The Real Estate Data Advantage: 311 Leads, AI Follow-Up, and Buyer Lists Explained

Rob Bergeron (00:00)
well, if you own assets, tokenize them, reach out to me, we’ll talk about what that looks like, but it’s dope. But you need to be using Claude, you need to pay for the premium, you need to be talking to it and creating ideas. If you don’t do that now, you’re not gonna do it ever.

Scott Bursey (01:46)
Welcome back to the Real Estate Pros Podcast powered by Investor Fuel. I’m your host Scott Bursey. And if you’re looking for that next level of clarity and massive action in your business, you are in the absolute right spot.

Today we’ve got a true powerhouse in the studio, Rob Bergeron from Winner Realty. Rob isn’t just winning, he’s built a system that turns agents into absolute rock stars and crushes market cycles. This will be in high octane fuel you’re going to want to stay tuned to. Get ready to download some serious strategies. Rob, welcome to the show.

Rob Bergeron (02:23)
Hey, thanks, Scott. Appreciate it. Much obliged.

Scott Bursey (02:25)
It’s really nice having you here. And what really caught my attention about you was the way you’ve been able to scale Winner realty across multiple markets while maintaining a hyper local success driven culture for your agents.

Rob Bergeron (02:38)
Thank you. Yeah. We just, I don’t know. It’s kind of a slow real estate market. It’s time to like expand. We have a lot of time. Let’s utilize it other ways.

Scott Bursey (02:47)
And for our listeners who may not be familiar with your journey, please tell us how did your career begin and what is your main focus now?

Rob Bergeron (02:54)
Okay, so like I moved to Louisville, Kentucky. Didn’t really know anybody. Everybody was married basically. And so I didn’t know anyone to lead generate. So I just posted like crazy on Craigslist and I just made it competitive. I’d watch, I’d sit in my boxers, watch Netflix and just post. And if one agent posts one deal, I post 50 more to knock them off the page. So in the beginning it was like me versus like 38 agents who would post their stuff. And then when I stopped doing it, it was me versus one other person, but I was just super aggressive.

with

it and I made it competitive and then this investor reached out to me his name was Hampton, is Hampton and he’s like hey can I see this property and they’re very cheap I was like yeah I don’t like I ain’t nothing else to do and so I just kept on going and like I made a little money here or whatever and I found out Hampton was like a big wig in the investor community and so

I started going to the meetups that he would host and some of the other ones. And since Hampton was working with me, they were like, ⁓ he’s working with Rob, I should work with Rob. And then of course I was like, crap. So I reread Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and I made sure I went to every single meetup. So for like seven years, I’d go to six meetups a week. And eventually, like he’d become one of the smarter people in the room. And so if I didn’t know the answer, I could, you know.

put him in the right contact with the right person who I knew would know the answer. And so I just kind of became solution-based. And so a whole set of others, I’d say, hey, happy to run comps for you. And essentially I was like.

Hey, if you get that under I have probably have a good buyer for you and eventually I was like hey guys instead of working against each other Let’s work together and so they all gave me their buyers list and I combined them to make one master list It was called the Louisville network. Now we’ve expanded and now it’s offmarket.deals. So if you google offmarket deals, it’s us and People submit their side of contracts or a loose deal they have sitting around that’s costing them money They put it up on the website and we charged

Only if we bring the buyer if not, we don’t charge anything, but we could do stuff I own a data company called property partner so we can do stuff No one else can do so like when we get a deal submitted We have a a disco person and we pull the data of the top 20 buyers for that asset class and we say hey We know you’re one of the best buyers We have this deal. about to submit it out. Do you want it and we go through the top 20? And you know investor lift can’t offer that no one else can offer it except for us and my agent

every deal they list, can put it out on the site and it gets done for them as well. So it’s a competitive advantage for all Winner realty agents.

Scott Bursey (05:23)
Rob, you just ignited the fire. Thank you so much. And let’s dive right on in. This is what all of our listeners are going to want to know. What is the single biggest competitive edge that you give to your agents?

