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Show Summary
In this episode of the Investor Fuel podcast, host Michelle Kesil interviews Luke Chece, a real estate agent and app developer, about his innovative app, Riva. The app serves as a real estate evaluation assistant, designed to help investors analyze properties efficiently. Luke shares insights into the app’s features, the journey of its development, and the role of AI in enhancing real estate investment decisions. He emphasizes the importance of providing value to investors and aims to empower them with tools that streamline the investment process.
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Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Luke Chece (00:00)
I, I,do a lot of demos at networking events here in San Diego. And there’s this amazing woman, Julie, I won’t say her last name, but ⁓ she’s awesome. And she is getting into the game of real estate investing here in San Diego. And she was getting a deal from these investors.
And I was like, hey, know, tell me about this deal you just got. I think it was in Poway. And she was telling me about it. I told you about the app that we created. Like, she was like, yeah, let’s run it. Let’s try it on it. Let’s try it on it. So we put in the address and we run the numbers and she looked at me and her like her eyes, like she almost looked distraught.
And she was like, Luke, if I had this when I bought the property, I wouldn’t have overpaid $80,000. Right here I can see my max lob offer to get the return that I wanted.
should have been $80,000 less than what I paid. you know, you can’t go back in time. can only, you know, fix things moving forward. So now she’s, you know, signed up and she’s going to be using it for her next deals.
Michelle Kesil (02:39)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Investor Fuel podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Kesil Today I’m joined by someone I’ve been looking forward to chatting with, Luke Chece who’s been making serious moves in the real estate space and technology space, creating a new app. So really excited to have you on the show today, Luke. I think the listeners are really going to take something away from how you’re approaching creating a new app.for investors to use and optimize their business. So let’s dive in.
Luke Chece (03:14)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Michelle. It’s an honor to be here. ⁓ Super grateful to be in front of a really cool audience and people who just want to go and get it. So hoping to bring you guys a tool that can ⁓ change the game for you and allow you to go and get more deals.Michelle Kesil (03:34)
Awesome. So first off, those who are not familiar with you and your world, can you give a short version of what your main focus is?Luke Chece (03:43)
Yeah, of course. ⁓ So I’m a full-time real estate agent ⁓ with Compass Brokerage. ⁓ I started my career with investors, so I really honed in on the underwriting and deal analysis experience and from that experience was able to kind of construct this app vision that a partner and I had together. And ⁓ yeah, it’s something that we use every day actually. it’s more so like it’s one of those things that you hear aboutthat’s
just like a tool that someone made for themselves and they realize, wow, you know, this has a great value to it. And, you know, other people are tending to agree with us. So, ⁓ yeah, I mean, in terms of experience, you know, work for someone that was purchasing 60 plus homes a month. So a lot of volume. That’s a lot of underwriting that goes into that. So you can see kind of the.
compounding of that experience come into fruition with this app.
Michelle Kesil (04:45)
So, can you expand a little bit more about what this app is, what it’s used for, just share all about it.Luke Chece (04:54)
Yeah, definitely. So it is called Riva, Riva.io. It is a real estate evaluation assistant. ⁓ So it’s essentially your underwriter analyst in your pocket. ⁓ What you’re going to do as a real estate investor, let’s just say you’re doing multiple deals a year, know, we’re not targeting anyone specifically, mostly like small to medium term investors, you know, and we’ve got a couple of, you know, enterprise level⁓ companies that are starting to use the technology as well. ⁓ So you have a subject property ⁓ and you’re thinking about purchasing it for an investment, whether it’s your long-term goal is to just flip it and wholesale it or you want to use it for Airbnb, you want to just do a long-term buy and hold and get some mailbox money coming in.
