The Art Of Real Estate: Merging Creativity With Technology

John Harcar (00:01.551)
All right. Hey, guys. Welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar, and I’m here today with Bianca Pietersz and what we’re going to talk about besides her journey in business and real estate and kind of where it got today. We’re going to also talk about, let me get this right, PropTech Innovation, right? I know this has to do some AI stuff and it’s really, really cool just from what we kind of talked about before. And I look forward to sharing with you guys. Remember at Investor Fuel,

We help real estate investors, service providers, really all real estate entrepreneurs, two to five extra business. We provide tools and resources to grow the business they want to have and in turn help some of the life they want to live. So Bianca, welcome to our show.

Bianca Pietersz (00:41.922)
Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

John Harcar (00:44.689)
Yeah, I’m excited to talk about it. And there’s been a lot of buzz. And even at our last Mastermind, we had someone talk about AI. We know there’s a lot of things, technology that just keep getting better and better. But before we get into all that, tell our audience a little bit about you. How you got into real estate? What’s your business background? How you got to today?

Bianca Pietersz (01:05.344)
Awesome. Yeah, so I am actually not from the real estate space or from the technology space. I just sort of happened to fall into all of this stuff. So I originally come from being an artist and a performer. And in 2020, I had my first child and we bought some homes. And this was kind of our first toe dip into real estate. And it was up to me to manage it.

So it wasn’t really my greatest life dream to be a property manager. But it’s something that I had to learn pretty quickly to do and to solve problems for people very quickly who were in distress and constantly contacting me. So it was a great learning curve. But I also, had so many stressors with that. I’m an empath. People like to tell me their whole life story. Yeah, so they’d keep me on the phone for

hours at a time when all they really needed was their toilet to be looked at, know. I felt pretty overwhelmed because I was also navigating motherhood and just doing what I could to keep everything balanced. And that’s when, you know, in 2023, everything kind of changed with chat GPT coming out and all of these large language models being introduced.

John Harcar (02:10.463)
toilet plunged or something or snagged or whatever.

Bianca Pietersz (02:34.606)
I just saw a great opportunity. I was like, man, this could really solve all of the issues that I’m facing. And it has. Yeah.

John Harcar (02:44.381)
Awesome. When you and if you listen to any of my podcasts before I like to go backwards because there’s always a backstory somewhere that’s pretty interesting. Before you bought these houses, was there anybody in real estate in the influences in your life? Anybody that you know that was a broker, owner, landlord, flipper, anybody like that?

Bianca Pietersz (03:05.439)
No, not really. so my mother, she, we’ve moved around a lot throughout my life. So she’s bought homes where she has lived. And then when we moved to the next place, we’ve rented them out. So I guess my mother, it was interesting to find out though, we actually have a generational ties to property management. So not only she was doing that, but her mother and her family extending like two or three generations.

John Harcar (03:19.281)
Okay.

Bianca Pietersz (03:35.17)
were property managers. yeah, so they managed buildings and I wonder if it’s like something in genetics that has transferred.

John Harcar (03:44.295)
Something in your blood, it got piped in there. So you’re about to have a baby or you’re having your first child and you just say, you and your husband, hey, let’s go buy homes.

Bianca Pietersz (03:55.982)
That wasn’t quite though. Yeah.

John Harcar (03:57.467)
How did that all come about? I’m just curious because how you said it was like, yeah, I’m having my baby. So we bought a couple of homes.

Bianca Pietersz (04:03.438)
Yeah, I mean, this is more strategic in terms of like, hey, we’d like to start a business that’s sustainable. You know, it’s 2020. A lot of businesses are closing down. A lot of people are going through like some really heavy waters. And this is something that’s predictable, something that is simple. It’s black and white. It’s something that’s very attainable and stable, right?

John Harcar (04:29.489)
How did you fund these? you use, mean, did you have savings? Did you use private or hard money? What did you do?

