Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello everybody. Welcome to another edition of the Mic'd up show where it is made for if you're listening on podcasts, whether it's Spotify or Apple. Where we try to differentiate ourselves is our commitment to being the longest running live show in mortgage lending. We're almost at 100 straight weeks without missing an episode, but the reason we do it is we say someday something will occur like it did a couple weeks ago, where people listening know there's a place they can go and chat in and ask a question to our host. And there's not much of that in the mortgage industry. So if you want to do that, that's every Thursday on LinkedIn and YouTube at 2:00pm Eastern and of course also.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: At 11:00am Pacific Time here in sunny San Diego.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: So today is an exciting one for us because we are into disruption, we're into seeing where the puck's going. Some things to us are very obvious, but we talk to a lot of C level in the mortgage lending space or the ecosystem. And it goes from drinking out of a fire hose to maybe a garden hose planting. It's just very hard when you're in the weeds. So to get to see somebody that can see it from a 30,000 foot view and actually practices it by going on a lot of these podcasts and talking in a lot of these arenas and talking up on stage. Even recently at Inman, I believe is James Dwiggins. He's Co founder and CEO at NextHome Inc. He also saw an opportunity where with the changes of NAR and real estate agents, I think you actually were ahead of it. But it worked out well. Real estate agents helping them show their value propositions has a technology called raise and so we will get into both of those today. But do you want to tell us about your journey, James, and getting to where you are today and sort of being one of the faces of real estate as it maybe enters a new frontier?
[00:02:01] Speaker C: Sure. I'll do a quick background just for audience and listeners. I'm just getting over walking pneumonia, hence my scratchy voice.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: I think I have that too.
[00:02:09] Speaker C: Three and a half year olds, I tell you, they just deliver everything. So I have been in the real estate industry my whole life. I'm 44 years old. My grandfather started his company in 1967. Both my grandparents were real estate brokers, both my parents were real estate brokers. I worked at their company when I was younger, started and sold at several prop tech companies in the residential space. And after the last sale of one of Those companies in 2006 I went to work for a regional franchise real estate franchise here in Northern California called Realty World. I worked there for a while before my. My business partner today and I bought that company in 2014. We ended up selling that in 2020 and we also started Next Home in 2014. We still run that business today. So I have been both in the brokerage business, the proptech space and the franchise space. As well as today we also run a mortgage joint venture and insurance joint venture. And then now I obviously have as a co founder and raised running another prop tech company. So I've got my in all aspects of the industry. So I call myself an SOB son of a broker. So there's that.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Yeah. In, in Massachusetts there's always a joke like for state troopers, like my father was a trooper. His father's father was a trooper.
[00:03:30] Speaker C: His. There's the accent.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It comes down and many people that are starting their own brokerage kind of have to work with a carrot in front of them and get the next sale. To get the next sale. You've obviously had the opportunity a couple times here to start with an abundance of knowledge, sort of road mapping before you jumped into it.
Since you've done this a couple times even since sounds like 2010, this new approach you have now, the humans over houses. So I wanted to jump into a couple places, but before I did. I think it's important people know who you are and what your purpose is as people are telling their life stories, which it seems like that this is about, I guess. Where did you come up with the idea and how did you decide how you were going to distribute these stories once your customers were willing to tell them to you?
[00:04:24] Speaker C: Yeah. So NextHome is a franchise brand. Just for context. We have about 630 offices across the U.S. we're in all 50 states, about 6,000 agents. We do about 12 billion in volume and we close roughly well this year with the market being what it is, about 30,000 transactions. So it's not a small business.
Humans over Houses was actually an idea that came from our chief Strategy officer Keith Robinson in our company. And it's a foundation of how our company has always operated.
So Next Home has always been about the quality of people, not the quantity of people. And so had we had a different approach to the business, we probably would have 20 or 30,000 agents. But we're not looking for everybody. We never have. Um, it's for us it's about finding people that are in residential real estate that care about the community and they're doing it not for the sole focus of a paycheck, but because they love helping people through this incredibly difficult, stressful transaction they're going to do two or three times in their life. And so for us, Humans Over Houses became a motto that the. That our members love and fell in love with. And so, you know, we, we are always trying to make sure that we're showing people the amazing stories that happen.
The people who have come from nothing or were homeless and saved up money or were. They got a good job and they were able to buy a house or, you know, the widowed mother who's taking care of her daughter. And so Humans Over Houses about sharing these stories of people who get into homeownership, which, as we all know, is the largest generation or generator of wealth in the US and so it's that. It's sharing that with the public. And humansoverhouses.com is a website that we host where we, we like to show these stories from all over the US and really just change the conversation from. What realtors do is just being transactional, but really being, you know, people that change people's lives. So that's what that's about.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: Wow.
It's incredible because when. When. When you put it that way, given your background in, in doing business and even technology and stuff, it's interesting to me because Humans Over Houses is really more of an empathy play than a technology play because it's, it's art. It's hard to. It, you know, it's hard to conceptualize how do you put empathy and technology together. They're really not synonymous with each other. But yet here you are now with NextHome and what you're together and an empathetic way of doing business with the technology play in itself as well.
[00:06:54] Speaker C: We love to spend time really focusing on the customer. And I feel like there's a large contingent of.
I think there's a. There's a percentage of the industry in both mortgage and real estate that have lost focus on what it is that we do.
And it's not that we should make a living. It's not that, you know, we want to strive to hit goals in our personal lives, but when you put people first and you think about them and what they're trying to go through and how you help them get into that, that is the rewarding part and to kind of bring it back. It's not that we have anything against anybody who wants to just make it all about themselves. That's fine, just not in our company. We're just not interested in having those people work at our firm. And we're particular about it. That's just how we are. So we have, we get a lot of inquiries to franchise with us. We only take a small percentage of them because we're not just looking at the production they do, we're looking at who they are as a human being. That's just how we operate. We've always operated that way. It's great being a private company. I don't have investors, I'm not venture funded. I'm not taking the company public. So my board meetings are my partners and I having a bottle of wine, making decisions like we do every day.
And, and that's a cool thing because we, we get to, we get to make these decisions based upon what it is that we're trying to accomplish and what our mission is. It's not about shareholder return. It's not about, you know, this extra deal. We do a lot of stuff as an organization, including the people that are at our franchisees where we take care of people. I mean I've had brokers who, you know, through these changes, veterans are having a hard time being able to buy a house, especially if the seller's not offering to help in the compensation. I've had brokers that just step up and say I'm going to help you buy the house. I'm not going to charge you anything. Wow, that's cool shit. Like that's, that's the kind of thing that we should be doing. And so that's, that's the, that's how our company operates. That's what that whole thing's about.
