Client Relations & Real Estate Technology: A Synergistic Approach

00:00:11 - Mike Mills

Hello out there to all you digital deal makers of the real estate realm. This is Texas Real Estate and finance podcast, and I am your host, Mike Mills, local Dallas Fort Worth mortgage banker with Mike Mills Mortgage and Finance. And if you're listening to this live today, Thursday, February 22, then it's most likely right now, it might be on your wifi and not on your cell phone, because half the country's cell service was out this morning, including mine. And that ain't great if you are in sales and do business with your phone. But nonetheless, here we are, and the show must go on. Now, I guess I must have psychic powers, because today, on a day where technology is failing all of us, supposedly due to mother nature flexing her muscle a little bit, we're here to talk about technology in real estate. So with that, I want to ask you a question. Is the digital revolution we are all fully entrenched in these days, not just in real estate, but in all walks of life, enhancing your client relationships? Or is it creating a great digital divide? And how can you find a balance between using all the incredible tools at your disposal without sacrificing that personal touch that your clients crave? Well, today we're going to solve all your problems. Or at least give it our best try. But before we do that, if we make your day orders of magnitude better, because you listen to this conversation between two middle aged mortgage guys, as always, I have a favor to ask. If we get you one step closer today to becoming the Tony Stark of real estate, blending tech genius with a human touch, then please, like subscribe and share this episode with your network. Because the more real estate ironmen and women we can add to our little community, then the more time I can spend bringing you impactful and relevant content to help you grow your real estate empire. Now let's get onto the show. So joining me today is a man who knows technology so well that he should be on the phone talking to at t right now and fixing my self service instead of wasting time talking to me. But here he is. Either way, the CEO of pre approve me and a real estate tech wizard, Mr. Michael Neef. Michael, welcome to the show.

00:02:08 - Michael Neef

Thank you, Mike. Yeah, my pleasure. I was actually on the phone with at T, but then the line dropped.

00:02:14 - Mike Mills

The line dropped? Yes. Well, I was wondering if we're in the first act of. What was that movie? Leave the world behind from Netflix, where everything. Did you see that?

00:02:24 - Michael Neef

I did. It was kind of crazy.

00:02:27 - Mike Mills

Yeah, it's a little concerning. I mean, especially, it's pretty apropos to our topic today just because you get the idea pretty quickly that we're so dependent on all the technology around us that when things go sideways, which they did today, and from what I can see, I don't know exactly, because this is all new to everybody. And actually, I joked, but my cell service is back up now and I think a lot of people are starting to come back up. But apparently they're saying it was a solar storm, which I don't know how much you keep up with that kind of stuff, but that was what they were saying. I don't know how it only impacted at T and a few others if it was a solar storm, but who knows?

00:03:06 - Michael Neef

Well, so when it comes to the cell networks orbiting around our system, those storms can impact dramatically the capacity for the satellites to produce service in massive areas. And that's why lately you've been hearing a lot about this threat of russian nuclear war from space. And it's not like they're going to launch nukes from space into the United States or anything, but more accurately, it's essentially an economical warfare tool because they would essentially detonate a nuclear bomb in orbit, which would create radiation, which would dramatically impact the ability for communications and these satellites to work effectively as they pass through these areas.

00:03:51 - Mike Mills

And a new EMP almost in space, kind of. Right, where they just shut down all the.

00:03:57 - Michael Neef

Yeah, I mean, temporarily, an EMP would be the effect. But long term, you're talking about years and years where, because you're in a zero g environment and things don't move on their own with inertia. They're essentially just, you have a satellite that's in orbit passing through a field of radiation, and you lose communication, and then the entire system starts to degrade. Oh.

00:04:21 - Mike Mills

Because the radiation doesn't dissipate, it stays there, basically.

00:04:25 - Michael Neef

So it's a way to essentially produce economical warfare when your country is tied directly into the ability to communicate. So who knows? Right?

00:04:37 - Mike Mills

Yes.

00:04:39 - Michael Neef

Maybe that was it.

00:04:40 - Mike Mills

Who knows? Well, there was a story, and I'm a conspiracy theory nut. I spend way too much time on some of this stuff. But they kind of made fun of it afterwards. But somebody, it was a Pentagon official, I believe, that did like a press conference and was know, raising concern, know, Russia having some weapon that they were going to launch into space and everybody was, no, no, it's not that big of a. They're, they haven't gotten there yet. It was just something that they were looking know, blah, blah, blah. So it was like somebody from the Pentagon actually came out, held a press conference in front of the press corps at the White House and said, hey, this is a problem. And everybody freaked out and they came back and no, no, it's not a, you know, whenever you see stuff like.

00:05:20 - Michael Neef

That, you're, hmm, wonder what's the real story? Yeah.

00:05:23 - Mike Mills

Yes. What are they really telling this? All right, well, let's try not to be too doom and gloom today, but it certainly is a weird day when you wake up and nothing is functioning properly. It makes you really think how vulnerable we are in some places. And this was a very minor thing. It wasn't a major thing. So let's get into what we're basically going to talk about today, which is how tech is impacting real estate and not just how it's impacting real estate in our industry, but also how it's impacting our relationships with our customers. Because for years, real estate has always been a very relationship based business. Right. This is why the zillows of the world and the Redfins, even in the last 15 or 20 years, have had a really hard time penetrating and taking market share directly from local realtors and local mortgage people, because we create relationships, we meet with people, we talk to people, we create bonds, get referrals. That's kind of how it's always been. And now, especially with some changes on the horizon, possibly with how realtor commissions are paid and how the AI revolution that's on us at this point, that's starting to impact everything that relates to what we do all the time. What are you seeing or what do you feel like is happening when it comes to all these tech innovations and how they're impacting our business? We'll get into kind of how it'll change things going forward. But just what's your overview of all this right now?

00:06:55 - Michael Neef

Well, I mean, it's very exciting. Yeah. It's a very exciting time to be alive. Just from an outsider's, let's say, just from an outsider's perspective, looking at technology just globally, what's possible? It's very exciting to see how it can impact every industry in a positive way. When you're talking about creating a general overall better efficiency or delivery system, driving down costs for the consumers, this stuff is all very positive when you look at it from the outside. Now, when you step into any particular industry, real estate, for example, and if you're a professional in the industry, well, then it can be used for good or used for evil. It can be looked at both ways. And so the thing that I like to say is it's important that you carry the attitude of positivity into this process and figure out how to use it for good. Otherwise, you're going to be on the short end of the evil stick and you're going to be a victim of technology, as opposed to somebody who leverages it to create their own success.