Bianca Pietersz (04:35.928)
So we have the initial ones were savings. And then we’ve gone in, done private lenders. And we’ve just navigated as it comes up, as we come into a little bit of liquidity, we’re doing like the BIRS strategy. We’re just like refinancing as much as we can and just kind of purchasing another home. Yeah.

John Harcar (05:00.815)
Okay, so as you started doing this, right, as you started buying homes, I mean, do you and your husband have any other real estate background or is there any specific things you had to go out and learn as far as being a

Bianca Pietersz (05:14.572)
Yeah, all of it has been learned very organically through difficult situations. At the beginning, we were, I’ve learned very quickly not to take this business as charity. So we’ve had people come in and just be in distressed situations, want to get into the home very quickly, and turns out they are either hiding something or there’s just some,

something that doesn’t add up and we’ve had some really excruciating situations with like all of the appliances being stolen from the home, including like washer, dryer, refrigerator, oven, everything. Yeah, so we’ve learned really, really quickly how to kind of vet people. And now we’ve got really good tenants who pay on time. We have no issues.

But it’s been four years in the making.

John Harcar (06:13.863)
What were some of the original challenges, right? The original struggles when you first started off, like what were some of those things you had to overcome and hurt?

Bianca Pietersz (06:21.184)
Yeah, so for me it really was that communication piece where people were constantly contacting me and I had to learn how to have professional boundaries. Like when it’s okay to interject and when it’s okay to say, hey, you know, I might have to leave this conversation and I have to do something else because I also have things to do in my own life, you know.

John Harcar (06:45.159)
So how many doors do you guys have now?

Bianca Pietersz (06:48.748)
Right now I’m personally managing five and I have started more focusing on the PropTech innovation where we now service, I think we have like 60 properties on the platform currently and it’s growing and we are inviting people to just test it out and see how they like it. We’ve automated the entire maintenance from tenant or manager requests

that coordinates with maintenance providers, sends it over. Then there’s maintenance reports that you can see at all times in real time. And then there’s an action log of everybody on the team. So it’s great for large teams, yeah.

John Harcar (07:27.805)
Okay. Awesome. Awesome. So let’s talk about this software. What is it? Why did you create it? Did you see a need for something that was inadequate that was out there?

Bianca Pietersz (07:39.842)
Yeah. So again, I am coming into this space as a mom and pop landlord, right? When you are at that level, there is nothing that is really automating the process for you. It’s a lot of manual data entry. It’s a lot of you being on the phones, you texting back and forth with people. It’ll take a ton of your time to coordinate back and forth. Then there’s an issue with reschedules. Someone’s calling you again and you might be in another

meeting or, you know, in court for an eviction and you can’t be doing both. So this was really just a way of me trying to like save my own time and overcome all of the issues that I was having. And then as we kept going and as we kept investigating and learning more and getting more clients, we started figuring out that, you know, larger property management companies would need this so much more than I would.

And their need is much greater because their instances are much greater. So they will have three or four different breakdowns at one time. And people are coming to them from every which direction. And then they have a maintenance team who can only manage certain amounts in a day. So they have to kind of coordinate and prioritize and make sure everything is serviced because there are actually legal limits for these things. Like, I don’t know where it is.

Like in Idaho, I’m not sure, but in Oklahoma, it’s a 14 day limit from the instance that you get a request to you servicing it, you have to make sure it’s done within 14 days. And a lot of people maybe don’t know about those things or don’t adhere to those things, but it’s pretty important.

John Harcar (09:20.527)
Mm. Right. Okay.

John Harcar (09:29.105)
So is this a tool that pretty much just kind of helps automate and organize and do all the things that kind of like a property management company would do for you, but you’re able to do it on your own?

Bianca Pietersz (09:42.84)
Yes, exactly. And if you have property management companies, you can actually have them use this and you as the landlord can see all of the conversations. You have full visibility on everything that’s happening and then that full action log on every ticket. You know exactly where something broke down. If there’s a communication breakdown or if there is like somebody who didn’t show up, you know exactly who it was, when it happened, why, all of it.

