The Future of Housing: Real Estate Innovation and AI Impact on Buying and Selling

00:00:12 - Mike Mills
Well, hello out there to all you resilient real estate professionals. So right now, we are at an unprecedented time, okay, for the real estate industry, especially so sales volumes are down, rates are up, prices are up, inventories low. To say that things are not going wonderful in the real estate industry right now would be a little bit of understand, especially now because it's also raining lawsuits. But not to worry. I'm here to help you sort through all the chaos and find opportunity to continue to survive and thrive in this business that we all know and love. This is Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance podcast, and I'm your host, Mike Mills, a North Texas mortgage banker with Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance. And when I'm not sharing my warp sense of reality on the Internet, my team and I are helping your clients buy and refinance their homes. And I must say, we are pretty good at. So we love referrals, of course. But if you're hearing this and you're a real estate professional and you have ever had any questions about the mortgage process or just need help solving a few problems, please feel free to give me a call. I love doing this podcast, but I love helping solve difficult loan problems even more. So reach out and say, hi. I'm always happy to help. So today, our episode is one that some of our audience might not like too much. Because today we are talking to a brilliant entrepreneur who has a new take on how to help buyers and sellers manage the real estate transaction. And I'm sorry to say, it doesn't really involve realtors. So, Mike, you ask, why in the hell are you raining on our realtor parade? Well, this market is evolving daily, and anytime significant shifts in any industry occur, there will always be new technologies and new companies and new ways of doing business that pop up to fill a perceived gap in the market. And if you want to have success in this changing landscape, you need to be aware of what these new platforms offer and how it can impact your business. And our guest today is spearheading one of the many new companies looking to gain market share. But before we get started, please help us win the algorithm game a little bit like subscribe Comment share the episode, a two second click makes a world of difference in our ability to continue to grow our audience and bring you more and more content each week to keep you on the cutting edge of the industry. So please share this with your network. I would greatly appreciate it. All right, today we welcome to the show the CEO of Galleon. Galleon is a residential real estate marketplace where customers can list, browse and purchase homes not listed on the MLS. Their mission is to expand residential, the residential real estate inventory. Excuse me. Their mission is to expand residential real estate inventory, simplify the transaction, and empower customers to purchase and sell homes on their terms. So this tech trailblazer knows her stuff. And after we spoke, prior to getting on the show, she made me realize how far down the ladder of intelligence I really was. And she's here to share her mind with us and an innovative platform with us. So please do me a favor and welcome Amanda Orson to the podcast. Hello, Amanda. Let me put you up on a screen here. Boom. How you doing?

00:03:06 - Amanda Orson
Great. Thank you so much for having me on.

00:03:08 - Mike Mills
Thank you. When we spoke last time, when we first met each other, I left the conversation feeling like that I really needed to read more. I didn't feel like there was a few things you were talking about. And I was like, wait a minute, I got to figure out what she just said. Because when it comes to real estate, I kind of know my business. When it comes to some of the tech side of things and a little bit of the, I guess you would call it venture capital and developing a company, that's where I'm at, operating in a severe deficit. My hope is I get to learn a lot from you today to find out what you guys are doing. But I do ask a favor. You're going to maybe have to dumb it down to a 6th grade level for me so I can understand exactly how you put all this stuff together and what the motivations behind it are, because sometimes my brain doesn't quite work as fast as it should. But I really appreciate you being here. Like I said in the beginning, I think there's going to be a few people that listen to this, that maybe aren't real fired up, that I would have the enemy, you know, come on and tell us what, what they're doing out there. But I don't look at you as the enemy. I look at you as somebody that is trying to find an opportunity in the market and, and fill that opportunity. And I think that, you know, for my audience in particular, you know, I think that's a good lesson to learn because just because things are changing, which they are, it does not mean that there's not opportunity to be had for anybody that's willing to put the time in and work and find it. And so, so what I want to find out from you to start with is tell us a little bit about galleon, what it is and kind of how you came up with the concept and why you feel like right now, especially, is a good time to get it going?

00:04:39 - Amanda Orson
Sure. Absolutely. One, thank you. You were way too generous with your characterization. I will say not dumbing it down. I'm going to try and speak slower. I am both from New Jersey and highly caffeinated, so I tend to go very fast.

00:04:51 - Mike Mills
Good.

00:04:52 - Amanda Orson
Galleon from inception has been focused on the individual, the individual home buyer and home seller. And I would say that's our biggest market difference versus a brokerage or an individual real estate agent or another aggregator that you might find on the web. You did a really good job of introducing who we are and what we do. But at its high level right now, we are a startup. We're only eight months old, and we are very, very, very early in our own journey. What we're doing is aggregating an off market marketplace, for lack of a better way to describe it. I recognize that's a little bit redundant, because we believe that in order to intuit the value, the ability to transact on your own terms, it needs to be very early on. And as we were digging into, is this the problem that the startup team behind Galleon, myself and three other people that were the initial core founding team came up with? Is this something we want to invest the next ten years of our lives into? We knew that it had to be a big problem, and it had to be something whose time was right. And we just took a look, and the further down the rabbit hole we went, the the more this idea became very obvious. Right in background. We're fintech based. All of us have previously worked in other financial technology companies. For those that don't know that term, one of us has previously worked@better.com. Dot. It's a fintech savvy team. The real estate idea was not native to the team per se, but it was born of personal experience. I have a few homes, and I kept getting flyers and cold texts and all the other things. Anybody who has rental properties certainly gets those. Anybody who has a home in a neighborhood that's very attractive right now is certainly getting this. And from a marketing perspective, I was looking at this and going, okay, you're not doing this if there's not a return on ad spend. So I started digging a little bit more and realized that there was like 690,000 homes on the market, but there were four, excuse me, 145 million single family housing units defined by single family homes and condominiums in the United States. So that's like, not 0.5%.

00:06:52 - Mike Mills
Very small percentage.

00:06:53 - Amanda Orson
Such a small percentage of the inventory. But we all know that that's not true. We all know that there are pocket listings. We all know that there are off market listings. We all know people that have transacted off market. And I just thought to myself, whenever there's this level of disaggregation, it never benefits the individual home buyer or home seller. Always, always benefits whoever has that unique insight. Yeah, exactly. The information asymmetry always benefits the person that's holding more of the money in their own pocket.

00:07:23 - Mike Mills
Well, I mean, and that's at the root of a lot of this stuff that's going on right now is, you know, it's access to information. Right. That's always been kind of, you know, that's where Zillow had a hard time penetrating the real estate market because the access to the listings and the information that was available was held within the MLS. And the only way to be a member of the MLS was to hold a real estate license or a brokerage license. And so, you know, that was a difficult thing that they figured their way around. I mean, initially they were paying nar, you know, to get access to it in the beginning. And then as that relationship fell apart, I don't know the details of how all that changed from there. But then they went into becoming their own brokerage and that was how they got direct access to the information. So I believe access to information is at the core of where all of these difficulties changes, whatever you want to call it, have come from. You can talk about commissions and all that. That obviously plays a role, but it is the who has direct access information. And especially these days with the Internet in its present form and how it exists, information is the key to everything. And so if you have that information, you have access to people that are willing to do it, then that puts a, that gives you a nice niche that you can fit into because everybody wants to see what's out there and not have a barrier of paywall behind trying to get in there.