00:08:10 - Mike Mills

So as real estate professionals, even lenders, too, because we're all in this together, basically, there are a myriad of tools available right now. If you're not used to using technology now, obviously you created an app that's designed for helping borrowers and buyers kind of keep everything in one spot, how to get their application completed. We'll get into everything that your app does here in a minute. But when you look at it from all the tools that are available to folks right now, real estate, realtors, lenders, all these tools that individually we can use, but even on a company level that can be used, where do you see the biggest impacts coming from that can immediately be used that aren't incredibly difficult to manage? Because that's the problem I think a lot of folks run into is like, there's all of these information or all this information, all these tools, but figuring out what to use and how to use it is really challenging because if you're not used to using tech on a day to day basis, it's too much. It's like drinking water from a fire hose.

00:09:11 - Michael Neef

Yeah, and that's exactly right. There's that old adage, teaching old dog new tricks. Well, there's plenty of 35 year old loan officers and real estate agents who have been doing business for 15 years in a particular way. And they're not old by any means.

00:09:26 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:09:26 - Michael Neef

But there's technology now that is likely foreign to them and forces outside of their own business that influence their business by leveraging technology in a more advanced way. So the trick is really just find out, first off, who's your customer, how that person wants to use technology in their life for transacting mortgage and real estate transactions. And then find the tools that are easiest for you to adopt. And don't drink from a fire hose. Because like you said, for example, if any of you guys have ever done a big transformation in your diet, it's very difficult to do a big transformation in your diet, to also create a new habit, going to the gym and to get your finances under control on the same day. Yeah, you got to do one thing at a time, right? You can only eat a whale one bite at a time. So the trick then is find out your customers avatar. What do they really need and then figure out how to solve that problem. Finding one piece of technology, learn it, become an expert, and then move on to the next thing as soon as it's a habit. Right. Because you're really talking about creating habits. And with humans, that's one of the hardest things to do, is to break old habits and build new habits.

00:10:52 - Mike Mills

So if you were brand new to either or, maybe not brand new, maybe you've been in the business for a long time as a real estate agent or a lender, because you were a lender at one point for a long time. What's your podcast called? A recovering loan officer.

00:11:06 - Michael Neef

Conversations with a recovering loan officer, yes.

00:11:09 - Mike Mills

So you did that for a long time. So you've been playing in our world. So we all are trying to reach more clients, right. We're all trying to touch more people so we can. Especially these days when deals are not falling out of trees like they were, right? It's harder. So if you were starting today, knowing what you know about everything in real estate, you where would you start? Where would be the first bite of the whale that you would take?

00:11:33 - Michael Neef

Well, first is I'm going to give credit to this, to Jason Fraser, who was on my podcast, actually. And these are concepts that I've known and that I've implemented in my own personal business in the past. But it's top of mind because of his appearance on my podcast. And that is really you have to learn how to build a community around your business. And so if you're going to focus on one piece of technology, it is how do you reach the customers that you want to do business with? And so you have to identify where they hang out, what kinds of things they're into, what hobbies, where they're working. And then you have to go and build a marketing campaign through email, social text, all these different channels to reach them. And so what technology would I learn to use first? That's social media, because awareness is going to drive business and it will continue to drive business into your life. If you can just focus on becoming a good marketer, it's going to continue to support you. Which is the good news? The good news is it's not one click Buy home today. It's not like I find a home on the MLS. I click buy. I'm already pre approved through rocket. Once I click it, they give me a 32nd countdown. Are you sure you want to buy? 25 20? Yes, buy. We're not there yet. Okay. Will we be there at some point? Yeah, probably for some buyers. Probably for some buyers, we'll be at that point in 510, 20 years, whatever that number is. But if you can create awareness of who you are, what you believe, and what you do in your local community or within the niche that you want, you're going to be able to build a sustainable business for the foreseeable future. Now, of course, you'll want to start because, and we probably are going to get into this, but as technology improves, your tasks that you're doing decrease the tasks you're required to do. Like, I remember when I first got in the business, I was in a real estate agent's office, and I was asking them questions about, hey, what are the home prices look like over here? And they whipped out a phone book was like, this fat, and it had listings in it. Yes. And they're like, well, let me look you here. Let me do some comps. Well, I mean, that's a lot of work. Well, now it's like AVM. I know exactly what the house is worth. So naturally, there's going to be compression and commissions and margins on the mortgage side and all these things. And so you'll need to scale using technology. And so what, you may get away with one or two deals a month right now and live a healthy life. You may need to do four or five in the future.

00:14:27 - Mike Mills

Yeah, well, I think what you're saying, and this is, I was writing down here, is, it's funny when we talk about tech so much that there's all these tools that you can use, but in reality, if you don't know yourself, right, if you don't know or have a plan as to what your plan of attack is, then you really don't know where text can help you. Because a lot of times people spend. We spend time just shooting darts into the air, just hoping that works. Hoping this works. Trying this thing, trying that thing. And I've talked to several agents about this and people, I mean, not just about real estate, but in everything. And this is something I even struggle with sometimes, too. And I know this, I'm aware of this. But if you don't sit down and write out what your plan is, here's what I'm going to do. Like you said, who's my customer? Who am I trying to reach? Well, if I don't know that, if I haven't figured that out, well, then I can't use the tools to find that customer because I have no idea who I'm looking for. And if I haven't written out my plan and I've said, okay, first I need to come up with a marketing strategy. Where am I going to target my marketing efforts? Am I going to focus on Instagram? Am I going to focus on YouTube? Am I going to focus on Facebook? Because, again, you can't do them all right? Not at the same time, at least not until you build systems. So really and truly kind of what you're saying is this whole balance between human ingenuity or human touch and technology is until you know what you're trying to do and you have a designed out plan that you've written up and come up with, which, by the way, Chad GPT could probably help you with that. But until you've done that, then the technology is useless to you. Or at least it's a waste of time because you're not being effective with your time. Right.

00:16:07 - Michael Neef

I'm not going to get into my car and plan a trip to China. I got to get on an airplane for that. The tool is not a car in that case. So identifying your customers, where they live, where they spend their time, how it relates to you, what you believe, what you think that your customers should know about you. I mean, this is kind of marketing 101, but very few people actually do it. Well. Yeah, it's because we all do what we're comfortable with, right. We get set in our own ways and our patterns, and it's hard to break them. It is really hard. Everyone struggles. You said you struggle. I struggle with it every day. It's the challenge.

00:16:45 - Mike Mills

Well, I'm curious. So when you started pre approved me, I'm sure you had to go through this process because you created something that solved a problem. Right. But you didn't know what you were going to create until you knew what the problem was and what the pieces were. So talk a little bit about how you went from being a loan officer, trying to solve these issues every day to just solving the problem, saying, I'm going to make a damn app myself and figure it out. So how did that process go?

