How View1stHome Helps Investors Find Verified Off-Market Real Estate Deals

Shaun Park (00:00)
like I said, people falsifying information or writing contracts when they had no true disposition to own or post the home. And so, you know, a lot of that started making me think that, you know, if all these people got scammed and we use some pretty serious software to clean up marketing campaigns, why couldn’t we have a healthy meeting between the two? So I decided to converge the ideas to make the fingerprint capture this way we can keep our website safe because we monitor it. It’s not like we just let it run.

Michelle Kesil (01:59)
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil. Today, I’m joined by someone I’m looking forward to chatting with, Shaun Park, who created view1sthome.com helping buyers find their homes through a direct site. So excited to have you here today, Shaun .

Shaun Park (02:18)
Hey, thank you. It’s nice to be here. So, Michelle, let’s get right to it, I would say. What questions do you have for me today?

Michelle Kesil (02:25)
Of course. First off, for those not familiar with your work yet, can you share what your main focus is?

Shaun Park (02:31)
So my main focus right now is to help clean up marketing. As everyone knows, especially with the way house selling is going on social media, it’s very hard to keep it organized and protected. So I put initiates in to help everyone verify house locations and information to make sure that when post comes onto our website, we verify them. Also, and with that, we also capture unique fingerprints

Michelle Kesil (02:42)
you

Shaun Park (02:57)
of people to limit scammers and fraud amongst our websites. So we offer a safer alternative than any normal social media. I would say it’s currently out there.

Michelle Kesil (03:06)
Awesome. And how did you create this?

Shaun Park (03:07)
So there’s that.

So I’ve been dealing with it for the last seven years. I’ve been writing code with some of my stock friends and then they actually helped me put it together. It took a lot of long nights, a lot of long time orchestrating this. And the biggest hang up that we really had was just getting patents and trademarks for everything so we could go about it in the right way. So it’s nice to see that everything’s coming to light finally and that it’s open to the public.

Michelle Kesil (03:32)
Awesome. And so what type of audience is it serving and how do they use it?

Shaun Park (03:38)
So it’s mainly going after off market stuff. The mainly reason why it’s our target market right now is like we said, because of the fraud, we have the unique ability to use geo position location so we can verify the homeowners location and details. This allows us to make sure that when houses come onto our sites, that once again, we verify them. I would say that is one of our strongest abilities to condense other market platforms.

and use our resources. It is social media driven, so you post your own stuff. It’s free to use and browse for anyone, but it’s only $10 to post your house because we do have a little bit of running costs with our eight employees currently. So, but I think it’s very fair.

Michelle Kesil (04:21)
And most of the audience here is investors. How can an investor use this platform?

Shaun Park (04:25)
So the investor can use it to sure check off market properties or even use it to obtain more properties. As people post, I make it publicly known so they can browse it or check out our UHL ID. So if it’s on the UHL ID, it’s been verified. And on the browser category, if someone posts their house, even if it’s under their platform, everyone can see it. So, and it tells you the disposition, whether they’re rent to own, land contract, or sale by owner, whether they’re a realtor.

So you gain that exact insight to know exactly who you’re dealing with, because we are profile based. We ask that everyone that uses our website uses a portrait of their face and an actual email. This way we know exactly who you are before you come onto our platform. It’s very important to be transparent in this.

Michelle Kesil (05:10)
And what makes this different from other platforms?

Shaun Park (06:01)
Because you know like I said we go off off-market and then we do step verification With employees so we making sure that everything gets posted to our website is legit I think that’s where a lot of people try to automate it our websites about 95 % automated and then our calling orchestrations and our Verification systems are not so we physically check it Which is just adds that extra element of protection for everyone. We also monitor our users as well

We don’t monetize anyone, but we make sure that your intentions are good.

Michelle Kesil (06:31)
And who is like your target audience? Is it mostly investors or just a regular home buyer?

