Reverse Zillow? How Sheepdog Connects Buyers With Off-Market Home

Jonathan Chames (00:00)
it’s basically the easiest, it’s perfect for an elevator pitch. It’s basically reverse Zillow. What does that mean? When you go on Zillow or Realtor.com, you go to see in the area or the zip code that you want to be in who’s selling your house. Sheepdog is gonna do the opposite. You’re gonna be able to type in a zip code and you’re gonna see what buyers are interested in buying your zip code.

Cody Crabb (01:54)
Welcome back to the *Real Estate Pros* podcast by Investor Fuel. I’m your host, Cody Crabb, and today I’ve got Jonathan Chames with me.

Jonathan is a South Florida real estate broker and the founder of Sheepdog, a new platform aiming to flip the traditional home buying process by putting buyers first instead of listings.

Today we’re gonna talk about why he believes the industry’s ready for a different approach and what that could mean for buyers, sellers, agents, and investors alike. Jonathan, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

Jonathan Chames (02:20)
Thank you so much, Cody, for having me. It’s great to be here. How are you today?

Cody Crabb (02:23)
I’m doing so good and I’m so happy to have you as well. Jonathan, for people hearing about Sheepdog for the first time, I’d love if you could kind of give us a little bit of info on like what problem did you see in real estate, and that made you kind of think there’s got to be a better way, like those old commercials where everything’s black and white and everyone’s like all angry about something. Yeah. So what did you see and have to fix?

Jonathan Chames (02:46)
Yeah, it’s interesting. I actually had this idea going back all the way to COVID. I am based in South Florida and one of the things as a real estate agent that we were all going through at that time was there was unbelievable demand from buyers to get out of from wherever it was they were to come down to Florida. And at that time, as you can imagine, a lot of sellers were very hesitant to let people in because we were literally knocking on doors at the time.

And so for a while there it was getting a little bit difficult to get leads. people weren’t you people were answering the phone, but they were getting inundated with phone calls. They couldn’t, it was a mess. Everyone they just it was it was just the whole a hundred agents were calling them. Are you looking to sell your house? I get you the top dollar, whatever it was. Yeah, I’m looking. And some of the sellers are were older people and they were scared. They didn’t want people walking in their house, whatever it is. So

I said to myself, like, wouldn’t it be great if like the sellers they could just view it on a on a website, on a list, on a computer, just so that they could choose which ones are serious, which ones are not. And then, or and then, like, we got busy. I got busy because obviously as the market got busy, things happened and thank God I closed a lot of deals, what have you, and life happened. And then over the last couple of years, I have represented, I was representing a few of my clients.

And they kept saying back to me, calling back, Johnny, like there’s just nothing on the market I like. I just wish like there was another option. I and I would send them stuff from the MLS, I would send them stuff, from even from FSBOs, for sale by owners. And they went it’s just

Cody Crabb (04:21)
Okay, like

Jonathan Chames (04:22)
really nothing out there. Like I said to myself, like there really should be an option where buyers have a way of posting.

of what they want. And then what really say, what, I’m going to do this was that I looked around Facebook and I looked around all these groups

Nextdoor website Facebook groups Reddit all these places and you constantly see even like on Craigslist

Although I’m not in Craigslist as much now as I was a while ago, there’s tons of people that are posting. Hey, I’m looking for a three-bedroom, two-bathroom. My budget is 500,000. Hey, I’m looking for I’m like, someone has to aggregate this, someone has to be able to take advantage of this. There’s obviously a vacuum here. And so for me, it just makes total sense from a buyer perspective of just saying, hey, why not just

what if sellers have a platform that they could post that they’re looking to sell, why shouldn’t there be a platform for me where I could just post what I want and people come to me as well?

Cody Crabb (05:23)
Yeah, I mean it’s a really good point. you described it to me as reverse Zillow. So could you give me like a little bit of what you mean by that?