00:17:12 - Michael Neef

That's a great question. So it was basically a desperate moment where. So I got in the industry in 2005, and I was fortunate enough to have a very good mentor. My uncle, who was in the mortgage industry for 15 years prior to me getting into it, now he's one of the top realtors in Oregon, told me. He said, as a loan officer, the one thing you need to focus on from a marketing perspective is creating strong realtor relationships. Okay. That's still a very good advice today. It's still relevant. And so I did so for five years I went out there and during the crash, eight, nine, 2010. Right. We start to get a little rebound. Well, I built relationships helping realtors learn how to build marketing campaigns and work on contact conversion and learn social media and retargeting and all these things that were really hot at the time and still relevant today. I built a strong book of referral realtors, and when the market rebounded, I sort of lost it. I didn't have capacity. I didn't have the teams, the systems in place to deal with. The production was coming in.

00:18:21 - Mike Mills

A lot like you opened up this big gulf of people, but now you didn't know how to manage it as it all came in.

00:18:26 - Michael Neef

My funnel was huge. The top of the funnel was huge. And the systems I put in place to manage the business coming in, it wasn't scalable. Wasn't scalable. And right now I think, guys, this is really relevant today because business is slow. This is when you build the systems. Yes. And so 22, 23, part of 24, who knows what the forecasting is? But people are saying things are going to rebound a little bit. It's an election year. That's what they say. Right. If your fingers are crossed, your activities should be focused on those things to build the system. So here's what it was for me. My clients and realtors needed information when I wasn't traditionally available. They needed information about what their payment was on a particular home they're about to go look at.

00:19:14 - Mike Mills

And this night when you're at dinner doing whatever.

00:19:17 - Michael Neef

Yeah, exactly. So I'm with my family, I'm hanging out, I'm trying to do things for myself. That's when my realtors are getting to work. Right. I mean, their work weeks are Friday to Monday. For me, it was that disconnect where my customers needs and my realtors needs interfered with my needs. So the question then was, okay, how do I empower my clients and realtors with the information they need, when and where they need it, so that I don't have to be sort of subject, know their needs on their timelines? And so I had read a couple of years prior to that, I'd read Tim Ferriss's four hour work week. Yep, great book. Well, people think it's gimmicky or whatever, but at the end of the day he talks about eliminating the things that aren't completely necessary to run your business. Systematize those things that are required, but can be systematized. Hire somebody to do the things that need to be done that can't be systematized and the very last thing you should be doing is doing it yourself. So I pulled my entire business apart, and one of the most frustrating things was those weekend and evening phone calls. Well, what can I do to improve this process for my customers and stop the calls from coming to me? Because my clients didn't like it either. I asked them. I asked my clients after they called me at eight on Saturday night. Hey, what were you doing when you called me? Was it hard for you to call me? And most of them are like, no, because I know you're a family man and I didn't really want to call you. Well, you know what happened was not everyone was calling me.

00:20:59 - Mike Mills

Oh, yeah, some people just didn't. Yeah, that's true.

00:21:01 - Michael Neef

Now what are they doing? Everyone has this. Assuming it works, maybe not today. They can look up information about the entire process here. Mortgage and real estate, they can get information. And where does that information go? Somewhere else. Another realtor. Yeah.

00:21:25 - Mike Mills

Somebody else is answering their question if you're not.

00:21:28 - Michael Neef

Yeah, exactly. Or they're getting it online, and now all of a sudden they're in a funnel. They're in somebody else's big funnel that they prepared. And best case scenario, and not to be crass, but best case scenario, it's now a threesome. Right? It's another realtor. And you and the consumer fighting for this customer, you don't want that. It's a monogamous thing. We want to stay with our customers, keep them, not captive, but make sure that we're the source of truth when it comes to information. And so that's the problem I was trying to solve with our system, is how do we empower our clients to get that information?

00:22:07 - Mike Mills

Yeah, well, and when you build something, that's the thing that not a lot of people do or are capable of, is they find a problem and then they create something to solve that problem, which is exactly what you did with your app. And obviously you've created a whole business and a whole career and a whole company around it. But not everybody has that ability. Or maybe desire or will is probably the better word for it.

00:22:34 - Michael Neef

I think we all have takers mindset.

00:22:35 - Mike Mills

Yeah. We all have ability inside of us. It's just how far you want to take it. So when you're looking at what kind of tech offerings are out there today, obviously you said social media is a big piece. I know people are always hesitant with that, but that's the other thing is there's a million ways to do social media. There isn't just one way you don't have to dance on a video. You don't have to even show your face or talk these days. You can get AI to do it for you. And we'll get into that some too. But if you had an essential toolkit, let's call it, right, if you're talking to your real estate professionals back then and you're like, okay, you got to have these three things or these five things or basically you're irrelevant today, what do you think that those things would be?

00:23:20 - Michael Neef

First off, you had a reach. So we talked about social media. Well, that's the first thing. So again, focus on just being. I guess one of the first piece of advice I got was like, if people don't know you're in business, they won't do business with you, right? So that's the first thing. So you got to make sure your reach is large enough. So that doesn't just mean social media. It could also mean like shaking hands and kissing babies, meeting people in the local community. It could be involved with your kids schooling or sports programs. That's really important. Crms, you got to have a really solid CRM and you don't want to think of it as just a place to send broadcast emails out and a place to send drip emails based on campaigns. You need to really organize your activities and put the emphasis on the things that drive the highest ROI in your business. So if you've never done a calculation on the activities that produce the most revenue for you, do that. You shouldn't be doing activities that pay you $20 an hour when you can make $100 an hour doing something else.

00:24:25 - Mike Mills

Right.

00:24:25 - Michael Neef

And so systems to help you track activities going to be really important. So a really solid CRM can help you do that. And then from the real estate side, I would say it's really important to build an ecosystem for your clients to shop safely. If they go on zillow, every single one of those listings has another person's contact information tied to it. If you're a loan officer, the payments tied to that listing lead to another loan officer. You need to find a way to provide value during that phase in the process. When your clients are in an information gathering phase, I say today it's really apparent in my kids, but even amongst people our age, Mike, there's very much this ADHD economy happening. You can't walk into a Starbucks without seeing 70% of people staring at their phones, even if they're sitting across the table from a friend they haven't talked to in five. The that's the amount of capacity people have to focus. They're just constantly needing to swipe to be engaged to collect more. So if your clients are on zillow, which you may not be able to stop, by the way, but you could provide them resources to get questions about the houses they're finding on there, maybe you could record videos and put them on loom into an archive for them to research information. Like, well, I found this house on Zillow. It's a triplex. How's that work in financing? Well, give them resources to look into that using your systems. So kind of like we did with pre approve me, I think it's important to build guardrails around your. So systems like YouTube and Loom and kajabi or something that would help you kind of build a protected system for information I think is really important today. You're going to have to invest time. It's a lot of time.

