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Show Summary
In this episode, Richard Helppie-Schmieder shares his inspiring journey into real estate, starting from purchasing his first property at just 20 years old to becoming a successful fix-and-flip investor in the DFW area. He discusses the challenges he faced, the lessons learned through mentorship, and how collaboration and experience helped him find his niche in the market. Richard also introduces Bird Dog AI, a powerful tool developed to streamline the process of making property offers and enhance efficiency for both flippers and agents. He emphasizes the importance of time management, building strong relationships with agents, and leveraging technology to stay competitive in today’s real estate market.”
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Richard Helppie-Schmieder (00:00)
That one might not work, but I would say anywhere from three to six times a month, I get agents texting me saying, hey, I’ve got this one coming up. You want to take a look. Now I’m the first one in position for it because I can check all the licensed official contracts. I’m going to put high option, high earnest. A lot of times skip the option. I’m going to close in three days. And so that’s the real benefit of going on market. It’s not the short game. It’s the long game.Dylan Silver (01:58)
Hey, folks. Welcome back to the show. Today’s guest is the owner of Bird Dog AI, which scans images on the MLS and facilitates one-click offers. He’s also a DFW fix and flipper, an ADU investor in the greater DFW area. Please welcome Richard Helppie-Schmieder. Richard, welcome to the show.Richard Helppie-Schmieder (02:22)
Thanks for having me, Dylan.Dylan Silver (02:24)
It’s great to have you on here. were talking before hopping on here. I was mentioning, know, I dare I say I miss so much of Texas and I specifically miss DFW. I was in North DFW in Denton where you have some ADUs, but I do want to back up all the way to the beginning and ask you about how you got into the real estate space.Richard Helppie-Schmieder (02:48)
Yeah, man, so I feel like my story is, it’s kind of unique, but at kind of the same time as like other people’s, I fell into it. I didn’t think I was ever gonna be doing what I’m doing now, you 14 years ago. My first house was a house hack before I knew what house hacking was. And it was also a direct to seller before I knew what the heck that was even. I was working at a gas station at QT, quick trip. So, you know, a nice gas station.Dylan Silver (03:18)
Yeah, yeah.Richard Helppie-Schmieder (03:18)
Andyeah, yeah, right. so I started when I was 18, I started working at a gas station full time, going to school part time to appease my mother. She wanted to see me finish school. And I rented a property up near campus in Denton, actually, at Bi-U &T. So the…
Dylan Silver (03:36)
Hmm.Richard Helppie-Schmieder (03:39)
We were about to move out, so I was 20 years old, or just about to turn 20. We were about to move out. I reached out to my landlord and I said, hey, I’m moving out, but I’m looking for a house to buy. My cousin was a little bit older than me. He just bought a house. I’m like, hey, if he can do it, I can do it too. And so the homeowner was like, well, I’m about to sell my house.And so we did a one page contract, sent it to title. I got a pretty, pretty good deal for the time. I bought it for 105 and it appraised for one, was 117 or 119. Uh, worked in the 3 % commission, worked in the repairs, which came because I was a tenant there for two years and did some damage. So I negotiated those downward and yeah, that was my first deal. I then.
Dylan Silver (04:28)
Aroundthe age of 20.
Richard Helppie-Schmieder (04:30)
A week after my 20th birthday, yes.Dylan Silver (04:32)
Okay so walk me through sort of the mentality getting first property at the age of 20. I think you mentioned you had some ⁓ mentors, some people who were not necessarily ⁓ coaching you through this, but you had some people who were supportive. Or was this, did this feel more like hey I gotta figure this out one way or other, I’m gonna do it on my own.Richard Helppie-Schmieder (04:54)
Yeah, I was mainly motivated through my cousin. really ⁓ enjoyed him and respect him. And he was a little bit older than me, and he was in the trades. And so after seeing him do it, I was like, OK, I can do this too, because he went to college, but I kind of skipped out on it. And so that’s when I decided I just need to figure this out. And so that was a huge encouragement behind me.Dylan Silver (06:07)
From there, 20 years old, get your first property. At that point, are you seeing the power in real estate and you think, okay, this is my forever industry? Or was it a slower progression than that?Richard Helppie-Schmieder (06:23)
⁓ so the first house didn’t do it for me yet, but I took my bills down to like 500 bucks a month is what I had to pay for my living expenses. But then the next year I was like, let me see if I can do this again. And I actually was driving around a neighborhood near campus and denting again. There was a for rent sign. I called them up and I was like, Hey, I not interested in renting, but I’m interested in buying.He’s like, well, this is perfect timing because I’m going through divorce and I’d be interested in hearing out an offer and I’m not making this up. It’s like bang, bang one and two. And at that point I moved in my roommates, fixed the house up a little bit. And at that point I was cash flowing positive and I could see the power of real estate. And that was two weeks after my 21st birthday.