John Harcar (10:12.505)
Awesome. Did you hire a developer to come in and create this for you? Or is this something you did on your

Bianca Pietersz (10:18.722)
Nope, I have developers. I am a non-typical person. So I was able to create initial prototypes through things like Voiceflow and like conversation builders, things of that nature. But nowhere near to what we have now. So we’ve actually built from scratch on Python. And we have a full team of developers now. It started out with one guy that I hired.

John Harcar (10:20.037)
Okay, I was gonna say that’s brilliant right there.

John Harcar (10:29.085)
Mm-hmm.

Bianca Pietersz (10:47.106)
and I paid him upfront, I didn’t have contracts, I just trusted that we would be partners in this, and I just gave him a ton of IP and the way it needed to function and how it needed to answer questions and just a lot of training material. Personal leases and contracts, things that I had worked on for years that I was just giving to this guy. And…

It took him about three months to come back to me and be like, hey, I have something for you. And I was trying to get information the entire time, and there was just no visibility. yeah, well, OK. So turns out he ended up creating two different products, one for me, which was this really disjointed thing that didn’t work.

John Harcar (11:23.805)
Here’s a quote. I’m sorry, go ahead. I’ll let you finish.

Bianca Pietersz (11:42.434)
And then one for himself that did work according to what we had discussed. And then he posted it on YouTube as something that he made.

John Harcar (11:44.731)
was fantastic. It had all the bells and whistles, right?

John Harcar (11:54.365)
Wow.

Bianca Pietersz (11:55.182)
And I was like, are you kidding me? Like I have been working on this for, I didn’t. So that was my first big mistake in business. This experience kind of set the stage for the rest of my business. So the worst thing that ever happened ended up being the best thing that

John Harcar (11:59.069)
Did you have any copyrights or did you have anything?

John Harcar (12:14.749)
Yeah, I could see that silver lining, you know? And because our topic is technology, innovation, and whatnot, and I like to ask this question. With AI and all the new things coming out, what’s the shelf life of property managers now? How long are they going to still be around? And do you think they’ll be replaced by technology? No.

Bianca Pietersz (12:38.262)
No, I honestly don’t think that they’re going to be replaced by technology. This is a very human centric business. So even though you may have parts of the process that are taken over, for example, maintenance coordinator, that one will be replaced for sure. Like we’re already doing that. But when it comes to people wanting people to service them, never going to go away. It’s like a nurse.

John Harcar (12:46.769)
Mm-hmm.

Bianca Pietersz (13:06.828)
Like you want somebody on the phone with you that actually is a person, that actually understands your problems, that can actually go over there and see you face to face. A property manager’s kind of like that. People want that human to human interaction.

John Harcar (13:25.573)
Yeah, I can definitely see that and appreciate that. know, mean, people I hate when I get on the phone and it’s someone that, you know, press one for this. And then you’re like, operator, operator, give me a person over your business time and your, you know, your, your, your growth and the things you’re up and downs. Like I’m, I’m big on mindset. Right. So I like to know if there’s some tools, trips, ticks, or tools, tips or tricks books.

Bianca Pietersz (13:33.102)
Yeah, it’s awful. It’s awful. Yes.

John Harcar (13:51.517)
speakers, podcasts, anything that you use to really help your mindset stay kind of, you know, in tune.

Bianca Pietersz (14:00.014)
Okay, so general resources, YouTube. YouTube will have every piece of information that you will need. Chat GPT, you can ask any question. You can generate images and content and there’s, I think, my biggest advice is to be a problem solver. It’s not to accept somebody’s guidance or direction.

and it’s to find your own way and to find something that works. So it’s going to be really, it’s like a mind shift. Some people, they just need that kind of helping hand. They want somebody to guide them through it, right? And then some people, like you have a problem in front of you, how are you gonna fix it? You find a way. It’s not gonna be crystal clear every time. And oftentimes it’s not at all.

John Harcar (14:40.925)
Kick in the That kick in the butt is what they need.

Bianca Pietersz (14:57.474)
you find yourself in a situation and you have to figure out a way to get out of it. Another really good person is like Angela Duckworth. I know this is gonna be random, but grit. She writes books on grit and she studies grit. And I think that that is like the most exceptional value to have.

