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Real estate entrepreneurs are the best people. On Real Investor Radio, we’ll cover advanced residential real estate investing topics. We’ll discuss how what you have seen in the headlines will affect your real estate investing business. And we’ll go deep on these topics to help you make better decisions and take specific action.
Craig Fuhr (00:19)
Well, hey, everyone, welcome back to real investor radio. I'm Craig Fuhr joined again by my good friend, Jack Bevere. Jack, how are you?
Jack BeVier (00:27)
Doing awesome man, good morning, good morning.
Craig Fuhr (00:29)
was a little earlier. I was a little worried when we jumped on today because Jack looked like he'd already had a day and it's only 930 in the morning here in Maryland, but he assures me that he's rested relaxed and ready. Jack, how are things going?
Jack BeVier (00:43)
Everything's good, man. It's good. There was like a busy felt like a busy I'm sorry, a slow first week or so but then man things have really kind of shot out of a cannon the past couple weeks so that's probably what you're seeing in my underneath my eyes there. But all for all for good reasons there all for good reasons.
Scott (00:57)
Hehehe
Craig Fuhr (01:00)
phone is ringing off the hook here at Dominion and things could certainly be worse. That's for sure. Man, I just wanted to briefly talk and then we'll jump in with our guests today. I'm really excited to talk about folks. You're you don't want to miss this episode or the next couple episodes got a really awesome guest today. We'll introduce in a second but Jack yesterday, or perhaps a day before we dropped an episode with Mr. Stein.
Doug Stein. And I just I just want to point everyone back to that episode. Because our conversation with Doug was just really deep, really pertinent for this time of year, especially if you're an investor and you're thinking about, you know, tax season. There was just so much great info, Jack. And I just wonder if we could want we want to touch on that again, just quickly to talk about the Corporate Transparency Act, and then just some of the things that Doug laid on us that we should point folks to in that episode.
Jack BeVier (01:56)
Yeah, so those dropped at the beginning of, or I guess at the end, middle of January, by the time this releases, that'll be, it'll be coming up on tax time actually. So definitely your kind of last call to refer back to that stuff. The corporate transparency act is a change in regulation that everyone's going to have to comply with. If you have an existing business prior to the end of this year, so you got a little bit of time on that. It's not that March 15th or April 15th deadline like taxes are.
But then in that second episode with Doug, we went over a lot of the changes that have happened, what's sunset in 2023. So important to understand, to make sure that your tax preparer is handling that return prep appropriately for the changes that happened in 2023. But then also on a going forward basis, we go through a lot of stuff that is going to be changing in 2024, which for at least us, certainly affected our 2024 planning.
So yeah, a lot of good content in there. You know, it's thick in the weeds, but because it's tax, but I like to say that, you know, taxes are boring until it's your money. And then, and then I, and then I tend to perk up a little bit. So we're worth, we're worth the investment of time.
Craig Fuhr (03:09)
Well, I have to admit, and I hope no one's listening, there's no one that hates the subject of taxes more than Craig Fuhr. I plead ignorant to most of it, Jack. And I really don't look forward to that time of year mostly. However, if you are someone who owns rentals, just our conversation alone with Doug on bonus depreciation, and how some of those Trump era
regulations will be sunsetting Jack, I think it's worth the listen. So I would point everybody over to those episodes and let us know what you think. We'd love to hear your comments on it. He was a great, great guest. So today, really excited to introduce Scott Fahl. He's the CEO of privy. If you don't know what privy is, chances are you should and you probably are not.
You know, we'd like to think that Real Investor Radio is a podcast for advanced investors. If you've listened to the podcast, you'll know that we talk a lot about some pretty we go deep into subjects here. And we generally try to keep the conversation away from sort of the how to of the business. We figure that most people listening to the podcast already have the how to down and we're just trying to make folks better.
But Scott, welcome to the show. Really excited to talk to you. Checked out the product over the last few days. And your website, by the way, is amazing. There's just so much great content. And so welcome to the show.
Scott (04:48)
Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Jack. Excited to be here. I've been following your podcast. You guys have some great guests, and I'm learning a lot, usually, when I'm on there. At least a couple of tidbits I can take away. So I appreciate you for that.
Craig Fuhr (05:01)
Yeah, we can't always promise that all 45 minutes will be chock full of actionable content, but there's always going to be at least a good tidbit or two when we have great conversation with folks like you. So thanks for taking the time. Really appreciate it. So why don't you, if you could tell us just what Privy is, what the product is, and then we'd really love to jump into the why and sort of, you know, the genesis of the idea and how you guys have been able to put together such a
Scott (05:04)
Ha ha.
Craig Fuhr (05:29)
such a robust platform.