⁓ So this caters to really any dynamic that you want to go through and it’ll actually learn your process.
you whether or not you have a bread and butter that you like to focus on. again, you’re going to start with the subject property, you know, 123 Main Street. ⁓ What you’re going to do is, you know, open up the app. You’re going to plug in the address. will usually, it’ll recognize it and you click on that. From there, you’re going to right away see, you know, the main specs of it. So your bed bath count, your square footage, but where it gets really cool is it actually shows you the tax owner, like who owns it.
show
you their percentage of equity. So you can see like, this person has a lot of equity in the property or, oh, hey, this person has no equity in the property. And as a, you know, as an investor that we’ll start turning with how, you know, where you’re recognizing motivation for this person to sell. right there, that’s kind of a cool little value add. And then after it’s going to generate five comps, comparable sales based on your general, you know, your general components like square footage, your bed bath count,
the proximity to the subject property and it’ll take into account some niche things too like your school zones and and you know neighborhood you know specific neighborhood niches and then from those comps it’s actually going to generate your ARV options so that’s after renovation values and it does that through you know kind of running the dynamic of okay are you going to do a full flip a standard flip or what would we call it a soft
flip, which is basically new paint, very, very minor repairs. The standard flip you can get more into like potentially new floors, a little bit more in depth. And then your full flip is essentially almost gutting and changing the inside completely. ⁓ So obviously these are different scopes of work. And from those different scopes of work, it’ll generate ⁓ just under that, you’ll see as it scrolls, you’ll see
⁓ different renovation estimates and those are going to be based on the cost of materials from Home Depot ⁓ just because that’s a very generic brand where lot of flippers will get their materials from and then you can really customize it as well with where you’re getting your cost of your materials. There’s a dynamic calculator involved that you can if it’s not working for you there. ⁓
And ⁓ we have a GC buddy, a general contractor who does incredible work. He’s growing tremendously here in San Diego. ⁓ And he actually will tell us the bids on what each job would cost in terms of the cost of labor. Because obviously these are really dynamic things. Sometimes it’s based on location, the time of year. Everyone’s dealing with the different costs of materials because of tariffs. So there’s a lot of things to take into account.
⁓ and constantly changing. So it’s good to have someone like him kind of helping us out and keeping our AI calculator very dynamic. ⁓ So like I said, it’s going to tell you based on your scope of work, the desired scope of work for the property, every property is different, it’s going to require a different touch to it. And also every investor has a different vision. So one person may see it as just a standard flip, while another wants to gut the place. And it’s going to offer you both scenarios. ⁓ So it’s going to give you your renovation
budget based on the price per square footage ⁓ and you’ll be able to account for that in what will come next in your max allowable offer. So that will take into account
What you need to offer on the property in order to reach a certain ROI so your return on investment It’ll give you different options like a 10 % ROI versus 15 % ROI 20 % and so on And from there it’ll have the correlated max allowable offer. So obviously as an investor, you know the The less you offer if you’re gonna follow the you know buy low sell high system the less you offer the higher
potential return, you’ll see. ⁓ And then what’s really great is the AI aspect of it allows you to really go into depth. It offers a lot of follow-up questions if you don’t already have some. And it’s like, hey, run this as a… ⁓
Short-term rental and it’ll tell you right away. Oh, you know short-term rentals are meant to be banned in Fairhaven, New Jersey in 2025 so probably not a good idea if that’s your only way of going about it But now you know and you can either pivot or just back away from the deal before you know Making an offer and getting pulled into something that you’re not ready for
Yeah, so again, you could really run any scenario. You could run it as a long-term buy and hold. Let’s say they do allow Airbnb, know, run the numbers as a short-term rental. And then there’s a whole renovation and development aspect to it. So let’s say, you know, we’re in San Diego. ⁓
ADUs, ⁓ accessory dwelling units, are huge here. So if you have a lot with 6,700 square foot or more lot, you’re valid, depending on the area, you’re usually valid to do an ADU in the backyard. So like a little guest house, a little casita kind of deal ⁓ that automatically, one, forces appreciation in the property in an already appreciative market. And then also, ⁓ you know, it offers another source of income coming
in because you can have a travel nurse staying outside, you you’re near a hospital, it’s a great location for it, you’re on a big lot, you can build an ADU for, you know, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars depending on who does it and right away that forces equity into the property and also offers a new stream of income. ⁓ So that’s another cool aspect of things. And then you can also, you know, use it for multi-family development. ⁓ Really the sky is the limit and it just starts with you entering the property’s address.