Rob Bergeron (06:24)
It’s definitely our data company. own a data company and it called Property Partner. I’ve got these nerds that are so smart and essentially like, you know, courthouse records, right? Well, most people, the best competitor, I think in my mind is like Data Syndicate. But Data Syndicate, what they do is they only pull the data on Saturday once everything’s in the system from the courthouse records. But us, my nerds, we’re polling in real time. So something hits the system, immediately it’s skip trace and drops into your API or your AI.

for follow-up or whatever for your callers. So we have first mover advantage on all of our courthouse records. But not only that, we have this thing called 311 leads, which is incredible. 811 leads too, but 311, everyone has heard of violation leads, which is basically when someone gets a fine because their gutter’s hanging. But we get them at the 311. So it’s like ⁓ someone puts in a text or call and says, yo, I’m tired of looking at my gutters hanging from my neighbor’s house.

you

seven to 10 days later, that person goes out there and gives that violation. Well, so we have, everyone’s paying for that violation lien, but we have it at the 311, seven to 10 days before. First we were advantaged seven to 10 days for wholesalers and realtors. That’s just incredible. So we have those leads for our agents. We give them a go high level CRM. So AI follow-ups just built in. You can mass text. And then now that Claude, co-work is out, like, I’m dangerous. And I know you mentioned in your notes that

You know, you just want to empower people. Everyone should be using Cloud Cowork. Pay for it. If you don’t learn the value of it now, the value of paying for the AI now.

that it’s gonna get more expensive and you’re gonna say, it’s not worth it. And then those people are gonna be here and the people using it where it’s worth it and who understand the value are gonna be up there. So make sure you’re using it now to see the value, but like, my gosh, it’s helping me with agent recruitment. It’s for sale by others I’m going after. I mean, all kinds of stuff that it’s redundant for me to spend the time. It’s just not gonna, like I have four or five projects going at all times. I turned it off for this podcast, but just weird stuff like we’re doing a climbing village at Red River Gorge.

which is number one short-term rental market in the entire country. People call it the red. It’s literally like the top two climbing in the entire world. And we’re working with this guy named Ian Teal who owns everything. gosh, it’s just, I don’t know where I was going with that, but it’s very exciting. But yeah, sorry Scott.

Scott Bursey (08:48)
That speed is everything right now. Having systems that allow your teams to move faster than the competition is the ultimate strength rub.

Rob Bergeron (08:57)
Concur for sure.

Scott Bursey (08:58)
And let’s go down this road. What common mistake do high achieving investors overlook when scaling their team?

Rob Bergeron (09:06)
well, I think I’d like to maybe flip that a little bit. I think there’s gonna be a new, new way of doing it. I want to like…

train people to do it the right way, I think. So like, I’m really, I’m really into AI. Like, I don’t know how to code. I’m just, but I, I vibe with it, if you will. And like my, I have this wonderful person named Colleen. She runs my operations for my business and for Winner Realty, but she’s been doing it for my business as well. And I basically had her come over one day and I dropped a bunch of stuff onto her, her computer for Claude Cowork. And basically I automated all of her systems that she does for the internal

operations

as much as I could and we can further it but I said hey Colleen I love you I’m still gonna pay you the same amount and all that stuff for you to run that business but the rest of the country they’re just gonna automate and fire that person right they’re just gonna let them go and I want people to

help that person and then utilize that person other ways. Like, what’s another bottleneck? Oh, you need marketing or hey, like maybe do an artistic pursuit with them in that time. We’re doing that, which will please another business. So I don’t know. I think people, instead of thinking, oh, I can cut this cost right away. It’s like, ah, let me reallocate that talent because I can see what they’re good at and what I had them do, like utilize them in the good at stuff that they’re excited because when you flow, your business aligned with what you’re interested in, it’s just fun.

All of it’s fun.

Scott Bursey (10:28)
That’s a huge distinction. And Rob, outside of traditional single-family homes, where is the biggest untapped investment opportunity in the next 12 months in your view?

Rob Bergeron (11:14)
Well, we do data centers. And so I’m very excited about this. This is kind of like the wholesaler thing. I talked about where I kind of united them. I have a newsletter, and it goes out to 40,000 people every morning. And…

I there I sit it out Monday through Friday 8 a.m. I mean Monday through 5 a.m. Monday through Friday But on one day I sent one out on a Saturday because they announced this big data center for Oldham County It was like a five billion dollar thing. I was like, ah, this is a big deal. I’m gonna send out and in that newsletter I said hey I’m seeing this intersection between real estate energy and data and I want to be a part of it If you’re in the space hit me up and let’s talk if you’re not in the space But want to learn hit me up and we’ll learn it together

And this guy Mark, who had read my morning emails for five years and never said anything to me, he booked a call on my You Can Book Me or whatever. And I took it and then I…

started learning more of what Mark could do. I brought him into that Red River Gorge project. I was like, hey, we can bring some Tesla chargers. And then it’s further spiraled to all these things. then Mark and I, we climbed to the top of the mountain with data centers, realized everyone’s just trying to do the same thing. Just a box, big, loud, whatever, the way we see them now. And so Mark and I climbed down from the top of the mountain and we united all those people like, hey, you’re the best at what you do. We want your component in our new data center.

like we know your edge, we’re gonna bring you in.