Scott (05:32)
Sure, yeah, I'd be happy to. So our history is quite extensive. When 2007, eight, nine is when this idea came about and Privy today is a real estate, residential real estate investing software platform. So it's all about data, all about comps, all about deals. And when it started way back when, I had a mortgage company back in the day. So I had a little finance background myself and a little lending background.
And when the market crashed, so did my company. So I had to sort of reinvent myself. And the knowledge I had that was the most useful was being able to help people buy investment real estate properties. I started my career with the REO brokerage, sling and bake properties that went back to the bank. And there was no shortage of investors looking for those.
However, that didn't last forever. So when the faucet started turning off, I had to get creative to keep the supply flowing for my clients. And it was pretty clear that the writing was on the wall that this is gonna get much more difficult. So I had a real estate license, which helped me help other people out. And one of the big things that was hurting my career was the MLS just wasn't set up.
for me to be able to identify investment deals. It was taking me a very long time to get through the MLS. And as a matter of fact, I would track everything that happened in 24 hours in an MLS at five o'clock in the morning. And by six, seven, because I did it every day, I would say these are the deals in the MLS. It was so tedious and arduous that it was just, you know, it was deflating, to be honest. So I ended up going to this, I got a meeting with the CEO here in Denver, Colorado at the...
Craig Fuhr (06:54)
Mm-hmm.
Scott (07:20)
the MLS and said that, you know, I need access to the data. I can't do my job. Simple as that. And MLS is, you know, they work for the agents. So I thought maybe I had a shot here and I ended up basically getting told to go jump in a lake. So I thought the whole thing was over, right? And I had to do something else. Well, about six months after that, I got a call from the same CEO saying that the National Association of Realtors is pushing this thing called RETS.
real estate transaction standard, where they're trying to get all 700 plus MLSs at the time. There's less now, because they merge a lot these days. But trying to get all 700 plus MLSs on a data standard, thinking that the future is right around the corner and tech companies need to have access to this because MLSs aren't designed to build software and technology. And if you have 700 companies building 700 types of software, it's going to be a mess.
Craig Fuhr (07:57)
Mm-hmm.
Scott (08:15)
So, she essentially asked me if I wanted to be the guinea pig for this and I'm on my own and they would only let me use one of five developers, or five developers, the entire country that they let touch the data. One happened to be here in Denver and we started messing around with it. So, you know, fast forward about six, seven years, because initially I was doing it just to help clients and, you know, to buy my own properties. And then we started hitting some jackpots with some algorithms where it was pretty clear that we could help a lot of people.
And, you know, everybody knows that working with MLS is a huge pain and that trying to find deals off that as a pain. As a matter of fact, most people we talk to or have talked to over the years or the decade plus doing this, they don't think you can find a deal on the MLS. That's like a standard, standard sort of narrative in this world that there are no deals on the MLS. Yeah, yeah. And I, uh,
Craig Fuhr (09:04)
It's the ultimate needle in a haystack, right?
Scott (09:09)
I had to basically convince Jack that wasn't true when I first had a conversation with him. And yeah, it was, well, proof's in the pudding, right? So you just, here's the software and figure it out, right? And there they are, right? So anyways, we have access to all of the data. So being able to just compare any market and say how many are happening off market versus on market, I think people will be very surprised. And we can dig into that a little bit, but to wrap up the story, essentially what happened was we...
Craig Fuhr (09:15)
That had to be fun.
Scott (09:38)
We were doing things like automated valuation models, which everybody knows what those are, especially on this podcast, so the more educated investor. And honestly, they just didn't work. So it was producing so many false negatives and false positives, right? That it just, it was riding around the wall was, this isn't going to work because you can go say there's a hundred deals and 50 of them aren't, nobody's going to use your software.
So it was another pivot point where I was really thinking that this isn't going to work. I'm not going to produce a product that 50% is not right. So what ended up happening is just had an epiphany one day because the more data we got, the more we could do. And I started working with our dev team, which at the time was one guy working part time, which is great. Yeah, the one guy working part time who, by the way, his name is Doug Hayes. And without that guy, none of this would have happened.
Craig Fuhr (10:26)
right? The team.
Scott (10:34)
He, you know, is one of the, you got to get lucky a lot of times when you're building businesses like this. And yeah, yeah. Oh no, there's more, there's more than that.
Craig Fuhr (10:39)
It sounds like you've been lucky at least twice. First of all, you got the whole you got the holy grail of getting a being able to look in under the hood of MLS data, which I know Jack has been salivating over for, you know, a long time, which many investors have. And so just to make that one phone call that worked out for you is shocking, frankly. But yeah, tell us more about Doug, Doug Hayes.
Scott (10:52)
Ha ha ha.