Dylan Silver (06:57)
Yeah.Okay, so 21st birthday. What time period, what year is this roughly?
Richard Helppie-Schmieder (07:20)
⁓ man, 2011.Dylan Silver (07:24)
2011 second home and it was really off of Chance rent sign you say hey, I know I’ll make an offer on it at that point I know you have ⁓ Fix and flip background and you’re doing lots of flips right now in the DFW area. Did you start getting into flips subsequently following that deal?Richard Helppie-Schmieder (07:43)
No, no, no, no, no, no. So I was addicted to the buy and hold at that point because I was still making good money at the gas station. And then I was just repeating that process for a few more years until I met my wife. And my wife had a job. She also had a house. That was a plus one to the portfolio at that point.Dylan Silver (08:04)
There you go.Richard Helppie-Schmieder (08:05)
That’s right. And then we bought a house together. And then I felt comfortable enough where I could leave my job and flip full time. And I was 26 at the time because she could support the family. Yeah.Dylan Silver (08:18)
Okay.So I’m getting the picture now, couple buy and holds, family, looking at, I’m gonna do this full time going into fix and flip. We were talking a little bit and I do wanna get to a bird dog AI, very interesting what you’re doing there. But I wanna talk about the fix and flip space as well because it’s so great for fix and flippers.
Year 26, going full time with fix and flip. Did you have at that point in time your niche carved out? I know we were talking about good school districts, you tend to look for certain things in DFW. Did you have that at that point or did that take some years to formulate?
Richard Helppie-Schmieder (08:57)
It’s been a working process over nine years at this point. Initially, I jumped in head first, then I met my business partner Shane playing poker. ⁓ About a year later, he quit his job, so he jumped in full time at that point.and we were just looking at anything and everything. We didn’t really have a niche. We were clashing on a lot of things. ⁓ We had some really hard conversations, but we’re both grounded in our faith, which really helps us overcome some of those items. And so really it’s been in the past two years where we found our lanes and found exactly the product that we want to purchase to flip. So it’s been very, very recent. It’s a, it’s a working process throughout those years.
Dylan Silver (09:43)
You know, I want to take a second to acknowledge how difficult it is to be a fix and flipper over a period of time. Because if you look at just the last two years and then from the last two years to the last five years and then before that, you’re talking about two totally, three totally different markets. ⁓ You could pretty much get everything. ⁓ I don’t want to say on the MLS, but you could be looking at a lot of fix and flip deals on the MLS.in that time period 2019 to where was it 2021, 2022 and then market shifts. Right. So kudos to you and congrats to you on being able to identify that. When did the AI when did Bird Dog Wolf come into play? When did you start thinking hey there’s got to be a better way to make offers on these properties?
Richard Helppie-Schmieder (11:05)
Man, that’s been about two years in the making. So Bird Dog has been around for a few years. I have a friend who’s an enterprise level developer that just loves real estate. And so he created this quantitative algorithm to detect, hey, price per square foot, radius of that, comparables, and trying to find outliers, right?And so while he was building that out, we didn’t really use it, but he’s like, this is cool. And we saw that the stuff it was pushing through, which was neat. I’m still over scrolling on my phone, looking in pockets that I know are awesome, looking just for houses that need work. And know, Sunday night, I’ll find five, 10 houses. We’ll put in offers over the next week or two. And then when AI starts coming in the scene about a year ago,
I talked with his name Spencer and we’re chatting about, how can we use this? And I was like, man, it would be so cool if like what we’re currently doing now, you can just teach AI to, uh,
just create, make it more efficient. He was, yeah, he was all about that. I was really more about the contract writing, because I was tired of going through my business partner to put in contracts, because I was like, dude, push these things out there. And it’s hard to work that muscle, because you’re like, I’m about to lowball this agent, and they’re gonna lose respect for me, which is true. But it also, you do it enough times, you get deals. So.
