Tinder of Real Estate? How OFFA is Disrupting Off-Market Deals

Ken G. Barton (00:00)
You post it on here. It’s entirely free. We do not charge you.

Give you access to all your buyers, phone numbers, and emails, and boom, you have responses in minutes. And if you’re on a wholesaling real estate or if you understand that game, that is night and day of what you experience right now. You quite literally have to hire someone to chase people and pull data and try to pull lists and all this nonsense. It’s like not an enjoyable experience. So that is Offa and yes, we will be the Tinder for off-market real estate.

Quentin (01:58)
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Investor Fuel podcast. I am your host Q Edmonds. And when I say, y’all probably can say it with me. I’m excited. I’m really, I’m excited to be here today. I am excited about my guest. He has me jacked up. He has me juiced up. This guy, see, he’s full of excitement, but not just excitement, just because. Excitement because of what’s going on within his business. The things that they are turning, like turning out like the.

the new opportunities that’s coming their way. He got me excited about what he’s excited about. And I’m sure he’s going to get you excited. And so listen, I want to introduce you to my friend today, Mr. Ken Barton. How you doing today, sir?

Ken G. Barton (02:38)
Great. Thank you for having me on.

Quentin (02:40)
Absolutely. And normally I tease them and let people know like kind of like a little bit about what you do, what you’re involved in. I ain’t going to tease them, man. I’m going to turn it over and let you do what you do because I know our listeners is going to love to hear the knowledge that you got, man. So listen, so people, you know, they’re not familiar with you. I know Ken. They don’t know Ken, right? And so listen, man, give me a short version of what you’re focused on, what’s your main focus these days. And if you don’t mind, man, tell them what markets you’re operating in.

Ken G. Barton (03:07)
Absolutely. So that’s a fuel. Hey, I’m Ken. I am a buyer. So I own 56 stores. I bought everything from like a duplex in the middle of the pandemic all the way up to a 20 unit hotel in Daytona Beach, Florida. Been through been through all of it been to the dirty like I’m definitely not like the the most callous hand of guy but like I’ve done a lot of the investor negotiations, the raising money and all that good stuff. My background actually comes in off market buying.

Right, I made all my money. My first million dollars before I was 30 years old, I made it in off market buying. As mostly you I’m sure most investors do, they find deals off market, they either flip, burr, they do all those strategies, right? And then I was head of sales co-in for a company called Empora Title, which is a digital title company specifically only for wholesalers and investors, specializing in double closing and all the things that make those investor transactions really work. And of course, as an investor myself and as your audience, we’re unique. We’re not mom and pop, we’re not…

We’re not buying our first single family home. A very different scenario. We’re looking for ROI. We’re looking for leverage, all those pieces. And so that leads to my market. So I built my company, OFA, it’s OFFA.com, to be a better place for me as a buyer to find deals, full stop. That’s what I’m trying to do. I want to go invest in more real estate, but my experience is there’s so many wholesalers out there. There’s so much off-market real estate that like, I just got to get lucky to get on email lists or go to the right event.

And like, you know, tech generation, right? AI is like prevalent. Like it would be nice to be able to see it on my phone and find deals there and not have to like move through, you know, old like Google Drive to find deals. So yeah, like that’s generally where I’m at.

Quentin (04:37)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it, man. I love it. Listen, I don’t know how much of a tease this man, but man, you made some audacious statements that I know you’re going to stand by, Like you saying like, man, this is going to be the 10th up off market real estate, man. Like, Offa is going to be the, yeah, it’s going to be the next R &B, and that’s, you know, like Airbnb blew up. Like Offa is going to offer these opportunities to blow this thing out of proportion. So I’m not speaking out of turn. Like this is what you believe. This is what you’re passionate about, right?

Ken G. Barton (04:52)
Precisely.

True. Yeah. So if you think about us, we’re a marketplace, right? We connect buyers and sellers. I’m not using those those brands sparingly.

When you look at like, and I’m a tech guy, like I build companies, you know, my intention is to make this like a deco or set a billion dollar business. But when I explained to you like Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, they’re all just marketplaces. So all the buyers and sellers of some service are some good, right? Office the same.