[00:08:50] Speaker A: So do you, if I can jump in here. So do you find the more experienced agents and we'll say loan officers too. Has, is there an arc here where technology has really. And especially the Zillow of the world, right where they've taken the home buying process from stories. And this might seem like the real old days, but it was only back in the 90s you didn't have the Zillows of the world. So you probably more bought talking in town and deciding. And now it's gotten to the point where almost everybody is just scrolling through not stories of the home, but really still pictures in a moment of each room, very surface level. And then they're buying the home. And home buyer regret is as high as it's ever been. And I don't think it's because of bad education. I think it's, they bought the home based on the kitchen and then they're in the home and they really didn't think through what, like what a home really meant to them all the time. Do you, like, do you think that we're getting too picture friendly in the home buying process because of tech?
[00:10:01] Speaker C: No, I actually think the more rich media that people have, the better it is for the buying experience. But I'll just give you some things to think about in this discussion. So Zillow was founded in 2005. Um, and if you go back to 2001, the use of a real estate agent on the buy side was 69% of the time. So buyers were using a realtor only 69% of the time today. So Zillow, Realtor, homes, all this data, all this information, everything you ever wanted to know about the neighborhood, everything you want to know about anything to do with the city is all online use of a realtor is hovering between 88 to 89% of the time. Why do you think that is?
It's because there's so much damn information out there, people need someone to help decipher it. And so it's, it's also incredibly emotional. It's the single largest expense 99% of Americans are going to do in their lifetime. It's stressful.
And you're, you, you can't really make mistakes on that. So I'm not, I'm not in the camp that I personally think we need to provide more information. Like why is it there's only 30% of homes have a floor plan? It's the number one. Number one, number one, or number two, most requested thing by a buyer is a floor plan, yet realtors don't do it. Except 30% of the time drives me nuts. So I think we, we want to get more information out. But my point I'm going to make is I also think consumers are looking for someone to guide them. And I think when they aren't using somebody who's an expert in houses in that area or who's just done this a lot, then you might have some of that buyer remorse because they weren't being advised by somebody. I'll give you some other things to think about. So all these pundits and professors and lawyers talk about how Realtors are going to go away. I completely disagree with it. Not because I run a real estate company. I'm a pretty pragmatic person. I think they don't have the slightest clue about human psychology. So as an example, in 1960, dual income households in the United States was around 30%, meaning mom and dad both had to work to make a living. You know what it is today? Almost 60. So almost 60% of people today have to have a dual income to live in this country. We've got massive inflation, housing prices out of control. You know, the work, the paid wages haven't kept up with some of these things. I mean, it's just, there's just massive issues. And so mom and Dad, I have a three and a half year old terrorist who I love dearly, but mom and dad don't wake up and go, yeah, let's just go buy a house on our own today. Nobody has the time for that shit like that. That's just not reality. So where we get into trouble is if we think we know more about something than we do and we make decisions. For example, I haven't been feeling well the past week. So what did I do? I went to WebMD and I typed in all my symptoms. I thought I was going to die of cancer. I thought I was going to die of brain, brain cancer. Like you read all this shit stuff online and you're like, you, you, you're going, okay, none of that's relevant. I talked to my doctor like, yeah, you probably just have walking pneumonia. Just take, take it down a notch. You're fine. Right? So my point is, I think people have to keep in mind using an expert's important in the process that these things are.
You need to have somebody advise you through it. I didn't know buyer remorse was that high. But I think also some of that might be people are just paying a lot for housing these days and that might be part of that conversation as well.
But I do not believe that anything we've done data wise or rich media wise is causing a problem. I think it's better for the consumer to be more educated in that process.
[00:13:35] Speaker A: So some of it has to do with they didn't realize how much time owning a home would take up on their weekends. Right. And then I think just the younger generation, there's more to do out there on the weekends than maybe my parents that just worked on the house.
[00:13:49] Speaker C: I mean, it's an asset, you got to take care of it. Otherwise it's a, you know, it's going to go down in value, not up in value. So I can't speak to the generations on it. But you know, it is the single largest generator of wealth in the United States. There's no downside, especially if you're going to hold it for buying real estate. Even if you bought in 2008, you made a lot of money on it if you just kept it.
[00:14:12] Speaker B: So I think the inherent problem that is at least what I've seen in western culture is that we, you know, we look at, for example, if you're a mortgage broker out there or originator or even a realtor, and you have buy versus rent scenarios and you say this is how much it costs to buy, this is how much it costs to rent. And then, you know, then a mortgage originator might go to their tax person, say well, you know, your after tax benefit is this, and so on and so forth. But you know, totally not really accepting the fact that you're not really spending money, you're investing money, right? And every dollar you invest, if it's a principal and interest mortgage payment, is actually buying future, buying the future debt, buying the present debt down so that the equity of the value, as long as we have inflation, which we have for centuries, as long as we have inflation, would continue to increase. I don't think that, I think that sometimes it's lost that we're spending money instead of investing money. And I think changing the narrative, just one word of saying invest versus spend actually causes some education back into the buying public and, or the consumer public to say this is what we're investing into. Because once we say spend, then there's a negative comments connotation that comes with that, those extra work and there's extra things that you have to do versus things that you want to do in the investments.
[00:15:33] Speaker C: Look, I mean we can go deep on this. The educational system in this country is shit. Like they're not educating people correctly about what it is. I mean, economics class, these kids come out of high school and they can't even balance a checkbook so let alone change a tire. So like, yeah, I mean we can go down that conversation and it is investing. If you're spending money on rent, you're literally putting money in someone else's pocket you're never going to get back. It's basic math. So if you're going to hold the property and you're paying down, even on a 30 year fixed mortgage, you're putting equity into a property. When you sell, you're going to get some of that money back. Renting does none of that. The end. I guess it's not even a conversation. If people don't understand that, then go back to school, I guess. I don't know.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: So you can't go back to school because the current public education system doesn't teach you how to do that.