Yeah, and that, yeah, yeah. So Doug, you know, I call him the genius, right? So it was like, just somebody introduced me to him. And, you know, I said, can you do this and that? And Doug's great, cause anything you say, he's like, yeah, I can do that. Yeah, I can do that. It's always yes, right? And he actually can. And you know, one of the algorithms, as a matter of fact, we were working on was tracking investor activity, right? So I just woke up one day and I was like, man, can we track all the investors in the country and what they're doing?
Craig Fuhr (11:15)
And he actually can, which is even better, right?
Scott (11:29)
So I got him on the phone and this is typical Doug. I was like, hey, can you run an algorithm? Just like find everybody who did a fix and flip in the U S right. And we already had sort of what the parameters, what a fix and flip is and what we're looking for. And as I'm sitting there talking to him, he's typing and he's like, done. I was like, what? You did it that fast? So, you know, I mean, it requires massive amounts of data and already wired together. But I said, show me the results. So he's like, they're in the, they're in the software. Right. So I looked it up and no kidding. We could track every investment fix and flip.
every fix and flip in the country in real time. And that was when the light bulb went off because essentially if we know what everybody's doing in real time, then we can identify properties that match it. And that's where this whole thing came from. So about 2015, 16, that's when we created a patent, put it in a patent office and called comparative search. So essentially we track all investment types in the US.
and we find similar deals in real time. And that's, you know, the 30,000 foot view. There's a lot of details that go into that, but essentially that's the nuts and bolts.
Jack BeVier (12:39)
Yeah. So just a couple of things that like kind of blew my mind talking to Scott about this. Cause yeah, back in 2009 to 2013, 14, 15, I was, that was my, that was my cadence, right? I'd wake up in the morning, I'd get my, my little automated search report and I was using dumb stuff like, you know, act, you know, list price is less than $200,000 or, you know, like hacks, right? To try to figure out good deals. And so
One thing that I'll that privy has figured out that really kind of, you know, was a light bulb for me is that they've been able to enable that deal searching aspect in higher price points and broader areas. So it's made that coming through the MLS much more efficient, something like I would, I would focus on the lower price points because when I, when I was searching the MLS, because I'd it would be because you know, well if I, if I look through 10 new listings, I might find a
you know, a house or two that I wanted to go look at. And then I'd call and I get the lockbox combinations and like I put together, you know, 25 houses and I'd get in my car and I'd drive around, come back home, make, you know, make 15 offers and might get a deal. You know, that was kind of like how we were buying houses back in the, after the great recession. Um, but I always, like you said, uh, it's gotta, I always found it to be a very tedious process. It was very manual and
Craig Fuhr (13:51)
Mm-hmm.
Jack BeVier (14:02)
Now it was kind of a competitive advantage, right? In that you like had to know that street and like the better you knew the neighborhoods, the more the, you know, the better of an edge you had over all the other investors that you were competing with. Um, but so like, you know, based off of like neighborhood knowledge and just pure work ethic, you could like out-compete other people. But man, after doing that for five plus years, like I was, I was, you know, I got, I was getting tired of doing it. And so
Craig Fuhr (14:18)
Mm.
Huh.
Jack BeVier (14:29)
And the MLS is getting competitive, more and more competitive as REO property inventories decline and more, there's more investor activity. And so the MLS for me, at least from my experience buying houses, the MLS was like the honey pot in 2009, and then there was another probably like, you know, 2011, 2012 point in time where it was another like phenomenal time to buy off MLS and then it's just gotten harder and harder and harder and harder.
Craig Fuhr (14:45)
Mm.
Jack BeVier (14:57)
to the point where by 2016, 17, I was saying publicly that there's no deals on the MLS period, hard stop. And so that's how I came into the conversation with Scott. He's like, hey, I got this MLS platform and it's really cool. It helps you find deals in the MLS. And I'm like, well, that's not a thing. So like, but in all seriousness, and he's like completely won me over on this now, right? So like I'm a complete, now I'm an evangelist, right? Like
Scott (15:14)
He really was.
Craig Fuhr (15:14)
Ha ha
Yeah.
Jack BeVier (15:26)
And to be clear to all the listeners, we have no association with privy whatsoever. There's no like affiliation. This is, we're trying to just bring cool content that we think is helpful for active real estate investors. That'll be helpful for your guys' businesses. And this is just one of those things. And, um, I was the biggest skeptic on this, on the whole thesis behind, behind this, and now I'm looking at it every day, uh, and when we're using the, the software actively, so that that's why Scott's here is to, to help.
educate everybody else on a phenomenal tool that's available nationwide and really makes the MLS a source, in my mind, a source again, at least for me, for finding deals.