Shaun Park (06:38)
So we do target investors and brokerages to offer deals because we don’t finance in-house. We let them do that creatively. The main reason why we do that is to stop like an embargo on certain companies or a forced nature of working with them. But we do have some contracts that we currently work with some investors now that can help people fund houses or buy out our land contracts, which is really cool. So if a normal person from the public wanted to purchase, they have every right to.

Michelle Kesil (07:06)
Awesome. And what have been the main keys of allowing this new business to run successfully?

Shaun Park (07:15)
⁓ A lot of it’s been strategizing by me and my spouse. We’ve been doing a lot of land contracts and assumption of properties to put up a goose egg. Like I said in the earlier conversation, some of our stocks hit and so we’ve been using our own capital to forefront our deals. What’s really interesting to us right now is finding partners that share our same vision of helping us make home prices cheaper. I know that kind of sounds crazy from an investor standpoint, but I don’t really believe anyone should have to

pay $1,000 or over for a single family home. And ⁓ there’s been programs that promote that as the everyday norm. And I kind of want to help break that cycle, to be completely honest with you.

Michelle Kesil (07:53)
Awesome. And so how does the process work when someone views your website to the finalization of the investment?

Shaun Park (08:04)
Sure, it’s just like any social media platform that you use. You you log in, you sign in, you create your account, you verify your email. You’ll get an email verification out to you. Then from there, you’re able to submit your property. The moment that happens, you just go through the list. You ask like the square footage, like how many doors or bathrooms or bedrooms do you have currently, just like any other normal website.

You put what the taxes are in the area and any utilities that you pay. This is a little bit different being that you can do rent to own. You can do land contract on here. A lot of the for sale by owners are ready to sign simply because they’re ready to move. A lot of our clientele comes from our own marketing stream because we have the ability to capture fingerprints. All of our marketing is generated by the website and we share those leads back to you. So much so we offer your own messaging platform.

that’s exposed to 33,000 contacts all at once. So when you post, it goes into my buy boxes instead of conventional browsers. So this way you can see it. And then people that are serious about buying, that’s the kind of clientele you’re getting instead of just a normal everyday browser, which is pretty interesting. You we’re actually having problems keeping houses on there because we sell so much.

Michelle Kesil (09:18)
And then does the investor need to pay for these services?

Shaun Park (09:22)
So it’s just $10 to post. To use the other higher functions of this site, we do offer admin restrictions to the right person. We would look at giving some of our investors admin functions so they can control the marketing on their end as well. And those would be things that we could talk about. So far, because we’re still in the early development of this, as of right now, it’s just $10 to post. And sometimes if someone said that would kill the deal, I would waive it.

It’s just to make tools more readily available for everyone, in all honesty. Because there are problems in the way how we do things now, so let’s create a new way to do it. And this is pretty much where I’m at.

Michelle Kesil (09:58)
So only the buyer pays but the purchaser doesn’t or the seller pays, sorry.

Shaun Park (10:03)
Yeah,

exactly. it’s whoever has the right to post the house would be the one initially paying the $10 instead of like, you some of our other competitors, you know, one over a hundred dollars to list the house that just gets sent to the general public. The general public does have the ability to view this, but then we also in the backend send it to our buy boxes too, to see if we can’t get you an offer quickly.

So that’s all automated behind the scenes though.

Michelle Kesil (10:24)
So

yeah, and how are you targeting this to investors? How are they finding your brand?

Shaun Park (11:06)
So, you know, lot of it’s by meeting and word of mouth. A lot of the investors that have helped me get out this far have had a pretty monolithic margin in the stock margin. you know, with their support and help, you know, we’ve gained the ability to pretty much find endless capital. So, I mean, just like anyone, if you have a good idea and you’re making a decent amount of money executing your strategy, the money comes, it takes time.

Michelle Kesil (11:28)
Awesome. And so when like, what are the types of listings that you are servicing and holding on your site?