Dylan Silver (12:09)
Right.They don’t.
You know,
I’ve done this myself earlier this year. before, and we’re really, one of the things that really spurred me to get my real estate license was actually seeing that we were writing offers and having to go to agents and basically they were getting paid to write offers. And I was thinking, well, how hard could this really be? And so we were putting out so many offers. And at that time I felt badly, cause I was like, these are low offers.
Like we’re putting in so many, we put in close to like hundred offers in like a 45 day period, right? And ultimately, now that I’m licensed, I actually have a different perspective, which is that the agent has a fiduciary responsibility to show every offer to their client, unless they have it in writing, I don’t want to see anything below X dollars, which typically they would not.
And so if it’s a property that has been sitting on market or heavily distressed or not great photos or some type of distress, financial, ⁓ the physical property itself, the agent and the client should be happy to receive any offer. So now it makes me feel like, we should be making as many offers as we can and any fix and flippers who are feeling maybe some slight level of trepidation or concern like, man, I don’t want to do this.
I would say don’t feel that way. ⁓ Be proud to make as many offers as you can and then find deals that way, which brings me to ⁓ your AI software, which really facilitates that. And I think it’s amazing what you were talking about before hopping on here is the ability to make one click offers ⁓ that and alone kind of is a standalone. Was that the intent? Hey, let’s make this an easier process to where I’m not having to go and find agents or
you know, write up potential contracts and it just becomes this long drawn out process.
Richard Helppie-Schmieder (14:30)
Yeah, I mean, it’s all about time and I’m thankful my business partner is an agent. So like that’s super helpful for a lot of reasons. But the time that this finally came to fruition to an actual product software that works, ⁓ that was a bottleneck where I did, I do majority of the acquisitions and responses to the agent. So this is something that I really needed. so solve the problem for our companyDylan Silver (14:56)
Yeah.Richard Helppie-Schmieder (00:00)
Yeah, it’s all about time. And the older I get, the more transactions I do. ⁓ It’s just how can you save time, right? And so that was just one, a huge lever that we could pull that saved just like 10 to 20 hours a week, which then frees you up, gives you back more time to do more high level tasks, right?Dylan Silver
I do want to get a little bit granular here, if we can, about Bird Dog. ⁓ And for folks who are maybe having difficulty picturing how this works, is it geared towards agents and agents, or is it geared towards one or the other?Richard Helppie-Schmieder
It’s really geared for flippers, where it really wins is…people that are flipping that are also an agent, we’re working, this is all on market stuff. Everything’s on the MLS, which is the biggest pool of motivated sellers ⁓ over anything that’s out there. So where we win with it as a flipper and also having an agent on our team is when we send that official state contract with our proof of funds with Shane Hickey, my business partner and agent, attached to the email.
It comes off extremely credible. So as opposed to as an investor who’s using it, if they don’t understand the track contract or have a one page contract, which works well on it, I mean, you can still manipulate the data to make it send well, but the agent receives that just like we receive offers when we flip houses that are like, I’m going to offer you this and this and this and send me your mortgage statement. And we just ignore them. You know, they’re not worth our time a day. But if it comes from an agent, there’s credibility with that.
So I would say flippers who either have a close agent they work with or ⁓ agents who want to be investors.
Dylan Silver
I would say forgive me in advance for getting really into the the nitty-gritty here, but I do want to ⁓ Understand better myself and our audience may have this question as well So for folks who are flippers and they have properties identified. Hey, I want to make all these offers They have a realtor identified as well are both the flipper and the realtor on the system effectively communicating so that when I send out, you know, heyboom, I wanna make an offer on this property. It goes directly through to the agent or is there like a different backend portal if you will for the agent directly who’s doing the heavy lifting here.