00:26:41 - Mike Mills

Well, that's the thing. It's weird, because these two things kind of mesh to each other, is that we're in a world now where everybody has the shortest attention span that we've ever experienced because of the Internet and social media platforms hijacking a natural dopamine interaction that occurs inside your brain. And they've figured out how to just basically ramp that thing up to 1000%. And so it's created in all of us. I give my kids a hard time because I can't sit down and watch a movie with them, because if the movie in the first 5 minutes doesn't have them excited about it, they're out. You know what I mean? I'm like, can we let it build? Like, this is a story. It's a three hour or two hour story. Let it build. There's some pieces to it, but we don't have time for it. And even myself, I'm a victim of that as well. But the downside to this, and I think it's like the thing that we don't maybe understand fully, is that whenever you're doing stuff like this, there's no immediate payoff. Right when I'm sitting down. If I'd decided that I'm going to create a library of videos, let's just say I'm going to make ten videos about the process of going through a home loan or the process of buying a house. What's earnest money, what's the inspection like? Or whatever. And I'm making this for YouTube. Okay, well, in order to make those videos, get them somewhat produced or whatever and edit them or whatever, and put them out. That takes time, right? That takes time you can do right away. And if you've never done it before and you're not an expert at it, then it takes extra time because now you got to figure out how to do it, right. Well, you get 5 minutes or 2 hours into that process and you're just like, okay, this is too much. I can't do this. I'm never going to do it. But what we don't understand is that if you can commit to those things, it may take you a week, it may take you two weeks, it may take you a month. And then as you get better at it, your time to work gets less. But as you build those systems and you build those things, they start to work for you. And you don't get the benefit of it until you've built it and it's there and it's working in the background, and then you reap the benefits at that point. But the build up takes so long and our attention span is so short that people just aren't built to sit there and go, okay, I'm going to sit down today for 4 hours and I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to plan it out, I'm going to put it together and I'm going to implement it, because in five years or in two years or in six months, it's going to pay off. But it doesn't pay off right now.

00:29:03 - Michael Neef

It's so hard. It is so hard because, I mean, delayed gratification is a lost art. It really is. Yes. And so one way to realign your goals, right? There's a couple of ways of doing it, but one way that I found today is most effective in this economy where people are constantly needing stimulation, is you need to set up your environment to drive the outcome you want. So, for example, my computer, I have a mic sitting right here. I have a light right there. I've got my podcasting background. I have notes on my monitor to let me know that if I'm not talking to new people or creating content on a one to many scale, that I'm wasting my time. Right. These are triggers for me to refocus on my mission. And my mission personally is to help 1000 loan officers make more than a million dollars a year. That's my mission. Right. And so the only way to do that is at scale. I can't coach 1000 loan officers individually. As a matter of fact, coaching is not going to be the tool that deliver the value that I expect to meet that goal. And so you need to really focus on the triggers and setting up your environment to support your goals and make sure that you really believe in them. One thing that people come back to is they always say, we'll start with why? Okay, well, why is great. But if you're not constantly being reminded of the why, then you're not likely going to take the action that is required. And sometimes it is a couple of year plan.

00:30:44 - Mike Mills

That'S part of building. I hear a lot of people talk about this social media. It can be used as a tool to help you, or it can be used as a tool to hurt you, right? It depends on what you. But you create your own world, right? You don't go into TikTok and open it up and see people getting into fistfights in the street and stupid people jumping off bridges and doing stupid, unless that's the stuff you engage with and interact with, right? Because you're creating that world. So if you're like, well, the social media is ruined. No, you're ruining yourself. You can create a world where when you go on TikTok, all you see is people with motivation quotes, and you see tech innovations and how to use it and how to prompt chat. GPT. That's what my TikTok is. I mean, I'm still cultivating, but if I go to TikTok, most of the time, it's stuff. That's why I can't watch it before bed, because my mind, I'm like, oh, this. I got to do this. I got to do this. It's too much. But the point being is you can take social media, which is a tool. It's a technological tool that is available to everybody, and you can use it to help you if you cultivate it in the right way.

00:31:56 - Michael Neef

Yeah, it's used for good or used for evil. It's either to achieve your agenda or somebody else's. That's what it comes down to. Do you want to leverage this to improve your life and your position, your financials, your happiness? Or are you just going to use it to buy a product somebody else wants to sell you? Right? And so at the end of the day, I think there's a way for you as a business owner, entrepreneur, entrepreneur, whatever you are, there's a way to leverage these tools to help you reach those goals. But got to set up that environment. Got to make sure your algorithm on TikTok, if your algorithm is messed up, delete TikTok, create a new account, spend a week searching the right terms only, and then go from there. There's ways of dealing with that. And also, I think accountability is super important. Find somebody to be accountable to because you don't want to disappoint the people that you care about. So if you've got a goal, you want to reach it. Find accountability with somebody, because if it's just yourself, I'll give myself a pass today. That's slippery. That's a slippery slope.

00:33:03 - Mike Mills

You get a pass every day.

00:33:05 - Michael Neef

Yeah, easily. Easily. I mean, I'm going to the gym tonight.

00:33:09 - Mike Mills

Sure you are. Okay, so there's some old tried and true ones that we talked about again, so everybody knows about social media, and I'm not going to beat him into the ground about needing to be on it, although I will say, because I've said it a million times, I'm sure you do, too. If you're not somewhere on social media, on the Internet, then you basically don't exist, because like you said, we spend 70% of our time staring at that little box in front of us. This is where everybody lives right here. So you got to have that. CRM is incredibly important because database management and being able to contact your clients with information, whether you're sending videos or you're sending newsletters or you're sending anything out to them on a regular basis, has got to be paramount in all of this, because if you don't have regular contact with your people in your database, then you're going to be struggling as well. So the next thing I want to talk just a little bit about, because I've done multiple podcasts on this, and I will continue to do them because I'm learning more and more every single day, and it blows my mind. Is AI right? AI is really. I don't think it can be overstated as to how quickly and how much it is starting to impact everything we do. I mean, when was chat, GPT released? Was it 2022 at the beginning or.

00:34:25 - Michael Neef

At the beginning of three? Okay, yeah, January.

00:34:30 - Mike Mills

We're not even two years into this thing, right? We talked before we came on the show about the amount of layoffs that have occurred in the tech industry because of what AI is doing to streamline all these tasks and processes that humans used to do. So what do you think right now in real estate, without getting too far into the weeds, but as far as utilizing AI to help you with your business, even if it just comes down to just learning the basics of it, where does anybody even start? And are you going to be by the time we figure it out, are we going to be too late. What's the learning curve and the speed at which this thing goes?