Michelle Kesil (13:19)
Amazing. It sounds like you guys have really developed something that’s niche and exciting. yeah, so awesome. How did that process go of conceptualizing this to making it happen? How was that?Luke Chece (13:27)
Thank you, thank you.⁓ I mean a journey, know, like a journey nonetheless and it’s we’re super grateful for all the ups and downs that it took, you know, it takes like
It definitely, it takes a little bit of like courage just to go out and start it and try it. And it’s like, all right, you know, we, kind of got something good and like, you don’t really realize you have something good until you realize you had something bad. Cause like we’ve had, we had to pivot, you know, when we first started, ⁓ and you know, focused like we’re in the, we’re in the right mindset, but we’re just not offering the value proposition that the market needs. You got to cater to what the market needs. And right now, like I said, we’re in this AI gold rush, you know, you
you’re constantly seeing AI this, this, this, and all these different aspects of it being used in these different markets and different ⁓ niches and positions of work. ⁓
real estate tech has kind of been dated and a lot of realtors and investors will, you know, back me up on that and say, yeah, you’re right. You know, it’s like why we’re in 2025 things should be caught up to speed. And that’s what we’re hoping to do with this app is kind of just, you know, bring the power of corporate level investing to, the, you know, the little guy or, you know, other corporations who may not have that access yet.
So, you know, in terms of like the conceptualizing the idea, it took a lot of just like putting, you know, me and my partner’s head together and just being like, you know, this.
this would be really helpful. what if we did this and just a lot of brainstorming. And then we were really blessed with finding an incredible CTO ⁓ who has been incredible with, you know, helping develop the app and bringing it to life. Like these ideas are nothing but ideas until they’re really put to paper, in this case, you know, put to code. And yeah, he’s been really monumental with helping us improve and very quickly. And we were now at a point where we’re
you know, offering this value to other people and their eyes are lighting up and saying, yeah, this is pretty great. So it’s cool to see the concept come to fruition.
Michelle Kesil (16:30)
Yeah, absolutely. So how does AI play a role in this app? Is everything coming from artificial intelligence or yeah, just how does that work together?Luke Chece (16:43)
Well, it’s a combination of ⁓ our experience and understanding how different formulas of underwriting work, and then just applying AI speed to it and applying an algorithm to it. ⁓ in terms of the coding, the coding is very intricate in terms of how to actually apply it physically to the app. ⁓ That’s a question for our CTO. ⁓Michelle Kesil (17:10)
Yeah.Luke Chece (17:12)
yeah, I mean, it definitely.it brings speed to things that have taken a long time. So for example, when I used to work for this investor, you know, that we would basically find a property that we’re interested in buying. ⁓ We’d send these numbers, we’d send the address back to the ⁓ analyst teams. And mind you, these analysts are getting paid, you know, pretty healthy salaries, like upwards of $100,000 a year. And if you have multiple, you’re looking at three, $400,000 a year as an investor in terms of overhead. So this is meant
to give you the same value, but almost more, definitely more, because there’s still human error when these things come back. Humans are humans. People make mistakes. No matter how much you’re paying them, things happen. Whereas AI has that computer, iRobot-like, scary ability to be just on point. It’s just a computer. ⁓ So it is a lot faster as well.
that has taken away the human error aspect of it. ⁓ So what used to take, you know, from the point where they do their comps to the point where it’s, you know, there’s an offer ready to submit to the seller. You’re looking at maybe like 30 minute process, sometimes more, maybe an hour or two, depending on the volume of properties coming in. So they could be overwhelmed. Whereas this, you know, busted out in between and 15 seconds. ⁓ And then where the AI really comes into play is the
up questions and you being like, hey, you know, like I’m in a very appreciative market right now, run this as a short term rental or hey, short term rental is banned here, run it as a medium term rental and knowing those numbers, right, you know, like within minutes of understanding what your potential offer can be, it allows an investor to really make what could be strenuous time staking decisions very quickly.