00:08:38 - Amanda Orson
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. One of the things that, again, from personal experience, I sold a house back in 2015 without a real estate agent by using one of these aggregators. At the time, there was a platform on Zillow that since been deprecated called make me move. And I wasn't really trying to sell the house. I just wanted to kind of see because we had had an exit. We had had an exit in the business that I was working at at the time. I knew that I wasn't going to be able to build another company and be called northwestern Gilmore Girls, Connecticut.

00:09:10 - Mike Mills
So, curious how your brain works on that. Are you? Because you're obviously, if you're in fintech, you've been in this world a long time. Do you try stuff out that is kind of a newer thing, you know, whether it be selling a house or buying whatever it is, that's a kind of a new, new tech platform to just say, like, let's see how this works. Let me just check it out and just kind of, you know, like a little research. Research and development or something.

00:09:34 - Amanda Orson
I would say that I'm definitely an early adopter for most technologies. I mean, I don't have Google and I don't have a humane AI pin, but generally speaking, yeah, anecdotally, I'm definitely an early adopter. Yeah. Humane.

00:09:45 - Mike Mills
I don't know. I don't know. What is that?

00:09:48 - Amanda Orson
That's a company that currently had a bad review. We're getting really off track, but a bad review from a very big influencer this week. They've raised a ton of money.

00:09:56 - Mike Mills
Gotcha. Gotcha.

00:09:57 - Amanda Orson
Bad news for them, but bad news for them.

00:10:00 - Mike Mills
So you were trying to list your house on the zillow site that moved on, and then what was your experience with that?

00:10:06 - Amanda Orson
Yeah, my experience was the exact opposite of the one where I had just sold the prior home I had sold through a real estate agent. And that was the first home that I'd ever sold. We had done got the studs fix and flip. Over the course of two years, they go to live in fix and flip, and we paid 9% all in, which completely wiped out all of the profits. It was extremely painful experience, and I was thinking, okay, well, we're not going to stay in this great bucolic Gilmore girls corner of northwestern Connecticut. We have to go somewhere because they have to build another company. Where is that going to be? And there was no timetable for it. I didn't have to move. So I just listed it to kind of see what would happen. Into my great surprise, as we listed on a Thursday, had a whole bunch of inquiries on a Friday. I had two different open houses. And I now have words for what I was doing. I was basically looking people up before I let them in my house. That's what we would call KYC or know your customer today. But I let people into the house. We had multiple full price offers. One was full price, all cash, and I was under contract on Monday. And sort of the light bulb moment for me as a consumer is that I went right back down because Connecticut is one of those states there are 21 in the country that you have to have a real estate agent on the transaction.

00:11:11 - Mike Mills
Are you allowed to sell it without it?

00:11:13 - Amanda Orson
Yeah. And there are, like, it's not the only state like that, but, yeah, I.

00:11:17 - Mike Mills
Was not even aware of that. Um, what? Um, 9% is a lot. So. Especially compared to, like, the standard six that exists right now. Again, good or bad, but why 9%? That seems like a. Is there something in your state in particular that worked out? Was there something additional that happened there? What? What?

00:11:33 - Amanda Orson
No, 6%. Three and three. But then it had the additional 3% of, you know, closing settlement fees and then.

00:11:39 - Mike Mills
Okay, so the overall cost is what you're referring to. Okay. Not the realtor commissions, but just cost. Yes.

00:11:45 - Amanda Orson
Yeah. So we went back down to the real estate attorney who was on the other side of the table when we had purchased that particular house, and I paid $750 and got under contract, and that was it. There was no commission on either side. It was a very clean closing. It was just, it was so obvious to me. And so when we were trying to figure out what it was that this team was going to go and build next, I went looking for this as a human, like, as a consumer who had just was sick and tired of the cold texts and the direct mail and all the other stuff. I just, like, wanted to put my house up somewhere and say, this is the price that I will take, and if you want to buy it, this is my price. It didn't exist. It doesn't exist anywhere on the Internet right now. And I thought, gosh, that's a mess. And the more I dug into it, the more we realized that there were a whole bunch of pending lawsuits. At the time, Citzer had not yet been decided that there was clearly a paucity of inventory. Like, there was a big inventory problem. Interest rates were only increasing. There's just the whole industry needed some WD 40. And I was like, well, you know, supply and demand. If. Let's go, like, do some customer research and figure out how many people have a price in mind. So we began dip. My colleague and I began doing a lot of interviews qualitatively, like, in person, and then quantitatively, by actually commissioning surveys nationwide, each and census or, excuse me, h. Census adjusted to figure out whether or not people would move for the right price, like, whatever that right price was. And we only needed one in every 200 homeowners to be persuadable, to basically double what was on the existing inventory because there's so little on the MLS or on Fred. When we took a look, back in August of last year, we found that that number was closer to one in ten. And in some markets, it was upwards of one in five. We also found that from a price sensitivity analysis, a lot of people would sell for roughly five to 15% over what their estimated home value was, which in the markets that have a lot of demand is about what they were closing at anyway. So it just seemed like it was such a native and obvious untapped opportunity. So our contribution, we hope, to the wider market is to basically aggregate all of these off market listings to encourage people to list and name their price and to put that up because the buyers right now, especially in markets where there is not enough inventory, are hungry for it.