Right now, I don’t know if you know this, but in the United States, 25 % of real estate transacts off market, 25. And about 80 or 90 % over a million dollars is all off market. You’re wealthy, you’re private, you don’t want people traipsing through your house. And wholesalers understand they move a lot of deals. And in Pora, we had 2000 customers moving 10 to 20,000 deals just at the tiny little title company. So when I say there’s a sleeping giant of an industry that we’re all participating in, but it’s…

broken because for buyers like me, it’s hard to find those deals. you got it right when Tinder of off-market real estate, simply enough, our big innovation was how do we make it easier for buyers to buy your deals? Sounds nice, right? It’s not rocket science. Like you want to sell more deals, everyone’s to move more deals. And simply enough, my opinion is like, you know, I’m 34.

Quentin (06:55)
Yeah, right. Absolutely. Yeah.

Ken G. Barton (07:03)
I’ve been using dating apps for a long time. I think that’s the easiest way to move through information you do or don’t want. you know, if you want content, there’s a clear like swipe, but we really beat it down with my whole team. said, okay, what’s the easiest way to move through these? What will be fun? What will be interesting for a buyer? It’s obviously location based. 90 % of buyers are buying physically close to them. We don’t require that only, but that’s what most people do. They know what they want. And so as someone swipes left, you could quite literally teach an algorithm, Hey, like I don’t want.

you know, single family homes as you swipe right. they want multi-family. That’s not rocket science. That’s real simple, you know? And so very quickly, within days, our algorithm and our AI learns what you like and only notifies you on your phone of deals you want. On the flip side for the sellers, this is where the wholesalers are going to love this. You’re like, you kidding me? How much? must be a billion dollars. Also is going to love this because as we start growing and putting I kid you not, I’m not cursing. I kid you not. One month ago,

Quentin (07:34)
Come on. Yeah, yeah.

Ken G. Barton (07:56)
We had less than a thousand buyers on our platform one month ago. Today, actually it’s like three weeks. We’re almost 10,000. That’s before our app. That’s only a web app, only a website. So we’ve 10x in under 30 days. When this app comes out, my expectation is we’re going to be probably in the range of like a hundred thousand to a quarter million verified buyers, but you probably in next two months. And so you just imagine you’re a wholesaler or you want to go sell your deal. You don’t want to go through your

Quentin (08:15)
Mmm. Mmm.

Ken G. Barton (08:22)
You post it on here. It’s entirely free. We do not charge you.

give you access to all your buyers, phone numbers, and emails, and boom, you have responses in minutes. And if you’re on a wholesaling real estate or if you understand that game, that is night and day of what you experience right now. You quite literally have to hire someone to chase people and pull data and try to pull lists and all this nonsense. It’s like not an enjoyable experience. So that is Offa and yes, we will be the Tinder for off-market real estate.

Quentin (08:46)
Woo, woo, woo, I told y’all, I told y’all this guy was gonna bring the heat. He got me excited, man. I’m excited about all, how about you guys, man? Listen, I love it, man. I know it’s not easy in this climate, right? You gotta get the deals, you gotta get, you know, get in front of wholesalers, right? You need to get where you need to get, right? And so, yeah, so that’s my question. What’s the key to keeping the machine running smoothly, man?

Ken G. Barton (09:06)
Hard. Yep.

The key is buyers. Like, Quentin, you’re gonna laugh at this, and I know I literally tell my team this all the time. I try to drill things down to the most simple elements because like, you know, I’m from Florida, I went through public education. I’m not that smart. Like, I’m being honest, I’m not that smart. Like, I just like try to drill it down. And so what I say is like, sellers, wholesalers are the boys. Buyers are the hot girls. And on OFA and at every bar, hot girls drink for free. Fact, right? We know that, right? And so the game is, we need good quality buyers. So when I tell you that like,

Quentin (09:21)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Woo!

Woo! We know it.