Craig Fuhr (16:09)
Yeah, I'll jump into all of our questions for you in a second. But I'll just piggyback on to what Jack was saying in terms of the experience there. So one really had to know the neighborhoods to understand, you know, what the value of the neighborhoods were so that if you set up that minus $200,000 search didn't necessarily mean it was going to be a great deal. It just meant that it was probably going to be priced closer to a deal than what you know,
It was great for finding spreads. Jack, remember when we used to do like remarks searches as well, you know, you'd set up this big long chain of, you know, motivated seller, fire, you know, mold, water damage and all those things that you put into the search just, yes. Yeah, just hoping that you didn't necessarily mean that they would be motivated, but it was perhaps a sign. And boy, that was super tedious if you were trying to.
Jack BeVier (16:52)
Do not enter.
Scott (16:53)
T-TLC. TLC is my favorite. Just needs a little TLC. That is trash. Yup.
Craig Fuhr (17:05)
You know, Maryland is a comparatively very small state, but it's broken up into many, many neighborhoods that you'd have to know the values of. And that was really, for me, the one benefit of the MLS. But yeah, it was a very large mining operation that just became more and more difficult as years progressed after the recession. Yeah.
Jack BeVier (17:21)
Hey Scott, talk to me about...
Scott (17:28)
Yeah, and to add a little color to that, that's exactly right. So back in the day, they used to tell people, well, they still do, you know, find your niche area and master it. They want you to know every single, you know, any educator, you know, throughout the years, as you grow and you learn, you're like, oh, niche area, niche area, niche area. We've completely blown that up. So it's with our software, when you're tracking every investor in the country, you can do some pretty amazing things, such as you can go to Chicago and say, show me the hottest area to buy and fix and flip.
We'll show you everybody who did a fix and flip in the last year in one second. Right. And you put them into clusters and where, where the biggest cluster is, is where the hottest areas of your fix and flips is period. Right. And that's, you know, that's sort of you getting local knowledge in real time. And, you know, we talk about once you go into those clusters and you see these fix and flips, we'll show you what they paid for it, what they sold it for, how long it took.
we'll show you before and after pictures of what they did on the construction level, which is a total game changer, and being able to have you get up to speed at what's happening in any square inch of the country in real time. I'm a big proponent of saying with this data, I know more in a couple of minutes than the people who have actually been flipping in that neighborhood for 20 years. And so when you say
you know, niche area, we just made the whole country your niche area. And it really does work that well because it's not an automated valuation model. It's based on people actually doing these deals.
Craig Fuhr (18:57)
Let's get back to the story though, Jack, because we've got plenty of time here. And I'm really anxious to hear how you went from, you know, basically access to one MLS system. And I'm assuming that, you know, they're not sending you a spreadsheet, they're giving you, you know, links with an API into the data, correct? At that time.
Scott (19:15)
Yeah, well, no, they, yeah, well, sort of. So you get more of like the raw data, right? And you sort of, they send you like updates and MLSs are great because they update every 15 minutes. Right? So that's, you know, as fast as you probably need to have happen. But getting those data contracts is not easy. They didn't, you don't just walk in and say, hey, I want data and here you go. Where we started and where we are today still is, you know, we, we're,
Craig Fuhr (19:27)
Mm-hmm.
Ah.
Scott (19:44)
big proponents of the real estate agents. And I just could hear your whole audience just cringe a little bit. But the deal is, yeah, it is. And the deal is we have a soft spot for real estate agents. One of the things we know is exactly what happened to me is that the tools available to them to be able to help real estate investors out or even educate themselves on the real estate market just don't really exist. So when you go to an agent and say, hey, help me find a deal.
Craig Fuhr (19:52)
It's a love-hate relationship.
Scott (20:13)
They, their, their action, maybe they showed or not, but inside they're going, Oh, great. Now I have to go search the entire MLS and have to, you know, do comps and run comps for this person and try to help them to decipher what a deal is when they don't have access to the tools, they need to do that very efficiently. Um, and it's, this started with trying to help myself as an agent do this better. And for the first five, six, seven years, we only sold this software to real estate agents to help.
And that was an MLS thing where, you know, compliance with MLS was extremely tight and extremely difficult. And it's kind of like, you have to show up and show them how you're going to help their community of real estate agents. And, you know, the software is designed to help real estate agents do what investors should or want them to do, which is, you know, find, analyze, and track real estate investment markets in real time and bring valuable opportunities to their clients.
Um, so we, we use the term a lot of helping agents become trusted advisors. Right. So it's like, if you're going to invest in the stock market, you have somebody to help you do that. Right. And that's, that's where we're headed. It was trying to get agents to the next level. And so with working with agents is how we were able to work with MLS.
