The New Way to Find Motivated Sellers Using AI, Property Data, and Direct Mail

Curtis Fenn (00:00)
expired and cancelled that come off the MLS. Right now in the last 12 months, 44 % of them will re-sign with a new agent or the same agent and go back on the MLS. So 44 % will expire and then go back on the MLS. Well, you can’t buy another list of leads that say 44 % are absolutely going to buy your product. So it’s a great list.

And just because the phone was changing doesn’t change those statistics. So the question becomes, well, how do we get in touch with them? How do we get in front of them? How do we… And so that’s when we developed our social media products,

Michelle Tack (02:11)
Hi, I’m Michelle Tack. I am the Real Estate Pros podcast leader for today. And I’ve got a great operator, Curtis Fenn. Curtis, say hi to the folks.

Curtis Fenn (02:19)
Hey everybody.

Michelle Tack (02:20)
I am so psyched to have Curtis on today because he brings something that is near and dear to all of our hearts, the aspect of data. ⁓ Data in terms of helping you improve your business, find leads and find potential buyers, et cetera. And to that regard, without spoiling Curtis’s ⁓ segue here, ⁓ one thing that really stood out for me is to try to identify his

as as possible the ideal customer profile that brokerages are looking for, maybe wholesalers are looking for, what have you, but that’s the ultimate crucible, right? Of trying to get as close to the prospect as I can find them with the traits that I am looking for that marry up so I have a higher win percent. So Curtis is on the technology side of the house in terms of software, but Curtis, can you?

get into for those that may not come from that background, a little description of your business and the markets that you serve.

Curtis Fenn (03:21)
Sure.

So REDX has been around for 23 years and we started in big data. We started with this concept of, you know, it’d be easy as if you had a phone number for somebody that was likely to do business with you. And back then that’s a novel concept, right? Because this is, you know, five years before the iPhone came out and three years before Gmail existed. And we were out there automating the process of

of looking up contact information for homeowners in bulk. And that’s where we’re starting. What it’s evolved to be is exactly what you’re saying is everybody has an ideal customer profile or I like to say that a person who is most likely to do business with you. And we help you identify and find the people who are most likely to do business with you. And then we fill the gap of that data to who is a

Michelle Tack (04:03)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Fenn (04:15)
great qualified lead or contact with different conversion marketing mechanisms, whether it’s social media ads or ⁓ traditional prospecting on the phone or mailers and postcards and all kinds of marketing aspects to get in contact with those homeowners and convert them to business.

Michelle Tack (04:34)
And do you do that, Curtis, across the United States, ⁓ regardless of, and is that in more commercial or do you do residential? Do you do both?

Curtis Fenn (05:32)
It’s residential, we really specialize in residential. That’s where our kind of our core competency is in property data and homeowner data.

Michelle Tack (05:41)
Great. You know what impressed me when we were getting ready for the podcast is the length of time, as you mentioned earlier of how long that you have been, you know, combing AI, beginning with AI for all of us that may be listening, you know, it didn’t just pop out yesterday, although it seems to be presented that way, but you’ve been doing it for 15 years. Given that, can you talk about how you’re able to run your

business in a smooth and efficient manner ⁓ with the technology and the benefits that you’ve learned with the AI.

Curtis Fenn (06:19)
Sure. We’ve been doing stuff long enough that before we never would have called it AI. We would say, this isn’t artificial intelligence, it’s machine learning algorithms. now AI kind of is an all encompassing term. But when you’re trying to identify information that is, ⁓ we used to say, hey, it’s really an art, not a science. But AI has helped us.

Michelle Tack (06:29)
Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly.

Curtis Fenn (06:46)
create a science out of it. And what I mean by that is it’s way more complicated, people think, to say, well, who is the homeowner of this property? Where do they live? What’s the best contact information for them? Where do they hang out? What do they do? How do we get in front of them? That’s a complicated, ⁓ you know, complicated algorithms, but the AI allows us to take feedback from what people are doing.

I’ll give you an example, is we, way back when, I think 2011 is probably the first time we hired some statistics, PhD statistics professors to come in and say, okay, we really want to get scientific about this. So help us put together the right kind of studies and do that. Well, we ended up pulling data from 22 different data providers, top tier one data providers. We pulled everything in. We ended up with hundreds of thousands

of data points. And then we hired call centers and we called all the phone numbers. We emailed all the emails. We, you know, we did everything we did to get a truth set. So what, what, you know, what’s going on here? And then you take, you take the feedback of that and you feed it into a machine learning algorithm to say, okay, well, I know where to look in this market. And I know how to look for a homeowner over here different than maybe the market over here. And so ⁓ for us, data quality really matters. ⁓ And it’s never going to be perfect.