00:35:08 - Michael Neef

Well, it's like compounding interest. If you started putting money into an account for your kids when they were born, over time, it's going to grow faster and faster. So start now. It's not too late. It's never too late. You can start now. It's going to compound. Your information and the ability to use the technology is going to compound. Where does it go? Well, it's going to touch every aspect of your life, even if you don't know it, right? Even if you don't know it, it's going to touch every aspect. I mean, you're going to take this video and I'm sure that AI is going to chop it up into segments to be leveraged as a reel or a minute long video on YouTube and a short. And it will take a two hour task and make it a 20 minutes task.

00:35:55 - Mike Mills

I have an entire step by step process and I have it built before the show. I have it built for after the show and I have it built for marketing purposes. And my before the show is it sometimes helped me with intros, topics to focus on. And it's just a brainstorming thing, right, because I'm going to choose what I want want to do with it. But sometimes it's like having another person that you get to talk to to come up with ideas, right? Because I can say, hey, this is kind of what I'm thinking and it'll give me five and they kind of suck. And I'm like, I don't really like that one, but let's focus on these or whatever. But I can build these prompts in and I can go in and create SEO keywords, I can create show notes, I can create transcripts, I can create key takeaways, I can create blog posts, I can create everything. And like you said, it takes me 15 or 20 minutes to do all that. Where before that would have taken someone a week?

00:36:50 - Michael Neef

Oh, easily. You said the word, you said the magic word, right? And I think this is where you should start. And it comes down to like, I'm going to pull it back into more understandable terms for most people because for some people this term is foreign. It's becoming more common. But prompting, that is really the key to starting your journey in understanding how AI works and how to utilize it. So what is prompting? Communication skills. So how do you communicate your desires to an employee of yours? Have you ever done that funny experiment where you write on a piece of paper for your kids how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And they have to follow every step. Yes.

00:37:39 - Mike Mills

Well, I did that in school. Yeah, we did that long. When you say spread the peanut butter, like with what do I. Yeah, their.

00:37:45 - Michael Neef

Finger, it goes sideways. Right. So prompting is a bit like that. Now, of course it's going to continue to evolve and get better.

00:37:51 - Mike Mills

It's going to be able to make. That's an awesome analogy.

00:37:54 - Michael Neef

Yeah. And so at the end of the day, you have to be able to give directions to let AI know what you want to do. And if you give really thorough, good directions, it can produce amazing results and you can systematize it. So once you understand, for example, that you need to take this episode and you need to from this episode, create three 1 minute long shorts for YouTube consumption. With captions and a blog tied to the episode. You can systematize that, box it up, and use it over and over and over again, and you can even tweak it. Right. But if you were to tell an employee, hey, take this episode and edit it, well, what's the outcome? Who's the audience? Why I'm editing it? What's the expectation of that? So really what it comes down to is management and communication skills, okay? Which I will admit, we are at our age at an advantage over, for example, my kids age because they have been constantly fed information based on their previous search desires. And they lack the ability today to clearly articulate what they want because they've been told, because they've been fed what they want based on their previous experiences. Okay, so when it comes to the younger generation, it's going to be learning a new skill set, right? It's going to be learning a new skill set that is concerning.

00:39:27 - Mike Mills

Actually, I never thought about it like that because I use this analogy with my kids all the time and joke with them about, you need to be bored. They're like, I'm bored. I'm like, good, you need to be bored because that's how your brain works. Your brain doesn't function properly if you don't have time to contemplate things when you're just constantly being fed information over and over again. I would joke like when I was a kid, we're lucky. How old are you, Michael?

00:39:55 - Michael Neef

41.

00:39:56 - Mike Mills

Okay, so we're about to say I'm a 45. So when I was a kid, we got in this generation where we didn't have Internet when we grew up, it wasn't there. Right? It came when we were in our teenage years. Or at least for me, that's kind of when it showed up. And we've kind of learned all the iterations of what it has been through this point, and the acceleration has been unbelievable. But we got to exist in a period of time where I could ride my bike down the street, and my mom would have no idea where I was for six and a half hours until I came home. And she just hoped to the universe that nothing happened in that time and didn't really worry about it until she needed to. But we were left kind of to our own devices these days. The kids, they just don't have that. They don't have the ability to sit there. My son, I'm not joking you. I think he would literally go insane if he had to just sit in a room with no television, no Internet, no nothing at all, and just think, I don't think he could do it. I really don't. And what would he think about?

00:41:00 - Michael Neef

Yeah, the scary part is, I don't know what I would do. Yeah, true. I came from your generation. Same thing. I come back at dinner, drink from the hose, I'm back out. That was my upbringing. I try to do that with my kids. Hey, go. Get lost. Get out of here. Here's your bike, here's your scooter. Go do something right? And they go do it for an hour. I was out there for an hour. Can I please play video games? Okay. Everyone gets to design their own parenting skills, but there's so much protecting them from this, because it is going to be important in their life moving forward. And the ability to leverage the technology is going to be how they make an income in the future. And so there's a fine balance between taking your kids into the woods and making them play and also encouraging them to learn how to use technology.

00:41:56 - Mike Mills

Well, you can't eliminate it from it, because anybody that says the folks that are like, well, I'm only using a flip phone, and I'm not engaging, well, I mean, look, you can, right, you can exist that way. You want to go live out in the woods and chop wood and garden, which I encourage, learning those skills. We talked about that a little bit before we came on. But at the same time, if you want to exist in today's world, and especially if you are running a business or if you are trying to make money and pay your bills, in a lot of ways, you don't have a choice. You have to integrate, because that's where everybody is. So if you're not engaged in the places they are, then you can't take advantage of the opportunities that become from that. And so it's something where it's like this, what do you do? Kind of a thing, because we don't want to be forever mired in technology. But at the same time, you don't have a choice. Like you have to be in there or else you're going to miss out.

00:42:50 - Michael Neef

Yeah. And I mean, there's also levels to that. You don't have to leverage technology. There's plenty of ways to make money building pottery. Sure. Or wiring somebody's house with electrical and technology will eventually improve the processes for doing all those things. But it's likely that there's professions for people outside of technology. Sure.

00:43:18 - Mike Mills

But with that being said, until they can fix your plumbing, then we still.

00:43:23 - Michael Neef

Yeah, right. It probably will happen at some point. I mean, I don't know. In my lifetime, we've supposedly been having flying cars on the roadmap here since I was a kid in the 80s.

00:43:34 - Mike Mills

It's back to the future, 1985.

00:43:36 - Michael Neef

Yeah. And here we are 2024. And it's still not a thing. Right. Because driving complications, logistics, things you have to. And there's also forces outside of your own business that are going to put roadblocks in the way of leveraging technology to its fullest extent, like government intervention with how AI works and what you can. Like, for example, robo sales systems, AI powered sales bots were allegedly going to be like changing the way the sales happened. Cold call robocallers. It's like your appointment center. The early state, well, can't use them in the US anymore. They passed legislation that says you can't make calls with a robocaller tied to AI. That's going to start happening. There's going to be regulation and probably for the better. Yeah.