[00:16:21] Speaker C: I mean, sure, that's My point. Yeah, yeah.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: So then in the value proposition then with, with the agents that you, that you deliver in the culture for next home, how do you begin to deliver a further message into the investment scapegoat of telling your agents or the broker owners of each individual branch so that we can deliver a value proposition? Hey, we're not just doing this for a paycheck. The culture here is we're making investments into our clients, the buyers and the sellers to give them.
We can't change the way they think necessarily, but we can certainly educate them. So how do you, how do you do that in your leadership?
[00:16:56] Speaker C: Well, so I, so I think ironically, some of the outcomes of this settlement with NAR has created an incredible opportunity for the lending industry to partner more closely with the real estate industry. And what I say by that is I think agents should be having their loan officer with them on buyer presentations, literally laying out the scenarios on how that property can be purchased, the different type of financing scenarios. To your point, what this investment could be, what's the up leg value? And I'll go further with this. So in part of the value proposition that agents should be doing.
So on the list side, we've been doing a good job for a long time. We sit down, we do a consult, we show them what we're going to do. Here's our marketing, here's our advertising. This is what I get paid, this is where it's going to go. Like we've got that down pretty much to a science. And if you look at all the surveys, sellers aren't questioning listing agent value, buyers are questioning buyer agent value. Because we have been lazy as an industry and haven't been forced to do our damn job, which is to sit down, do a consultation and actually work with the buyer, understanding their needs, explaining what we do and then creating that relationship. Because for a long time we're like, yeah, you can work with me, don't worry about paying me because it comes from the, from the seller. That's a horrible way to articulate value now. And I'll bring this full circle. We have to think differently about it. And agents, we're teaching. This is something I'm only teaching in my company, but I do keynotes all over the country and I teach them, look at your buyer the same way you approach your seller. So I'll bring this to your question. So when you sit down with a buyer, you should be sitting down and asking them, what are you looking for? What are your needs? Are you going to have family? Are you going to have more kids. What, you know, do you want to be close to school? All of that stuff should be a conversation, which sounds basic, but people aren't doing that. Number two is, you know, for example, we use a partnership called Kuba Casa. It's something anybody can do. Kuba Casa is a floor plan creation service. So we tell our buyers, if there's a house that doesn't have a floor plan, you really like it, let me know, I'll go buy and I'll create the floor plan and send it to you. What am I doing? I'm increasing my value. I'm providing services to the buyer. Here's where my comment's going to go. We also talked about the investment opportunity. So there's a great company called Revive that does a remodel service through AI is you can upload the photos of the mls. They'll look at it through machine learning and all these cool things through AI. They. They will determine, like, what it would take for financially to upgrade the house, to remodel it, and then what the uplake value would be on that property. Why are we not doing that? I don't think 99% of realtors do that. They go, here's the property. We're not bringing in somebody to go $50,000 worth of a little bit of work here. We could probably make this thing worth another $200,000 more. It's a conversation you need to be having. Like, why are we not having those conversations and getting the bid and like, really figuring out how to look at this not only from a home, how we're going to create great memories. What is the cost to buy this asset, but what can it be if you put some money into this asset and is this property going to appreciate more than this one if we do those. Those investments? So that's the kind of stuff we have to be thinking about. And that's why I said, I think a loan officer coming in with an agent makes it bigger. You can talk about the complexity of it. They can tag team that. They can talk about what they need to do and the financing options do. Should there be. Should there be concessions done for a compensation? Because obviously there's limits on that. That's where you bring in and increase your value. And that is, I think, a huge opportunity that our industry is missing right now. So I want to be able to.
[00:20:37] Speaker B: Add something to that. You know, you said, you know, when you go and ask a buyer, hey, you know what, you have two kids, let's say three and five, right? Hey, you know what? They're going to go to this elementary school and let's say you're in Northern California, you're a junior software engineer or junior accountant or junior something, whatever.
[00:20:55] Speaker C: Software engineer.
[00:20:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Right. And your income may be $150,000 this year, but maybe five years from now, when your kids are getting ready to go into middle school and you want to move to a better district or whatever, your income could be $250,000 a year. Right. And maybe you're going to have an extra kid or two. Though if you're a lender, you're actually for compliance purposes in fair housing, you actually can't ask them, well, how many more kids are supposed to have. Right. And if you're a financial advisor and you can't go and ask them, you can't what a loan officer can say, you can't say, hey, take equity out of your home to make investment because that's not only is that selling away for the financial advisor, it's also, it's against the funeral rules. And so my point in saying that is that if the loan officer can ask questions that the financial advisor can't, that means there's questions that the realtor also can ask the buyer that the loan officer actually is not allowed to ask the buyer. And I think some realtors don't know or have been informed on the disconnect on questions that are able to be asked not only from the loan officer standpoint, but also the financial services standpoint. And so if there can be a greater amount of dialogue or I would say trial log, right. Three conversations with the, with the tax professionals or financial professionals, with the loan officer and then the realtor, if the value proposition in buying property can be multilayered so that, so it's not just the spending of the money. And to your point, and back to the original question I had for you, it becomes the value proposition for how, how the realtor actually is the basis and the crux not only of home ownership and also for a potential for their financ financial planning in conjunction with all parties.
[00:22:41] Speaker C: Yep, yep. Well, that actually ties into one of the value propositions we talk about. So there's a great company out there called Homeowner AI and what it is, it's a, it's a software that essentially it allows the homeowner to have a place to manage their asset. So it logs, here's how you need, how often you need to get the air conditioner serviced, make sure you change your air filters and all the lender the financial advisor, the cpa, they all get brought into the system. So everyone's in one spot helping manage this asset. And I think that the more you think about it that way, because they're going to buy a house and they're going to sell it somewhere between eight to 13 years later. It's kind of the normal time frame. Now that 8 to 13 year time frame, the more that to your point, the agent can be the crux of that, the hub, but everybody else around it, you're creating a relationship long term, you're keeping that client and you're increasing value because you're constantly in touch with them on this particular asset class. And that's where we're headed by the way. I call it the life cycle of homeownership. Right now the industry is very focused on top of funnel. We need to be thinking much more long term about top of funnel. But how do you maintain that relationship? So they come back and then get referrals along the way, etc. Whoever cracks that code, by the way, is going to be the holy grail. Because the portals like Zillow and all these companies are counting on the fact that realtors suck at following up with their clients.
Literally they know and want you to not follow up so that client becomes a new lead on their website that they can sell for referral fee back to somebody else again.