Shaun Park (11:36)
Sure, so right now ⁓ for sale by owner, rent to own, they can do land contract, realtors can post on there as well. So as long as they have permission to post their houses on there, we allow it. It allows to have a double measure for messaging so the owner can see what the realtor is doing in real time. So when they get messaged on there, we also put a unique marketing system on there. When you make the profile, you can track your views.

So you can see how many times people looked at your house before it sold. So it’s a little bit of a system different than days on market. So what really interests us is how many days it takes. With usually within 300 views, we usually get at least one to two serious offers on there. So it’s pretty cool.

Michelle Kesil (12:19)
And what are you most focused on? Like how are you focused on scaling this? What are your goals?

Shaun Park (12:25)
So like I said, it’s a ramp up from single family houses and then go more into multifamily so we can offer our services at lower rates by not hiking up prices. I think with the foundations of like the loans that we have available now pretty much make it so that even single family homes are really hard to press to become profitable quickly. And I can’t really change the notation of that pricing as I would if I borrowed.

millions of dollars versus hundreds of thousands of dollars. Every time you touch a new zero, it helps that cap margin come down, which lets us lend for less and at a less percentage, which lets us carry that on to our sellers or buyers, especially if they buy it directly from me. And I do play on this website with you. So, you know, there’s very chance that you will see me buy a multifamily home or single family home and put it up there. So I’m not just saying that my website works. actually using it with you guys.

Michelle Kesil (13:18)
So you’re an investor yourself, correct?

Shaun Park (13:20)
Yeah, I mean, you have to be. And we’re looking at debt investing, but we’re still setting up our capitalist company to do so. But we’re probably about six months out from that. any investor that would come on our platform has every right to call someone on there and message them. Like, hey, can I be your finance guy? We allow that on there. Although we don’t openly advertise, if someone was to do it, as long as they went about it on the messaging platform in the correct way, we wouldn’t stop.

Because it’s open to the public, right? So it’s a public resource.

Michelle Kesil (13:51)
Awesome. And as an investor yourself, what were some of the bottlenecks that you were seeing in the industry that caused the creation of this?

Shaun Park (14:01)
So, like I said, people falsifying information or writing contracts when they had no true disposition to own or post the home. And so, you know, a lot of that started making me think that, you know, if all these people got scammed and we use some pretty serious software to clean up marketing campaigns, why couldn’t we have a healthy meeting between the two? So I decided to converge the ideas to make the fingerprint capture this way we can keep our website safe because we monitor it. It’s not like we just let it run.

You know, we do have some AI services, but we don’t lean on them nine times out of 10 when you call us, you’re 99.9 % of the time going to speak to a person because we offer 24 seven access. And I work with some Philippine peoples to work at night while my team works during the day. So my time schedules can be truly open to 24 seven platforms. The idea here is to not just be in the United States, but to go globally. This is the reason why I made the universal home listing.

This is where I can sure check all of them. And that geo positioning really helps us out at the time because we can verify whether the house is truly there or not. And then that lets us gain information on the property and we look into the owner’s disposition and who has rights to sell. It takes us like five minutes to do it. But we have systems set in place that helps speed that up so you don’t have to take the guesswork out of it. We verify it, it’s legit.

Michelle Kesil (15:18)
What are those systems?

Shaun Park (16:00)
So right now, like I said, that geo-positioning runs off of a unique fingerprint that captures people’s VPNs and ASN numbers. So we actually get to see who you are when you browse our website. We don’t use it for any alternative motive other than to keep our users safe. Because in this day and age, with AI technology, people like to emulate fake fingerprints. Our website kicks them. People that try to practice scamming tactics, we monetize them.

Like I said, we make sure people have the validations to post or that they have a contract to own the property or then on to sell it So in doing so these few little steps and with working with social media We’ve established a way to clean up all these bad leads and all these bad deals that are out there on the market You know, we don’t actively go after people So if you post it we check the legitimacy of your post and I think that’s very important moving forward because in many senses it has not been pretty much

monitored all up until now. No one’s done it or tried to do it.