But it needs to be the very best that it can be. And AI and machine learning algorithms have been helping us for a long, time to kind of sit at the forefront of that data acquisition.

Michelle Tack (08:20)
think that’s a, you know, it gives, think confidence and comfort, right? To know that you’ve been doing this for that long. As you go and expand, we’ve talked a little bit about, you know, broadening, ⁓ you know, the ⁓ areas that you sell into. And what I mean by that is more of, you know, looking at ⁓ continued, you’re doing wholesale, you know, data, you know, large data.

that can be sold. But as you continue to look and expand, know, what we often find are there’s challenges with that, right? Everyone is not necessarily looking to expand their footprint. Some are and some not. And we know in the software business, it’s about adding capabilities, or maybe it’s a, it’s a, not just maybe on that platform, but it’s a new platform that gives you X, Y, and Z. Can you talk about, you know, maybe an instance in time, maybe recent or, you know,

what have you, where things are not going well, where maybe it was a deal or maybe it was development or maybe it was people. And you had to step in and pivot pretty quickly, which is not unusual in the technology business. But you learn from it and either were able to salvage the situation and or learn from something from it. Can you talk to that in a little bit of detail?

Curtis Fenn (09:41)
Yeah, yeah, I’ll give you

great example. For the majority of our existence, I probably would have categorized a lot of what we did beyond data as a prospecting platform or a cold calling platform because it was the data and a dialer ⁓ and some dialing technology and people made a tremendous amount of money. I mean, it was great back in the day, you could get a hundred phone numbers and you’d talk to 20

Michelle Tack (09:56)
Yep.

Curtis Fenn (10:10)
Qualified people and and it worked really well.

Well, you know between between phones putting Restrictions and saying I mean I I have it on mind that if I don’t have you in my contact I like your stuff is buried and lost and in and not only that but then carriers are now blocking and spam flags and telemarketing flags and and this and then

Michelle Tack (10:53)
Ha ha.

You’re not getting it. Yep. Yep.

That’s right.

Curtis Fenn (11:07)
You know, you go above that and you go, well, there’s a lot of regulations around that now that they say we can’t call everybody we used to be able to call. So now the pool of who we can actually pick up the phone and call is less because of now TCPA and other risks and things. that was a major pivot and where we said, okay, well, the data is still good. I’ll give you an example for people who have access to the MLS, real estate agents, brokers.

Michelle Tack (11:11)
That’s right.

Right. Yep.

Curtis Fenn (11:33)
expired and cancelled that come off the MLS. Right now in the last 12 months, 44 % of them will re-sign with a new agent or the same agent and go back on the MLS. So 44 % will expire and then go back on the MLS. Well, you can’t buy another list of leads that say 44 % are absolutely going to buy your product. So it’s a great list.

And just because the phone was changing doesn’t change those statistics. So the question becomes, well, how do we get in touch with them? How do we get in front of them? How do we… And so that’s when we developed our social media products,

where right from our platform, you can take the data, whether it’s those expires, maybe you’re a wholesaler and you’ve made a list of empty nesters or vacant properties or absentee owners that have…

a ton of equity in their home or whatever. You can make the list of people that you want to market to. And now it will create the custom audiences inside of Facebook and Instagram and maintain those audiences in real time. So as new data comes in and matches your criteria, you can have ads going that just target those exact people. And as most people know, most of the ad platforms don’t allow you to get that narrowed in what you’re doing. But if you bring your own data,

Michelle Tack (12:51)
That’s right.

Curtis Fenn (12:56)
you know, then you can. And so, so that was a major pivot in what we’re doing, because we still believe the data is the right data. What’s changed is the methodology of how you, you get their attention and get in front of them. And so, and we’re constantly looking at that. So it’s like, okay, well, well, if, if, Facebook doesn’t work, then what is working? Well, maybe TikTok is working. Maybe YouTube is the right channel right now. And so we’re expanding that channel, but also expanding the ways we do it. I’ll tell you just,

Michelle Tack (13:02)
Yes.

Right, exactly.

Curtis Fenn (13:23)
because I can’t help myself to give a real tactical ⁓ advice here is, know, wholesalers, investors, property managers, real estate agents, real estate brokers, right now, direct mail, postcard mailings are crushing it in terms of marketing to get in touch with the homeowner because it has 100 % exposure. If you’re over 40, you remember junk mail, but if you go to your mailbox now, there’s just not a lot of it.

Michelle Tack (13:51)
Yeah.

Curtis Fenn (13:52)
So your exposure rate to get that and do that and get somebody’s attention is really high right now. And that didn’t work 20 years. That stopped working 20 years ago for a time and now it’s coming back in a big way. And so, you know, us revamping that whole system and automating those processes for you to be able to just go send these postcards and it gets printed, stamped and sent without you having to do the work is a big pivot to what we used to do.