[00:24:16] Speaker A: What I was going to ask is very similar theme in what do you teach your agents to kind of keep that stickiness? When I was so the big piece of when selling the mobile app was the creating mobile apps for mortgage lenders was there was a huge disconnect between what they thought consumers would do on their phone of actually going to Safari and going back to a website without an app and actually having an app that people knew where to go to on their phone. Like that sort of step one, step two is getting them into the habit of actually going to the app, which is another whole difficult step. But without that first step, they were just convinced somebody's going to go back to that website and unless it's got four letters in it and it's a news station, like nobody, nobody does like does that directly. So after you have that great trial log meeting, let's say we talked to a lot of loan officers last year, at least the year before that maybe left the industry because they had 30 pre quals going but there was no inventory to execute. So it's on both sides. What would you say to the loan officer, to the real estate agents in a Phone centric world. Like how do you keep not just follow up but stay sticky with them during the home buying process?
[00:25:40] Speaker C: Well, I mean first of all be consistent.
Anybody you ever talk to about anything, pick something and just be consistent with it. That's 90% of success. If you're going to do door knocking, then just do door knocking and just make sure you're, you're good at it and you're consistent with it. If you're going to do online lead gen, same thing that look the. So I think the stat I'm going to give this for real estate just because I, I know it. I think it's 82% of people said that they would, they would use their realtor again but something like 20% of them actually do.
And the reason for that is because of lack of follow up.
So we teach lots of ways to do it and I think it's a matter of finding that methodology but simple ones that I always look at. So there's two that we teach in real estate. You can do this in loan officer as well. So we teach them to call on the anniversary of their sale of their house or the purchase of their home every year. Put in your calendar, repeating calendar appointments, really simple to do. And just call them and go, hey, it's been a year, just wanted to check in. How are things going? It's been two years, how are things going? It's an easy conversation to have. Just wanted, how's the house? Any issues you need help with anything? Super easy conversation. Second one, call them on their birthday. Like that's an easy conversation to have. Be like hey, I just wanted to say hi, happy birthday, how are things? How's the family?
That's two touch points a year that keeps you front and center. Now I'm just giving that from, from, from the perspective of just maintaining relationships.
As far as content, you gotta just put stuff out that's that people want to hear about. So if we're talking about rates today or the Fed dropped rates, then post something about the Fed's, you know, bringing rate. If there's some great thing that came out or there's some bill that happened, post something about that, put it in a newsletter. It's not, it actually isn't that complicated to create content if you're just looking at what is trending and what people want to hear about and then surfacing that content out. It's the number one reason why people don't end up working with someone is because they, they're, they're not being followed. Up with. That's it. It's literally that. Um, and so I, I just, I would comment that you just gotta update people. You gotta be top of mind, you gotta be willing to pick up the phone. This is a hard business. If you're not comfortable doing that, find another career. I hate to say it and be a jerk when I say that, but like, this isn't an easy job. You gotta be very consistent about things. You gotta be willing to have people hang up the phone on you. You gotta be comfortable with that. You gotta get content out there, ask for the referral, have those conversations and be repetitive about it. And you're gonna find that you're gonna get lots of repeat business and referrals and people will stick with you. I don't know, I just think it's pretty basic to me whether it's phone, email, text, chat, all of the above.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: Yeah. The investment in time that you, that you're purchasing is also, you're buying brain cells. Right? You're buying the brain cells of your customer. Whether it's the buyer or the seller, you're still buying the brain cells. And the return on the investment is not when you're buying those brain cells. Are you buying today's brain cells or are you buying the brain cell 3, 4, 5, 7, 10 years ago, 10 years from now, when either the buy to sell or if you're even thinking a bigger picture, are you buying brain cell so that you're in front of them to get the referral?
[00:28:55] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean this isn't like if they've already bought, then it's a different follow up mechanism. How's the house going? Have you changed the heater? I mean, whatever. Like you just need to make the content relevant. If it's somebody who's been wanting to buy but they can't find the inventory or they're on pause, then you should be on the phone with them. Consistently with. Have you seen this house? Rates just dropped. How about now? Like you gotta catch them when they're, when they're thinking about it. And by the way, most of the time people are so busy they aren't paying attention to this stuff. So it might be that your phone call is the one that goes, oh man, I didn't even see that house for sale. Ah man, I love that thing. Let's write on it. So that's just relationship 101.
[00:29:37] Speaker B: Yeah. And we miss the things. For example, like every September or every fall when school starts again, it's back to school time. Are you living in the House that you want to live in or are you living in the right schools, district? Right. Are you thinking about college? Are you moving to the area? Or you know, is it time to be looking at kitty condos?
[00:29:52] Speaker C: Or second you have a CRM or is everybody using a CRM? Because my God, if you're not like seriously, get with the times. Like you have to actually take notes. Like if you've got a customer database, did you write down the kids names and that they have a dog named Spot or whatever? Like you should have all of that stuff because those conversations show the person on the other end that you actually know who they are and care about them. Like, and if you can't be expected to remember all of it but get all that stuff in your, in your system.
[00:30:22] Speaker B: So do you know of agents in the next, in your, in the next home world that do that and do the, and do you utilize them as examples for mentors?
[00:30:33] Speaker C: Of course. We literally supply an entire CRM system to our entire organization and we use a product called KVCore and we train on it and we have ambassadors for it. And 10% of people use it effectively, another 10% use it somewhat and 80% of them don't do anything with it. It's the same thing in mortgage. Yeah.
[00:30:52] Speaker A: Do you find that there's going to be an evolution of like you keep saying phone calls and that is obviously a big part of it in that connection.
Is that the important piece that you get into their phone so they actually have a name when you call versus a number they don't recognize as spam? Is that going to be a big. It seems personal to me. Like that would be a big part for me.
[00:31:12] Speaker C: Personal phone calls always go further. I mean, but you know, you're going to see AI. I've already seen AI that talks as you. There's already AI that mimics your voice and your tone that can make phone calls out. You're going to see that become fairly standard, you know, these AI bots that are acting on your behalf. But look, I would segregate my clients into like my top clients that I need to do those one on ones with and then the people that investors that are buying properties all the time, like you don't do AI on that, like call them, have conversations with them, nurture those relationships. But everybody else, you're going to find a lot of automation that will be involved in it or you have team members that do it, you know, and just check in and see if there needs to be an actual one on one appointment.