Ken G. Barton (09:39)
How we do what we do, how we discard, how we find buyers is we quite literally pull public data. We’re looking at people who’ve previously bought a deal within the last two years that’s like your asset type. So it’s your deal, right? I’m from Orlando, Florida. Let’s say three bed, two bath, concrete block, deal in Orlando, Florida, 200K. It’s got a whole lot of it’s got rotten animals in it. Sounds great, right? Probably worth 400K. So you want to go sell that for 250K. You don’t want to talk to the luxury flippers and they don’t want to talk to you.

Quentin (09:46)
Hmm. Yeah.

Yeah.

Ken G. Barton (10:04)
And you also don’t want to talk to the newbie that can’t handle a caved in roof, you know, that’s buying 50k or 100k, you know, like mobile homes. So what we do is not rocket science, which is a lot of work, but we draw a circle around your property. We go to public data. We use AI to scrape all of it. All the people who have bought a property successfully in the last two years, similar to your asset type, similar to your price point, pull all that data together. And then we do the thing that no one else is willing to do, Quentin. We do the work. Call, text, email.

And when they say, yep, I’m interested, we say, here’s the link to our app, know, swipe up on that seller, connect with them directly, phone number, email verified, boom. And that’s all done for free, Quentin could you imagine? Could you imagine a platform that does all of that for free for you? Offa.com.

Quentin (11:21)
Come on, man.

I love it, man. I absolutely love it, man. Now, of course, you know, like you said, you know, it’s not always easy, right? So what’s the time? Yeah, yeah. So, right. So that’s of course, get real. You guys are launching, but things can get real. So I want you to tell me, what’s the time maybe something went sideways, right? Maybe you had to pivot fast. You mind sharing a story like that for people that’s listening?

Ken G. Barton (11:30)
That’s that easy.

I have so many, you know, whenever you do anything for free, you have spam. We got a lot of guys. had a whole like, quote unquote, wholesaling group out of Egypt to load us up with 200 properties over the weekend. And of course it’s the weekend. So like we’re busy, you know, we’re trying to like live our lives, but also working 24 seven. And we had 200 spam properties on our platform. It was mostly like a big like trying to grab and face from our buyers. And a lot of them were too good to be true. So people like, I literally had buyers in my network texting me photos. They were like,

Quentin (11:54)
Mm-hmm.

Ken G. Barton (12:10)
why is this house $20,000 when it says it’s worth 500? And I’m like, that sounds wrong. And so of course you fix that. that’s, the beautiful thing about tech is, you know, you don’t gotta show someone they can have a limit of submitting five deals before we flag them and we’re like, that’s one of the reasons we require phone number verification and email because that cut all of that out real fast. If you don’t have a U S based phone number and a U S based email, you can’t post deals. Cause we really don’t want this like

But spam is always going to happen, right? And we’re going to have spam buyers too. like, I’ll tell you one really interesting thing, Quentin, I’m not sure if we discussed it before, but we’re implementing three things to verify buyers. Again, entirely free, which is like a mind blowing thing. Right now we verify phone number, email. That’s kind of standard in the game. What’s a step above that, the awful like expectation is we’re going to verify your actual identity. You’re going give us your ID. We’re going verify it with your face. So you are the real person’s contacting us. Then what do we do? We hit up your LLC. We say, Hey,

Quentin (12:45)
Mmm.

Ken G. Barton (13:05)
send me your EIN doc, we verify. you know, every real investor who’s a real buyer is buying with an EIN. They’re not buying individually. And this is not required, but we’re going to say like, hey, this is an elevated buyer. And then finally, the coup de grace is we proof of funds. Every quarter, you got to submit your proof of funds. You say, oh, I have all this money. Great. Prove it. And the nice thing is with AI, we can verify all of these things almost instantaneously. So it allows us as the platform to help the sellers say, yeah, know, Katie Smith is worth your time.

Quentin (13:11)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Ken G. Barton (13:33)
And these buyers get more attention because if it’s a good deal right now, we’re getting 15, 20, 30 buyers coming in and the pro buyers need a way to like elevate themselves on our platform. So, you know, but spam is always an issue, Quentin. It’s a battle.