Richard Helppie-Schmieder
So as it sits right now, it would go directly to your agent, then your agent would essentially just forward it to the listing agent. They don’t even have to look at the contract if they don’t want to, but it gives them a full package just to pass along. And now you’re not making your agent upset for wanting to write 30 offers a week, you know?Dylan Silver
Yeah.That’s right. mean, that was another difficult thing. As you know, ⁓ when I was not licensed, I was thinking, man, what’s so hard about, you know, writing five offers? And then I realized, OK, there’s almost a degree of liability that comes in here, even for the agent. I do want to ask you about, ⁓ if I can, the decision to go with, ⁓ you know, making offers on MLS. I think this is an interesting niche because flippers
I wouldn’t say fall into two categories but ⁓ definitely source deals off market. They source deals through a number of ways and on market. When you were identifying hey there’s there’s a niche here and deciding to go on market one click offers were you at that point in time looking at hey I’m doing a lot of my own deals through on market listings and I’m encountering this bottleneck. I think other people may as well or were you seeing that hey this is
This is ⁓ kind of the traditional way of doing things and it’s ripe for innovation and if no one’s going to do it, I’m going to be the guy to do it myself.
Richard Helppie-Schmieder
Well, yeah, you nailed a couple of them. So one, I receive about 70 wholesale, I want to say like deals in quotes a day, right? And I would say all 70 of them are not good deals. But I do write offers on them. So wholesaler comes in, they want 300. Even today, there is one in Carrollton, Texas, where it ARV is 460. But the highest ARV in that neighborhood that’s ever sold was 430. And it was much more square footage. But we see it.Dylan Silver
Yeah, get out of here.Richard Helppie-Schmieder
We see this all the time and this is a pocket that we buy in regularly. So it’s like no surprise, right? And so they want it 330 and I’m like, I’ll give you 265 because that’s honestly any investor, any flipper that does this at scale like we do would probably be in between the 250 to 285 range, right? So we’re giving them good offers but there’s a lot of competition of people that, know, flipping is a sexy business, man. It’s all over TV. People get into it. People have a lot of money. So…So that’s one reason it’s like, okay, how do we find other lead flow? Because this thing with wholesalers where we’re buying one, I probably, one out of every thousand offers I see, we’ll probably buy. It is, but we have some good systems in place where it takes about five minutes a day and we still buy from wholesalers, like very rarely, but we do. But on the MLS,
Dylan Silver
Brain.That’s time consuming too.
Yeah.
there may need to be a bird
dog for that as well. We may see that in the future, right? A way to filter for the investor.
Richard Helppie-Schmieder
I’m already working on something with that. but the, on the MLS, it’s much more professional. You’re dealing with agents. There’s not a lot of people searching in that, I’d say ocean of motivated sellers. And the big benefit of putting out these clean offers to these agents isn’t necessarily the deal in front of you. It’s the deal that they have coming as an agent. So I’m giving them an offer.Dylan Silver
Right.Richard Helppie-Schmieder
That one might not work, but I would say anywhere from three to six times a month, I get agents texting me saying, hey, I’ve got this one coming up. You want to take a look. Now I’m the first one in position for it because I can check all the licensed official contracts. I’m going to put high option, high earnest. A lot of times skip the option. I’m going to close in three days. And so that’s the real benefit of going on market. It’s not the short game. It’s the long game.Dylan Silver
It’s a long game. are coming up on time here, Richard. Where can folks go if maybe they’re in DFW, they’re interested in Bird Dog AI, maybe they’re, a flipper themselves would like your feedback on a deal or would like to reach out to you. How can folks get in contact with you?Richard Helppie-Schmieder
Well, we host a meetup the first Saturday of every month. It’s called Rooted Real Estate Meetup. That’s on Eventbrite and Facebook. You can find me on Facebook, first and last name, or on Instagram. I think it’s Richard H. Real Estate, but I’m not sure. But if you find me on Instagram, add me there, because then I know, yeah, that’s a good place to start a conversation.Dylan Silver
Richard, thank you so much for coming on the show here today.Richard Helppie-Schmieder
Thanks for having me, Dylan.