Craig Fuhr (21:30)
That's one. That's great. And so initially, you're saying that that's really what the that's all that the user base was, was just realtors, or how soon did you then transition to making it available to investors?
Scott (21:45)
It was seven years into it before we did that. Yeah, and the agents, so how you would use it is you hook up with an agent who has real estate investing experience. And imagine like the scenario I was painting with in Chicago where I can figure out Chicago's market in a couple of minutes, that's what happens to an agent. So an agent, a client shows up and says, hey, can I buy a fix and flip in whatever zip code? They don't know everything that's happening in that zip code in real time. They need to go look it up.
If they're using the MLS to do that, it's going to be a problem. So they're, you know, you're going to spin wheels. They're going to try their best to bring you a good deal. And if it doesn't work out, they got to go back to the drawing board and they're spending hours and hours and hours to do this as opposed to going, here's the analysis and that entire zip code. Everybody has ever done a deal. Here's what you should expect to pay to sell for construction level. It changes the game for everyone.
Craig Fuhr (22:39)
Yeah, I think that part of approaching real realtor's for potential referral deals is that you often have to train them extensively on one what a deal looks like, you know, to how to use the MLS to even do that. And what I found was even the most eager, hardworking realtor
grows pretty tired of that pretty quickly. They send you over basically a search that they set up for, just like they would be setting up for a homeowner. Most of the properties that they send over to you are never going to be deals. And you tell them that and they're, okay, we'll refine the search. And then about three weeks into the process, you find that they've completely lost any interest in trying to help you because it can be a very frustrating process. And I love the fact that your software sort of opens up a whole new world to them.
Scott (23:27)
Hehehe
Craig Fuhr (23:34)
That's great. Go ahead, Jack.
Scott (23:35)
Yeah, that's, you know, it's one of those things where, you know, when you build any sort of company, you have to see a need. And you know, the need was the writing was on the wall that I needed it personally to help my clients. So initially, it was designed to do that. The algorithms, as we got more data and better algorithms, it's pretty clear that there's a need for.
the real estate investors themselves to be able to analyze and pull comps and do things. But the relationship, if you're working with a trusted advisor as a real estate agent knows what they're doing with a software like this, the efficiencies go through the roof.
Craig Fuhr (24:11)
Let's jump into some of the tech side of it and some of the things you mentioned before we hit the go button today. But just to give our obviously we have folks listening from all over the nation. Just to give folks an idea your the product is available. I read on your website about 97% of the markets in the country. Currently, is that correct.
Scott (24:32)
Yeah, so we have multiple data feeds running into this. So we have MLS, direct MLS is the best data we can get, and also the hardest to get. And that's a differentiator between us and any other product out there in this space is that we have direct. And we're direct to 80% coverage of the US, and that's based on population and actual real estate listings. The rest of the 20% is pretty rural after that. So we went from the biggest areas down.
Um, but we still have coverage in those areas through third party listing data providers, but it's not the same. It's, it's not updated every 15 minutes. There's not, you know, photos. So the before and after isn't going to be the same. However, being able to identify all the fix and flips that happen, all the long term rentals that happen to still, still works the same. Um, but you know, as a company growing, like, you know, we aspire to have 100% coverage, but.
You know, it's interesting that the number of MLSs that cover 80% and then it's five times as many cover the rest of the 20%. So you look at some of these MLSs where the listing total is 27 listings where, you know, it costs the same, it's the same amount of work to negotiate and get it set up. We're just, you know, not quite there capacity wise to be able to handle something like that.
Craig Fuhr (25:36)
Mm-hmm.
Sure.
Jack BeVier (25:51)
By the way, I think this is a huge deal in terms of like how cool the software is because like, I'm all right, you know, I want to flip in my backyard. Probably the first thing I do is go get my license so that I have access to MLS data because why would I want an information disadvantage over the rest of the market? So like that was like the first thing I did, right? Is I go get my real estate license so that I can have the same access to data as anybody else out there. Well, if you're like, if I live in Maryland and, you know, and for
Craig Fuhr (26:14)
Mm-hmm.