and with certainty. So I think that’s where the AI really plays its role. But you know, there’s parts where human discernment is huge, right? Like with the comping aspect. ⁓ Sometimes you’re in a very niche location and you’re across the street from a cemetery. ⁓ that’s not every day, you know? How does that come into play? Does that affect the home’s value? And yeah, you know, like…
say, the app would tell you because it’s across from a cemetery, it’s going to go down this amount. there’s no way to tell that because it’s very niche based on the value of the home and everything else. But your ability to then apply your human discernment is you can hack into that way faster because you saved all this time doing the other monotonous things that just take time that AI can do very quickly. So regardless, you’re
Essentially buying time with with doing this and as they say in the industry time kills all deals I can’t tell you how many times you know we’ve we’ve lost out on a deal because you know our Competition over at XYZ Realty got their offer in 20 minutes faster, and you get a sorry text Hey, sorry we went with someone else that that sucks, so this is meant to eliminate that
Michelle Kesil (20:30)
Yeah, it sounds so powerful and I love that you combine the best of all the tools because, yeah, AI does things way faster than our human brain, but there is still that important aspect of what humans know that it can’t touch. So what is your biggest goal with this app? Where do you want it to go?Luke Chece (20:54)
Well, I mean, the biggest goal is just to see people using it and like knowing that it’s helping them. Like I want to help people. I genuinely want to see this help, you know, your average investor who, who may not be able to, all right, for example, I,I, I,
do a lot of demos at networking events here in San Diego. And there’s this amazing woman, Julie, I’m gonna call her out, sorry, I don’t know if I’m supposed to do that or not. I won’t say her last name, but ⁓ she’s awesome. And she is getting into the game of real estate investing here in San Diego. And she was getting a deal from these investors.
And I was like, hey, know, tell me about this deal you just got. I think it was in Poway. And she was telling me about it. And I was like, I told you about the app that we created. Like, she was like, yeah, let’s run it. Let’s try it on it. Let’s try it on it. So we put in the address and we run the numbers and she looked at me and her like her eyes, like she almost looked distraught. And I was like.
I hope I didn’t offend, like what’s going on? Are you okay? And she was like, Luke, if I had this when I bought the property, I wouldn’t have overpaid $80,000. Right here I can see my max lob offer to get the return that I wanted.
should have been $80,000 less than what I paid. So I mean, you know, you can’t go back in time. can only, you know, fix things moving forward. So now that she has this, she’s, you know, signed up and she’s going to be using it for her next deals.
And hopefully it can be a tool for, you know, for her and countless others so that they don’t run into that. Cause you know, in this game, there’s a lot of great people. And then there’s a lot of people who will smile while you’re overpaying $80,000 cause it’s, you know,
in their pocket. And it is, it’s the, can’t hate the player, hate the game, you know? ⁓ So this just kind of maybe evens the playing field if you will.
Michelle Kesil (23:00)
Yeah,that’s so powerful. I love that as a tool. So can anyone get this app right now? Like they just go get it on the Apple Store. How does that work?
Luke Chece (23:10)
Right now we are a web-based app.So it’s accessible to absolutely anyone that has Wi-Fi and an iPhone or computer. You would just type in app.dealmindai.com. ⁓ Our first name was Deal Mind. We felt that was a little bit long-winded, so we wanted to shorten things and streamline it with Reva. I think it sounds pretty good. Let us know what you guys think, if you have any feedback. ⁓ But yeah, it’s available to everyone and anyone. Sign up. ⁓
⁓ a two week trial, 14 days, and use it as much as you can and let us know any feedback that you can. ⁓ Good, bad, whatever works. ⁓ And if you like it, we’re happy to take into account any customizations and changes that you guys want, especially with enterprise level, where we cater to the individual investor and then also companies that have teams of analysts that are looking
looking for a leg up on their competition or to streamline cut costs. yeah, mean, if you guys have any questions, let me know. You can reach me on Instagram at luke-underscore-ch-e-c-e, ⁓ my partner. ⁓ I won’t reveal his information yet. ⁓ But yeah, it’s available to everybody. So it’s ready to go.
Michelle Kesil (24:39)
Amazing.Yeah, hopefully people here reach out to you, try out the app. Yeah, that would be awesome. So yeah, really appreciate your story, your time, your perspective. Thank you for being here.
Luke Chece (24:48)
Yeah.Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I don’t know if I should have mentioned it there, but yeah, for the individual investor, it’s going to be $50 a month. And for the enterprise level, we’re looking at $4.99. So that’s for about 10 seats. we’re offering pretty good value for pretty good prices. Yeah.
Michelle Kesil (25:16)
Definitely,awesome. Love that. Go get the app. And yeah, for those of you tuning in, if you got value from this, make sure you’ve subscribed. We have more conversations coming with operators just like Luke who are building real businesses. And we’ll see you all on our next episode.