00:44:25 - Mike Mills

Let me push back because people don't want to be annoyed constantly by some robot calling them on their phone. Twenty four seven.

00:44:31 - Michael Neef

Yeah, of course. Leveraging technology. Yes. Is it important? Now, the thing is, if you're 45, 41, could you make another ten year push in your business old school? I think you can.

00:44:47 - Mike Mills

Okay.

00:44:48 - Michael Neef

I think you could. I think that if you really committed to old school ways, you could work with customers who are your age or older who are also not adopting, adapting to the new technology, and that's your niche. And you could build a solid book of business until you're ready to retire. Yeah. If you're 20, I don't think it's an option for you. Right. You're going to be working with younger customers and if you want your career to last more than ten years, there's going to be some changes that are going to prevent that from being scalable.

00:45:25 - Mike Mills

Well, I say it all the time. I do think there are old school methods that still are functional because I use the mailbox as an example, right? I mean, we're used to, again, back in our day when we were younger, the mailbox, you would open that thing up and it would be a stack of stuff just this thick. Every mailer, every flyer, every whatever you could possibly get. Then email comes along. Right? And now the cost to deliver to 10,000 people is significantly, I mean, orders of magnitude significantly cheaper than putting something in the mail.

00:45:57 - Michael Neef

Right.

00:45:57 - Mike Mills

So now your email is filled up with your, we have, we literally have spam folders specifically for the fact that we just get hit with junk mail on a constant basis. But things still go through the mail. And now when I go to open my mailbox every day, I might have two or three things, sometimes nothing, right? So if you're an old school marketer and you're like, well, where can I get more eyeballs and attention that I stand out from the crowd? Well, that's a place where you could go because very few people are there. So if you want to go back to creating the mailers with your picture, and, I mean, you can use technology because you could put a QR code on there and have them go and give you a review or look at the neighborhood valuations or whatever the case may be. But that's a marriage of, hey, this is an old school technique that we used to market to people with a technology flair, because I'm using this QR code to give people access through their phone to all the information I want to give them. And that's a great marriage of those two things, because you're using both opportunities to interact with your clients better.

00:47:00 - Michael Neef

Yeah. I mean, you're not competing as much for attention at that level. Right? Most of what they get is bills. Yes. And so when you send something that's happy, like, hey, congratulations, you got like 30,000 more equity in your home. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah, I got this bill for $100, but I have 30,000 more equity in my home. Thank you, Mike.

00:47:20 - Mike Mills

Good day.

00:47:21 - Michael Neef

Super excited about that. You can marry the two. You could let technology help provide you with customized tools. I mean, building a postcard in canva never been easier, right. To build an effective postcard, that is one tool I think is really popular and really powerful. Canva, it allows somebody who has almost no technical skills when it comes to doing editing image or building flyers, it allows you to kind of, within an.

00:47:51 - Mike Mills

Hour, a myriad of. Actually, I was looking at your podcast the other day because I'm always playing around with thumbnails because I don't know. I don't know it very well and I'm trying to make something that doesn't look cheesy and whatever. So if you look at my YouTube page I've gone through, you can see my evolution of thumbnails. But I looked at your show and then I realized that because I use a different one for the actual episode that I post and then the pre, like the event one. And we use the same canva template.

00:48:17 - Michael Neef

Totally. I was like, yeah, I know, it's exactly right. And I do the same thing with, like, when I send an email out, it's a video they want to click. I like, put a YouTube thumbnail in. Yeah, it makes it easy. You don't have to go off the deep end and prompt your day away. Yes, but there's a healthy dose of information and learning of this stuff that you can take on. And there's lots of resources. Guys, too. I mean, you can find the information on how to do it and what's important. And the thing about, you talked about mail being a really good way to communicate with people today, and I completely agree with that. Email is very commoditized. I mean, everybody collects email. I think crms from an email perspective are a waste of money. Like sending an email with Thanksgiving recipes. No one cares. It's not top of mind. People care about their own stuff, not what you care about. And so one question is, when you're looking at technology, is the technology you're deploying in your business there to serve your customers interests or your interests, right. In my mind, one thing I always coach with our platform with pre approved me is it's a system to help you play offense in your mortgage business, which basically is how do you get in front of the questions your clients have before they have them so that they use your tools and systems as a resource to get the information they care about. Right, versus going online and getting sucked into somebody else's funnel.

00:49:59 - Mike Mills

Okay, so speaking of that, I do want you to explain a little bit about what pre approved me does. So especially now, this is more geared towards lenders specifically. But realtors can really use this tool, and it's a powerful tool, especially because of everything that you've said about keeping them. You're trying to keep people in your sphere, not going out to the wild, wild west of the Internet, because you never know where they're going to end up.

00:50:23 - Michael Neef

Yeah, great. Yes. I appreciate the t up there. So basically, we talked today about how technology is here to stay and people are spending their time here. There's one thing I sleep closer to than my wife. It's my phone.

00:50:39 - Mike Mills

I know it'sick.

00:50:40 - Michael Neef

As that is, right?

00:50:41 - Mike Mills

We're all sick human beings. Yes.

00:50:43 - Michael Neef

And I give my wife a kiss good night, and then I check my phone. It's the last thing I do before I go to bed.

00:50:47 - Mike Mills

And the first thing you do?