Jonathan Chames (05:31)
Sure. So it’s basically the easiest, it’s perfect for an elevator pitch. It’s basically reverse Zillow. What does that mean? When you go on Zillow or Realtor.com, you go to see in the area or the zip code that you want to be in who’s selling your house. Sheepdog is gonna do the opposite. You’re gonna be able to type in a zip code and you’re gonna see what buyers are interested in buying your zip code.

So if you’re aka a seller who instead of want instead of having to rely on what other people in the market are telling you what’s going on, you could just go on a website and it’ll be able to say, there’s 173 buyers interested in buying your zip code. There’s 60 of those buyers that are interested in buying your neighborhood. There’s 20 of those that are interested in buying on your block. You understand what I’m saying? So there’s gonna be all these filters and all these different things where

sellers are going to have significant advantages with data that they’re going to be able to be able to act to go through and be able to say, hey, listen, like wow, like I could just contact these people. So it’s very simple. It’s very it’s a reverse it’s the reverse of what we’ve been doing for the last hundred some odd years. Or I was going to joke and say the last thousand years, but maybe thousand years because who knows, maybe for a thousand years that’s how we go down. But definitely since the existence of modern day

real estate, this is gonna for me, I believe is gonna change the game and make it more efficient so that there is more liquidity in the market.

Cody Crabb (06:58)
I love it when people kind of look at a model and go like, well, why do we even do things that way? Like it doesn’t it doesn’t make sense to me why we do something this way. And we just kind of haven’t really questioned it. And I guess it works okay and there’s maybe some problems with it, but there’s problems with everything. So you never know. But I find I always find it interesting when someone kind of sees this kind of this middle thing.

And I also think you caught onto something really big, which you said that right now kind of people in this in this arena are kind of inundated with everything, with spam and ads and people that are not super serious. And so I think I think that is the thing that a lot of people would be like, Hold on, you’re protecting against that because that

That’s interesting to me. So how are you planning to protect against that kind of stuff?

Jonathan Chames (08:32)
One of the biggest things that I get from f from people why they don’t want to deal with Zillow is because like you mentioned, there we there’s tire kickers, there’s people that just aren’t serious, they’re they inundate you with calls, there’s agents that call you the second listing expired, all this stuff that goes on and people are just sick and tired of Zillow.

And what wanted to do when I wanted to build when I build this website was I wanted to make sure there was a moat where we get rid of a lot of that. We what so what we decided to do was we said, okay, fine, how do we make this user experience not only better for the buyer, but also for the seller? Because we want to make sure that no one is nobody is taking advantage.

nobody is nobody is doing tire kicking nobody’s doing anything like that so first of all from the seller there is going to be a a payment but why is there gonna be a payment so let’s go back to the buyers when the buyers fill out their profile it’s gonna be free and not only that you’re going to be able as a buyer to choose whether or not you only want to be able to deal with agents or you’re gonna be able to deal with only sellers or you’re be able to do deal with both.

And what that does is that allows for not only the buyers to have full transparency as to who is allowed to contact them, but you as the seller, you as the agent, feel much more comfortable contacting them because in their profile, you’re the only reason why you’re gonna be able to see their profile is because they said, Yeah, I wanna c I wanna be contacted by sellers. Yeah, I want to be contacted by an agent. So a lot of times when you have lead generations.

And lead sources and all these other different things and these ads, they promise you left and right, and they give you phone numbers that they say are scrap trace skip trace. I was gonna say scrap trace, but you skip trace, but you might as well call it scrap trace for some of the crap that they give you. And so all this stuff and our website, we have to, in order for this to be successful, we have to be able to provide you with real buyers. Because you’re gonna know the second that this happens if you get the

phone numbers for a buyer and the buyer sounds like someone that they’re not really interested then you’re gonna know right away okay this is not it so we have to be providing real buyers and the buyers themselves are going to feel more appreciative because this is going to be a real platform where real professionals or real estate owners are gonna be able to contact them. So it’s a win-win for everybody. The buyers win because they are in control of who contacts them.