That’s where I’m at.

Michelle Kesil (17:00)
And

what have been the biggest challenges in this creation?

Shaun Park (17:05)
Software compromising. So we actually had to buy a 10 terabyte server because our website took up so much space because of all the features we packed into it. But now that we got our larger servers and we have access to our own hard-crypted files, we’ve seen a bigger change in how fast our website loaded, the amount of information we can put out there to help protect you. And we created one of the first AI labyrinth security systems

I think that are on the market today. So I think it’s cool to see that, you know, people are creating stuff and we’re initiating our platform. I mean, you can tell if you’ve been on social media and look at some of the houses where you get 70 comments, you can’t even really keep track of it. This creates an inbox schedule for you so you can answer it and keep everyone separate. I think that’s very important to be organized when we offer that. We also do video tours, too. So if you’re a seller trying to sell your house, you don’t want someone coming to your house.

You can literally hop on your phone through our app that’s on a secure line and do a two-way conversation with them on a video chat like we’re doing. So this way they can see the house. I mean, a lot of places say that they have it, but it gets rid of the Android and iPhone barrier and computer barrier. So it links them harmoniously together. So you could use any type of device to do your video tour, including tablets.

Michelle Kesil (18:22)
Awesome. So is there any one that would not benefit from using this?

Shaun Park (18:29)
So, no, because we work behind the scenes for you. So while you go about your everyday life, we’re out here trying to market it for you. So you don’t have to worry about falling up on your social media posts, only your messages that come to your box. We take a lot of that burden off of your shoulder by, like I said, executing it to our 33,000 leads. So, and those are lot of times our investors or brokers or people are very serious about buying homes. And we use this list that we’ve created off our website by everyone that’s ever viewed it. They’ve told us a little bit about themselves.

And along with collecting information over our stock campaigns, we have a plethora of information that we can provide without charging you too much, which is beautiful.

Michelle Kesil (19:06)
Awesome. So investors have no charge and they can just browse whatever they want.

Shaun Park (19:11)
Exactly, because unless they have posted a house on there, they have the right to get ahold of anyone on there. Or, you know, if they work with me one on one, I could add superficial links that can send them contact information. So if an investor wanted to have my deals come through my website directly to their email, all they got to do is sign up and they can do that in the top disposition on our marketing tab. It’s the lime green one that runs across our site. They just say it’s the state they want to have information come to them.

They put the state in their email and then it sends everyone that post that state directly to them. Or they could jump on my website and go to the browser tab and just look at what’s on there.

Michelle Kesil (19:48)
Amazing. Thank you for sharing all of that.

Well, before we begin to wrap up here, someone wants to reach out, connect, and learn more, where can people find you?

Shaun Park (19:58)
So I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram currently. Then you can always go to view1sthome.com You can, if you want to speak with me directly, you’re more than welcome to, especially investors wise, you’re more than welcome. On there is a contact tab that has my phone number and my employee’s phone number on there. If you reach out to us, one of us will get back to you. We usually pick up within ⁓ the first try, but if we’re stuck in a phone call for whatever reason, I do have eight employees to take your calls there.

So if you’re struggling to get through our landlines, you can always set an appointment with me. And if you really want to know how it works and see how it works, I could show you how our admin functions work so you could see how your leads would be captured and given to you.

Michelle Kesil (20:39)
We’ll appreciate your time and your story. Thank you for being here.

Shaun Park (20:43)
Hey, was a pleasure. Thank you so much, Michelle, for being patient with me today and just hearing a little bit about my story.

Michelle Kesil (20:49)
Of course. And for those tuning into the show, if you got value, make sure you’ve subscribed. We’ve got more conversations with operators like Shaun , who are building real businesses, and we’ll see you on our next episode.