00:50:48 - Michael Neef

First thing I do in the morning. Right. You. How backwards is that? But it's the reality. It's the way my brain is wired. It's the way her brain is wired. What it is. We actually last week just talked about disconnecting, like, phones out of the bedroom an hour before bed. So we're going to try it. We're going to just give it a shot. Okay. See what that is. So what does the system do? Well, essentially what it allows a loan officer to do is build a brand and add it to your customer's most precious device. Okay, so we build custom mobile apps for mortgage companies. And essentially what this mobile app does is an ecosystem that sits on top of your los to manage their entire mortgage and home ownership journey. Okay. So it's everything they need to from a virtual business card with tools, calculators, messaging, all wrapped into like, top of lead funnel, engagement, conversion through the transactional management piece, a point of sale, applying for a loan, having that application produce a list of documents that the customer needs to get you based on the data in the application. So we're leveraging AI to help produce that list of conditions tied into how are we communicating about the mortgage process in a way that everyone can check on it 24/7 they're getting notifications, they're tied into the experience. And then how do we make it customizable so that if someone like you, Mike, was to invest in truly playing offense and you wanted to build an ecosystem that had maybe the visualization is the app is like a shopping mall, and the tools you embed into the system are like stores. And every store has got different products and different information, and you're essentially sitting on top in a lawn chair, watching your customers move through their mortgage and real estate experience. And as much value as you can pack into the mobile app, the more likely they are to off ramp into the store that you own. Right. When they leave your store and they go to somebody else's store, that's when there's problems, right. So essentially our system is designed to help you engage those customers by allowing you to build a custom experience and tie it to the position your clients live in the process. So, like, you meet somebody at a soccer game, they're not ready to apply. They need different tools than somebody who's writing an offer on a house. Different information. Okay. And so from a marketing perspective, it's very important to deliver the information your clients will need based on where their brains are at. So it takes a bit of set up to get that dialed in the way you want. But when you do, it's super powerful because you can protect yourself and your realtors from externalities. Right. Other people trying to get their attention. How does it play out for a realtor? Well, essentially you have that same glass ceiling on the mall and your loan officer can embed your tools in their mobile app. So if you've got a great home search, you've got a link to schedule showings. You want to run numbers before you take your client touring for houses to make sure they qualify for the house. So you're not wasting your time or touring with your fingers crossed. Super important, right? The ability to get a pre approval letter, check loan status, everything's co branded. Loans close faster because your clients are, like we said, emails are not a good way to get people's attention today. Well, most lenders communicate the documents we need via email. Yes. Well, when I get off this podcast and I go to my email, I'm going to have 30 emails, right? Well, actually, fortunately I'm not because my assistant, he deletes them. All right. But most people, they'll have 30 emails. Okay. And if I wait 2 hours, it's going to be off the first page of my account. So staying top of mind with needs and having a system to remind the client and to give them the ability to use the technology they're comfortable with. Their phone, they can manage everything on the computer, phone, text, email, wherever they want. Call it the choose your own adventure mortgage system. That's what we built and that's what we're focused on doing is helping loan officers stay and realtors stay valuable throughout this process.

00:55:16 - Mike Mills

Yeah, I've been doing this mortgage space for a little while and everybody has, and I think when we first met because like, to find out the new tools that company offers and things that they have that I can use and just like anything else, like we talked about, it's one bite at a time. So you're just trying to get what you can get figured out. But when we sat down and met for the first time. In my head, I was like, okay, well, everybody's got an app, so I just need to know what the functionalities of the app are and how they work. But when you started getting into the pieces of having the loan scenario that's already built out inside of our los, that feeds into the app. So then that way, because like you said in our conversation originally, and this is true, when a mortgage person qualifies a buyer for a house, we're not qualifying them for a purchase price, we're qualifying them for a payment. And if you're with somebody that's kind of shopping towards maybe the top end of their range, that they can qualify for, that payment calculation becomes incredibly important when you're trying to make offers, because we need to know if they're at the top end, if they can qualify. Because taxes are different, insurance is different, mortgage insurance. I mean, a lot of realtors don't realize this, but mortgage insurance on a conventional loan is very much factored, or the debt to income is very much factored into that. So if you push your debt to income to 46% or 47% on a home, and you don't update the mortgage insurance premium, well, if that jumps $100 because their credit score is maybe a little on the low end, and then now they're at a 47, 48, 49 DTI, well, then all of a sudden, boom, they don't qualify for that house without making some significant changes. But what your app does is it takes that functionality and it makes it to where if the realtor goes in and puts in their taxes, because you can pull it up on your MLS, it's written right out there. So not always accurate, if I'm being honest, because it's human data that's typically put in there. But if that shows up and you put that information in, then it'll calculate within the app, okay, yeah, this payment fits. And then at the bottom it says, you're good to go. And just that feature alone takes a lot of stress from the loan officer, it takes it from the real estate agent, it takes it from the borrower having to find out, because I still have people call me and say, hey. And I tell people I'm like, hey, when you find a house that you like, shoot me the address and shoot me the purchase price, and then I'll make sure that it fits. Well, now I don't really have to do that because now it's already built in there. And I'm like, no, just put in the app. It'll tell you if it's good or not.

00:57:50 - Michael Neef

Yeah. And realtors have that control and that capacity to protect their time now.

00:57:56 - Mike Mills

Yes.

00:57:56 - Michael Neef

And that is really the biggest, I think, for me, that was the biggest piece that I didn't expect, because originally I'm like, I can't take calls at 09:00 a.m. On Sunday anymore. But what I didn't expect was that my realtors were struggling with the opposite problem, which was they needed to know before they showed their client anything that they qualified to buy it. And there was just no good way to communicate that part of the process. And so what our platform does is, like with that little piece where we're using the customer's financial data, their income, assets and debts, the guidelines for the loan program to let, essentially a realtor have a loan officer in the palm of their hand and the borrower to have a loan officer in the palm of their hand. We do the same thing with every aspect of the process when it comes to the home buyer or the borrower. Okay? So we're helping them manage conditions the same way, getting in front of that. And that's why I say we help loan officers play offense in their business, because information is available. We want to be the conduit that they get it, but they shouldn't have to wait for us to pick up our phone in order to get the information because more and more people are just seeking it now. They're just going out there looking for it. I can't imagine how many people are asking Chat GPT about what the mortgage process is today.

00:59:16 - Mike Mills

Yeah, it's something to wear, because what we do, real estate, mortgage, all in general, is something that becomes so foreign to people. Not because it's like everybody owns a house or. No, I'm sorry, not everybody owns a house, especially not these days. But people buy homes, right? But the rules change, the guidelines change, the process changes on a regular basis. And so if you bought a house ten years ago, it does not mean that it's anything like what it's going to be like today to buy that house. And so because of the distance of time between the transactions, the average consumer just doesn't have the basic knowledge. I mean, I think we talked about this maybe in our first, but the number of people that think that you have to put down 20% to buy a home is still something like 60%.

01:00:02 - Michael Neef

Right?

01:00:03 - Mike Mills

And we all know that that's not the case, and it hasn't been ever, or at least not for a very long time. It's just one example of the fact that we just assume as professionals that our clients understand some basics about the process. That is not true. And that's why the education on social media is so important. That's why having technology tools at your fingertips that you can create this educational information to build, which, oh, by the way, are great funnels to get clients and people to come to you. And when you're creating this type of stuff and leveraging the technology and tools that you have, that's going to get you more opportunities to have better relationships with people because they don't know this information and you have to find a way to get it to them. And whether you use social media, or whether you use your app and build your videos inside of it to follow the steps of the process, that you're the human talking to them, then you're not leveraging all the tools available. And that's really, like I said, the crux of what we're talking about today is you can still stay with your clients, and it's all about scalability. Because if you have more time to have those one on one interactions, because all of the mundane processes and tasks are being managed on the back end by some piece of technology, well, that lets you help even more people.