00:14:05 - Mike Mills
Yeah. Yeah, well, and there's, there, I mean, that's most markets right now, unfortunately. I mean, it's, it's, you know, it, uh, there's a lot of people on, you know, on, on Twitter and out there that are. You've been predicting a housing crash for. For five years. And, you know, it's, it's, it's when you argue simple economics of supply and demand, it's just, I don't see where that occurs because you just don't have an environment where you're going to have a bunch of glut of inventory hit the market because builders are, you know, they're building, but they are certainly not building at an exceptional pace. And they've actually scaled back a little bit of the, you know, the last couple of months, the new home starts have declined because of the uncertainty of where kind of things are headed overall. And then you have the lock in effect that takes place for people. You know, if they have 4% or less as an interest rate, unless they absolutely have to move, they're not moving. You still have people that are going to buy and sell because they don't have a choice. They're changing jobs. They have to pick better schools, you know, they're tired of renting. And then you have the other side of it where, you know, you're looking a lot of the multifamily between the apartments and multi unit properties. I don't want to say they're overbuilt, but to a certain extent they are. And so you're seeing rental prices come down quite a bit. We don't. We're still not seeing it fully in the inflation data because it's such a lagging number that comes, you know, because it's all based off of current contracts and new contract signs. So in order for the market to shift, overall, it can take a few months for that to occur, so, but it's still there. And when you start seeing these new contracts come up and these rent prices a little bit lower, well, the, the apartment complex building and the multi unit building has, I mean, hasn't come to a complete halt, but it stopped. And so the availability of housing is starting to get even tighter and tighter and tighter. And as time goes on, this is going to get nothing. But I don't see a world in which it just doesn't get exacerbated. So having, you know, having that be the environment that we're in, then it becomes okay. If things are so incredibly unaffordable, which they are, and they've been that way for a period of time, at least for the average american, then you have to figure out where to save money and, you know, to be able to afford to do anything. And if we get to a place which, you know, based off of what these lawsuits are, you know, projecting at this point, we'll see nothing's definitive yet. But, you know, there is very likely a world in which a buyer's agent, for example, and their role could be severely diminished because of the inability for the seller or lack of desire for the seller to sell. Because if there's high demand, then the seller doesn't have to pay a buyer agent if they don't want to, you know, and you're seeing that happen in a lot of markets right now. Whether or not it's prevalent or not, it's happening. So when you guys look in an environment like that and you come along with your, you know, with your platform, where do you see the biggest opportunities? Are you looking at particular markets to start and really put your money towards, or are you trying to start on a nationwide scale? Like, what is the plan to kind of roll this out over time to where, you know, to make that? Because you're going to have to go directly to the consumer so they're aware of it. So how are you guys trying to tackle that problem?

00:17:02 - Amanda Orson
Sure. So in January, we actually opened the marketplace up. And anybody can come in and list right now the first key unlock to what we're actually developing in beta. It looks very simple, but the development work on the backend is non trivial. With the marketplace, a seller, anybody that actually owns their home can list their home in two minutes. If you have a price in mind and one photo, you bring your address. We're populating all of the details about your house and background, including square footage, acreage, beds, baths, all that you bring one photo. We're actually running KYC on the back end to make sure that you are associated with the property in question. And then we're actually populating the first seller's description or the description of the property that you would see on any mass aggregator by Agi. You have the ability to edit that as you want, but the net of it is that you can basically impulsively say, look, I'm sick and tired of getting direct mail or cold text, here's my price and you can list it in two minutes. That's already available, that's nationwide. What we're going to start focusing on is actually developing out the Dallas Fort Worth Metro. And that's going to be the place where we focus on one to one aggregating some of this off market inventory that we already know exists and then socializing that there is more inventory than what you're currently seeing on the MLS available for buyers. That's going to be the focus for the next several months, probably for the rest of the year. We really want to prove the concept out in one individual market.

00:18:31 - Mike Mills
So, so this market is pretty much one of your test markets. Then where I'm at it is. Okay. All right. So are you at least in the beginning, are you, do you feel like you're primarily targeting sellers or are you, I mean I know you had the way you explained it. I think it can go both directions. But I know a lot of times with these launches, you know, you want to get as specific as you can because I assume you have more traction that way. So are you, are you thinking more on the seller side and that's where you're focusing on, or are you still trying to balance between the two?

00:18:59 - Amanda Orson
So from like the marketplace, any marketplace, and I've done a couple of these now, always has a hard side. And our initial hypothesis was that the sell side would be the hard side and we found that's not the case. Getting listings is actually pretty easy. We sent out a tweet and had something like 450. So that part's not hard. The hard part is socializing it to the buyers. So for us, what we're really focused on are the kinds of buyers that don't need assistance because that's where we think that the core value prop for Galleon is. We're an off market aggregator at the very top of funnel. And what we're actually building in background and we'll deploy in late July, is a transaction tool, a way for you to actually get guided assistance, like a turbotax for real estate to actually do this transaction on your own. That was always our initial thesis. It's what we originally put down on paper back in September of last year that we were going to do. But with the new NAr settlement agreement, where we recognized that the first place of need is going to be on the buy side because a lot of people are just not going to come out of pocket for their buyer's agent. They just won't. Especially the people that have done more than one or two transactions, they're categorically in the, you know, we kind of get what's going on camp. We want to be able to provide something that helps them actually understand where the transaction is happening on a step by step basis and then helps to facilitate some of that documentation. So our navigator product will be coming out this summer, and some of it.

00:20:29 - Mike Mills
Isn'T necessarily that they will or they won't. A lot of cases they can't. You know, they just don't, they don't have the funds to do it. And that's, that that's always the concern on our side, you know, of the businesses, you know, because obviously I'm a lender. And so when you look at, you know, I talk to buyers every day. And so when you talk to them and, you know, these days, obviously with the home prices increasing like they have, there is more issues on debt to income ratios and qualifying levels, especially with taxes going up and insurance going, I mean, insurance has gone through the roof and just everything is being piled upon. But it's not as big of an issue in many cases as the money as the cash that they need to purchase and between the down payment and the closing costs and everything that's involved. And there's a misconception outside the industry a lot of times because I get calls about it all the time, but we want to roll our closing costs into our loan. You can't, you're not allowed to do that. The loan amount can exceed the loan to value threshold for whatever particular product that you're doing now. You can raise interest rates and you can, you know, have seller costs and all that, you know, seller concessions that can offset that. But at the end of the day, cash is a big barrier for people. And when you're going to, if you're going to take a home buyer who's already stressed for cash as it is, and now you're going to layer on top of that that they're going to have to pay their buyer agent or, or may have to, even if they don't absolutely have to, just may have to pay that buyer agent, then that's a, that's going to be a big burden for them. And, you know, I've used the example actually multiple times on the show, just what you just said about the turbotax for real estate, because I do think that based on where things are headed, there is a lane for that. Whether realtors and people in our industry want to believe it or not, or want to realize it or not, it's moving in that direction. But it doesn't mean that there isn't also a lane still for the professional realtor. When you and I first met, and we talked a little bit about this, about you explaining this on the show, um, one of the things I told is, like, you know, I don't know if everybody's gonna be real fired up about me bringing on, you know, the, the enemy here. But, but you also said, like, you're not anti realtor, because you also believe that there's, there is a place for that. So, so give me a little bit of your thought behind that. You know, when you, when you look at and go, here's our lane. But I do believe there's a spot here for realtors. What, what makes you still believe that, too?