The sellers win because they’re going be able to see that wow, there’s a real profile, a real buyer who really wants to be my area. And just as important the agents win because the agents are like, wow, these people actually say that they want to be contacted by agents. So when I call them, I don’t have to have that nervous feel and that anxiety feel of, my God, if I call this person, are they gonna hang up on me? Are they gonna, tell me to go to hell? Any of this stuff. Like these are these are people that say, no, I’m looking in this area.

And yes, I want an agent contact me because maybe they know something that it I don’t know.

Cody Crabb (11:37)
Hmm. I like this because no one would say no to like having people be more like to welc to welcome your call. I mean, I it that turns every lead into like a thank you like thank you so much for calling me instead of like maybe tolerating you, maybe hanging up on you. Like that I’m sure that would make your time a lot more efficient.

Jonathan Chames (11:56)
Absolutely. And that’s the most important thing we wanna make sure that we stress is that the reason why we’re doing this is because we want to make the process of real estate buying more efficient, more liquid, and most of all, like a smoother experience for everybody involved. It there’s there should be no reason in twenty twenty-six why there should be all these different hurdles that continue to

tramp trample some of these real estate transactions. And I also think that as time has gone on and we have become a society where we want things to be a little bit easier. We want things to be a little bit more of a touch of a button. I believe this is something where you don’t have a lot of the guesswork is going to be taken out because you’re really going to be getting significantly targeted data where

You’re going to be contacting people that are that have expressed their desire to really get down to the nitty gritty of what it is that they want. And we even have a feature where if you’re driving as a buyer, a lot of times on Saturday or Sunday, you get in the car with your significant other or what have you, and you drive around and you see the area that you want to potentially buy into. And if there’s a house that you particularly see,

We have a feature that you could pin the house. what that does is that if that seller ever signs up to the website, the seller is going to be able to see in their inbox, you’ve already had three people pin you to see if you’re interested in buying your house. And we’ll have the buyer’s information and contact number. So this thing is not just going to be, I say it’s a Zillow, it’s a reverse Zillow because.

Does everyone want to just hear the elevator pitch? That’s like the hot thing right now. But what I also wanted to do was bring something to the market that really is beneficial for all parties involved. And that’s one of the features that we’re gonna be offering on the website as well.

Cody Crabb (13:50)
Yeah, see that I now that I find interesting. It’s all that’s almost like Tinder, right? no, but like

Jonathan Chames (13:54)
Basically, if you will.

Cody Crabb (13:56)
Well I find that I find that really smart because you’re it you’re taking the burden you’re putting the burden on the people that are trying to work the hardest for it. Right. Like if you’re if you’re gonna go see it, if you’re trying to buy something, you’re gonna be the one that wants to run around and see all the things and it makes sense like to put that put that work or that responsibility on the people that are like already hustling to do that ’cause they’re motivated to

do that. It makes so much sense to me.

Jonathan Chames (14:24)
Exactly. And also it gives sellers a motivation because a lot of times listen, I’ve walked into a number of different houses and I’ve given the listing pitch that a lot of us brokers do as to why they should choose me and why they should list their house, blah And what I do find is that a lot of sellers they are a little bit at a disadvantage. I mean sure nowadays they could go on ChatGPT, they could go on

or even before ChatGPT, they could go on Google, but they still they just see like what the buyer market is like for their area. But that doesn’t really give you true sense. All in all, sellers are still kind of reliant on, what agents tell them and what other people are telling them, even sometimes what the news tells them, which is not always an accurate indication of what’s going on. So there really isn’t like you could go on Zillow and you could right away.

see and pull okay how many houses are located in a certain area. I mean you could just count or whatever, but there really isn’t that platform. I see like sometimes on Twitter you’ll see people put together graphs. I’m not exactly sure where they’re pulling this data, but they’ll s show like very weird graphs of potentially interested buyers or whatever. I’m not exactly sure where they’re pulling that data. In other words, there’s no real case or real

platform where you could see say for definitively, I know that there’s 37 buyers that are looking to buy in not my neighborhood. So if the 37 buyers looking to buy in my neighborhood and they’re all on Sheepdog, let me first contact them and let me see if any of them are going to be interested my house. And then after that I could I could decide what to do next. So this gives just as much power to the seller as it does to the buyer because now you’re armed with more data and you’re armed with more options.