Michelle Tack (14:20)
Yeah, I you know what I love about being able to do this podcast is I talked to a lot of people from everything that touches real estate. And one of the themes that I see for those that are very successful are two things. One, they want to be of service to help others. Money is secondary. And two is that they are open to other suggestions, even if they’re making 500 million dollars a year. And that is a very unique animal out there because a lot of people get successful.

become successful, right? And you’re like, no, I got it. I got it. with this, like the fact that you, didn’t realize that about the direct mail is, but it makes sense when you explain it that, you ⁓ you’re going to look at it probably, right? No one really that I know of answers their phones. You know, it’s, it’s a different animal today. ⁓ When you look out from today, 12 months from now,

Curtis Fenn (15:09)
Yeah.

Michelle Tack (15:15)
and we were doing this podcast then. What would you like to have achieved and what are you excited about in addition to continuing doing what you’re doing?

Curtis Fenn (16:07)
Well, I’ll be quick, but I’ll give you three answers on that. The first is things are changing so rapidly in the tech space because of AI. mean, anybody’s ability to write programs and the age of personal software is coming because anybody can just speak to an AI and say, build me this thing and I want it to do these things is coming. so 12 months from now,

I want, know, their data’s gonna be data and that’s always gonna be, there’s kind of a mode around that, know, AI can’t really touch personal, you know, that kind of data. But the marketing piece, the way that we get people’s attention is changing. And so I’m both excited that I can say, I don’t know entirely what it’s gonna be, but we know that it’s changing and we wanna be on the bleeding edge front.

you know, front edge of what is changing about the way people consume information, how we get people’s attention, how you can get the attention of someone who’s most likely to do business with you. And so in 12 months, I wanna be saying, ⁓ you know, we found this out and things have changed, so we built this new medium or new way to get people’s attention. That would be what I’m most excited about. The other thing is the principles that apply to real estate apply to all small business. And I think that we’re seeing

a lot of uncertainty in the economy around ⁓ smaller businesses and their ability to get business, to acquire customers. mean, Google is saying most small businesses, organic web traffic is down 80%. And people are going out of business because of that. It’s huge. if they don’t know what to do, well, the answer is don’t rely on Google. You have to take control of your own funnels, your own acquisition funnels.

Michelle Tack (17:47)
Is that the stat? That’s huge. That’s huge. Yep. Yes, absolutely.

Curtis Fenn (17:59)
And what better way to start with people who are most likely to do business with you and then have marketing that can actually get their attention and convert that into business. And so 12 months from now, I really want to do that. And the third answer would be that there’s no future that doesn’t include agentic AI to help facilitate the mundane and to help people become infinitely more efficient.

Michelle Tack (18:17)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, absolutely. You’ve been a tremendous guest. ⁓ Data is king or queen and I’ll take the queen part. You can take the king part. ⁓ But at the end of the day, ⁓ it’s crucial. We are all intelligent beings that are in business understand that we do need to get close. The closer we can come ⁓ to where people need us, ⁓ our businesses are going to flourish.

Curtis Fenn (18:31)
Yeah

Michelle Tack (18:50)
I want to thank you very much for your time, but before we leave, for those that are interested in speaking with you, ⁓ whether utilizing your platform or investing or what have you, Curtis, can you provide your contact information and spell out your email address or however you would like people to get in touch with you?

Curtis Fenn (19:05)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah,

two ways to get in touch with us, I mean, our website, of course, www.redx.com. ⁓ And just in case people are like, where’s REDX come from? It used to be an acronym, Real Estate Data Exchange. so, so then we kind of dropped that over time as you know, but redx.com. ⁓ And then if you just look, look us up on Instagram or Facebook, we have a very, very active

Michelle Tack (19:24)
I didn’t know that. I was going to ask you about that. ⁓

Curtis Fenn (19:38)
Facebook group, it’s a private group, you need to apply to get in. But once you’re in, it’s all about customer acquisition through the data. Those are the best ways to get in touch with us. And then of course, anybody can always email me, [email protected]

Michelle Tack (19:52)
You’ve been a great guest and I say that because you are. I, you know, I love the fact that, ⁓ you know, you’re so specific and we need to be more specific, right? We have to get us just the world the way it is today. We have to get as specific as we can. And sometimes that that’s not sexy. It’s not maybe sometimes fun, but it is ⁓ a ⁓ key to being successful and reaching your goals.

So I’m thrilled that you’ve been with us today. For those that are listening to our podcast that may not have subscribed at fan value, please subscribe. And for the continual support of our subscribers, we hope you enjoyed the podcast today. Curtis, good luck in the future. Thanks for attending.

Curtis Fenn (20:38)
Thank you

so much.