And so we just brought in the best thing and we pushed all those components together. And now we’re working with this company called HKS, which is the fourth largest engineering company in the entire world. And they did the SoFi Stadium for the Rams. They’re doing the Washington Commander Stadium for the NFL teams is what I’m referencing. And we’re building the data center that we think will be the institutional good neighbor data center for the entire world, for the entire country. And every, every

mean meeting, people will come with their pitchforks for data centers and they’ll say, well, if we have to have a data center, it better be one of those good neighbor data centers. And damn right, like it doesn’t have to be the boogeyman. And we bring jobs with our data center. We help agriculture with our data center. We use the data center money, which is significant. We use it to spurn other things that need to be addressed, like agriculture. I don’t want to get too much into the ag stuff, but we really want to help solve problems for farmers.

Scott Bursey (13:32)
That’s a massive injection of value right there. Rob Curious, what market trend currently poses the largest threat to agent profitability?

Rob Bergeron (13:41)
I’m gonna flip that question again. I think…

Agents, but like every anybody with money or I mean assets who own real estate. I have this guy named Joe Burnett jr He says this when he speaks. He’s like all my friends bought stuff itself directed IRAs and I did well now he’s gonna have a huge tax bill when he sells that stuff or whatever Well, what’s coming you guys need to be on the front end of all this we are follow us connect with us We’re already doing it and if you’re in the space hit me up I love talking about this stuff, but the token ization of real estate so basically when you tokenize real estate, it’s not a taxable

But it lets you access the liquidity. So, so Joe Burnett, he wants to sell something. Well, no, no, no.

Tokenize it get that liquidity you still own the asset and now you can make improvements on those properties buy more properties Do whatever you want to do buy vote who cares? So I think every investor who owns real estate needs to learn how to like what tokenization real estate does and how it’s not taxable and you can borrow against that those assets those real-world assets and So like the farmers I don’t want to get into like those farmers Like they are getting sweated out. They’re like

profitability, taxes are killing them, like whatever, like it doesn’t have to be like that. And so if they like think about it, they own the asset, they own the ground. So what if they tokenize? We help them tokenize their agriculture and then we can use that liquidity that we have access to, to improve the farms with like IOT devices. So that way we’re not, getting rid of the chemicals and we’re just automating these farms and modernizing for the future, where the world’s going.

And so that’s, and we align that with the data center money and to make it feasible. everything starts with data centers. Sorry, I go in a lot of tangents.

Scott Bursey (15:25)
Risk mitigation is absolutely key. Couldn’t agree with you anymore, I’m at. Give us the rundown on some of your short-term strategy over the next 12 to 18 months, if you would, Rob.

Rob Bergeron (16:18)
⁓ I just get an idea and I talked to Claude cowork about it for about three hours, depending on how dense the ideas. And then I implement it right then. And I just do that all day, all the time. And I have my agents come over and I do a session with them and I align all of their interests. Like, what do even like doing?

And then I helped build a business model and then they run with it and they’re happy working every agent We had an agent join my brokerage recently and she did point two five deals a month with her previous brokerage She does seven deals a month with Winner realty seven deals. So point from point two five to seven deals a month I mean and it but but she’s clever and so she sat down learned some tools met some people through us and everything blew up and so

I don’t know, we enjoy another one of our agents. we have a Winner realty and then there’s this thing called Winner services. In our Winner services, we participate in getting our agents mortgage license if they want for free, we pay for their schooling. So now they can serve in that way as well in tandem with their real estate. It’s just, we want to give all of our agents more ways to earn. I think, you know, everyone’s about to lose a lot of jobs with AI automations. And it was important for me to have solutions for my

agents to make money outside of every 30, 40 days when they have a listing sale or whatever. And so I want it to create those solutions. So when people lose their jobs, they can go push water treatment systems or they can go sell my data at property partners. So every dollar we make, we pay out 30 cents on the dollar. Well, these people buy data month to month. We pay out residuals lifetime a client. if someone buys a thousand dollars of data from us a month, we would pay you out $300 a month the lifetime of that client.

Stack that, that’s like how golden handcuffs work for insurance, but we don’t have those. As long as they’re a client, they’re paying, we’re paying you. I don’t know, we just really, I think people are gonna be really stressed and I envision people coming to me, Rob, when they lose their jobs, they’re like, Rob, what can I do? I wanted to have an ample amount of solutions to point to and say, see if something gravitates to you. And like, that was just really important to me.

Scott Bursey (18:16)
It sounds like focus on controlling the controllable.

Rob Bergeron (18:21)
Yeah.