Cody Crabb (16:47)
Yeah, this is really interesting. so let’s say I’m an investor, right? I’m a real estate investor. Give me s give me like a little bit of insight on how I might use Sheepdog as an investor to my advantage.

Jonathan Chames (17:00)
Sure. So actually I’m glad you mentioned that because one of our first signups was were cash buyers. And basically what I explained to them is very simply, you fill out your name, you fill out the areas and the zip codes you want. Right now we’re strictly in South Florida because we want to start small, and South Florida is more than enough of a of a market to start off to start off with this. So we’re fine with that. So you could be a cash buyer who’s

looking to let’s say buy in Broward County and Palm Beach County or Dade County only, whatever it is. So you fill out your name, you fill out where you want to buy, you fill out your budget, and then there’s different and then there’s different levels that you get. So if you want to put out your pre-approval letter, the sellers see that there is a verified third party pre-approval letter. If you want to show that you’re a cash buyer, we haven’t we have an option where you could show that you’re a cash buyer, you could and you could show POF.

Now we ne won’t necessarily show you exactly all that inf data specific, but we would have something where the buyer has the option of submitting it and then we would have a badge or a check mark that third party verified their pre-approval or they verified their ca cash cash buyer. So there’s basically like three or four levels. Either you can just fill out your name and just say, Hey, I’m looking, I’m a I’m an investor and this is what I’m looking for, or you could

is submit a pre-approval or you could submit obviously which is king cash and you could submit proof of funds that way as well. And then once you’re once you’re on that, it’s totally free and we don’t sell data. I’m not in the business selling data. I’m in the business of making sure real estate houses get sold. So I’m not in the business of selling your personal data. Your personal data is not going to go anywhere. It’s not being sold. That’s not the purpose of this. If I don’t make money the real way, I’m shutting it down. So

The way that this is done is you sign up as a buyer and that’s it. And then once you’re on there, you we don’t charge you, we don’t whatever it is, and we send you emails. If someone, if a seller or an agent signs up and in your area or what have you, get notifications. I believe we recently are just implemented something where you’ll get a 30 day report to see like who has

skim through your profile, whose render profile and what type of reads it’s getting, what have you. So this way you get a feel of like, okay, what type of con what type of traffic and whatever’s coming to the buy profile. So you’re not just like putting your stuff out there and just like in WebRiverse. And then that’s it. And then and then let the let them come to you. I mean that’s kind of

what we want to do. And I and I told investors, I go, listen, like you’re already paying tons of money for all this other crap. Let me be the guy that posts what you want for free. And if you get one or two amazing I mean, hell, you get you get three amazing I mean, you could just get rid of, whatever it is that you’re doing and then I’m saving you a ton of money doing it that way.

Cody Crabb (19:56)
Yeah. I mean, everything that you’re saying is like this seems like this these problems have existed for a really long time. I mean, you said like we don’t even know how long, like it’s as long as there’s modern real estate really. one thing I’m curious about is, you spent years as a broker inside the this traditional system. Why do you think this kind of hasn’t become standard already?

Jonathan Chames (20:15)
I get that question a lot and I remember when I first spoke to I forgot who it was, I remember speaking to a friend of mine about this idea. And I said to them, I said, Well, why didn’t Sears try doing what Amazon did? Right? Like Sears had a money c they had their catalog and they had their stores, but why didn’t Sears or why didn’t Kmart, all these other companies got

That got defunct. Why didn’t they just do what Amazon did, which is to deliver items and books to the person’s home? And of course, if I don’t know if you’re old enough to know this, but I’m 41. But I remember a day when Amazon first came on the market. Everyone’s like, Who the heck is gonna wait a week or two, three, four days to get their stuff? I could just go to the store and just pick up my, a book, or I could just pick up,

a coffee pot or whatever it is. I don’t need Amazon. And here we are in 2026 and we no longer have Sears and we no longer have I mean I guess there are maybe some K markets, but you get the point. You get the picture. I don’t know the answer to why it is that people haven’t been done. My guess is that especially in this risk-averse time that we live in, a lot of companies are just not interested in taking major risks. I think a lot of money is just

reinvested into things that we know already work, kind of like i.e. Hollywood. That’s why we get a lot of the, Die Hard sevens and leaf

Cody Crabb (21:40)
*Ghostbusters* reboot number five.