00:22:43 - Amanda Orson
I mean, I've bought and sold homes individually, like, as a human with real estate agents multiple times. I recognize their value. I think, and I've been very clear about this for, on Twitter, you can check my receipts from the very beginning, I think that real estate agents provide an absolutely essential service for a lot of people. But a premium, or, excuse me, a bespoke service should command a premium price. Not everybody needs that level of bespoke service in the same way that I think 70% of Americans currently file their own taxes or are using some assistance product like Turbotax or an h and R block, and, like, 30% are currently using a CPA. I don't think that's necessarily the ratio, but just to kind of give you an example that you can take an exceedingly complex document process that involves a lot of money and also some very serious repercussions if you do it wrong. And most Americans are capable of doing this on their own, I think it would just be incredibly ignorant or arrogant or, you know, lacking perspective to believe that every single person who buys and sells a home requires that level of service. Where I think real estate agents will always have a place, first time home buyers, certainly that's just an obvious place where the more, the more that they can actually understand about the process. And actually ask another human being, yeah. What's going on, the better it'll benefit them. I think that there are obvious use cases that will always persist, like out of market moves, special circumstance moves, trying to get into a specific building in a co op in the Upper east side. That will always be a place where you need to use a broker. But that's not everybody. And it's a little bit silly that we continue to transact real estate in the same way that our great grandparents and our great great grandparents did. But we do not transact anything else from travel agency to autos to securities like stocks in the same way that even our parents did.

00:24:51 - Mike Mills
Yeah. Yeah. It's changed a lot, and technology has played a big role in that. And that's, you know, to think in our industry that this, what, this hasn't been moving in that direction, you know, again, would be a little bit naive. And it's, you know, Zillow is a really good example of a company that has been able to come into the market in a way that the people that they are trying to supplant not only supported their, their ability to do so, but then also didn't realize that they were doing it along the way. And, you know, there was always an undertone in our industry as a whole where, you know, you had realtors that would purchase leads from Zillow because they were trying to get business right, and then you had a separate section of the market that would say, why are you guys buying real leads from Zillow? Because they are literally trying to buy and sell homes and cut you out of the transaction and you're funding that for them. But the nature of human beings is, you know, I've got to pay my bills. I've got to take care of my family. And so whatever it is that I need to do to make sure that that happens, if I'm having to buy from this company, I can't look five or ten years down the road and think that they might be, you know, coming for my job. I just have to deal with what's here in front of me right now. And unfortunately, for the average person out there working, that's just what they, that's their reality, that that's what they see every day. So, you know, when, when new technologies approach and start coming in, there's either a fear, oh, my gosh, this is going to destroy us, or this is, oh, this is great for me. And, and it's not always the way it ends up. You know, sometimes that fear isn't actually a bad thing and actually could work to your benefit. And sometimes that thing that you thought was awesome is actually the most detrimental thing that could have happened. So, you know when you guys, when you guys look at how you're handling transactions, right, with, with your company, walk me through what it's like for a buyer on the front end. So if I'm a buyer coming to your site to look at properties that are, that are on there, and I'm assuming you only have off market, right. You don't have access to pull in listings from any other zillow, MLS's or anything like that?

00:26:52 - Amanda Orson
No, no, we don't. And that's by design. So right now, if you express that you're interested in one of the properties on Galleon, we take your information in and then we verify your identity. I think that's just a very basic thing that we, coming from the fintech world, know to be a value add for the entire ecosystem. And we want to make sure that we're matching verified homeowners and verified buyers with each other. But at this point right now, we're hands off. We step out of the transaction. It's entirely between the individual buyer and the individual seller. After that, in the future, what we're actually developing is basically, again, using the turbotex analogy, basically a way for you to sort of walk through the steps of this transaction. And we're building it for single player mode in mind, meaning that it can actually be effectively handholding as you go through the transaction on the buy side. Eventually we'll bring the seller side up and we'll have a way for them to both integrate in the future. If you want to do a transaction completely on Galleon, whether it's from Galleon or not, but it's literally just to provide transparency and control and to have a very clear understanding of where the transaction is in its process, who's waiting on who for what. And eventually with data, we'll be able to provide benchmarking and a lot of things that currently don't exist.

00:28:15 - Mike Mills
Gotcha. So are y'all in works to try to put together or do you have in place so, you know, like from a buyer's agent point of view, if they, if they take on a new client? Well, there's obviously several things to go. We'll take the home search out of it. Let's say they found the house that's there. But then you've got, you know, completing the contract, deciding who's paying the title policy, like in Texas in particular, you know, seller or buyer, if there is a home warranty that's available. And what companies are available to provide home warranties. You have sellers disclosures that you need to check and make sure that everything, the house is in good shape. If you have an inspection, you know, that comes out an inspector that shows up. Because one of the, you know, one of the roles that realtors play in the transaction is they're kind of like the quarterback of the transaction. They are. They are helping you with the lending side of things in at least putting you into some direction and providing you options for people that can help with lending. They're providing options for inspectors. They're providing options for home warranties. You know, they're providing options for, you know, roof inspections to come out for, you know, to make sure the roof is in good shape, all that kind of stuff. So are you kind, are y'all trying to develop something that is somewhat helpful with negotiations, helpful with, you know, in lieu of repairs, that kind of stuff. These referrals out to different services that most homeowners are going to use in a transaction. How are y'all tackling those challenges?

00:29:29 - Amanda Orson
So I think that, to borrow from the football analogy, because it's Texas and I think that it's incredibly appropriate.

00:29:34 - Mike Mills
That's right.

00:29:35 - Amanda Orson
What we're not, we're not seeking to be the quarterback. Instead, what we're doing is giving you the playbook. You are your quarterback. Right. And the playbook on the other side is sort of step by step guidance with Q and a format that's easy to follow and allows you to do an if this, then that on your plays. Like if you're here, then these are the available plays to you and follow it down the transaction.

00:29:59 - Mike Mills
Okay.

00:29:59 - Amanda Orson
Every individual transaction is its own animal. They're all a little bit different in the same way that taxes are all very individual and highly personalized to that individual person's circumstances. All we're doing is providing kind of the checklist, the guidebook, and by actually having the documents in platform, by being able, through open banking platforms, for example, to confirm receipt of escrow, all of the things that we know that we can do from a financial technology point of view that have not yet been widely distributed within real estate will be able to offer a lot more assurance, a lot more transparency, and ultimately, we think, a lot more control that hasn't been there in the buy owner marketplace historically.

00:30:45 - Mike Mills
Okay, so what is the current monetization plan like? How are you guys, you know, obviously you're starting a company, you're not doing it for free. You know, you're not a nonprofit, so, so how are you looking to generate revenue from this? Are you taking percentages, flat fees? Is there a, you know, are you looking into possibly like advertising models where, you know, a lender like me can come on and say, hey, I offer my lender services off this platform to, you know, to reach out to your customers? How are you guys looking to try to monetize it?

00:31:15 - Amanda Orson
On the consumer side, like Turbotax, we envision like a free and then a mid tier where most people end up. And then eventually once we've gone through all of the compliance requirements, we'll actually have something where we probably will bring real estate professionals in for the people that have, I would say, additional questions above and beyond what we've anticipated. That's a day later than now.

00:31:39 - Mike Mills
Sure.

00:31:39 - Amanda Orson
And yes, we'll definitely have a widespread third party marketplace because every single one of these people are going to have to have insurance, mortgage, the whole rigmarole. There's going to be a lot of that. But again, this is something that we need to work through, the respite implications on the other side.