Jack BeVier (26:20)
I'm making this up, but like, and perhaps inventory is getting a little tight or, uh, you know, I want to like, you know, look, look into a different market market. And I've decided that, um, you know, I've decided that South Carolina is somewhere that I really want to like pay attention to. Maybe I got a buddy down there and I want to start paying attention to that market. Well, I'm going to, I'm going to, I have to go down and go get my real estate license in South Carolina, hang my license somewhere, join the board of realtors down there, like those barriers to entry to even monitoring.
what's going on in another market, prevent, I think most folks from doing it at all, right? They just say like, ah, you know, like, I know, I'm just going to do what I know how to do because I don't want to pay any dumb tax. Like, I'll just, you know, stay what I'm doing. And what privy allows folks to do is you don't have to do any of that. You can log into the software and start monitoring what's going on in those markets and specifically monitoring the aspect of those markets that you care about, which is like, Hey, who's making money? How are people making money?
in Charleston, right? Like show me what the flips look like in Charleston. If I'm downtown, if I'm out in the suburbs a little bit, if I'm, if I'm down at Folly beach, like, you know, and you can get a sense of the, you know, seeing investors go in and out of deals in places where you don't live. And it makes it so easy to do that. And you don't have any of those barriers to entry anymore for monitoring what's going on. So if an investor's thinking about their, you know, they're, they're either
actively looking to go into another market or thinking about market selection, and they want to see what it takes to compete for flips in particular markets. The whole country is now our oyster from an information point of view. There's no barriers to entry anymore for understanding what any flipping market in the country looks like. And you'll get real-time notifications every day for the searches you set up.
get in their profile of what you think, what a new active listing needs to look like for you to want to be aware of it. You then just start getting email notifications every day. And so you can start doing that legwork to figure out like, hey, how easy is it gonna be to find a deal? Who are the folks I should be networking with? All those barriers to entry just come down. Whereas before you had to like physically go there, get the license locally and scroll through.
you know, MLS old school to try and like decipher a market. It's like it's a total like shortcut for me when I was when I was playing with it. And I was just that's all I was having a grand old time doing it right.
Scott (28:56)
Yeah, that's a really good point. And when we first started, we're getting one MLS feed. And honestly, there was no intention of going outside the Denver market. And then once we started getting more feeds, then it became, well, what are we trying to do? Are people really going to buy outside of their home market? That's again, the whole idea you're taught is niche area, niche area, master it, know everything.
Craig Fuhr (29:04)
Hmm.
Scott (29:20)
When the comparative search analysis and tracking investor activity was developed, it made it so easy because really what you're saying, Jack, is exactly what the software is designed to do is to get you educated on anywhere you're interested very, very quickly. It's not always positive. Sometimes you think that you want to do a flip near your house or in your backyard and you realize nobody's done one in 12 months. But you'll realize it in 60 seconds. Not.
Craig Fuhr (29:46)
Hmm.
Scott (29:50)
not weeks and months of researching and trial and error. And when you go to other markets, it's the same thing. Like what are people doing? And when you see what they're paying and what they're selling for, and then the idea of before and after pictures, you can identify really quickly, is this in my wheelhouse? Does this meet my skillset? Is this something my contractors can do? But when you move out of market, it brings up a whole new set of...
I guess, scary, right? Or, you know, who's the contractors in this area? Like, how do I find an agent? And that was something that we built into to be able to filter for experienced agents. And, you know, comparative search for properties, we're also doing that for agents. So, in the very near future, you can do some of it already, but in the very near future, let's say, you know, you wanted to buy an Airbnb in Hermosa Beach, California, right? We'll show you all the Airbnbs in Hermosa Beach, what people paid for them.
you know, what they're renting out, all the data that you can get in some other places. The difference with us though, is we say, okay, that's something that if I could get one of those, I'd be happy with that. Well, we, you simply click one button and we'll show you every property that's available that matches those square footage, bedrooms, bathrooms, same area. And then we'll show you all the agents who actually worked on those Airbnb. So they have the skill set, which is now we help you start building your team like instantly.
So, and those agents, believe me, when you reach out to them and they know what they're doing and they say, I'm an investor, I'm interested in X, Y, and Z, and here's the property and I live in a different state, they're excited about that because you know what you're talking about, they know what they're talking about and you're starting to really collaborate and get things done quickly.
Craig Fuhr (31:34)
One of the things in my experience after the recession was, you know, crisis markets create these great opportunities, especially for those who are quick to jump on them. And I had a guy, a buddy back then, who was almost as smart as Jack Bevere, but not quite, but anyway, this guy would basically just stay up at night. He had access to several of the larger MLSs across the country and he would just stay up at night looking for opportunity markets that had better spreads.
And one of the markets that we found was like in that Phoenix area in the Queen Creek and Apache Junction, Gilbert, all those places that were like pig farms that Lennar and all the major builders were building thousands and thousands of houses prior to the recession. And what we discovered was there was just some tremendous spreads to go in there and buy houses that were built for, you know, in 2003 for 350 grand.
We were buying them for $180,000 at the auctions and then listing them with carpet and paint and granite in a weekend and then put them back out on the market for $275,000 and people thought they were getting a great deal. I think we were very early to the market there. And what we discovered was is that everybody else discovered the same thing about six months in and that opportunity sort of went away. But to Jack's point,
Scott (32:43)
awesome.