But yeah, and it's, it's, it's not one way. Like I can't explain this enough. You have to hit people where they are. So short form content, get 1 minute little videos out about updates and get that out on social media. Get it on Facebook, LinkedIn, you know, Instagram, all of that stuff. Have a YouTube channel where you're, you're interviewing experts, send that stuff out. Follow up. The email though, that's a hard one. People don't read a lot of email anymore. So maybe there's a texting mechanism you do and then you've got phone calls. And by the way, there may be even actual ones where you just stop by and say, hi, you can't, it's not one size fits all. I mean, use a carrier pigeon for all I care if that's going to work. But just find a way that gets people to read your content.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: You know, you mentioned that, you know, loan officers should be doing the same thing as the, as the realtors should be doing when it comes to content. Follow up. You think that there is a, I'm going to ask for our lending community out there. Do you think there's a better, a better way that loan officers or originators, mortgage brokers can follow up Realtors that actually instead of getting, you know, realtors are afraid of getting hung up on time. Loan officer are getting free up on time because they don't like telemarketing calls. Right. Or they don't like receiving. They don't like, they don't mind giving them, but they certainly don't like receiving them. Is there a better way to follow up? If you are an originator and you want to follow up with a realtor, is it going to.
[00:33:06] Speaker C: Yes. First of all, they're being called by every loan officer humanly possible.
Everyone wants the top agent's business. So you're going to have to figure out a way to differentiate yourself. Number two, provide value. Give them something they don't have. Help them with things. Maybe it's provide content. Maybe you say, let's join in and we'll do joint content. I'll provide mortgage content on your social media pages, your open houses. I'll bring information for that. That's obviously a standard one. But also like, how can I help you?
How can I help you get buyers in the contract? How do we work together on making sure the financing scenario is a good fit? Send them information on that. So I think you have to look at what they're doing first. What is the realtor doing? Who Is their relationship with. Look for the holes and then try to find ways to fill those holes. So if they're the agent's not doing any content on social media, on mortgage, there's your in. I got this great system. I can do this. I'm not asking for all your business, but I'd love to have some of it. Let me earn it. Let me see if I can help you generate more business. By the way, if you generate business for an agent, they're going to give you business. Like if you're able to give them a new deal 100%, they're going to start using you as part of their, as part of their system. So find the holes, do the research, target them, give them something they don't have. Show value. They'll use you.
[00:34:25] Speaker A: The lending industry has become big on recruiting lately. In fact, I would say the dynamic has changed. Where loan officers have as much power as ever, where they can bring teams over. Could loan officers help real estate agents or franchises recruit more real estate agents? Is that a. I don't hear it very often, but is that a new value add that could happen?
[00:34:50] Speaker C: Maybe. I. That's not very common. Usually a loan officer is finding six or seven agents that do a ton of business that they work their relationship with and that's that.
I mean inside joint ventures. When LOS make a move, they try to bring some people over. But I don't see that as a huge recruiting opportunity.
Agents don't choose to go somewhere because their loan officer went somewhere. No offense. Like they choose to go somewhere because they're unhappy in their current brokerage. Usually it's because they don't find value in what the company's providing or they've had a falling out with their broker.
That's basically it. And people think it's always about money. Wrong. Agents don't leave because of money. Lower producer agents leave because of money. But they don't do anything anyway. Top producers leave because they found lack of value in the business or the relationship soured with their broker. That's about 90% of the reason they move.
[00:35:37] Speaker B: You think that brokers can do a better job in maintaining those relationships? They don't leave. I mean whether. Because if the systems are the same, like for example, like what I've noticed about ReMax agents, just for example, say ReMax agents pretty much stay REMAX agents. They'll bounce around, but they always go back to ReMax. And I think that it's just because they get used to that system. So when you're putting the Value proposition out as a broker, as a branch manager slash broker of whatever regional locality you might be in, what can you do to teach the culture of the brokerage so that you just sit there and go, you know what it may be xyz, my finances, my personal relationship, whatever, it doesn't really matter. Because I'm doing business. I don't really care about the emotions or the people. All I care about is doing business. And I want to make sure I do business the right way. So given, given that relationship, is there a better way that Next Home can foster that type of environment for the branch manager, franchise owner?
[00:36:38] Speaker C: Well, first of all, systems are important. So the more that you get your agent base using the systems that the company provides, you have more stickiness. Right, because nobody wants to leave and start over. Like that sucks. That's painful. Which is why agents don't move very often, especially producers, because they're having to start over.
There's that. But look, the secret to recruiting is it's really two things.
Agents choose the broker they want to work for. First, it's not the brand. I'm in franchise. I'm not supposed to say that. Nobody gives a shit. That's not the reason they go there. It's because that broker has nurtured a relationship with them where the agent feels that working for them, they're going to succeed more in their business.
That's 80% of it. Then it's systems, services, tools, et cetera. So you could have the cheapest split, the best technology, the most popular brand, but if the broker that's running that the agent and broker don't connect, they won't leave. It's. It's literally about that relationship. It's the same reason why people choose loan officers because of the relationship that's been developed and the fact they close deals. But the point's the same. So I don't think relationship is going to. I think people underestimate the leadership and relationship. That being said, for people that want to recruit, you've got to be a better leader. And that's what we teach in our company and any company is you have to convince an agent why working for you is going to be better than where they're currently at and would make sense for them to go through the headache of leaving that brokerage and starting over and moving over and doing these systems. And if you're not good enough to convince them, they're never going to make that move. That's why you see a lot of agents that work at companies where they pay a lot more than they have to where, like they've got, you know, splits that are much more favorable to the brokerage. And people are like, why haven't you left? Because they love where they work. They love the relationship with the broker. They find value in what the broker provides. That it's not about split. So that is in real estate. That is 100% where it is in mortgage. I think it's probably a little bit, some. Something to do with that. But product mix is important.
We all know that. Like, if you've got products that can get loans done, you know, what's the, what's the cost? What's the company taking? And I think there's a little bit more in the mortgage side because it's kind of a little more math based. But in the real estate side, it's much more emotional based in that. There's 1.5 million realtors. 10% of them do 90% of the business.
That's just, that's just the reality of it. So those relationships are what's key in driving those decisions.
[00:39:21] Speaker A: And there's a bigger push towards teams versus individuals or 100%.