00:31:53 - Mike Mills
Yeah, well, and like you said, I mean, what did you say? You're eight months into this. Like, it's not exactly like this is all figured out.

00:31:59 - Amanda Orson
Very early days, very, very early days.

00:32:01 - Mike Mills
There's always a trial and error on this stuff to see what works and what doesn't. So on the seller side of things, what, you know, what's kind of the playbook for them, how does that look? If I'm coming to try to sell my home, is it very similar? Just step by step follow this process. Is there any additional side? I mean, or even how are you marketing to sellers? Are you calling them on the 1800, say you want to list your home, how are you guys reaching out to them?

00:32:26 - Amanda Orson
Two minutes to listen. That's the big prop. I don't know exactly how long it takes to get a property listed on the MLS, but having done it more than a couple of times, it's a lot longer and it's not an impulsive decision. So as a result, what you see on the MLS is a marketplace of highly motivated sellers. We just think that the market is much larger than the marketplace of highly motivated sellers. We want to be a bit more inclusive. So right now what we're doing is aggregating anybody that currently entertaining an offer or is a buy owner seller on their own and giving them the opportunity to put their home up. There's no days on market, so there's no result in price compression. And I recognize that is a feature, not a bug of the MLS. But we would like to take the other side of that bet because we think that there are a lot of people that have a price in mind and they don't have a reason to move.

00:33:14 - Mike Mills
Okay, so one of the things, if I heard you right again, this is my translating my monkey brain here. So you're saying that there, you took off the days on market feature, so that's not there anymore.

00:33:27 - Amanda Orson
No.

00:33:27 - Mike Mills
Interesting. Okay, well that, and that's always been a big, you know, when you, when you talk to realtors, my wife's a realtor, we have this discussion from time to time. But you know, they go in and sit down with the client and they say, hey, I want to list my property for, you know, $500,000, okay? And the realtor who knows what they're doing and has looked at the marketers, run their cmas, looks at that piece of paper and goes, this says like 460, right. But the seller, there's a disconnect. Right. And so then the realtor has to make a very tough choice because now it's, okay, do I want this listing or do I want to risk making this seller upset because their price is not what the market is currently demanding. Right. And everybody decides differently on how to do that. But that is, that is the decision they have to make. But the repercussions of that is if you choose to accept it and say, okay, I'm going to say we're going to go with what the seller wants, put it at 500,000 and let's see what happens. Well, what happens in the current market is if your house is listed for 500 grand and you don't have showings and you don't have offers and the house has been on the market for two, three, four months or whatever it is, which, you know, days on market right now aren't that long. But let's just assume that that's the case and there are in some individual circumstances. Well then the consumer, now, who's getting access to MLS, who's getting the emails looking on zillow where it says big right there, days on market, 60, 9120, whatever. Well their first thought is either a, I'm going to offer way less if I want this house or b, what's wrong with it? Why, why has nobody purchased it? Right? And that, and those are the two questions that get asked. But if you, you take that out of the equation entirely, I mean, I guess somebody just comes along and says, yeah, I think the house is worth that. I'm willing to pay it because ultimately, I mean, the market decides now their funding obviously is going to, I was thinking something with appraisals, but obviously the, when they get their mortgage, the appraisal will determine that piece. Y'all have any type of, I don't know, warnings to sellers or any, you know, things up front to say, hey, look, you know, I know this is what you want to sell it, someone agrees to it, but, you know, if it doesn't appraise, you know, do you give that kind of guidance at all in that process?

00:35:28 - Amanda Orson
It's definitely something that we're going to have to continue to evolve the customer communications, not only for that reason, but also because there are a lot of individual market dynamics that we will need to be thinking through. So the customer comms piece is going to continue to evolve and it is aggressively evolving right now.

00:35:42 - Mike Mills
How are you guys handling all the regulatory stuff? Because obviously, you know, real estate is extremely regulated and the contracts, you know, are generated now, I guess they're generated by state. So, and if you do, I guess if you're doing for sale by owner, it's, it's kind of like in between each other. So you're not having an intermediary, but is there any challenges that you all had to overcome with that?

00:36:01 - Amanda Orson
So by owner is its own protected class in every state right now, we are just providing the ability to list. There is no listing agreement with Galleon. I think that's, we're going to try and stay intentionally in that lane for as long as possible because there is so much product work that needs to be done on the legal side, just like we did. The team had previously built a consumer financial product, and consumer finance is like the most heavily regulated business you could possibly, or most heavily regulated industry you could possibly build an industry or a business in. It's brutal. It's brutal. It's a patchwork quilt of like 50 state AG's laws and then the CFPB and then depending on what your product construct is, you know, FInra, it's a lot. So it's not to say that real estate is not heavily regulated, but compared to where we have just come from, it is not nearly as heavily regulated as consumer finance. This is where the team actually shines. We've come through financial technology companies. We understand what that means. And it also means that we are working aggressively with what we call real estate product attorneys, attorneys that actually understand this landscape from a compliance regulatory standpoint and specifically in Respa to make sure that we are compliant.

00:37:13 - Mike Mills
Excuse me. So sneeze there. Okay. So my other question then too is, all right, when you look at the landscape as a whole, because obviously, you know, it sounds like this idea that you had come up with and now have brought to fruition was something that occurred before all this lawsuit stuff even happened, because you just saw a place in the market where this could be a need. But since then, you know, probably to your benefit, to some extent, these, these, these commission lawsuits have occurred. These settlements have happened. Again, still not approved yet, but changes are coming, as they say. So what have you been paying attention to? Because I imagine on your side of things, you're paying close attention to this because it's going to impact to some extent, you know, where your business can really fill a need. So are you, you know, are you hearing anything? What is your research showed you where you, where do you think, from your own point of view, what do you think the real estate market looks like in the next twelve months as far as where some of this stuff heads? And I know, you know, you're not an attorney, neither am I. You know, we're just kind of taking wild guesses here, but based off of because, I mean, you're building a business around some possible outcomes to these, you know, these lawsuits. So what are you thinking? You know, the changes come around.

00:38:27 - Amanda Orson
So exactly to your point, when we initially drew the plan up on paper, we knew that there were a lot of lawsuits at the time. I think there were something like seven or eight really big ones, class action or something that was DOJ level, it was pre citzer. So we knew that this was coming. We knew that the market was ripe for it because it is so locked up. What we didn't anticipate was how fast. So we've already been responding aggressively to the changes like the settlement agreement and understanding the implications for buyer's agency that might change from July is why we immediately had to pivot and decide, you know, what, we're going to bring our product navigator to bear, but not a steel with two player, but instead with single player mode and allow buyers to walk through just the buyer's agent side. Because we think that there are going to be a lot of people that are sort of left in the dark that can afford the two to 3% but shouldn't have nothing to go by. And that's an obvious opportunity where we can actually fill a need that the market will have going forward. I know that there's still several over a dozen copycat lawsuits. I don't know what the implications are with the settlement agreement and all the copycat lawsuits at the individual status state level, but there are other lawsuits still pending. And now, of course, the DOJ has gotten the green light to sort of reopen its antitrust inquiry. Honestly, there's a lot going on over there and I don't know which way that's going to change. I just know that there is going to be a space for a company to focus with priority on the individual home buyer and the individual home seller. And that's where we're going to stay. I'm not worried about competition. I'm not worried about what happens legally. I just know that change is already coming and we need to be where the puck is going, not where it has been for the last hundred years.