Hmm.
Craig Fuhr (32:58)
Just finding the spreads back then was difficult enough. Finding those little niche opportunity markets was difficult enough and daunting enough. But then to be able to know the players in the market, to know the realtor players in the market, to know the investors, to really be able to put together a team before you even bought a plane ticket to go out there is just brilliant. And love to hear about sort of the evolution for you of how that became, you know.
such a part of the robust package that you guys offer in privy. Like it's just it's one thing to have access to the MLS data as we've said it's a whole other thing to be able to put together a team based on all of the data that you're providing Scott.
Scott (33:42)
Yeah, the MLS data obviously plays a role, but if we're just going to take MLS data and put it on our site and just one-to-one build an IDX site and just give people access to it, it's not going to do you that much good. You have to be able to write algorithms and filter it to the needs of your user base. And for us, it's real estate investors and the agents that work with it.
Craig Fuhr (33:54)
Mm.
Scott (34:02)
Um, and things like you said, you know, your friend who had access to four MLSs and he started, you know, writing his sort of own algorithms. We we've heard all a lot throughout this process of people trying to do these things and you know, there are, you know, a lot of, I'm glad somebody finally figured it out kind of thing, cause it does make a difference, but
Craig Fuhr (34:10)
Mm-hmm.
Scott (34:21)
Honestly, it is the investor activity. That's the key piece. And as far as I know, we're the only ones that are doing it. And with the patents now, it's, we're probably the only ones who can do it. Um, and it's just a situation where literally you could go into the site and say, the market I'm interested in is the United States of America. And I want to see everywhere people are flipping house at 50% of ARV. And it'll be, it'll take one second.
to show you every market in the country where they're doing it. And you can drill in to see the actual properties. That, to me, is the type of thing you need to be able to do to get to the point of, is this a deal? Is it not a deal for me? You know, it's classic for us to.
put a deal in front of 10 investors and say, you know, what do you think? And you'll get 10 different answers every time, right? It's, it's, somebody's going to do that. Somebody's going to do that. Well, what's interesting is when you say 50% of ARV, what are these houses look like that they're buying at 50% is it a total, totally trashed, you know, is it burnt down as a meth house or whatever? Um, and you'd be surprised at how many areas aren't like that. They're just, you know, dilapidated neighborhoods. They've been sitting there. Something happened where now people want to live there.
Craig Fuhr (35:09)
Hmm.
Scott (35:33)
and people are running in there at 50% fixing them up. And I think one of the things that I can't stress enough is being able to say these houses that are selling for 50% more of what they paid, the construction level that they're doing, to not have to figure that out and just look at the pictures of what people are doing and hand that to a contractor and say, do this, right? So when you're building or remodeling these houses and you're working with your GCs and contractors
Craig Fuhr (35:33)
Mm.
Scott (36:02)
a lot of back and forth and it's trying to discover you what we should do this and that. When you're doing it out of state, and it can be kind of nerve wracking, but when you see here's 10 examples and they're all selling at the same price and here's exactly what they do and you hand that to your contractor and that's your roadmap, it simplifies it in a major way.
Jack BeVier (36:25)
Yeah, it's a very, it's a really cool. That's a really cool skills or a feature set that you guys have put in there. I also love that like, you can identify the flips. Like when you're doing like in a market analysis, right? Like I could be like, all right, I'm not familiar with this area. Show me all the flips that have happened in this area. And then you can see was that deal sourced on the MLS or was it sourced off market if it was sourced on the MLS, then we've got the before and after so we can do a
just a very direct comparison. And then you can make an assessment like right then and there, like did this person make enough money, right? Like you show me the befores, you show me the afters. I can tell you, yeah, that cost 80 grand, right? And then is the spread 80 or a hundred or 150? And then I can be like, well, that's interesting, right? Like, and it's like, that's such a hack, right? Like that's such a shortcut to being able to evaluate whether there's opportunity in an area as opposed to whether it's just.
Craig Fuhr (36:59)
Mm.
Jack BeVier (37:16)
people who were just, you know, buying houses and doing flips for doing flips sick. They can brag about it at cocktail parties. So like I was, I'm all, I'm a huge fan of being able to like get visibility into the entire transaction so quickly. Um, and then seeing, all right, you know, here's the, here's a, here's that successful flipper. The other flips that that, you know, that individual has done, like, you know, you can use other, you know, you can use data, other data resources to be like, all right, so what other stuff has that person bought?
Scott (37:22)
Hehehe
Jack BeVier (37:45)
figure out who the big flippers are in a particular market. Just as a market intelligence tool, you know, like it's a phenomenal deal sourcing tool, but also for just from a market intelligence point of view, I'm getting a lot of value added on that side of things as well.