[00:39:27] Speaker C: Yeah, it's the future for sure. So you're going to see teams continue to grow. I'd say 30% of our franchises are teams that have left the company to open their own business, but they operate as a team. You're more efficient, you've got job responsibilities. They can do more production, they can follow up because they have the time. They've got dedicated staff to do specific roles. That's all that Zillow works with, his teams, that's all that realtor.com works with, is teams. Because when they're sending out leads, they want those leads to close, especially if they get a referral fee off of it. Teams are efficient. Higher close rate, they're going to be more productive. That's why teams are continuing to grow and you'll see more of that. I think the future in real estate looks a lot different than today. I'm estimating somewhere between another 30% of the industry is gone over the next 24 to 36 months, depending upon the market coming back.
But teams will certainly grow in size.
Big brokerages that have a lot of overhead are going to struggle because you can't. Maybe you don't know this, but brokerages don't make a lot of money off teams they use. Teams typically keep a lot of. A lot of the money. They use that team being there to recruit everyone else. Brokers, brokerages in America make most of their money on the bottom 80% because the splits are different. The teams keep a lot of the money. The people below them don't. And so for them, that one to two deals a year that agent's doing, they get a better split on that. The team is just a way to get agents to work there. That's. Everybody knows that in residential real estate.
[00:40:55] Speaker A: And then on the mortgage side, you have, which is these regional managers that can move these large groups of mortgage branches over from one mortgage company to another. But they make their money on the signing bonuses. But the way Fannie and Freddie have moved over the last year and a half, where there's very little margin involved, the loan officer is still getting paid, their loan officers are still getting paid and staying loyal. But that region is no longer pulling in the money over the top. There's just no margin right now to have the excess money. So they're just waiting to keep them together. They get their next signing bonus when the time comes. And then you have the brokers of the world who are leveraging the rocket and UWM who are saying we're better because there's no middle people, no middle management involved. And this is why it's going to be better. But they also don't have that same support system all the way up that structure. And so I think you face it, there's going to be no right answer. And that's why cyclically it gets bigger and then it gets smaller.
[00:41:58] Speaker C: But I mean, this is a. The mortgage industry, I think, has. Is going to have a much more difficult time. I'm saying this as somebody who owns a mortgage company, so I just want to be clear with my words, but I think it's gonna have a much more difficult time competing against automation than the real estate agent. And the reason I say that is it's. It's finance versus the asset that's incredibly emotional process.
It's. It's like. It's. No, everyone knows this. You put a buyer and seller in the same room and it's just going to turn into fireworks. It just turns to shit. So a lot of what realtors do is help guide that process. Some they're like a therapist, you know, and you can't AI that there's. There's no way around that. Like, it's, it's just. How do you deal with the emotions of that buyer de escalating the fact the seller loves their shag rug and shag carpet and the buyer thinks it's hideous. Like working through all of those things, I'm not saying loan officers go away. To be clear, I, I find tremendous value in it. I think we have to think about how we reshape and articulate that value.
But there's certainly more and more automation coming to that space. Realtors are going to also deal with automation, but I think people still want that guidance. And I think the more we can figure out how to position loan officers in the same way that's going to be imperative in the future as things continue to. There's a lot more automation coming to all industries. So.
[00:43:24] Speaker A: Well, Zillow, I've been saying for forever gets into the mortgage space, but this year they really turned it on, meaning their home. They've been able to convert those eyeballs. They are supposed to do $7 billion. And I posted on this, it took NFM about 520 loan officers to do that amount. If they double it next year, they're almost at the point where a loan depot is, which takes 1700 loan officers to do that. And I don't see it so much as stopping now. They might, they might hit a ceiling. But it goes to your point that there is some automation ability and let's be clear, that's probably still less than 4%, 2% of the market. So it's not like it's, it's a total takeover, but there'll be. I'm on record in 2017 saying that by 2027, 75% of all mortgages would come from the servicer's mobile app. Now, I was wrong. But if you took just refinances, I'm not that far off. They said in Covid 60% of all refinances were done with the servicer. That number is getting up to 70%. So I think purchases are still in play for loan officers, but the refinances are going to be. The automation is getting really good.
[00:44:40] Speaker C: Yeah. Remember, the only reason Zillow is doing. I shouldn't say the only reason, the most of the reason why Zillow is getting that capture rate.
[00:44:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:44:48] Speaker C: Is because they forced the agents to have a certain amount of capture rate on loans or they will pull back the leads.
[00:44:54] Speaker A: I think it's 60%. Yeah. I don't know if that's, I mean that's public, but I don't know if they.
[00:44:58] Speaker C: It's. My point is, is that it's damn near close to like respa issues, but let's not go there. But like, I mean it's, it's, it's forcing.
They're Basically telling people if you don't attach the loan, we're not going to send you leads anymore. Well, that's where that number is coming from because the agent holds that relationship. We all know this. So the agent tells you to use this loan officer 90% of the time the buyer will.
And so that's going to be a big thing. The question you have to ask yourself, and this is just a long term thing to think about, is what happens if the agents don't play that game anymore? Where does that business go? Because I don't think people are just going to Zillow and signing up for a mortgage. I believe that's a very small percentage. I think it's the agent is telling them to use Zillow home loans and they're doing that. And if the agent isn't incentivized to do that anymore or doesn't want to or has another reason to not do it, that is a, that is a significant hit on their P and L long term. And by the way, I do think those days are coming. There's a lot of interesting tech coming out that is going to help agents have more of an attach rate that benefits them as well. So.
[00:46:06] Speaker A: And when you said teams, I almost see like that's a benefit of teams is more people knowing how to use some of these technologies like Kubacasa and that you master that. Can you just speak a little bit more about maybe some of the real estate tech or just Raise if you'd like? I mean, I'm obsessed with that type of stuff. So as we're coming up here at the end, maybe just a little bit about how you created this company and what it's like owning a real estate company but then selling to the masses of real estate agents.