John Harcar (15:17.905)
Yeah, yeah, for sure. So outside of the AI part that we briefly talked on, like what other trends are you seeing? What other innovations are coming down the line? mean, what do you see coming in the future?

Bianca Pietersz (15:29.638)
Mm-hmm. So I think we can all see what’s coming in the future. We have we have like a merge of AI and humanity and things like Neuralink and those types of things. That’s that’s a that’s a dangerous slippery slope. That is You know, there’s that idea There’s also robotics and like an entire Robot human

John Harcar (15:44.381)
Mm-hmm.

Bianca Pietersz (16:00.622)
force, I guess, in this would be us working with robots and being kind of, you everyone has their own personal robot and whatever. That’s cool. That’s an idea. It’s also been depicted in all of the movies and it’s also a pretty dystopian idea. And then we have things that are more kind of grounded and based in reality where we have like small little robotics that are being built for specific purposes. So for example,

John Harcar (16:08.669)
Alright.

John Harcar (16:13.231)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’ll work out

Bianca Pietersz (16:30.51)
I know MIT was working on something, I think it was last year or the year before, it might be like a few years back now, but they’re working on like a little robot that can fix pipes. They can just like crawl through the pipe and then patch it when something is broken. So you see those types of things are like, oh, I could use that, that’s fun. And it’s not this like crazy Terminator vibe of like.

John Harcar (16:45.328)
Wow.

John Harcar (16:56.615)
Hahaha

Bianca Pietersz (16:57.792)
It’s just gonna know everything about me and come kill me.

John Harcar (17:00.667)
Yeah, right. What do you see as your keys to success over your time in business, over your growth? Like, what do you think were the things that made you get to where you were or where you are?

Bianca Pietersz (17:12.3)
mentorship.

John Harcar (17:14.151)
Explain.

Bianca Pietersz (17:15.704)
So this is actually the other part of that conversation that we were having earlier. When I had lost everything and I had to just keep going through being IP theft, it’s that and self-advocacy. So I was able to go to the bank, get all of my money back after submitting a report. Then I found an IP lawyer through a friend and

I spoke to her for a while, we kept setting meetings, kept setting meetings, and she ended up telling me like, hey, I believe in you, and I believe in what you’re doing, and I’m gonna come on as your co-founder. So the worst thing that ever happened, right, that I had to just figure out how to dig myself out of that and just keep going, made me meet my future partner. And then we were able to meet another future partner really soon after that.

and it’s been us three ever since. And both of them are much more experienced than I am. Much older, much wiser, with really long track records. And I think that that’s huge for anybody who is young and in business, being willing to take advice, being willing to take direction, being willing to learn from the people who have done it.

John Harcar (18:16.221)
That’s awesome.

John Harcar (18:33.277)
Mmm.

John Harcar (18:37.607)
Yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean, that’s kind of like, you know, the thing of our mastermind is that you want to be around people who’ve already been there so they can guide you there and help you avoid the pitfalls.

Bianca Pietersz (18:48.472)
Yeah, and remember, only take advice from people you want to be like.

John Harcar (18:53.233)
Exactly. There you go. there’s folks listening that want to reach out to you, want to connect, want to talk a little bit about maybe your software, property management, whatever it might be, what is the best way for them to reach out to you so you guys can have a chat?

Bianca Pietersz (19:07.49)
So if you want to know about our product, Vizysmart, go to vizysmart.com. And if you’d like to reach out to me personally, I am on LinkedIn all the time. So Bianca Peters on LinkedIn.

John Harcar (19:23.407)
Hey, we’ll put the contact information you already sent me we put it in the show notes So everybody will have it Bianca. Thank you again for coming on here and sharing sharing this some information with us guys I hope you enjoyed it. Hope you took some good notes and you know, if you guys have any interest reach out You know, don’t don’t be afraid. So appreciate you all see you all the next time

Bianca Pietersz (19:42.616)
Thank you.