Jonathan Chames (21:42)
reboots right it’s just like it’s just like let’s not reinvent the wheel let’s just stick with what we know and let’s reinvent it we know we everyone just wants everything on a nice Microsoft Excel chart like I know what I’m going to expect I want I know exactly whatever it is and so I don’t know now the other question you could ask is well aren’t you worried about once this takes off that they would do that and my answer to that is no because

It’s going to take such an upheaval because this comes with such a mental fortitude and mental challenge. And what’s gonna happen is that you are going we’re going to be building a brand that’s going to be something that is so unique and so different that it’s not gonna be it’s not gonna be possible, or maybe it is possible, and they could repeat it. I mean listen, Zillow has Realtor.com, Trulia.com, and all these other websites.

So if there are other websites that repeat what we do, we don’t have a problem with it. But we all our goal is to be the top dog of all this. And I do think that it it’s going to catch on. I really do. I foresee this. Listen, if this works out, I could foresee this going in a bunch of different directions in a bunch of different industries. But for right now, for the time being, w the what I see is an opportunity or a vacuum that needs to be filled.

And I have years, like you mentioned, I have years of experience of seeing that there is legitimate frustration out there in the market. where people will say, in fact, I am in a realtor chat that I’m in. And even the realtor said on the chat, we’re looking he put a he posted a Google map and he posted a square. And he said, We are looking for options in this square. Everything on the market, according to my buyer, stinks.

Does anyone have anything in that area that we may not know about? So that happened today. So this is happening. This is something that does happen on a regular occurrence. So

Cody Crabb (23:40)
Yeah.

I think everyone in everyone that’s listening to this has definitely had at least one of these issues from either side, at least one time. Like it’s just a thing in the industry, it is.

Jonathan Chames (23:49)
Yeah, a hundred percent. and I don’t wanna babble whatever, but I just y I just think that there’s really a need for this and I see it on a re regular occasion and with the overload of data and the overload of ads and the overload of all these different things that are being thrown at you, i it gets to the point that people are just getting overwhelmed and they’re just getting like over information overload and they just don’t want to deal with it anymore. And this will hopefully

get rid of a lot of that and be able to really simplify things for everybody involved.

Cody Crabb (24:20)
Love that. So okay. So if somebody is hearing all this and saying, I get it, I get it. Just let me use the app, please. Like what would you tell them? Or how close are you to having being ready to have people sign up and get involved?

Jonathan Chames (24:32)
So

we’re ready for people to sign up now. We literally just launched this thing, or as my marketing in the my marketing person tells me, tell them it’s a soft launch tell them it’s a soft launch. So we’re doing a soft launch, which I guess is going to be a learning progress because my background is in real estate. My background this is not necessarily is in technology, although over the last number of months I’ve had to learn all these different things of how to do these things, but

sheepdog-realestate.com. We don’t have an app yet, but you could go on our website and you could visit the website. It should be very simple to sign on. It literally takes 60 seconds or less to sign up for a buyer profile. And that’s it. And as far as sellers and agents are concerned, we have all the different prices and different levels that you could sign up for on there.

And yeah, and we and we’re happy to hear from you. We’re we have a link that, you have a support if you want to get feedback and that’s it.

Cody Crabb (25:36)
Love it. Well, thank you so much, Jonathan. I think everyone that has kind of been tired of some of these issues that you’ve mentioned, I think they should definitely check this out. this may be beginning of a shift of some kind in the in the way that we do things. So hopefully that’s true. but for now I can’t thank you enough for giving us some of your time today. And audience, same to you too, and we’ll see you on the next episode, Jonathan. You take care. Have a

Jonathan Chames (25:58)
All right, thank you so much. Thank you for your time.