01:01:19 - Michael Neef

I love that. The thing that a lot of people struggle with is putting themselves in their borrowers shoes or their homeowner's shoes. Because you are an expert in the industry. If you've been in the mortgage or real estate industry for six months, you know more than 98% of the normal population, then it comes down to, how do you identify what they don't know and put yourselves in their shoes? Well, for me, anytime I got a question at all, any question, I had a process where I'd write the question down. I'd ask myself, why did they ask me the question? What were they really looking for? What information were they really looking for? And how can I answer this question for every customer that I have in the future without having to personally answer it? Okay, that was my process. So I had a list of hundreds of questions, like, what is an appraisal? How long does it take? When does it come back? Do I have to pay for it in advance? Why do I pay for it in advance? And every time I got a question my team knew, put in the spreadsheet, let's figure out which ones and tally them up. How many times am I getting this question? How do we automate that? Okay? And that was why we built pre approved me, is because we know these customers or realtors have these questions. We want to provide them the answers quickly, but we can't be constantly available to get those answers. And so here's the trick. We talked about triggers earlier. Back in the day when I was doing loans, I didn't wear hats all the time because I was a professional. Now it's acceptable. But in 2010, 2012, you couldn't wear a hat. I would put a hat on to trigger myself out of my professional state and to put myself into the consumer's shoes. And I would essentially now be like, okay, I'm a borrower. It's like role playing.

01:03:03 - Mike Mills

Yeah. With you this time or not.

01:03:10 - Michael Neef

That'S the thing, right? You have to find a way to identify that information, and then how do you want to solve it for the next client who has the same question? And if you're not building a system to deal with it, you are the system to deal with it.

01:03:25 - Mike Mills

It's just your time. They're just going to eat up your time.

01:03:29 - Michael Neef

Great. I mean, how many times can you answer the same question, guys? I mean, that's really my opinion. It's not that they don't need to know. Maybe there's a better way of delivering it.

01:03:39 - Mike Mills

Well, and the goal is because everybody, if you ask the average real estate agent or loan officer, well, I'm trying to help my clients. I want to help them understand how and who's the best person to do that. Well, if you think that you're the best person to do that, which I think most of us do, then how can you help more people answer more questions? Well, the way that you do that is by automating and systemizing these questions. But you can't. Again, going back to the very beginning of what we talked about is if you don't have this stuff written in and you don't have a plan on what you need to tell people and what they need, the answers they need to know, then none of these tools are going to be helpful to you whatsoever. And that has to be the first. When you sat down and you started writing out those questions, how long is appraisal? Where do I have to pay for it? How long does it take to come back? That didn't happen. You didn't solve all those problems in a day. It took a long time to build that system, to build those questions up, to figure out, okay, what can we group together? How often do we get asked, can I make a video about this? Where do I need to put it? All of that stuff took time. But now fast forward five years or ten years or I think 2010 years. Yeah. Now you have an entire company and you're sitting here chatting with me about how AI is going to take over the world. So it's pretty good system.

01:04:52 - Michael Neef

I love that, too. The way that you phrase that, you don't know how the problem is going to be solved. And oftentimes because you've been dealing with it a certain way for so long, and I talk to loan officers about this all the time. I go, tell me what's frustrating you in your business. And I don't care if you think there's no solution. Tell me about it. Because in my mind there was no solution for answering that question. What's my payment? Do I qualify? Can I get a pre approval letter? There was no solution for that. And I'll tell this story very often. The process was, it took over a year and a half to two years for me to figure it out. Right. Okay. I'm going to educate my clients. So when they come to me for the pre approval, I'm going to tell them about DTI and I'm going to hand them a mortgage calculator and then they can run their own numbers and figure out if it's in alignment. Well, now rates have moved. Okay, well, so how are they going to deal with that? Okay, so I'm going to build a spreadsheet, right? I'm going to email them a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet has all their income, assets and debts tied into it. And they can leverage the spreadsheet and they can run the numbers. And then on the second page, if they see a qualified, it's going to let them print a letter. Okay. 10% of my clients used it, 90% of them, like all emails, after the first week, it was completely gone. They forgot about it. They didn't use it. Okay, so now what? Okay, I'm going to hold educational seminars for realtors. I'm going to give them the spreadsheets because they're professionals and they're going to keep them top of mind and you're going to be able to leverage them with each client. Well, spreadsheets gone. Oh, I couldn't find Joe's spreadsheet. All I could find is Susan's spreadsheet. So that didn't work, right. Maybe a little bit more. So there's a process for this, guys. Don't think you're going to solve the problem in one day. At the end of the day, it took me two years to figure out the way just to deliver the information. And it's taken me another eight years to. It's not even perfect. It's taken me eight years to get it to the point where it's providing the right value for the right people and we're going to continue to improve it based on the feedback and the questions that are annoying our members. At the end of the day, that's how you need to approach it.

01:07:03 - Mike Mills

Well, and like you said in the beginning, it's one bite at a time. You can't eat the whale in one bite. You got to take one step. And the place you have to start is you just have to start. And you've got to figure out where you're trying to go, where the ship is trying to head, and then start building questions and solutions around that and processes that will help you get there. And just be patient with it because it will take time and it isn't. But if you don't start now, then you're going to be behind no matter what. So you got to get it going one way or another. Well, Michael, I appreciate you, man. We're just over an hour, so I don't want to keep too much of your time. So thank you so much for hopping on and chatting with me a little bit about this. I'm sure we could go on and on about AI taking over the world at some point too, so maybe we'll carry on that conversation another time. But I really appreciate you hopping on with us for a little bit. Just as a quick reminder at the end here, just tell everybody how to find you, where you're at. If there's any lenders or companies out there that are interested in pre approved me and want to find out more about that, just let them know how to do that.

01:08:02 - Michael Neef

Yeah, the best place is just go to our website, go to preapprovemeapp.com, that's app at the end. Preapproveme app. Or you can email me. Michael@preapprovemeapp.com yeah, we'd love to chat with any loan officer or mortgage company that wants to build this kind of experience for their customers and realtors.

01:08:21 - Mike Mills

Yeah, perfect. I'll have that information in the show notes because chat GBT just heard you do that and it'll be able to print it off for me so I don't have to worry about it. So it'll be available in back. I'll be back on Tuesday next week with my market update. There was a new thing released this week or actually today HUD made some changes to what they're going to allow borrowers to do regarding if you have an FHA loan and you can't make your payments, they have a new program in place that are going to minimize reduction on your payment. I'm sure they're going to tack it onto the end. So I'm going to dig into that, talk a little bit about that. So you guys know what's going on there and then all the other news that's happening. Hopefully everybody's cell phones are back on and we're not headed towards Armageddon. All right. Well, everybody have a great week. Thanks for tuning into the end, and I will see you next week. Thanks, Michael.

01:09:10 - Michael Neef

Thank you. Take care.