Quentin (13:39)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, yeah. And I love, I love the system that I’m putting in place to wean out these scanners. I love the three-step process that you talk about. mean, that’s brilliant. That’s brilliant, man. And so that for me, know, let me know y’all, y’all in this thing for the long time, right? Y’all ain’t dabbling. Y’all not playing no games. Like no, is the real thing. Yeah. I love it, man.

Ken G. Barton (14:04)
Now this is Airbnb. Quentin, I want

you look back at us in six months. Like you look at this in six months and if you don’t see headlines from Crunchbase, which is a very popular venture capital like thing, if you don’t see that we’ve raised 50 or a hundred million dollars, I have failed you. Like maybe a year, but we’re coming in. I mean, the way in which we can make this industry, Quentin, here’s the real thing you need to take. Like if you guys listen to one sentence on this entire podcast from like as investors, here’s what you should hear.

I am going to 10x the quantity of buyers who play in this space. So right now, 25 % of American real estate is done off market, a lot. Does not touch a realtor. But I believe my parents, your friends, doctors, lawyer, the accountants, a lot of these people want to play in this space, but it’s not easy. Just like Airbnb, Quentin, you were to ask me 10, 20 years ago, vacation rental, someone my age was like, I don’t know.

Quentin (14:35)
Mmm.

Ken G. Barton (14:55)
like ⁓ what website do I go? Didn’t exist. Airbnb made it real, made it easy, made it fun, made it on your phone, very simple, everyone’s protected, like everyone feels good. That’s Ophir. Ophir’s going to do that for the $45 trillion real estate industry. That is what we’re doing.

Quentin (15:11)
Man, I love it. Listen, I’m going to ask this question because this is a question I asked. You almost kind of nailed this question, but I just want to put it out there and see if you want to knock it out the park again, right? So what are your main focus? Like what is the next real goal?

Ken G. Barton (15:20)
Bring it on.

Yeah, there’s three. So I’d say goal number one is getting ourselves to a million buyers. My dream would be we hit that before the end of the year, 2026. If we’re doing as well as we think we are, if we’re getting, you know, 100, 200 new wholesale deals a day, we should have a lot of buyers coming through. You know, we on average right now get anywhere from 10 to 30 buyers interested per deal. But that’s just folks that contact the seller. Like we sometimes get like five to 700 buyers viewing a deal. So a million buyers is number one. Number two.

We got to go raise our first venture capital round. So if any of you guys invest in private companies, hit me up. Ken at off a.com. Really simple. That’s my email. Generally, you know, we need to go with a venture capital firm who understands building marketplaces. If you guys aren’t familiar with venture capital, Airbnb, Tinder, Uber, Amazon, all these people raise money from these private investors so they can basically 10 or 100 X faster. If we just go on revenue, we’ll never keep up.

Right. Someone will come in, a competitor will come in, they’ll eat the market. We’re going to we’re not going to let that happen. So we’re going to raise venture capital. And the final thing is I got to build that team. You know, right now we’re kind of like if I’m being if I’m being real critical of myself, we are very like chewing on my duct tape. It’s working great. You know, like we’re floating. We’re fine. We’re getting like going faster. But a company is built on a team. And I need people who are half as crazy and twice as obsessive as me.

Quentin (16:29)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ken G. Barton (16:42)
That’s what I need.

Quentin (16:43)
Man, that’s big, man. One million buyers raising venture capital, building out a team. Like, y’all making moves, man. And I know you know this. The next move can either compound things or can create total chaos, depending on how you play it. And so I know you know that, Right?

Ken G. Barton (16:57)
Chaos every time. is guaranteed, Quentin, I promise you. There’s nothing in software development. You know what’s the funniest thing? I had

an investor reach out to me. He’s like, why isn’t AI building everything you’re doing? And I’m like, you don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s a nice idea. Everyone’s getting shoved this AI conversation down their throat. But when you’re in the code, it’s like when you’re in the real estate rehab, right? When you are literally ripping out drywall, you’re like, no, this is like 10, 100x harder. So yeah, I guarantee you it’s chaos.

Quentin (17:23)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Ken G. Barton (17:26)
100 % chance.