Scott (38:01)
Yeah, when you talk about, you know, how different people use it and you know, initially we were sort of convinced that this is sophisticated stuff and only the best of the best are going to be able to do that. Right. Um, and now we've sort of shifted where there's, you know, how to beginners, first timers use our software. And it's just the education piece, like them knowing what other investors are doing and getting comfortable with, you know, this is what it takes.
is massive because right now the real estate investing education out there, it's really about, you know, that space is a little, well, it's called interesting, right? Or everybody has an idea. This is how you do it, period. Right. And then you follow along and you go try to mimic it. But being able to show that this is what people are actually doing. That's the education piece. Right. And, you know, and as fun as it is, or I mean, as useful as it is, and you have that additional data sets and there's a lot of things coming down the pike.
You know, we talk about, you know, what's next for privy and we'll do, you know, some minutes into that in a minute. But, you know, it's also just fun to see what other markets are like. For example, we go to California and you see people buying a total, you know, I don't know, 800 square foot ranch for a million dollars and flipping it for 8 million bucks in 120 days. You know, like what in the, what in the hell? You're right. Like this is real. Like people are actually doing these things.
Craig Fuhr (39:19)
Mm.
Scott (39:25)
I like to say like every one of these is like a mini home and garden TV show, like flip this house, right? Like every single one, there's all the details, the photos and how fast it happened. It's, it's pretty interesting. You know, it's like you said, Jack, where you're, you're just in there like learning and having fun with it. And, uh, you know, that's, that's to me, if you can make, if you can educate people in a, in a very quick determined way, um, and make it fun, you win.
Like that's how this works.
Jack BeVier (39:57)
Yeah, I love getting the I love getting the alerts every morning. And like, you know, it's now part of my routine. And instead of it taking me two hours, it takes me, you know, 10 minutes. And I'm getting all and getting alerts where I click on each one and I'm like, deal. Eh, maybe not. But I get why it's in there. Deal. Eh, maybe not. But like, I'm like three out of five. Like that's ridiculous. Right? Like that from a hit rate point of view, I was really, I was, you know, that, that for me was like, that's where the, that's where the
That was my, where my last piece of skepticism, you know, was going to be, was like, all right, cool. I've got some alerts, but am I going to get a little dopamine rush when I click on this thing? And now I click on it every morning because I get a little dopamine rush every time because I'm like money, like maybe money, maybe money. No, maybe money, like three out of five links, maybe money. That's like, yeah, I'm clicking on that email every morning. Uh, so yeah, I've had a lot of fun with that.
Scott (40:28)
Hehehe
Hahaha
Yeah, I think, yeah, that fun factor, it is the education piece, right? So you're saying, you're getting educated every time you click on one of those. So, you know, what's happening, what are people doing? You know, what's exciting? The fact that you get some dope, it mean hits and excited about it without having to filter through the entire universe of data to get there is key. But I will say, you know, these other markets, you know, we talked a little, you mentioned a little bit about.
getting these emails and getting these properties and just add a little color to that for your audience that essentially what you're doing, and it's not all deals, right? It's not all, hey, just send me all the good deals. And if you know an area and you're saying, this is my buy box, you can totally enter your buy box and it will send you what you want. But for new areas to track investor activity,
is key. So you can go to Charlotte, North Carolina, if you've not invested there before and set up a search that says, show me every time somebody successfully flips a house. And in your inbox, it'll say, here's three investors that just flipped a house. And you pull them up and it's a CMA, but it's live. So the data in there is active. So meaning if you pull it up today, it's going to be one thing. If you pull it up a year from now,
Craig Fuhr (41:46)
Hmm.
Scott (42:04)
Whatever happened in that market, we'll track it and it'll be live. So we give those out as like little, you know, data sets for people to just monitor their own portfolio and we can get into that in a minute, but being able to say, this is what's happening in this market in real time is how you get educated in these markets piece by piece without this brain damage of trying to figure out everything.
Craig Fuhr (42:26)
So we're talking with Scott Fahl, CEO of Privy. I've heard people online call it the MLS on steroids. I don't know if you guys refer to it around the office like that, Scott, but great conversation to start off just sort of giving the overview of the features and the benefits. Why don't we end this episode now, Jack, and we'll jump in on the next episode with Scott. We'll get into the technology of it, ask him a whole bunch of questions about what's coming down the pike.
Scott (42:35)
hehe
Craig Fuhr (42:55)
and I hope everyone tunes in for that. So this is Real Investor Radio. I'm Craig Fuel with Jack Bevere, and we'll come back in just a second with Scott Fahl