00:40:14 - Mike Mills
Right. So speaking of competition, obviously, you know, if we don't all live in a vacuum, right? So if you saw this opportunity, then there's got to be others out there that are seeing a similar thing. And, you know, you're obviously not going to bring up any competitors or future competitors. But either way, when you guys were analyzing, you know, the opportunity that you could find, are you seeing and are you concerned with, you know, some of the big, you know, the big, big boys coming in and trying to take this lane as well? Or, you know, is, is maybe an idea that, hey, look, we're going to develop this, this platform. We're going to kind of iron out all the wrinkles and then we're going to live the capitalist dream and sell it to the big guy. So, you know, what's the key? You know, what is your, what's your kind of your long term plan? And then are you also seeing or even concerned with some of the larger players that have been in the real estate space for a long time that are trying to find their way through this as well, kind of coming in and trying to compete with what you guys are doing?

00:41:11 - Amanda Orson
I think so. We can never rule that out. That's, that is a, that is a probability. It is an inevitability. Eventually, what we need to do is go as far as possible, as fast as possible. And I think that we have a couple of strategic advantages. When you're a very small startup, like you are going to be out monetized. You don't have the resources, but you can be world class at one thing. And that world class thing that we can be really good at is speed. It's just really hard. Having come from a very large company very recently, it's really hard to pivot something that's got like a 6000 person opex. It's like turning around containership.

00:41:47 - Mike Mills
Yes, yes.

00:41:48 - Amanda Orson
Yeah. It takes a while. And fundamentally when you do this, everybody's.

00:41:52 - Mike Mills
Got to get together and have a meeting every five minutes and agree and then we got to have another meeting to set the meeting for the next one.

00:41:57 - Amanda Orson
Yeah, but think about it like it's a fundamental business, a business model arbitrage, right?

00:42:04 - Mike Mills
Yeah.

00:42:05 - Amanda Orson
If you are a brokerage right now, you're not going to do this. Like there's no incentive for you to do this. If you are fundamentally building an ad or building a business based on selling ads to brokers and to real estate agents. You are also not going to do this because you are completely undermining your business model. And there are several billion reasons at play as to why you would not do that. So I think eventually it becomes very clear to the market that real estate agents will always exist. There will always be brokerages and they will always provide a needed and valuable service. But there is some subsection of the wider marketplace that does not require that level of handholding. And for that market they should have another way that is more than just looking up some videos and hoping for the best. That's where we seek to actually fill a need.

00:42:58 - Mike Mills
Yeah, so, so let's, let's steal man the other side for a second. All right. Let's, let's pretend like you are a realtor in this market. And I know you're, you're not a real estate veteran, but you know you're building a real estate company. So obviously you've got a little bit of a little time spent researching this topic. So if you were on the other side of this as a broker or a realtor headed towards this change, what are you doing for your business? To make sure that you still stay in a competitive place, still provide value to your clients and still are able to compete with the technologies coming in. What would you do?

00:43:35 - Amanda Orson
I would focus hard on what my, I would one discern and understand what my unique selling proposition is to my market. And that could be anything from sort of owning the first time homebuyer market to owning the high end market or owning the out of market folks. I have a, I came from military school, so a lot of my classmates have moved a lot because the military likes to change locations every two to four years or six years. And I know that there are some real estate agents who for example, just focus on those folks pcsing in every market there's a niche and you want to find that niche as an individual agent and make sure that you really own that niche in your market. From a brokerage standpoint, I would probably be focusing on getting as many listings as possible and prioritizing the listing side of the business because we know that buyer's agency is going to be impacted. It has already been impacted according to some of the anecdotal data that I've seen, and it's likely to continue to be impacted down the line. So I would focus on the volume play with the listing side of house and in general from a horizon scanning perspective, I would be keeping an eye on all of the brokers that are doing really interesting things like Howard Hanna outside of I can't remember which Metro in Ohio, but they recently left an IDX and have reported that they've had better conversion rates and higher overall margins. That's interesting. I would want to keep my eyes on sort of where everybody is falling because I know that there's going to be a lot of change, especially with the ongoing lawsuits and what those implications might be for the MLS and how the MLS might be gatekeeped in the future. So I would want to at least see what the outliers are doing. Not necessarily that I want to follow, but I want to know so that I have sort of a heads up on what the new opportunity might be. There's no question it's going to change a lot. So you want to keep your heads up.

00:45:21 - Mike Mills
Yeah. I mean, again, we said this at the very beginning. It's going to change. It's just the hard part is right now is we don't really know. And this is the most frustrating part of as an industry where we are, is there is no direction yet. There's a lot of speculation. There have been, you know, the settlements obviously were put out, but they haven't been approved. You know, I saw something the other day that said they felt like the Department of Justice was going to issue some sort of a statement in the next couple of weeks regarding the citizen Burnett judgment and the settlement to see if they could at least give a little bit of direction on what's going to be allowed and what's not going to be allowed and if they're going to leave it up to the judge or if they're just arguing with the amount of money and not necessarily what the settlement said because literally nobody knows. And that's the most frustrating part. I will say in my experience in talking to agents and other folks in the marketplace right now, I do think that as far as just on the day to day operations, especially when it comes to the consumer, because look, most consumers, buyers and sellers, they're not dialed into this. You know, we talk about this every single day. I'm talking on the phone to people about this all the time. But the average person that's getting up and going to work at the school and teaching the kids and coming home and making dinner and going to soccer bar, they're not paying attention to any of this until they go sell. And then maybe they're like, wait, what, what did I hear? Is that something, you know, so, you know, we've been telling our agents, like, look, now is the time when things are still kind of status quo that you really need to dial in your value proposition. Like you said, you have to be able to, because the questions are going to come and you're going to be able to have to answer them when they do come. And if you want to answer it in a way that the consumer understands and can be clear about it, and then they can make a decision based on good information. And that's really what your job is going to be at that point. And go ahead.

00:47:04 - Amanda Orson
I was going to say, I think that's a really important point because one of the problems that every business that's new and novel has is educating the marketplace. And what has just happened is there has been a lot of free consumer education for anybody that's actually inquiring on the cost of commission. There's been a lot of free consumer education that this is now negotiable. That is something that you're going to have to anticipate and just be on the front foot about it, I think that alone will go so far into instilling trust in that relationship and increase your likelihood of converting it.

