live on the first floor.

Everybody thinks they want to be in the penthouse. There’s only three or four people in the penthouse level. And, you know, the penthouse people, they they’re on the 10th floor. They hang out with people on the ninth and the eighth a little bit too, but you know, five, six and seven, they don’t really understand what the people are talking about on the penthouse. You know, they’re riding on the elevator together and there’s a conversation and they’re trying to pick it up, but it’s just not quite clicking, you know, but the same thing, you know, first floor, they’re, they’re partying.

second, third and fourth kind of hang out together. There’s a little bit of overlap, you know, as the frequencies are kind of in and out, right? So I tell my kids like, it’s your job every day to get on the elevator, you got to get off the first floor every day and get upstairs. But it’s also your job to drop nuggets, because what you don’t want to have happen is you make it to the penthouse and you’re all by yourself. Because the higher up you go in life, the more that you know, you’re enlightened or whatever you want to call it, the lonelier it gets. You have to shed people

⁓ show me your nearest five friends. I’ll show you your future. Well, you can’t jump to the, you just can’t jump. It’s, one floor at a time and you have to learn the lessons of each floor. But I think the biggest one in there is that it’s your job. It’s not your job to pull people there. It’s your job to drop the nuggets and let them know, Hey, this is what’s going on in the second floor and here’s how they think. And, that’s, so for me, as far as like impact and where I want to, what I want to scale and what I want to do is

You know, I spend a lot of time thinking, obviously, I was a songwriter a lot of my life. So I just, I analyze things. I love doing that. And I just want to constantly look for problems that I can solve and help people, you know, solve theirs faster. But doing that by sharing, you know, sharing those nuggets as I go. A lot of times, like when I’m speaking, you know, it’s like when grandpa talked about having 10 foot of snow walking back and forth to school, you know, even on my own team.

my own, you my own company, there seems to be a disconnect between what Justin’s done and what I’m doing now. Well, you don’t understand because it was different back then somehow. It’s like, no, it wasn’t. In fact, most of my growth came in the last three to four years. So a lot of what I’ve done was scaled in a short amount of time. Once I broke through the ceiling, I could run but it just took it took the right information and being around the right people. And like for me, ⁓ we went to Jared James mastermind. I think it was in

21, 22, yeah, three, four years ago, it was $5,000 a seat. It’s the most expensive thing I’d ever bought that I didn’t know what I was getting. know, all you know is that bring your laptop and you’re going to learn a lot of stuff, you know? And what I ended up learning was all the answers I needed were in that room. But the real change for me, my best friends came from that room. I distilled down, you know, distilled down to 15, 20 people that paid $5,000 a seat to be there.

Quentin (21:29)
Mmm.

Justin Berry (21:34)
We probably shared the same problems. Guess what? I found out we were all on the same floor of that condo tower. I just finally found my people. Now I had my four, I had my four or five friends that were all thinking the same way. Now they live all over the world and all over the country. So we hop on planes and get together all the time. But when we do, we’re like, we are committed to each other for three and four days and we would rent houses and do masterminds just us. And, um, but those became my people. And that’s like, like, that’s where I really grew from was the community.

Quentin (21:40)
Come on.

Justin Berry (22:01)
⁓ and then finding, just finding that resonance that was where I was at. And I find that we, ⁓ we share like, like we will, we, ⁓ connect over problems. You know, like if you find the most successful people, you know, imagine shark tank. bet you if you’re backstage shark tank, they’re not sitting around talking about successes. I bet you they’re sitting around going, I got this problem and somebody else’s.

Quentin (22:21)
Right.

Justin Berry (22:24)
got the solution or they’ve know somebody that’s got the solution, but it’s, you know, we all get together around our problems. at least when you get off the first floor, maybe the first floor, it’s just, maybe we just watch football and drink beers. I don’t know. But when you get to five, six, seven, whatever that is, you’re, you don’t relate to people on the first floor because you don’t share the same problems anymore. So like, you know, I just want to help people have better problems.

Quentin (22:44)
Man, so well said. I mean, that was a wealth of nuggets that you just gave, man. And you talked about community. You talked about giving back. These are the things that I’m synthesizing, right? Because what I know, everybody in this world wants community. They want to be around people that understand them. And I mean, we can go Eva scale. We can go in a criminal world. We can go in just, you know.

Justin Berry (23:02)
Yes.

Yes.

Quentin (23:11)
the teacher world, can go anywhere you want to go. Everybody craves community. Everybody wants to be understood. And so I thank you for giving that knowledge about connectivity, about sharing, about you being in the same room, about the elevator. Every metaphor that you use was just perfect. And so, man, I thank you, man. I thank you. Listen, we are up on time. I knew this was going to be our easy flowing conversation. I could go another 30 minutes. I just don’t have the time, man. So before we wrap, if someone wanted to reach out to you.

connect with you or maybe collaborate and learn more about what you’re doing. What’s the best way for them to reach out to you?

Justin Berry (23:44)
Yeah, higher today VA, H I R E T O D A Y VA like virtual assistant.com. that’s the easiest way to get ahold of me. You can schedule a time on there. Happy to hop on a call with anyone and talk. we, know, basically our, our goal is, ⁓ to just help you figure out how to, you know, identify the constraints in your business. Guess what? It’s probably you. It was always me. So if we can help you,

figure out how to get out of your own way, get more time for things that are more important, whether that’s scaling your business or more time with your family or a combination of both. That’s literally what we do. And I sat down with you with my team and we hash out some plans. If it’s something you want to move forward with awesome. If not, we got new friends. So I’m okay with making friends.

Quentin (24:26)
love him, man. There he is. Let me put some respect on his name, Mr. Justin Berry. ⁓ Not Jerry, people. Mr. Justin Berry. Listen, man, thank you so much, man. Thank you so much for your time, your perspective, your storytelling. We’ll talk a little more, but I love your storytelling, man. And so thank you for your time. Thank you for the nuggets that you dropped. ⁓ It was great, man. It was great having you here today. And so just thank you, man, for being with us.

Justin Berry (24:32)
Yeah.

I answered to a lot.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate it.

Quentin (24:54)
Absolutely.

And for everyone else, you’re tuning in, you’re watching this. So just go ahead and hit subscribe. Come on, you don’t want to miss out on these great conversations, right? So just go ahead and subscribe and then we can guarantee that we will see each other on it next time. Let’s do it, right? So thank you all for tuning in. This is Justin. Thank you again, sir. Everyone have a great day. Absolutely.

Justin Berry (25:14)
Thanks, Quentin.