[00:46:38] Speaker C: Well, in fairness, Raise is a company that's owned by a large portion of the industry. So the investors behind Raise are most of the major MLS associations and brokerages across America. So Next Home is an investor too. I happen to be the co founder of it, but it's, it's, it's a joint collaborative project. Raise is a very simple, it's a very complicated product. But what it does. The issue that loan officers and agents face is that the way consumer perception works is we only see value in the things that we can actually see. So for example, when you're working with an agent, they go with you to tour a home, but the buyer doesn't see the fact that you drove there. They didn't see the fact you called the listing agent after that you had a 45 minute phone call, then you got a copy of the disclosure package for the property. You spent two hours reading that, then you wrote an email to them laying out all the key bullet points, which took you another 30 minutes to do. The buyer saw the 25 minutes that you showed the house. But in reality, every house you show is between two to three hours worth of work. I know this because it's what Raise does. And so you have this perception versus reality. And I'll back this up with the most interesting stat you'll hear today. So the wave group did a really interesting study earlier this year that we were working with them on, and they asked 500 buyers how many hours they think a realtor spends helping them buy a house. 46%. Basically, half said 15 hours or less to buy a house. Now, you say that in front of a group of realtors, everybody gets pissed, because I can tell you what the actual number is. The average amount of time an agent spends with a buyer to help them buy a house is 87 hours. Yes, I know, because that's what Raise does. So Raise literally tracks all of the time, activities, expenses, phone calls, texts, all of that, and creates this really beautiful collaborative experience for the buyer to see what the agent's going to do. And as they're doing it, it's updating them in real time. And the buyer's like, oh, my God, I had no idea my agent was doing all that. It's like, yeah, I know. Because they're doing their job. You just don't see it. It's out of sight, out of mind. Another example, every house, they tour, again, two to three hours worth of work Inside of our app, every house you toured becomes part of a carousel.
[00:48:47] Speaker B: It's.
[00:48:47] Speaker C: It's showing them all the homes they saw because they forget about the houses they saw two weeks ago. But all of that's time. And so what raise does is it creates a presentation that explains how long it will take an agent to get you into a property, the amount of work that's involved, explaining, etc. There's this app that makes it collaborative in the experience, which buyers and agents love. And then it provides a closing report, which is what I call the best part. It's literally an entire document that shows every single detail about the amount of work that was involved, the time. It's like 15 to 20 pages deep of all the items. And the buyer is like, oh, my God, it. Thank you so much. It changes the whole conversation. This product will be eventually available for mortgage we're going to be moving into, into other business sectors. But the point I'm making is if people don't see value in what you do, then all you have is cost.
Really important comment. In absence of value, all you have is cost. And if they don't see value then they're going to shop you. Because all they think about is all loan officers are the same, all companies are the same. All I give a shit about is the rate. By the way. That's the same thing we're dealing with in residential real estate. Think all Realtors are the same. If there's no value and I'm not going to spend that kind of money, your compensation's too high. But if you flip the script and you go, no, actually here's how much work's involved, here's the 200 things that I'm going to do over the course of, you know, 45 days. They're like, whoa, I had no idea. The long term vision for Raise is to create a unified experience. So we're. The product has started rolling out in September across the country.
It's not the 200 things the agent's going to do. Let me go back to our original conversation. It's the 630 things. Their agent, their loan officer, their inspector, their appraiser. So that the buyer goes, oh my God, I don't even, I wouldn't even know where to begin on this process that helps people understand what it is that they're doing, how complex this transaction is. And that's what Raise is literally built to do. That product started rolling out in September.
It's had 156 brokerages onboard already in the first two months.
And next year it becomes this big national rollout all over the country. It's going to be an incredibly successful product. And like I said right now the Investor network represents about 700,000 agents across the U.S. it's going to be a really fun ride to do.
[00:51:04] Speaker A: How do you handle the challenge of automating? So let's say they're driving to the home. Do they have to put in the miles like a QuickBooks or do they put in their ways and somehow are you slowly trying to automate some of those?
[00:51:16] Speaker C: It's all done on the phone. So what happens is we integrate with your calendar so we can see where your appointments are and then your phone through location services tells us where you are. So I can see that you're at your house. I can see you have an appointment at 8:30 to show 1, 2, 3 Main Street. So we immediately see when you leave the house. We use a program called Radar, which tells us every location that you're at. Which, by the way, everyone's freaking out right now. This is already happening on your phone. You just don't know it. Your mapping service does the same thing, by the way, you been using for 10 years.
So we can see that you're driving to an appointment. We tracked the time and mileage automatically because your phone tells us that to the location. We use MLS data so we can see you're at the location. We can use the geofence to determine you're on location. We immediately start the time of when you're showing the property and then when you drive away, we know that the showing has ended. And then you drive back your metadata on your phone. When you call the listing agent, we can cross reference the phone call that you did against the MLS database. See that? That's a listing agent that represented the property you just showed. We can automatically take that 30 minute phone call, assign it to the record. So it's automation across the board. I can even pull down your expenses. So we use a program called Played. So we insert your. You update your bank record or your credit card and as you're buying things for like a listing or photos or whatever, we can pull those expenses down automatically. If we know you only have one listing, we can assign those automatically to listing. If you've got two listings, we'll ask you which listing was this for? 1, 2, 3 Main Street Saved. So it's just very quick interactions we'll get to. By the time we get to V3 of the product, which will be in the summer of next year, It'll be about 80 to 85% automated, which means an agent will spend one to two minutes a day just yes, no moving things around on their phone.
Complete automation spend.
[00:53:01] Speaker A: That's incredible.
[00:53:03] Speaker C: It's pretty. It's pretty. I mean, it's an incredible product already. And our V2 product launches in January. That gets a 60% automation, but it's very smart. So like we'll grab your phone call log. We have the metadata, we don't. We'll look at the phone numbers and try to determine what they were based upon database records. If we don't know, we'll prompt you. What's this phone number? Oh, that's my appraiser. Now. It's learning. So it saves. That's the appraiser. And if it's like, oh, that's personal, you hit check a box that's Personal. We never look at that record ever again. So it learns your behavior and your, your database as you use it. So essentially we're only going to serve up phone numbers that are relevant to your business over the course of time.
[00:53:42] Speaker A: So sounds like what realtor.com like should have been able, like should have figured out on how to preserve all the MLS and put a moat around something that all the users are using. Congratulations to you on that. That is so hard to do. And do it so eloquently so that loan officers can pick it up and have it on auto drive. So you don't need a hundred customer success people calling them to get them to use it.
[00:54:06] Speaker C: We don't have loan officer system yet. That's where we're going to go right now. It's just for realtors, but our plan is to deploy it into other aspects of the industry very soon. So we're doing a big fundraise in Q1. So we're doing our Series A. And so we've raised about 7 million to date from three different rounds from the industry to build this whole thing out. The product started rolling out in September across the country. And then we'll do our series A in Q1 with a very, very significant valuation on the business. That influx of capital will diversify into the other sectors. But mortgage is definitely one of those we're looking at because the loan officer is spending a ton of time doing a ton of work that nobody appreciates. And that all needs to be logged, that all needs to be shown. The process of what's happening needs to be updated and we want to bring that forward. All the studies we've done, all of the studies we've done show that when a consumer understands and sees exactly what someone's doing, they appreciate them more and they don't question the compensation they're charging.