00:47:37 - Mike Mills
Yeah, well, and, you know, and to be fair to say, because we always say it's always been negotiable. Right. But, but there is always a standard in the market, and then the 6% has been the standard. And if you don't know to ask the question and if you don't have somebody that's, you know, a professional on your side explaining to you how it is, you know, how it all works, then it doesn't always get conveyed, that's for sure. Now, I do think, like you've said, there's a role for realtors in this new world, whatever it ends up being. So, you know, you mentioned a little bit of something, you know, with what you guys would do. And again, this is, you said for another day down the road where you might have realtor involvement. I've actually recently spoken to a broker I'm going to have on soon out of Houston who is kind of doing a, he calls it a doordash Uber, you know, service for agents. So for like, those agents that maybe aren't doing as much business and those that are, because the business is more concentrated, maybe they help with, you know, showing open houses. And he's creating like, a marketplace where you, it's like fiverr, where you're like, hey, I'll show the house or I'll, I'll run and, you know, do this listing presentation, whatever it is. But they're paying, you know, a fee for that to agents so they can kind of like, you know, source out their, their knowledge base. So there's going to be a spot, and the agents role is going to adapt. There's going to be the old school, you know, the way it's always been done role. There's going to be, you know, maybe that, that new price per job, maybe it's per hour, maybe it's, you know, in your company. But what do you see for you guys if you were to, at least right now and again, it's always evolving, but in your mind, because you said there's going to be a level, even to you, where you get to a place where, you know, we really kind of need to get some, some professionals involved. Do you look at that as being licensed folks, or do you look at that folks that you employ, you know, contract workers? I mean, again, I know it's in flux, and there's no way to say for sure, but, but what's your, where's your mind at with that right now?

00:49:25 - Amanda Orson
Absolutely TBD. I would say that the most important thing and the thing that we're most focused on is that we can't be good at everything, right? We're just focused on being really good at sort of creating what the turbotax real estate might actually look like. So all of the other services that tie into that, that are not core to the development of this software are things that we're going to end up partnering with, if not now, that at some point in the future. So it's a, watch this space.

00:49:51 - Mike Mills
And what is y'all's, and I think you mentioned this a little bit, but just clarify, how are you guys reaching to the customers right now? Is it social media? Is it, you know, what's your, what's your method of getting your message out there to the overall marketplace? Like you said? Cause that's a big problem or a challenge, I should say. So what is it that you guys are trying to do? Where are you focusing your efforts on trying to get to the consumer right now?

00:50:13 - Amanda Orson
It's definitely social media, but I would say that there is no real estate portal that exists that cannot also be thinking about search engine optimization. So for the long term, that's definitely where we're going to be focused. In the immediate term, it's social. And honestly, podcasts and pr and all of the things we can do to sort of get the word out that this is, this change is coming. If it's not galleon, it'll be something else, but we're going to make very sure that it's us.

00:50:36 - Mike Mills
Yeah, well, and, you know, look, at the end of the day, regardless how it works out, you know, I do think, and we talked a little bit about this ahead of time, I do think that there are, you know, tinfoil hat, you know, there's a little bit of this, these aren't your words. These are my words. Tinfoil hat. I think there's a little bit of money behind some of these lawsuits that are driving this to some extent, to villainize realtors and their role in the transaction. And look, just like anything else in life, there are folks that do great jobs and there are folks that don't do a good job in the industry, any walk of life, this is what it's going to be. And it's unfortunate that the agents out there that do earn their money and that do, you know, justify their paychecks and what they make on these are put in a position where, you know, they're having to be questioned on what they're doing, but they just have to, you know, explain it better and make sure that they're clear about it. But, but anytime you have something like that, there's always going to be bad actors involved that are going to kind of, you know, spoil the barrel for the bunch or whatever they call it. So, so when you have housing that makes up 30% of the country's GDP and the amount of money that flows through it, and I don't mean just through real estate transactions, but everything that touches housing, it's right for any big business to come in and say, how do we get a piece of this? And, you know, I'll just say from my own personal feelings on all this, it does not what you're doing. But I think you're a small business that is trying to fill a need and find a place that is going to help the consumer ultimately save money. And I think that that's fantastic. But I also think that, you know, just like with a lot of under other industries like telecom and, you know, the food and drink business, and, you know, you start to see consolidation in these big companies where there's three or four big, big groups that are running everything and then gets to that point, it sounds on the way there, it looks good. It's like, oh, this, you know, we're going to have this company and that company, they're gonna do different things. And then money and resources just start gobbling everything up. And then you get to a place and you look up in ten years and we've got three place, three companies that will give you cell phone service and everybody else, you know, they're all gone. And it just, I mean, I know it's the nature of the beast, but it just feels like that, that's where stuff like this starts to gravitate to. Not that I can do anything about it, nor really can you, but you just look at that and you go, okay, you know, I wish, I wish it stayed more local because real estate has always kind of been that way. There always has been a need for this, and I do believe that. But I also think that when money gets involved in those that have the power, control, you know, they, they start coming in, taking over stuff and then, you know, now, you know, one day, I mean, home prices are already crazy. I just hope we're not a world of renters down the road. So, you know, hopefully we can chip away at it as we go.

00:53:20 - Amanda Orson
So we completely agree with that. I know that there is an 800 pound gorilla fight. I think we all know that based on who bought a whole bunch of Super bowl ads and let those guys fight it out. At the moment, I think that we as an industry, meaning everybody who is not the 800 pound gorillas, just go as far as possible as fast as we possibly can. If your real estate agent go and build up your book of business in your like, whatever your new domain is that you really want to be known for in your local market or in your regional market, if you're a brokerage, think about how you're going to diversify away from reliance on the buyer's agent commission, because it's clear that it might not go away, but it's certainly going to come down. Concessions will not cover everything that you had previously enjoyed. So how are you making up that margin? It's a really good time to be thinking about that because it's coming. It might not be reflected until 25. But it's coming. It's already here in some markets. And then for the technology players, I mean, really focus on where the obvious consumer need is. Not being that that's, it's really that simple and that hard. There's a reason why it's not being met. And the reason is normally because water seeks the path of least resistance. And there is more water in selling ads to real estate agents than there is in other things. But doing the hard thing now and sort of building your competitive moat and your brand around doing the harder thing will pay long term dividends, and that's what we're working on.

00:54:40 - Mike Mills
Real quick, before I let you go, I do want to get your cause. I feel like a good chunk of your, what you guys are doing with your company is centered around artificial intelligence. Would that be a fair statement? Okay, so where do you see the role of AI moving this stuff, even from? Because like right now I actually, I'm working with someone. We do classes on AI for real estate and how to use specifically chat GPT with prompting and creating Orson and GPTs to kind of help with your marketing and help with, you know, copywriting and all that kind of stuff. So where do you see the role of AI? I mean, obviously it's going to continue to grow, but at what pace and at what point do you feel like the human piece of it just, it's not, at least as we understand it right now, is not going to be able to supplant having a human being involved in that to some degree.