Quentin (17:27)
Man, listen, so we got a lot of people listening, They’re either early in their journey or they’re looking to level up. And I think it would benefit from hearing this when it comes to building relationships and growing your network, what’s made the biggest difference for you?

Ken G. Barton (17:44)
how interesting. So I started in Rios, like I’m from Orlando, Florida. I went to CFRI Central Florida real estate investors. That’s a network with people. That’s where I started. I did not know. I mean, I definitely didn’t know about off market real estate. I assumed Zillow and Realtor.com. That’s what everyone assumes, right? My hope is to change that with often becoming more prevalent. Like people understand the outs for off market deals and flips and whatnot. I will say, what I did start doing though is I’m a reader. audio books though.

Quentin (18:08)
Mmm.

Ken G. Barton (18:10)
I’m way too ADD, I can’t sit down. Same, Same. Yeah, yeah, Who has time to sit down? You got to walk in. As an American these days, you cannot afford to sit and read. Jesus, like never. But I read a lot. I came from a software sales background. I love software. love the scale and speed at which it can go. It’s the sexiest business in existence. And so I read a lot about real estate investing because my family…

Quentin (18:12)
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Ken G. Barton (18:34)
They do okay, but they’re like blue collar folks, you know, like we didn’t come from money. Like that was never going to happen. How do I retire my parents? How do I like take care of them? It’s probably real estate. It’s probably tangible assets. You know, I went through an economic downturn. I knew there were people making money. I wasn’t, but I wanted to, know, wait, nine. I was graduating high school, you know, and like, was like, well, I’m gonna make any money in this, but I could have. And so I got educated. And then when 2020 hit, I had my commissions that I had made from working for all these companies. And I’m like, okay.

Quentin (18:36)
Yeah, yeah.

Ken G. Barton (19:01)
I’m now ready to deploy because I’m educated enough and I have my network. So my two sentences start with, start with RIAs, Real Estate Investment Associations. I prefer in person, you know, not everyone has the privilege. Everyone kind of lives everywhere. School.com is quite interesting now. SKOOL.com, a lot of communities there of like real estate investors giving out free information. The only challenge is it feels like everyone’s selling a course and I’m like, that’s enough. Like that’s not exhausting. I’d say buy the $12 book, don’t buy the course, but that’s just me.

Quentin (19:26)
Yeah.

Ken G. Barton (19:28)
But you I think it starts with getting educated and then just like getting the reps in. One of my favorite things, Gary Vaynerchuk always talks about pushups, businesses pushups, right? Like, right? Like Quentin, you just gotta those pushups in. Like I can tell you people are like, oh, when are you gonna come out with comping software, like comp your deals on online? I actually said to them, we haven’t done it for a reason. If we try to hamstring you or like try to make things too easy for you, and also the data is probably wrong. So I don’t want you to like expect us to be right. Like everyone hates Zillow’s estimate.

Quentin (19:35)
Love Gary Vee.

Ken G. Barton (19:55)
Realtors hate it, buyers hate it, sellers hate it. Exestimates always wrong. So the question is, should they have ever even delivered that? Like it’s actually kind of bad. And so what I’m saying is, get the reps in, learn, expect yourself to fail, expect to be wrong. But like the nice thing about real estate at least, like no one’s rude. Everyone’s pretty friendly and they all know, they’ve all been through the nonsense. So like usually they’re pretty welcoming.

Quentin (20:05)
Yes.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, man. I love it, man. Yeah. Relationships is everything in this space, making the right connection,

Ken G. Barton (21:04)
way to contact me is ken @ offa.com is my email. I’m obsessively fast. You can text me to my phone number is 407-978-7064. Especially if you want to invest, we love to talk. But yeah, that’s that’s the best way to contact me. And obviously, obviously go to offa.com. We have a real time chat in the bottom right. So we operate that seven days a week. Often I’m actually operating it to give questions or comments. I just want to see it get better. And hopefully by the time this podcast is live, our app is in the app store.

So should be an Android and the iOS app store. Download it, try it out and find some off-market deals.