Scott Bursey (18:21)
And Rob, now it’s time for the money question, where you bring the high octane fuel. You’ve built winner-reality on a philosophy of pure performance. If you had to distill your success down to one single place of high octane fuel advice for our pros looking to, let’s say, 10 times their portfolio or team revenue this year, what system or mindset shift must they adapt today?

Rob Bergeron (18:45)
well, if you own assets, tokenize them, reach out to me, we’ll talk about what that looks like, but it’s dope. But you need to be using Claude, you need to pay for the premium, you need to be talking to it and creating ideas. If you don’t do that now, you’re not gonna do it ever.

they raise the price you’re not going to justify the price and I don’t know I know how empowered I am and like I feel like I live the life of a hundred men before 9 a.m. because I have my AI doing so much stuff for me and then my newsletter goes out I feel like it’s just like a big outburst into the universe so that’s a big thing and if the our agents ask me like what would you do if you’re getting started I always say build your buyers list because that buyers list for my off-market deals that became my newsletter

And so every day, like, and so, people are degenerates. Like people click on Zillow because they’re like, they want to see the deals. Well, we have a website that’s called Off Market Deals and it’s kind of exclusive. You have to know about it. And so people have very high open rates when they see deals come through and they click and they revisit the website. So there’s just a lot of cool things. And those people opening those emails makes my newsletter deliverability go up. So like they, they help flow. It’s an ecosystem and just keeping everything aligned. And we, mean,

We just really want, we like to solve all the gaps. So we bring the data, we sell the off-market deals. We have the Winner services, Winner realty, we do contract to close for all of our assignments as well. So we just try to make it like, hey, we’ll get you the data, you just get the deals under with the seller and we’ll figure out the rest. And then, another thing too.

Scott Bursey (20:15)
You just.

Rob Bergeron (20:16)
Letter of Intents, Especially with AI, you should be able to, you should be spraying offers. Days on market is super high, everywhere in the country. I send out a letter of intents for my clients, you know.

And I offer a low cash hard money offer and then a seller finance offer as well. And I let them say yes, but it’s planting seeds and postcards have 1.1 % hit rate. Ours is 2.1 % and cost zero money. Just reach out. It’s just it’s not hard, but it’s and you know what? You’re going to get a lot of like fuck yous, but there’s the two people that say yes out of that hundred. They’re going to be it’s going to be a relief for them. And I’m fine being getting those fuck yous to solve those two seller stresses. And you know, I like making money too. And like I like

being rewarded and like you can go work at McDonald’s and make whatever an hour or you could spray out offers every two minutes and maybe make six thousand nine thousand on those deals I think it’s just but you got to learn how to utilize your time and implement

Scott Bursey (21:11)
That is a masterful blueprint right there. Thanks for sharing. And Rob, if you could leave our audience, our listeners with a golden nugget or some advice, what would it be?

Rob Bergeron (21:22)
Follow my morning newsletter. just like, I don’t always talk about business. I talk about whatever I feel like talking about. I’m ADD, so I’m like, but I’m gonna follow it. It’s called the morning Bergeron. I’m Rob Bergeron. You might see an email or newsletter come out from my dad every once in while. He’s a Bergeron too. was like, you can write a guest session every once in while. But yeah, would sign up for that and to go to offmarket.deals to get all of our assignable contracts, submit your deals. It doesn’t matter anywhere in the market. We can pull the top 20 buyers for that asset.

class

and we’ll push it out into all the Facebook groups, Facebook Marketplace, local Rias, a bunch of other stuff like we just we’re very systemized and automated. We use AI agents. Most people don’t even know what those are. I don’t know. I’d love to talk to anybody that is doing anything like what I’m doing because I want to work with you and collaborate.

Scott Bursey (22:08)
This has been pure gold and for those of our listeners that want to follow your journey or collaborate with you What is the best way for them to reach you?

Rob Bergeron (22:16)
Yeah, I guess you can email me [email protected] Follow me find me on LinkedIn Rob Bergeron I’m on bigger pockets I’m kind of everywhere. That’s the point right like systems like

Shout in the universe. It’s like God don’t just send the newsletter get it out LinkedIn bigger pocket everywhere You can go because you want to leave with value and you want to be considered the expert in the space Well, you got to prove it and then it’s the consistency of doing it every day

Scott Bursey (22:44)
Thank for joining us today. This has been a pleasure.

Rob Bergeron (22:47)
Thanks, Scott. This was fun. Thanks for having me.

Scott Bursey (22:50)
And to our listeners, we appreciate each and every one of you. If you got value from today’s episode, please subscribe. We’ve got a lineup of exceptional guests, just like Rob, who are moving the needle in the market. Until next time, keep your standards high and your vision clear. We’ll see you on the next episode, everyone.