Pretty basic.
[00:55:11] Speaker B: I think it's pretty similar if you're an originator or a realtor.
[00:55:14] Speaker C: Right.
[00:55:14] Speaker B: For example, like if you know the agents are putting their hands in the air 18 hours. No, it's actually 84 hours. And I totally resonate with that because when you look at the originator, they're not only talking to the buyer with the agent, it's also all the phone calls to the appraisal management company, to the processor and then the broker of relationships on the loan side is all the follow up. All the follow up, follow up.
[00:55:40] Speaker C: You know what's funny about this whole thing? So I'll give you just some anecdotal things that we found really Kind of hilarious in a way. First was, we knew.
We knew that buyers were going to say the following, which they do. They go, basically go, I had no idea my agent was doing all of that, which is the whole point of the product. Um, the second thing we get is agents go, I had no idea I was doing all of that.
Because they don't track their own work.
Then we have what we call the closing report, which is that report lays everything out. We break down compensation. So I'll give you an example. The buyer thinks the agent's gross commission is what they make, which is not true. So they look at the gross commission amount and that's all they see. So inside of our system, we lay out in detail how compensation works. So gross commission, if you were referred, this client from Zillow, 40% of that goes to them first. Then there's a broker split. By the way, you're an independent contractor, you gotta pull 25 to 40% depending upon your income out for federal and state income taxes. Then you got health insurance costs and operational expenses. And the buyer's like, oh my God, you're making anything. You know the best part, the agent goes, oh my God, I'm not making anything.
[00:56:55] Speaker A: It's, yeah, full. And everybody's sort of working together all those mls. We want to thank you for your time. I know you battled through the second person and the other one was one of the largest owners, American Pacific Mortgage. He battled through too. So battle through sickness, paddle through walking pneumonia to finish through this. There is one question from the audience on raise. Do you want me to put it up here and answer it or.
[00:57:20] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:57:20] Speaker A: For another. All right, we'll give that. This is interesting. I'll read it for that. Because most of people are listening on a podcast. How are, how are agents linked? Linking the functionality you described to an initial buyer consult meeting. How are self reliant home buyers who do not want the full service responding? I guess that means choosing an itemized version. And do they? Any clients willing to offer alternative money saving fees or is the product designed to default to the traditional commission? You can answer any of those? Some of those. And then.
[00:57:51] Speaker C: Good question, Bill. I know Bill, he's connected to me. So the product designed to allow agents to charge in different formats because we track hours, they could do hourly, they could do commission, they can do a flat fee. We're even looking at the ability for an agent to do some type of retainer and then some type of time on top. So it's a very flexible product intentionally, because we do believe you're going to see a lot of those variations with it. As far as the consult, how are they, how are they working with it? The interesting part is when what agents are doing is they're taking the closing report from a previous client and they're bringing it with them to the consult on the next buyer to show them, like, how much work was involved with a client who they just worked with to buy a house. So the buyer understands this is a very complex transaction. And I think I'll just leave it with this for, for you, Bill. What's interesting is everyone's going to learn a lot when they use this product. Like I just said, buyers think it's much easier than it actually is. And agents who are. I've had agents go, I don't want to show them all that stuff. What if it was a really easy transaction? I'm like, they actually really aren't. Because when you start tracking your time and all of the things you do, if you were a lawyer, for example, you'll see that you're doing a lot more than you actually even believe that you are. So what's funny to me is when people have said, oh, there's these easy transactions out there, I'm like, nah, not if you actually track it all, you're going to find that you're not making nearly as much money as you thought you did. Imagine being a buyer's agent in 2021, where you're riding on like 15 houses and none of them are being accepted. You were literally a charity. You made nothing if you actually looked at all this stuff. So I think there's a lot of interesting things that will come from this product and certainly it's going to change the way agents approach the business and consumers appreciate or. Bill, also another idea, it's going to weed out shitty agents. Great. Good riddance. Bye.
[00:59:50] Speaker A: So I think the best part is it, it takes out the, like, the big tech because it gives the real estate agents a chance to be transparent and authentic. Authentic. And that empathy we talked about in the beginning, but more of a trust relationship there. You know, it's hard to buy trust. And I absolutely think it's incredibly intelligent for the real estate community to get behind this. I hope when the lenders have it, there's a chance for the IMBs to invest in this so that they have something that they have ownership to protect against these big juggernauts coming. So I'm, I'm thrilled to hear it's kind of for the, by the people, for the People product, and Mike usually takes us home. Mike, any final thoughts here to take us home?
[01:00:38] Speaker B: I think that the loan officer doesn't understand the realtor. The realtor doesn't. The buyers and the seller don't necessarily understand the realtors. I think there's a lack of. There's a disconnect, which is why teams are such a big deal right now. For example, if you're, if you, if you're a loan officer, you don't understand compensation of the realtor, and that's a team, you might have like it hit a certain gross commissionable income. The gross commission says 25,000 or $30,000, and then the team gets to keep 100% after that. The loan officer doesn't get to have that same type of compensation because you. They might be W2 because they're doing FHA loans, right? So you earn whatever, however many basis points on every single loan, not realizing that the agent that you work with, if it's on a team, they might be earning a little bit more, but if it's an individual earning a little bit less, and I think there's a lack of communication on what is actual competition, it shouldn't really matter because at the end of the day, it's the hours that we pour into our buyers and our sellers in order to provide them with the best product, which is the investment into real estate and the return of, of not only home ownership, but the livelihood that our customers receive. And in the type of conversation we had today in communication not only between agents, but also between the broker managers to the, to the actual realtors themselves. Incredible conversation that we had and to tie it all up that we can use technology today in order to produce a more efficient Realtor so that loan officers can have better communication with the realtor and then they'll. They'll be accountable to all of the work that the agent does. And in return, the technology that is headed in that direction is definitely headed to produce accountability also to the loan officer and then other trades and in the financial services industry as well. So great conversation that we were able to have today.
[01:02:28] Speaker C: Been a lot of fun, guys.