00:55:33 - Amanda Orson
So there are probably two dozen different parts of the transaction or the real estate purchasing experience that we could talk to. But I think the first and most natural that will impact real estate. Real estate is the same one that's impacting legal. It's the automated document processing from OCR. So for folks that don't know that acronym, it's optical character recognition. It's basically how documents can be photographed and then read and scanned and evaluated. Automated document processing is probably the first place that we're going to see it because technology can digitize and extract information about all of real estate contracts, the agreements, the disclosures, the property inspection, and it will ultimately reduce paperwork, hopefully minimize errors, and accelerate the transaction process. There's going to be a lot of gnashing of teeth and a lot of human reading over of this before we get to a place where we're very comfortable with it. But that is very clearly the first place that you're going to see it impacted and it's something that we're thinking about proactively right now. I think the second place where you're going to see it is all of the administrative tasks that you currently have an individual human being, whether they're in house or out of house handling. I think a lot of that administrative stuff is something that you're going to use AI to leverage. And if you're already talking about chat, GPT and things like chatbots, you're probably already headed in that direction down the road. I do think that you're going to see a lot more VR and AR as it applies to home touring. I think that's a very native use case that is going to completely revolutionize the way that we, you know, see a home online. I think that we're actually going to be able to walk through it. I think that will happen sooner than later. It's not our core competency, but I'm definitely interested in talking to anybody who's working on that.

00:57:15 - Mike Mills
Yeah, well, I mean, with. With what Apple's doing with their, you know, with their. What are they called? The Apple Pro goggle? I don't know what it's called. And then I knew Google took us, took a. Took a shake at it for a minute and kind of pulled off with their glasses, but I'm sure they're probably working on something in the background, too. So, I mean, it definitely. I mean, I hate the fact that we're. None of us are ever going to leave our homes anymore because we're all just going to be living in VR and, you know, being virtual. I mean, we already kind of do it, right? I mean, you and I are having a real time conversation online and, you know, you're in northeast, you're in New Jersey. So, I mean, you know, we're. We're super far. I'm in Texas, so, you know, it's just. It's just the natural progression of things. But, you know, technology is what it is and, you know, you got to keep that human element, I guess, but close.

00:57:56 - Amanda Orson
I'm in Pennsylvania, but I actually have a spicy take on this. One of the places where I think there's a lot of overbilling on AR or, excuse me, on Agi and how that might impact things. A lot of people are doubling down on using AI to help you find your perfect home. I don't think that's ever. I think that that will happen, but I actually think that we are over crediting it because scrolling through homes is recreation, and a lot of people genuinely enjoy that. And even if you can be sort of steered via AI, I don't think that we're ever going to give up wanting to scroll rooms.

00:58:30 - Mike Mills
CHGTV it's, it's no, it's no different than I think it's very similar to the, I'm not a big shopper, but to the shopping environment where the reason I think a lot of retail stores have still been able to hold on even with the encroachment of Amazon and, and all of these other online retailers. I mean, you can buy if you want to go to, you know, Lululemon or whatever. I'm not. But if you're going to go Lululemon, you could buy all their stuff online. But it doesn't change the fact that you still want to go in the store. You want to feel it, you want to touch it, you want to try it on, you want to see what your options are because it's not the same experience flipping through a webpage as it is, like physically being there. And so I very much agree with that because I don't think that, I think there's too, at least right now there's too many other elements, which is, again, why I think the realtors are still going to play a big role, especially on the relocation, like you mentioned before, because when you're moving into a new state, a new city, a new neighborhood, or whatever the case may be, you don't know all the ins and outs of that area. So as an agent, if you can become the IMD, Arlington, Texas, or I am the Fort Worth, Texas realtor, or this neighborhood or this area, then you're going to provide real value because you're going to be able to tell people, okay, I know that street looks great, but this is what's happening here. These are the developments that are occurring on the other side. You're way better to be on this side because it's a more developed neighborhood. That's just stuff that I don't know that a computer is or an AI is going to actually be able to communicate.

00:59:49 - Amanda Orson
Absolutely. No. I mean, the first homes that we flipped were all in Philadelphia. And Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods. And what one neighborhood looks like, like on one block is not the same way it looks two blocks down. And you really do need that local level of expertise. So if you don't have it as an individual home buyer, that's a great use case for why you would use a real estate agent.

01:00:08 - Mike Mills
And it's always changing. That's the other thing. Yeah. It's never going to stay the same, and especially as areas get grown up. I mean, one area for ten years was fantastic, and then ten years later, it's, you know, it's trash. So it's. Yeah, that, that's something I think is always going to require the human touch to it, and you're going to have to have an expert that's going to help you, which is, again, back to where we started. You know, this doesn't eliminate the need for realtors at all. All it is, and what you guys are doing is you are providing a service to the consumer that is in demand, that you're filling a need that is in the marketplace, that has filled the need in a lot of other industries. It just hasn't bled its way into real estate yet. But taxes and travel agents and attorneys, I mean, they have legal zoom, they have all kinds of stuff you can do, but you still have to. So all you're doing is just creating a. A product that exists in many other industries that is just getting into real estate for the first time, because now there's, you know, there's a need for it. So, Amanda, I really, really appreciate your time. I know you're a busy lady. Anytime you're starting up a company, you know, it's 80 hours, 90 hours, weeks, no sleep, always going and blowing. So thank you for hopping on with me for just a little bit and kind of sharing everything with us. It's very enlightening. I'm glad that you, that you're willing to talk to me about this, considering most of the people that we reach out there are realtors. But before we go, is there anything else you want to share with us? You want to tell us where to find the company, the website, anything like that you want to leave us with?

01:01:31 - Amanda Orson
Absolutely. So you can give me all of your hot takes and feedback and hater aid or positive comments at Amanda Orson. On Twitter, you can find Galleon at galleon IO. That's g a l l e o n IO.

01:01:44 - Mike Mills
What's the IO? Is that just. I know. It's like the.com. Is that like the. Where did that come from?

01:01:49 - Amanda Orson
It's just another TLd. So the.com landscape generally is difficult to find real estate in. So we wanted to capture the name Galleon. Galleon ships in the 16th century kind of created new trade routes and then protected those trade routes. And we're doing the same thing, we hope, for real estate.

01:02:08 - Mike Mills
Love it. Love it. Beautiful. Well, thank you, everybody who stuck around, listen to the end. And I wish everybody, everybody a great week. I'll have a market update on Tuesday. We'll talk a lot about interest rates because those are not being friendly to us right now, and it's been pretty gnarly. But I do also feel like the there might be a turn coming down the pipe, even though it doesn't seem like it right now. But the numbers aren't as rosy as they may bear out to be. And sometimes it just takes a little tip for things to go sideways. Not that we want a recession to happen, but we might already be there. But either way, everybody have a great week and great weekend, and we'll see you back next time. Thanks a lot. Bye.